Little in the film stings as much as the fact that Knoxville and co. have clearly lost a step. It’s a bummer that Knoxville himself is too banged up to get involved to the same degree that he once did, and though some of the new bits reflect the visionary idiocy of the crew’s finest work (Larry the robot is a brilliant addition to the cast), many of them fail to leave a mark.

Alcock, tasked with playing a character that might strike some as “unlikable,” instead finds both the very human dimension and the out-of-this-world charisma necessary to make Kara worth rooting for.

She’s the He might not be the funniest or most fearless film about trans identity to find fans this year. But it understands that while queerness isn’t contagious, hope is.

For Girls Like Girls the movie, the final result is less a standalone work of great cinema announcing Kiyoko as a feature director, and more an act of dreamy devotion designed to comfort her core fanbase. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it does change who, and perhaps what, this soulful and peculiar film adaptation is for.

But for all of its teachable wisdom, this movie knows that life is never sweeter than it is during the moments, and years, when we simply can’t accept that love is also made out of plastic.

There’s only so much marveling at brilliant and grotesque creature designs that can be done before the story needs to get on its feet, but I Am Frankelda does eventually click into place once its world is fully established.

This is the action movie of the year so far as American theatergoers should be concerned, and nothing else really comes close.

The Death of Robin Hood isn’t revisionist history — it’s a history of revisionism. One that fittingly creeps further into fiction with every claim it makes towards “the truth,” as Sarnoski’s ultra-austere effort to cut through a millennium of myths can’t help but create a hard-to-swallow fable of its own along the way.

Filled with sight gags, innuendos, and puns galore, Stop! That! Train! has a shaky hit or miss ratio in its humor, with great jokes wedged between hacky bits that land like a botched lip sync death drop. And it’s unmistakably a fan only affair.

Far-fetched as this popcorn movie gets, it crucially never loses sight of the notion that to look outward is to look within (and vice versa), a theory that only grows clearer over the span of a blockbuster whose 79-year-old director still peers back at his childhood for a better view of the stars.

Ryuya Suzuki’s masterful anime, which spans the century-long life of a J-Pop star, makes it impossible to ignore how little it shows you.

The most compelling thing about Office Romance, which would be as formulaic as it gets if not for its admirably deep bench of deranged supporting characters, is that it gives Lopez the chance to publicly negotiate between the extremes of her own screen image — to explore the frustrations of being a self-possessed woman who has to shrink herself down in order to maintain her power.

Scary Movie 6 manages to come across as thoughtless and toothless at the same time.

The characters in “Masters of the Universe” are considerably more fun than the vast CGI world around them, or the weirdly compact adventure that takes them through it (how this movie is 141 minutes long is an even greater mystery than why this movie is 141 minutes long).

The film isn’t so bold as to suggest that it’s never too late to find fortune and fame in the entertainment industry. But it replaces those fantasies of overnight success with something richer, and its conviction in the power of songwriting as something that doesn’t have to be connected to record sales and stadium shows makes it a charming entry in a filmography that has never tried to be anything it’s not.

A nature doc mixed with autobiography, “Time and Water” is a poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery.

Perhaps predictably, the cast’s strongest chemistry has little to do with the nuclear Wilcox clan. Bargatze comes more alive opposite his fellow comedians, who, appearing in various supporting roles, seem to understand the unusual frequency Appel is chasing better than the film’s star himself.

Backrooms is a movie more likely to blow young minds, but remember the first horror movie you saw that changed who you were? This movie will be that for a lot of people.

There are hints of a far better movie peeking out from Maras’ dull weather drama, and the Australian director nearly finds it on numerous occasions. But even supported by Scott’s broad tonal excellence and Fraser’s obvious (if misplaced) commitment, when “Pressure” finally approaches the beaches of Normandy, the attack sails past catharsis and lands like a mercy killing instead.

While hope on the horizon is presented, this rich, deeply moving drama doesn’t shy away from forgiveness being something that cannot be easily forced, even when the will may be there, however far buried.

Mysius is a rigorously attentive filmmaker, obsessed by the small details that make up the frames of a thriller, who I’d love to be served by better material that isn’t such a by-the-numbers thriller.

Colony is literal and uncritical in the application of its ideas so that genuine fear is obliterated in exchange for a blasé familiarity. We don’t expect superlative fascist critique at every turn, or a treatise on team-level failure within behemoth institutions, but at least bring emotionality and intimacy with your more clear-eyed pacing.

