A tense prison drama that’s penned into the trappings of a classic Western, The Mustang is a small movie about a subtle transformation, but its closing moments — however contrived they might be — are as touching as they are unexpected.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

With every note as predictable as the next, the movie just blends into a discordant mess. Even Rodriguez’s smile can’t salvage this disappointing remake, but at least it provides a welcome reminder to check out the movie that inspired it.

Colaizzo’s script weaves in enough detail to explain some of Brittany’s demons, but Bell sells the tough stuff too, doing more with a cautious look in the mirror and a slow smile than other performers can do with an Oscar-ready speech.

Grainger and Shawkat are wonderful together, conveying the depth of a 10-year relationship with affection and honesty.

Ejiofor’s compassionate script, adapted from William’s 2009 memoir, is finely attuned to the cold realities that confront its warm characters. It only struggles to chart a clear arc for its protagonist, who remains a bright and quietly determined kid from start to finish, while his (often sidelined) father is the one who best embodies the film’s conflict.

If you have even the slightest emotional connection to Springsteen’s music — if you’ve ever found salvation in a rock song, or desperately wished that you could change your clothes, your hair, your face — this giddy steamroller of a movie is going to flatten you whether you like it or not.

As coming-of-age stories about wayward teens go, writer-director Jason Orley’s debut is a sturdy, endearing portrait of youth in revolt that takes few surprising turns. But the two actors sell their dynamic well enough to inject the story with palpable authenticity despite the familiar premise.

It’s only a little while before this starts to feel like just another documentary, but even a short-lived miracle goes a long way. It’s still enough to make you believe in the impossible.

There are flashes of subtle resentment to Williams’ performance that register as some of her best work in ages, so it’s unfortunate that the movie’s calculated assemblage of sentimental beats dominate the show.

The beats of Fighting With My Family are comfortingly familiar, and the soap opera pomp of the wrestling world is eye-popping to both fans and neophytes alike, but it’s Pugh that is always fresh, surprising, and wily. The film might not hit hard, but Pugh never stops doing just that.

Gilroy’s film needed to be 60% better or 20% worse in order to transcend the forgettable silliness of its existence, but it could stand the test of time as a lasting monument to the idea that our own personal taste is the only real thing we ever had.

Cold Pursuit resolves as a riotously fun example of a director remaking their own film for the right reasons.

The film is funny, quick-witted, and even throws in a little sex for good measure. Best of all, its various competing ideas eventually knot together in such satisfying ways that the didacticism required to bind them up feels more like a feature than a bug.

One Cut of the Dead is so heartfelt and hilarious that it’s easy to forgive the contrivances that hold it together, and to overlook how transparently Ueda reverse-engineers most of his best gags.

The genius of the first movie was its ability to disguise a searing critique of capitalism inside a hilarious package, an idea that is genuinely funny itself. The sequel, with its recycled jokes and re-mixed songs, is merely a reminder of how original the original actually was.

The big reveal at the end of the second act is absurd enough to pump some adrenaline into the third act, but the movie drags on too long afterwards.

Whatever inherent value there might be in gender-flipping such a generic template is mitigated by the movie’s reluctance to seize on the unique energy that its women bring to the table.

The austere minimalism of Rust Creek works to the movie’s advantage.

Egg shows the Scottish actor-director’s continuing ability to ground her films with strong character work and a buoyant sense of humor.

Reaping the benefits of a generation that compulsively records the evidence of their crimes, Fyre exploits a motherlode of private footage that festival mastermind Billy McFarland commissioned throughout the process. It’s less of a snarky recap than a clinical post-mortem.

Joe Cornish’s long-awaited and largely delightful follow-up to “Attack the Block” is a unicorn of a children’s fantasy movie: It’s imaginative, it’s heartfelt, and it never feels like it’s trying to sell you anything more than a measure of hope for the future.

Frankensteined together from the stiff corpses of a dozen smarter movies, Replicas is a cloning thriller so carelessly stupid that it often feels like a mad science experiment gone wrong.

Sweet’s work is a time capsule of a bygone era, preserved in glorious, saturated technicolor. He was the master of the unexpected composition, and in that sense, The Last Resort is a fitting tribute.

Perfect Strangers takes too much time to get to its big game — nearly its full first act is consumed by introductions and set dressing, most of it unnecessary, considering how believable the group’s chemistry is — but once it kicks into gear, the effect is dizzying.

For a movie with so much going on, (not even counting the CGI cougar Bella befriends), A Dog’s Way Home is wildly devoid of meaning or humor.

The trouble with Glass isn’t that its creator sees his own reflection at every turn, or that he goes so far out of his way to contort the film into a clear parable for the many stages of his turbulent career; the trouble with Glass is that its mildly intriguing meta-textual narrative is so much richer and more compelling than the asinine story that Shyamalan tells on its surface.

For all its of-the-moment charms, Escape Room can’t shake its more basic genre trappings, eventually giving itself over to tired and predictable revelations and flimsy twists.