The onslaught of death is more relentless (and numbing) here, yes. But we don’t know these young men as well when they do meet their deaths, which makes the loss hurt just a little less.

Kendrick makes the case for why she belongs in more dramatic roles that allow her to shed her normally peppy usually cheery onscreen persona. We know how good she is, and we’d only love to see more.

Spare but poignant, "Monica" is a pensive family drama that’s loaded with the empty space of things left unsaid.

What Corbijn lacks in filmmaking panache here he makes up with strong journalistic chops: These interviews are great.

Even a movie as evocative and well-mounted as this one can’t help but feel like a shadow of a shadow. It traces the silhouette of “The Strange One” without ever achieving the emotionality it needs to feel her touch first-hand.

With its everyday setting and social interactions mixed with an obtrusive, innovative soundtrack (composed by the band Aunt Sister, along with Colin Self and Ben Babbit) and hyperactive visual style, The African Desperate straddles the line between shock and banality.

Though the original novels were written in the ’70s and ’80s, at times Confess, Fletch feels like a ’50s farce, with good old-fashioned misdirection and mistaken identities doing the leg work. Unlike James Bond, Fletch doesn’t need gadgets or fast cars to untangle this mystery, just a few Negronis and heaps of charisma. The formula works.

Like “Green Book,” The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a broad historical outing based on real people and real events, condensed down into an essence that can only be billed as “crowd-pleasing.” The trick this time: Farrelly seems far more aware of how he’s playing fast and loose with history to offer a zippy feature to a fractured world. Dare we say it: It works far better.

Panahi is a director who has always mingled fact and fiction, and here the distinction is more addled than ever, so that by the time the final credits roll it’s not exactly clear what was staged and what was real.

Much of the charm of Ticket to Paradise comes from knowing exactly how this story will end — what would a good romantic comedy be without a guaranteed happy ending? — without being totally certain of the journey to get there, because of the originality in the script.

It’s a nifty fit for the Danish filmmaker behind similarly cold-blooded dramas like “A War” and “A Highjacking,” who establishes a sense of unease from the film’s opening moments and never quite relents.

This could all feel schematic in lesser hands, but Neugebauer gives Lawrence and Henry the space they need to make the film’s characters feel like real people. As a result, the inevitable glimmer of hope they share at the end is as honest as the hurt that guided them to it.

The movie is a giddy joy, hilariously gross, and earnestly heartfelt, with the kind of icky-gooey attention to detail that makes Selick’s movies such a visceral experience.

At its core, A Jazzman’s Blues is a soap opera full of shocking secrets, emotional confrontations, and one exceedingly satisfying slap.The mystery aspects are thin; anyone with passing knowledge of Black American history can infer early on who was killed, why, and by whom.

It’s a shame that telling the Gibbons’ true story is a task too difficult for The Silent Twins, because there are real signs of promise.

With her first fiction feature, Diop lets real material speak with an ancient sadness, with hope offered in the form of Rama who keeps moving, carrying a burden of knowledge into the birth of a brave new life.

After the wearying sameness of so many recent American features, You Can (Not) Redo is as shocking and energizing as the slap a Zen master would administer to a student.

My Policeman isn’t not arresting, and that’s thanks to the work of David Dawson and Emma Corrin, and not the film’s top biller, who was never the lead at all.

Catherine Called Birdy is so good, so raucous and wild and wise and witty, that it not only makes me eager to write in alliterative adjectives, but to reconsider my views on everything else she’s made in recent years. It’s wonderful.

I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

The Menu does do one thing exceptionally well: it holds your attention and makes you think for a time that any outcome is possible. That alone is something to salivate over.

Rest assured: Johnson isn’t reinventing the mystery movie with “Glass Onion,” but he is having a hell of a time lightly deconstructing it and reorienting it to suit his whipsmart script and central super detective.

If this is what a Hollywood-ized and -sized blockbuster looks like in 2022, bring it on. Bring them all on. They’re worth the fight.

Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power... This is an overwhelming film.

Eichner’s gay homage to the great American romcoms of yesterday looks and feels exactly like them, and that’s groundbreaking enough. We’ll take that any day over a movie that tries too hard to pander to gay audiences. This one just hears and sees us.

If A Compassionate Spy is oddly dispassionate for a documentary so attuned to the humanistic inner-workings of history in progress, the film can’t help but find a measure of beauty in the unspoken trust that Ted and Joan placed in one another.

While Love Life has its fair share of sharply written heart-to-hearts, many of its most touching moments (and all of its most telling ones) hinge on a certain kind of emotional geography.

This is a human story, as messy and complex and maddening as any ever told, and while Bratton makes it his own (how could he not?), the generosity with which he shares it with us make it special indeed.