It is so wholly transporting that its running time flies by unnoticed, and as it barrels toward its melancholic end, you’re left breathless in your seat wishing you could spend more time with these kids, hoping they will all be OK, even while knowing that life still has many more knocks waiting for them, and that perhaps none will be ever be as monumental as when love is lost, but if you have patience, also when it is found.

It’s hard to identify when the emotional circuit board underlying “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” switches on and a low-key multi-character yarn coheres into a humanist light show, only that after that certain point it achieves the enduring power of a folk ballad.

“Jim Queen” along the way becomes a kind of I Spy for gay tropes that those in the audience will laugh at and recognize, but won’t be left to feel much about after gay humanity has been saved.

No matter how pleasant and even insightful certain segments of the interview are, it would play immeasurably better as a stand-alone audio program than inorganically expanded into a feature film that’s part-archival and part-tech experiment.

Tedious in its plotting but rich in its temporal frictions, this ultra-faithful adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel embraces the time-honored traditions of its form with an eye toward subverting them by the end, an approach that proves apt — if not always satisfying — in the context of a story about a samurai who’s struggling to determine if he should do the same.

Clocking in at a tight 90 minutes, some changes to the also-slim book are smart, while others dilute its darkest impulses.

On one hand, there’s perhaps no more honest depiction of a relationship between a parent and their adult child having hit a wall, and a point of no return. On the other hand, pushing against this inevitability is a much more intriguing concept than simply presenting it as-is, over and over again, even when its specifics are disguised by a fable.

Grisebach’s understated approach to character works evocatively at the start when it is a question of blending them into this very specific place (filmed with consistent majesty by cinematographer Bernhard Keller) and teeing up the mystery of the past. However it falters when it comes to paying off that mystery and exorcising the ghosts that Veska is reckoning with.

At a mere 94 minutes in length, its meandering, meta-textual appearance might seem like a misfire at first, but it disguises what might be Jude’s most slyly character-focused work, culminating in a completely unexpected emotional gut punch.

As a war movie, Coward isn’t especially unique. Nor is it as a queer romance. But how many straight wartime love stories have we seen? This is a lovely, if rather decorous and reverent, tale of an illicit affair that’s unlikely to cause as much noise as Dhont’s last two films. But in this case, that should actually work to its benefit.

The film strikes an elegant balance between providing context for his innovations and letting the work do the talking, resulting in one of the more entertaining art documentaries that this critic has ever seen.

This intimate and psychologically astute portrait of the human cost of U.S. imperial violence draws a precise focus from what cinema is built for: putting us in a character’s skin.

Ashes doesn’t feel like a typical immigration tale, not because of where it takes place, but because of the nuance of emotion that fuels it.

Carroll may have made her bones as someone with ready answers and an irrepressible spirit, but Meeropol’s film is best when its subject finally realizes even the best advice only applies in the moment, in certain places, for certain people. Living in the after of those questions? That’s much more important.

The gratification of experiencing all the narrative threads coming together is only eclipsed by an awe at the underlying emotional continuity.

Marre’s position as the most anti- of anti-heroes initially feels like it’s going to generate fresh insight (not to mention contemporary prescience) on the era, yet the film can only restate the basics on one of the most mythologized periods in French history.

Sachs, co-writing the film per usual with Mauricio Zacharias, has a deep investment in the Manhattan arts scene of the period that pays off in terms of the drama’s immersiveness.

Passenger may lack the interpersonal and mythological complexities required of a proper, obsession-worthy classic. But Øvredal is nevertheless skilled at trapping his audience inside a disorienting, semi-liminal space where anything can happen… and it probably will. Like the best late-night drives, it’s an outing without a meaningful destination that lets you have fun in total darkness.

For better or worse, Harari uses gender dysphoria as a conduit to his more immediate concern: The idea that who we are is ultimately a memory that we share with ourselves.

Minotaur isn’t the best movie of Zvyagintsev’s career, but the icily exacting power of his filmmaking is undeniable — and it sucks you in like a vortex. Rarely are you so glued to a tale you’ve heard so many times before. Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed, and we need you.

Nemes’ understanding of the filming methods of the era in which his movie is based sets “Orphan” out from other, more conventional historical dramas. As with “Son of Saul” and “Sunset,” this is a sophisticated endeavor and, in craft terms, a level above the norm.

