The best Springsteen songs sound as if they’ve pulled directly from his diary, and while this “Road Diary” might have a bit more polish and gloss, it’s more than worth the read and the ride.

More importantly, the film specifically examines Blackness through the lens of whiteness, making a white man the enemy and showing how an outside force wreaks havoc among the closed group. The film jokes about Black suffering, but this is far from trauma porn. It’s a truly Black horror comedy.

The pervasive elegance makes up for a largely derivate plot. We’ve seen variations on this story before, and Mean Dreams doesn’t do much to shake up expectations — until, that is, a violent finale that punctuates the characters’ psychological development.

The film is visually breathtaking, and anchored by two strong performances. But the loyalties in My Cousin Rachel seesaw too dramatically for tension to build satisfyingly; the film runs hot and cold when it really wants to simmer.

Knappenberger has delivered a film brimming with outrage, whose zeal becomes persuasive once Swartz takes on his activist mantle.

More than a cock-eyed peek back at an unprecedented culture clash, the film provides a bittersweet glimpse at a small, stained-glass window of time when anything seemed possible, and the concept of change was rich with promise.

Though suffering from dry patches and a fairly mannered approach, The Invisible Woman eventually makes its way to a powerful final third documenting an ultimately tragic romance in deeply felt terms.

Beatty’s long-gestating project is a modestly enjoyable, well-acted nostalgia piece with just a touch of edge.

Perhaps what is most radical about Disclosure is the wide array of trans spirits both onscreen and off. In making the film, Feder and Cox are rewriting the very history they set out to tell, adding one more title to “positive representation” list. That alone is worth coming out for.

For a movie about the sky, “Weathering with You” is ironically one of Shinkai’s most grounded films — immediately more warm and engaging than “Your Name,” if not at all capable of delivering the same emotional payoff.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

With tightly controlled performances and uniquely eccentric events, The Beaver is mainly undone by the lack of a satisfying outcome.

Despite routinely overstating the scenario with rampant scenes of tantrums and sobs, the majority of Beautiful Boy is made bearable by its two solid performances.

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.

Union is all the more effective because it doesn’t see the need to argue its case. Instead, the film is free to focus its attention on how difficult and inspiring it was and remains for the Amazon Labor Union to press that case into action — and even just to exist in the first place.

A smart twist on the coming-of-age comedy.

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

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.

While the movie finale may not come in a package that satisfies every diehard fan, it wraps up its compelling portrait of an eccentric working-class family as emotionally chaotic as should be expected; although the specifics still may come as a shock to some.

If nothing else, audience members will walk away from Martha with a far greater understanding of Stewart — of all the “good things,” in her parlance, and plenty of the bad — and equal admiration and unease of what that all adds up to.

While the film is hardly as transgressive as its subject, it manages to be unexpectedly moving, and a nostalgic time capsule of an art-world rebel whose unorthodox methods and decidedly politically incorrect vision couldn’t exist today.

This is the kind of mad science filmmaking worth rooting for: Aster refashions “The Wicker Man” as a perverse breakup movie, douses Swedish mythology in Bergmanesque despair, and sets the epic collage ablaze. He may not land every big swing, but the underlying vision is hard to shake even when it falters.

The animation itself is striking — an early sequence in which the sky is filled with dragons is an early sign of the visual treats to come — and ends up being the film’s highlight.

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.

The film is so self-aware, in fact, that it raises questions about which of its flaws are intentional and which are, well, flaws. The filmmaking here is as polished as one might expect from a Hollywood crowd-pleaser, well lit and only occasionally showy in terms of its camerawork. And the combat and car-crash stunts are great — they better be, given the subject matter.

The details are so hypnotically sadistic that Titley’s documentary is seldom bothered to deviate from them, as none of the film’s retrospective interviews, candid and thoughtful as they are, prove as gripping as the raw video of Nasubi’s ordeal.

Clocking under two hours, The Real Charlie Chaplin is less concerned with being an exhaustive biography than trying to pinpoint what Chaplin’s life means to film history and how we might think of him today. It’s an approach that, while not entirely successful here, could help introduce newcomers to classic film rather than preach to the already converted.

Most of all, it’s about the depressing reality that some of us are capable of holding both of those extreme views about a person without noticing any level of contradiction. There might be no fixing such a fundamental flaw in the human condition, but “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” does an admirable enough job of dramatizing it.