An agile, vicious piece of work that’s anchored by extraordinary performances from Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, Una maintains its grip even when swinging a bit too hard for the fences.

We can’t all have a supeheroic squirrel to help find our own purposes in life, but Flora & Ulysses posits that we don’t need one — just a willingness to welcome their special kind of magic, in whatever shape it may take. Cynics, beware, “Flora & Ulysses” is coming for you.

As seen through the eyes of her former lovers (merely a few of many), Highsmith’s life is brought sharply into focus, revealing as much about her humanity as her work.

Plane may not take you anywhere you’ve never gone before, but if you’re buying a ticket to a movie called Plane, odds are it will get you exactly where you want to go.

Lynch/Oz is less compelling for any of its individual theories or observations than for how it frames movies as permeable membranes that flicker between personal obsession and the collective unconscious.

Rich in its execution and careful in its approach, The Sounding resonates.

Guided by Angel Manuel Soto’s slick direction and a breakthrough performance from Jahi Di’Allo Winston, the movie works overtime to energize real-world struggles with the thrill of street life.

All the individual pieces that make “Allswell” interesting are smothered in treacle.

Annabelle: Creation does offer several shocking moments, and manages to deliver some truly eerie imagery. Even when you can spot the gimmicks from a mile away, Annabelle: Creation hits the horror notes it’s aiming for.

Black Box won’t galvanize audiences like “Get Out” into rethinking the way society interacts with itself. But it’s just shrewd enough to question how we interact with ourselves.

Occasionally, both Johnson and Penn — unquestionably talented performers — nearly get Daddio back on track.

There’s no denying the purity of Fleming’s intentions (the movie’s end credits even play over a montage of same-sex parents), but Ideal Home is too cartoonish to meaningfully celebrate the beauty of the families we choose, and too casual to accomplish much else.

It isn’t involving enough for you to ever truly care about how these many, many problems will resolve themselves, and not funny enough for the experience to be more enjoyable.

Even the most formulaic scenes in the film bop with the zest of history being lived first-hand, as if the script were happily oblivious to its own clichés, and while the filmmaking itself falls well short of creating the chaos that it aspires to celebrate, Fluk at least taps into the fun of telling us about it.

There’s Something in the Water doesn’t break any molds in terms of documentary form, and it’s less impressive as cinema than activism. But it’s easily digestible and well researched, with the aid of Waldron’s book.

The King is so eager to be a mud-and-guts epic about inherited violence and the corruption of power that it loses sight of the rich coming-of-age story at its core.

Drawing on interviews with 10 experts and internet theorists with an endearing mashup of film clips and trippy 3-D animation, A Glitch in the Matrix adapts to the internal logic of its echo chamber until starts to sound pretty convincing on its own terms. If you’re not already one of the diehards convinced we’re living in a simulation, this movie might actually get you there.

Yes, “Abigail” was conceived as a new take on “Dracula’s Daughter.” But as the finished product stands, that infamous origin story is as invisible as a vampiric reflection. Not only is Abigail routinely sidelined by a plot that fails to trust her skills, but the ostensible underpinnings to her character are as half-assed as one-sided fang.

The movie takes its time to provide a satisfying rationale, occasionally suffering from a sluggish pace and sleepy atmosphere that lessens the underlying mystery surrounding Erin’s mission, but Kidman imbues the material with continuous bite.

On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.

A minor effort in a filmography largely composed of them, All the Light in the Sky is nonetheless satisfying on the terms it establishes early on.

Even in spite of its obvious nowness, this thing is such a lean, mean, and utterly merciless old school programmer that it might seem anachronistic if not for the fact that it’s being released onto many of the same drive-in screens that would have shown it 35 years ago.

Acting as the film’s teetering anchor, Seyfried channels a fascinating blend of composure and chaos that, in a less muddled movie, would have sung. Yet here, her portrayal of an assured woman unraveling under pressure merely lends a haunting note to a tale that strikes as simultaneously laborious and opaque.

The performances — especially Stevens’ — are silly and sincere, and the action competent enough for “Cuckoo” to have worked as pure pulp. But this film takes itself too seriously and pokes fun at its own silliness, a fatal combination.

The Bad Batch further solidifies the strength of Amirpour’s idiosyncratic vision, which takes familiar details and bends them into spiky bursts of unpredictability.

The capacity for "Milo" to foreground its human character over his unspeakably nasty situation makes the whole package go down a lot better than one might expect.

Less moment-to-moment funny than committed to a sustained pitch of devilish glee, Never Goin’ Back couches its silliness in a credible milieu of American malaise. The women may never understand how they might find a better place, but the movie makes the case that their unending commitment to getting there might be good enough.

Lucy doesn't hold together, but with its flashy innovation, Besson's trying to freshen the formula. It's the kind of freewheeling mess of a movie you wish studios would try out more often.