Bitter Christmas is neither the work of a filmmaker atoning for, nor justifying, their greatness so much as it’s the work of a filmmaker simply explaining how their greatness works.

For all its real-world anguish and fictional dread, Mārama never collapses beneath the weight of its own seriousness. Stappard understands that catharsis matters too, and the film’s conclusion is exhilarating.

The film is simultaneously unadorned and deeply oppressive, staying close to the historical record (while fictionalizing the circumstances of Moulin’s eventual death, or martyrdom) in a fashion that offers little perspective, beyond a humanist call-to-arms and appeal toward remembrance.

With ghoulish visuals, a coughed-up script in which Refn appears to pastiche only himself, and performances that even at their best just die onscreen under the portentous weight of the filmmaker’s dreadfully detached vision, it’s one of the most miserable theatrical viewing experiences in years.

Inessential and inoffensive, frequently adorable and fun for the whole family, Jon Favreau’s film feels like three good-enough TV episodes smushed together. If that sounds pleasing to you as a movie-goer and a “Star Wars” fan, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” will satisfy. But if you’re hoping for something a bit more ambitious, the film’s generic soul will likely just keep chipping away at the franchise’s up-and-down goodwill.

This film piles on the mawkishness to add up to what’s basically a slightly scuzzed-up cautionary movie of the week.

“What does it mean to be a good neighbor?”, Fjord wonders in Mungiu’s usual tones, its probing handheld wide shots infused with the callous indifference of the gods. And why is that so rarely a question that people feel required to ask of themselves?

It’s clear that something went terribly wrong in the making of this movie, but the worst part about it is how much goes ecstatically right before the wheels fall off. Bad films are a dime a dozen, even at the world’s most prestigious festival — this one is only so painful because it first gives you the hope of being great.

Esteban is a black hole that sucks out all the air from the space around anyone in his midst; Bardem’s perpetually alpha aura makes for a great match to the material. His performance is terrific and internalized as ever, bringing vulnerability and edge to a stereotype.

Sheep in the Box is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to elide them.

Gray is no stranger to saga about fraternal strains, but never has he so forcefully tugged at the ties that bind, or more sensitively observed how they can suffocate an entire family when a certain force pulls on them hard enough.

In the context of such a terrible crime, Kreutzer is naturally less concerned with right and wrong than she is with the way that even the most sordid type of abuse is able to disguise itself in domesticity. If victims are our friends and neighbors, then it stands to reason that perpetrators are too.

Club Kid has real potential to break out bigger than its seemingly niche scope would suggest, with Firstman finally shirking the ironic pose he’s taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humor.

All of a Sudden is so prescriptive with its ideas that its characters are liable to become vessels for them. It’s the one regard in which Hamaguchi’s impulse to mash everything together softens the power of his point rather than sharpening it, and the one regard in which this three-and-a-half hour sit threatens to seem too short.

Loosely adapting “A Short Film About Love” into a long film about nothing, Asghar Farhadi’s cramped and tedious “Parallel Tales” forfeits the sordid humanity of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece in exchange for the soapy meta-fiction of a meandering daydream.

Written alongside her real-life husband (and fellow filmmaker) Mark Duplass, Aselton has made it clear in press materials that the film, about a loving if troubled married couple (played by Aselton and Daveed Diggs) isn’t explicitly about her actual marriage. But it’s also not not about her and Duplass’ long-running relationship. Still, once you see where Aselton and Duplass’ script takes their characters, the differentiation becomes easier to swallow, if not all the more intriguing.

The internet is the closest thing these teenage cyberthieves have to a real life, and Corrigan’s dopamine onslaught of a film is an authentic portrait of the most alive they’ve ever been.

It’s only once Butterfly Jam seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along.

Pawlikowski’s elliptical style — keen on empty spaces, minimal dialogue, and crisp cutting — has its limits in terms of achieving an emotional payoff, but the actors’ understated turns make for a captivating (and, at 82 minutes, miraculously short) elegy to a lost homeland at the kickoff of the Cold War.

Gabrielle is at the center of all things, but what about her center? Well, it’s not going to hold. And there’s no one better to portray that than Drucker, who has become one of our foremost portrayers of women on the edge.

