Once Encounter reveals its destination, there aren’t many places for the script to go, though there’s a savage little side trip to a rural militia during which it becomes clearer that this Ahmed acting showcase is also interested in touring the American psyche

Though the title may be the cleverest thing about this cookie cutter affair, it’s refreshing to see a gay family film that doesn’t use its characters’ sexuality for dramatic conflict.

It’s a wonderful musical, and an unabashed Steven Spielberg movie. And the moments in which it most comfortably allows itself to be both of those things at once leave you convinced that some harmonies are worth waiting for, even if it seems like they’ve been always been around the corner and whistling down the river.

This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the darkest margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for even the most damnable creatures he finds there sparks new life into “Nightmare Alley” as it narrows towards its inevitable dead end.

It’s a wrenching look at the perils of prohibition, and who wins when all is said and done.

Adrienne is a beautiful testament to the power of Adrienne Shelly and will hopefully inspire fans, new and old, to revisit her work. Andy Ostroy’s documentary certainly emphasizes the emotional and sentimental, but that intimacy bonds the audience to Shelly as a woman. Bring tissues.

It’s here, in these more high-altitude and less high-minded passages that “The Summit of the Gods” reaches the peak of its power, as the lush 2D animation indulges in the kind of ecstatically true vistas that live action would never allow, while Amine Bouhafa’s gorgeous and beguiling score makes every step feel like a spiritual proposition before exploding into an avalanche of synths.

The moral is clear as day to any kid, though plenty of adults could use the reminder: Never judge any creature by the way they look. And, for animation devotees, the lesson is the same: Never judge a cute animated offering by its platform.

In practice, mincing up the miniseries’ plot without losing any of its main ingredients — and even adding several new ones to the mix, including a whopper of a third act twist that turns Ruth into a martyr and all but completely erodes the movie’s emotional core — results in an undercooked stew that isn’t given the time it needs to find any real flavor of its own.

Locked in a heated conversation with its own campiness from the moment it starts, 'House of Gucci' leverages that underlying conflict into an operatic portrait of the tension between wealth and value.

If “Unstuck in Time” offers an erudite and affectionate portrait of its subject despite being so oddly generic, Weide shares his own frustrations with it in such a plainspoken way that he can’t help but pass them along to us.

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.

Despite its refined palate and dashes of local flavor, The Feast remains empty calories — haunting only for how it seems to admit as much in the very last shot.

Director Maggio’s reverence for Parks is certainly palpable in his documentary. It’s just not the deep-dive necessary to complement the scope of the work he created, and the impact he made, that would make the film truly enriching and compelling. But it might be enough to serve as a cursory introduction for the uninitiated.

In Licorice Pizza, time isn’t something that keeps people apart — it’s the only thing that allows them to find each other in the first place. And this euphoric movie doesn’t waste a minute of it.

The pacing is so frenetic that audiences will likely never have more than a millisecond to appreciate the textures or the visual spectacle of a shot before it’s already zipped ahead to the next sequence, always another song and dance to see, even if it’s woefully hard to actually enjoy.

Encanto feels like one of the Mouse House’s more emotionally complex animated features, even if its story ultimately tries too hard to wrap up that nuance in a very tidy bow.

Bruised isn’t breaking any new ground from a narrative standpoint, but it does show the strength of Halle Berry as a director, boasting a powder keg of dominating performances within a simplistic story.

At its core, this is an iPod-shiny parable about the pain of being left behind, and one that — like so much of the best sci-fi — poignantly literalizes some of the the anxieties that have dogged humanity since the dawn of time.

Dan Mazer’s film is the closest yet the series has come to a true remake, focusing on one plucky kid, two crazed robbers, and a Christmastime backdrop engineered to make anyone feel warm and fuzzy, but despite a classic blueprint, the end result is grinchy, grouchy, and just plain odd.

A film so calibrated when humming forward starts to lose its tonal footing when Jon’s creative spark dims to a too-faint flicker.

In a film that barely has a grasp over its own hare-brained conspiracy and often feels like an extension of the mental breakdown that its protagonist might be suffering . . . Cummings’ performance adds a key measure of consistency.

If the film had focused on its set pieces and not made time for dialogue scenes, One Shot would be a helluva ride. But there’s no getting around the fact that these are cardboard characters, even by action movie standards.

In Beans, Deer has transformed the most painful experience of her life into a vital human story, while holding an unflinching mirror up to the racism and discrimination indigenous communities still face to this day.

Like most of Netflix’s seasonal assembly line of yuletide fare, “Love Hard” is both too well-cast for the Hallmark Channel and too half-assed for movie theaters. It’s likewise adrift between rom-com nostalgia, reckoning with the anxieties of dating in the digital age, and simply hitting enough data points to give the algorithm what it wants for Christmas.

Fans will praise this film as yet another brave sacrifice at the altar of artistic vulnerability — because that’s what “A Man Named Scott” wants you to believe. But the authorized film lacks the artistic vision of Cudi’s musical talents, despite its best efforts.

You can hardly see the scaffold of a documentary film at all. In fact, “Simple” unfolds more like a riveting neorealist drama, with no trace of the woman and her crew behind the camera, no talking heads, no filmmakerly intervention of any kind

While the movie sometimes hides behind its own derivativeness in lieu of daring to play things straight — the references fly fast and furious long before a punchline is made at Vin Diesel’s expense — “Red Notice” never loses sight of the visual shorthand that comes with bonafide stardom, nor the simple joy of seeing very famous people make total fools of themselves for a laugh.