On its own terms, the film is an exquisite star vehicle for one of Hollywood’s best rising actresses and an engaging thriller about the contradictions that form when you can’t assemble the puzzle of your own life without relying on pieces you’d rather throw away.

The lively narrative flits and darts between scenes like the film’s namesake, lingering for a moment before speeding off to the next in an edit that feels energized yet never rushed.

Trigger Warning only exists to serve the needs of a streaming algorithm, which is just as well, as that streaming algorithm is the only audience this undercooked and utterly lifeless piece of streaming content could ever hope to satisfy.

On the one hand, it’s a mediocre genre movie with a title as mundane as it is misleading. . . On the other hand, even as a muddy character study making only the weakest attempts to scare, “The Exorcis-m” is still a bigger treat for fans of “The Exorcis-t” than its recent flop sequel, “The Exorcist: Believer.”

There’s an element of finding yourself, of course, because that’s what you do when you’re coming of age in a summer set film on screen, but the script feels underdeveloped still — a work in progress like Annie, herself.

This haunted and harrowing psychodrama — based on surviving records from the 18th century, and rooted in the day-to-day tedium of Styrian farm life — has too much respect for its emotionally isolated heroine to frame her unraveling as part of a broader phenomenon.

This creatively unbound tale about imaginary friends is so determined to spirit you away that it soon loses any meaningful grip on reality.

Hacking Hate can charitably be construed as a subversion of social media incentivization, a filmic attempt to channel free-floating rage towards powerful entities who make money off of human fragility and social discord. But as an exercise in positive or progressive radicalization, it falls short of its aims by communicating well-known problems without offering solutions beyond the need to soldier on in the face of such vast hatred.

Menuez and Rendón share a terrific chemistry as long-holding-on friends questioning whether they should stay friends at all, and if they should, then why? Comedies like Summer Solstice rarely ask that question with such candor and insight, and with a trans lead actor and character the movie lets simply be themselves despite living in a world rigged against them.

Just the Two of Us is a rare thriller whose setup is more compelling than its climax.

Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.

Here we have another spreadsheet of a movie that conceives of the human mind with the vision of a digital artist and the ethos of a corporate accountant; a film so mercilessly “relatable” that only a chatbot could ever hope to see themselves in it.

This is a filmmaker who knows how to tell story by showing it, and by trusting her audience to come along for the ride. How rare that has become these days.

There are things in life that you can’t avoid, and things that you can’t take back. Vulcanizadora doesn’t know how to cope with these truths, and will alienate much, if not most, of its audience as a result. But the honesty with which it expresses these dark thoughts is commendable — and more reflective than a dozen articles on the “male loneliness epidemic.”

Running eightysomething minutes with credits, “Sacramento” never aspires to be much more than an incisively rendered sketch, but its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognizing that someone else in your world is changing with you.

As a showcase for his stellar casting abilities and knack for heartwarming storytelling, Griffin in Summer is a very fine feature directorial debut.

Although it succeeds on its own terms in bringing to light the pathetic and exploitative behavior of plantation owners during the final era of Dutch colonialism, it succumbs to the same listlessness as Josefien, lying in bed, covered in mosquito bites, waiting for a climax denied.

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

As much as Tuesday strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.

This Diane Von Furstenberg is plenty engaging, but as a tribute to the woman who reinvented the modern dress, it doesn’t reinvent anything itself.

If there’s much about her debut that left me wishing the apple had fallen a little further from the tree, there’s also no denying that the “Unbreakable” filmmaker’s daughter has the skill to follow in her father’s footsteps, which she does here even when the material is begging her to blaze her own trail.

While a degree of naturalism does still make its way into many slow-burn scenes, Quy’s filmmaking largely favors expressionism.

The gradual transformation of an innocent child into an accessory to violence, forced to become increasingly pragmatic and cold along the way, is far from a fresh hook this far into the history of crime movies. But Colonna’s film, co-written with Jeanne Herry, is a riveting, moving take on this narrative.

The sometimes-rapid shifts in tone, even within the same scene, are aided to tremendous effect by the magnetic, fearless performance from Saura Lightfoot Leon.

Rooting his drama in the specifics of rural Taiwan and the Southeast Asian diaspora that make their way there, Chiang’s tough but affecting film taps into tragically universal notions of feeling invisible or ineffectual in one’s day-to-day survival. These concepts are most certainly not lost in translation.

To a Land Unknown is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its genre narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity.

Gazer might be inspired by New Hollywood, but its existence is almost reason to believe that a similar filmmaking renaissance could be on the horizon.

The film is ultimately most interested in celebrating the irrational levels of devotion that live theater inspires in the people who make it. While it doesn’t pull punches about the challenges that lie ahead, “The Great Lillian Hall” ultimately makes it clear that its protagonist is lucky to have something that’s so hard to let go.