If Nagi Notes is so watchful and unforced that it often seems as though it isn’t looking for answers — or for anything — as hard as it should be, Fukada’s elegant plotting gradually allows this quiet film to assume the forcefulness of a full-throated shout.

Harris refuses easy answers, and announces herself as a singular cinematic force in the hell her story brings just the same.

You can view the work as a visceral slasher send-up, a stylish academic exercise about gender expression and inquiry in horror iconography, or as just a plain old, super fun, future cult lesbian classic. Either way, it will take multiple viewings of this film to fully embed yourself inside it — body, brains, and all.

The tightly crafted story ensures that everyone is running a different race as the characters sprint to the finish line, leading to a deliberately unsatisfying ending that reflects those divergent goals.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be.

The filmmaker’s documentary background also adds that kind of touch to the film, which so often feels like we’re watching something, well, true. We are, though, and even if it’s a different kind of truth, a scripted one, it’s still sprung from the same well of experience. Elizabeth Cook has plenty of it, now it’s time to keep finding new places for it to shine.

Learning how to face difficult emotions as a natural part of life: that’s a great lesson to teach kids, just as much as how to solve their first whodunit.

A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot The School Duel is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence.

Steal This Story, Please! is the kind of film that has no problem sacrificing artistic merit if it means inspiring a few more people to get out and protest.

Maybe it’s something about seeing Sally Field bond with an octopus, or watching a true inter-generational friendship blossom on screen, or maybe it’s just something more obvious: taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits. Or, well, best arms? Tentacles? Whatever can reach out and touch you, just as this film will.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

With whispers of another film already looming at Warner Bros., McQuoid’s best defense might be tapping out — before he’s tasked with delivering an even more insufferable cinematic fatality.

For gay viewers more aligned to these experiences, for those of us familiar with these “dickheads that fucked us over” firsthand, Departures is a cult classic in the making. And that’s true whether you’ve been fucked over by others or fucked over by yourself in a similar fashion to Benji’s own self-hatred.

There’s too much effort, too much time, and too much sincerity apparent behind this film to dismiss it outright. That’s what makes it frustrating, and maybe even tragic.

A cute, simple, and very colorful fable of a film that will almost exclusively appeal to the youngest of kids.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

Fine enough, really, but if the first film was the kind of thing that never goes out of style, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will last a season. That’s all.

I couldn’t help but try to read a bit deeper into how these characters rhyme with each other, especially since Egerton is so game to go nuts, and Theron — ever the reliable action star, radiating strength through a clenched vulnerability — is as human as he is cartoonish.

The movie’s endless middle is so dull and uneventful that Desert Warrior can’t help but belie its true purpose at every turn, as whatever momentum its hyper-fictionalized story was able to conjure at the start begins to sour into the stuff of a glorified commercial.

This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.

That “Michael” skirts around the controversies, legal troubles, and horrifying allegations that marked the entertainer’s later years — and, for so many, have forever marred his legacy — isn’t a shock, as the film was supported and financially backed by Jackson’s estate. What does rankle, however, is that that by glossing over such matters, the final film has been mostly stripped of any humanity, good and bad.

Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.

Roommates has a real chance at being a formative experience for someone, which is more than a lot of movies can say. But those of us who have already been sufficiently formed? We can find better things to stream this weekend.

The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.

A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.

There’s no outright preaching, no plea to condemn or sympathize either way. What unfolds is far more complex, morally speaking, even if the bones of the narrative and how it’s shot are deliberately pared down.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

Indie films about indie filmmaking are a tired trope for a reason, but it brings me pleasure to say that The Travel Companion is one of the better ones in recent years.

More shark action would be welcome in this film about sharks. As a basic disaster flick? Thrash works, and offers up less than 90 minutes of admirably silly and occasionally chilling action, even if it could stand to take a bigger bite out of the story.

Erratic, petulant, and shot with a humor-killing hyper-saturation that smothers its Apatowian improv scenes under the sickly patina of a Gaspar Noé drug trip (the film was lensed by “Climax” and “Enter the Void” DP Benoît Debie), Outcome is nominally about a repentant soul trying to make amends with the people he’s wronged, but it seems more interested in focusing on the people who’ve wronged its hero in return.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

Huo’s project is to portray these social relations and material disparities with crispness, therefore the image is sharp, and though expansive, also concise.

It works if you are really paying attention to the pageturner storytelling and have the spatial intelligence to proactively connect plants to payoffs.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.