Last Breath is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions. That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed.

This is a film of rare joy and spirit, and one that deserves to be celebrated as both a feminist fairytale and a manifesto that will inspire a myriad of future stories.

One development gets short-shifted: the onslaught of studios drowning out what made the Con so attractive in the first place.

Estevez treats the drama with a straight-faced, utterly earnest approach with dual respect for the material and the audience's awareness of how it can go wrong. By playing it straight, The Way never goes off the deep end.

Like its tattered setting, The Rover is scattered with intriguing ideas never successfully fleshed out.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

The film shimmers with beauty and sadness despite its length, and the Japanese director’s background as both a photographer and a documentary filmmaker brings a gossamer naturalism to this realistic tale about a young woman’s regrets over abandoning her child years after the fact.

At just 81 minutes, the film’s sagging middle soon gives way to a zippy and very funny final act, which ties up big plot points while still hinting at more adventures to come for its charming trio.

Director Sarah Gavron's celebratory chronicle would inspire strong reactions even if it wasn't much of a movie, but the filmmaker compliments her powerful tale with the immediacy of her filmmaking and performances on the same level. It's an unabashed message-driven story that imbues the past with modern power.

While the raw material for something twisted and operatic exists here, Leblanc is too committed to putting meters of space between herself and the material to fully absorb the viewer. The motivations for that choice, however arty, are uncertain.

Russell and Karpovsky are a winning pair, and if they ever want to hit the road for more big jokes and even bigger revelations, any director would do well to let them take the wheel.

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.

Edited by writer-director Levin, Runoff is the kind of film that finds power and pleasure in silence; many of its best scenes come in careful, long, quiet scenes of revelation or desperation.

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.

It’s certainly hard to imagine a cruder way of connecting the dots between the series’ fractured mythology.

Every beat of the film might be obvious, but that doesn’t detract from the enjoyability of watching an indelible young heroine like Lara Jean figure out her own life and just maybe fall in love in the process.

No sequel is essential, but Frozen 2 makes the argument that, even in the fairy tale land of Disney, they can still be important.

If the rest of the film does err towards the slightly generic, Howard gives Thelma the Unicorn a great lead that you’ll have no trouble rooting for.

The scares are mostly metaphorical and the sparse imagery becomes repetitive by the end, but “The Damned” remains a promising debut that offers a moody exploration of the human condition.

Goat scrutinizes an aspect of American culture often relegated to punchlines and magnifies the darker reality beneath.

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.

The film reunites most of the principal cast and crew of director Harry Bradbeer’s 2020 Netflix feature, “Enola Holmes,” and while that franchise-starter was frisky and fun, its followup rehashes the original’s charms (with wishy-washy results), while expanding elements that required no additional attention.

While nothing in your life may come as easily to you as everything in Coldplay’s lives seems to have come to them, this delightful and unexpectedly inspiring documentary has a funny way of making your dreams seem closer than they might appear.

It’s a shaggy and distended portrait of friendship that pinballs through time as freely as it does between genres, and a few too many of the 140-minute story’s frequent detours wind up in dead ends, but Ride or Die retains enough forward momentum to roll across even its least successful chapters because of how stubbornly Hiroki refuses to keep score between these characters.

Your Lucky Day moves along at an engaging pace throughout, although it doesn’t reach its brutal potential as a thriller until two-thirds of the way through. Up to that point, it’s burdened by clumsy repetition of its central theme.

As generic and retrograde as “Black Panther” was specific and revolutionary, Captain Marvel is a frustrating disappointment at a time when every inclusive blockbuster is fought over as though it could be the decisive battle in our never-ending culture wars.

Weisz flirts with greatness but unfortunately misses the opportunity to make the material soar. And yet he comes close.

This is a nice movie: the kind that’s lit brighter than a dentist’s office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives. It’s about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them.