The filmmaker manages to bring much of his sensibility and overall texture to the series. Part of that is due to the nature of the prequel itself (go back to where it all began!), part of that is due to the relative freedom to build in new characters and stories, but much of it is thanks to Sarnoski’s ability to pull deep emotionality out of his stars and audience almost immediately.

If nothing else, the dazzling finale feels like a hyperviolent ‘80s period piece tailor-made For the Girls. It delivers some of the series’ most extreme kills as well as its best uses of glittery costumes, bloody testicles, and feminist subversion for a whirlwind joy ride that doubles as a societal lambasting.

Jordan Scott’s film, adapted from Nicholas Hogg’s novel “Tokyo Nobody” and produced by her father Ridley, isn’t quite as interesting as the towering questions that it asks. But the fact that it bothers to ask them at all puts the film in a rarified class above many of its Hollywood counterparts.

Don’t be fooled by the airiness of its wine-drunk aesthetic or the languor of its pacing: Last Summer is every inch a Catherine Breillat movie, and its effervescent sheen is nothing but a natural distraction from the uncertain gloom that comes with the fall.

Watching Cho, perhaps on the same search as the filmmakers — for profundity, for catharsis — is always an entertaining experience, and a reminder of her curiosity as an actor more than the sum of her stand-up parts.

The film’s wild ending will determine whether or not a viewer enjoys the film. But rather than trying to understand exactly what it means, you’re better off appreciating it like one of Alex’s photos.

Quad Gods is less effective as a social issues doc than it is as a work of individual portraiture, and while Jacklin’s emphasis on camaraderie prevents her from digging all that deep into any one of her subjects, each of her primary characters proves sufficiently riveting all the same.

At first glance, Bang Bang seems like a dreadfully cliche-ridden film. Nelson throws everything he has at the eponymous character, but the washed-up fighter archetype who spits poetry about the demons he now battles has been done to death. Yet it becomes clear those cliches are the point.

This is a rare nonfiction chronicle of an artist that also avoids hagiography — we see Dion at her lowest because that becomes the reminder of who she is at her very best.

On its own terms, the film is an exquisite star vehicle for one of Hollywood’s best rising actresses and an engaging thriller about the contradictions that form when you can’t assemble the puzzle of your own life without relying on pieces you’d rather throw away.

The lively narrative flits and darts between scenes like the film’s namesake, lingering for a moment before speeding off to the next in an edit that feels energized yet never rushed.

Trigger Warning only exists to serve the needs of a streaming algorithm, which is just as well, as that streaming algorithm is the only audience this undercooked and utterly lifeless piece of streaming content could ever hope to satisfy.

On the one hand, it’s a mediocre genre movie with a title as mundane as it is misleading. . . On the other hand, even as a muddy character study making only the weakest attempts to scare, “The Exorcis-m” is still a bigger treat for fans of “The Exorcis-t” than its recent flop sequel, “The Exorcist: Believer.”

There’s an element of finding yourself, of course, because that’s what you do when you’re coming of age in a summer set film on screen, but the script feels underdeveloped still — a work in progress like Annie, herself.

This haunted and harrowing psychodrama — based on surviving records from the 18th century, and rooted in the day-to-day tedium of Styrian farm life — has too much respect for its emotionally isolated heroine to frame her unraveling as part of a broader phenomenon.

This creatively unbound tale about imaginary friends is so determined to spirit you away that it soon loses any meaningful grip on reality.

Hacking Hate can charitably be construed as a subversion of social media incentivization, a filmic attempt to channel free-floating rage towards powerful entities who make money off of human fragility and social discord. But as an exercise in positive or progressive radicalization, it falls short of its aims by communicating well-known problems without offering solutions beyond the need to soldier on in the face of such vast hatred.

Menuez and Rendón share a terrific chemistry as long-holding-on friends questioning whether they should stay friends at all, and if they should, then why? Comedies like Summer Solstice rarely ask that question with such candor and insight, and with a trans lead actor and character the movie lets simply be themselves despite living in a world rigged against them.

Just the Two of Us is a rare thriller whose setup is more compelling than its climax.

Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.

Here we have another spreadsheet of a movie that conceives of the human mind with the vision of a digital artist and the ethos of a corporate accountant; a film so mercilessly “relatable” that only a chatbot could ever hope to see themselves in it.

This is a filmmaker who knows how to tell story by showing it, and by trusting her audience to come along for the ride. How rare that has become these days.

There are things in life that you can’t avoid, and things that you can’t take back. Vulcanizadora doesn’t know how to cope with these truths, and will alienate much, if not most, of its audience as a result. But the honesty with which it expresses these dark thoughts is commendable — and more reflective than a dozen articles on the “male loneliness epidemic.”

Running eightysomething minutes with credits, “Sacramento” never aspires to be much more than an incisively rendered sketch, but its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognizing that someone else in your world is changing with you.

As a showcase for his stellar casting abilities and knack for heartwarming storytelling, Griffin in Summer is a very fine feature directorial debut.

Although it succeeds on its own terms in bringing to light the pathetic and exploitative behavior of plantation owners during the final era of Dutch colonialism, it succumbs to the same listlessness as Josefien, lying in bed, covered in mosquito bites, waiting for a climax denied.

Ultraman: Rising is a fun, sincere, and thoughtfully conceived piece of kids entertainment.

As much as Tuesday strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.