These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but Sound of Falling so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us.

The mythology of Bring Her Back is dizzyingly unclear and patched-together from what feel like studio notes commissioning both over-explication and also less of it, as if ambiguity alone can pass for scares. But the emotions and the performances in the present day are there.

A viewer may find themselves appreciating how the non-visual element of music allows figurative language to retain some wisp of mystery, whereas onscreen it’s made to wear its significance in blatant, artless ways.

The film is as incomplete as the city it’s portraying, but manages to say more with what it leaves unsaid than any of its dialogue.

“We make our own destiny,” someone intones during the film’s closing voiceover, and by the end of Ethan Hunt’s story, it’s hard not to take those words to heart. I only wish that Cruise and McQuarrie had managed to make a better one.

It doesn’t get much better than a rude maître d’ denied room on a life-saving elevator. And yet, even falling from the top of the Skyview, Bloodlines will have you laughing about that piano all the way down.

If nothing else, it joins “Trap” in an expanding canon of mid-career Josh Hartnett movies that are memorable for their utter ridiculousness. And perhaps we all ought to be grateful that a film that promised us fighting or flight had the generosity to deliver on both.

An imperfect hidden gem worth ticking off for genre completionists, it’s also a suitable pick for Mother’s Day 2025 — one that will remind true horror myrmidons why the best springtime releases so often lurk in mess.

More than any individual song or album, the film seeks to encapsulate the Swamp Dogg vibe. Effortlessly cool, thrilled to be alive, and mildly entertained by just about everything, the man offers what appears to be the perfect blueprint to stay in 2025.

The threat of violence hangs over even the most quiet of moments, and — some shoddy CGI animals aside — the film’s grip on that disturbing undercurrent is convincing throughout. That’s why the ending works so well, an abrupt climax that’s darkly poetic and anything but normal.

Its characters might be preoccupied with trying to find the most outlandish subcultures on planet earth, but Magic Farm persuasively argues that the daily mundanities of being human are more than absurd enough on their own.

Like any Mamet endeavor, the real star is the language. Major plot events happen almost entirely offscreen, with its ensemble of characters using them as jumping off points to soliloquize about everything from the value of therapy to Snow White’s vagina. Everyone has preconceived opinions about his writing style, but Mamet puts it to use, with more substance than recent misfires.

The indisputable highlight of “Jewel Thief” is watching Khan enjoy himself (if he’s not, that just makes the acting more brilliant) even when the filmmakers don’t seem to encourage it.

I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is . . . he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again.

Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one.

Caught between “Cabin in the Woods” and the mystifying “Serenity,” Until Dawn makes countless gestures at being an incisive horror comedy — some good, some bad — but works better approached as a full-blown spoof. If that was the intent here, a better name might have been something like “Video Game: The Horror Movie” (or maybe “Horror Movie: The Video Game: The Horror Movie?”)

The film prefers to operate purely as a trip down nostalgia lane.

Ghost Trail is a film that refuses to let anyone treat the plight of Syrians like a thing of the past, or to delude themselves into thinking that the war ends once Syrians are relocated to safer countries.

This is the kind of formative underground movie you could pledge your allegiance to for life, especially if you’re coming across it at a certain age for the very first time.

Even as the Shinkansen decouples some of its cars at full speed and performs death-defying track changes in order to avoid crashing into other trains, it never really feels like anything is meaningfully at risk, and Higuchi’s setpieces are seldom intense enough to offset the lack of danger that’s baked into this project from the start.

The King of Kings does offer a theologically accurate message that’s largely about being kind and helping the needy. If you fast-forwarded through all of the Dickens nonsense, it would make an adequate introduction for a young child looking to learn the basics of the Christian faith.

Sinners is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time.

Mostly, G20 has two major points in its favor, right out of the gate: a super-fun premise for an action film (what if money-mad mercenaries seized the 20 most powerful leaders of the world and demanded some really insane shit?) and a star both so good and so classy that it never feels as if she’s punching below her weight class.

An aggressively competent spy thriller that has less use for logic than its lead actor does for his smile, this globe-trotting Robert Littell adaptation would have us believe that no one is more dangerous than a math nerd who refuses to think of himself as a killer, and the film makes a compelling enough case to sustain itself across the entire television season’s worth of plot that it packs into two hours.

I Love You Forever unfolds like a documentary to those who have lived a similar experience — and a stalker horror movie to others.

No one’s proposing the story should be as radical as “8 Women” or as dark as “Swimming Pool”, but it’s almost too restrained at times, to the point where you end up wishing Ozon would push just that little bit more. Still, it’s hard to complain when the end result is this accomplished.

Even the worst capitulations to convention are short-lived, just as even its most eye-rolling moments can be seen as more of a feature than a bug toward the end of a fun sleepover movie that never forgets how hard it is to grow up without losing your head.