If you’re going to make an R-rated horror wank about Dracula slurping throats with a smile on his face, make sure that the rest of the movie doesn’t suck as hard as he does.

Blomkamp might have directed the best 90-minute sports movie of the decade — it’s just a shame that Gran Turismo is nearly two and a half hours.

This visceral portrait of life during wartime is at its most harrowing and unshakeable when it confronts the heightened reality of its conceit with the apathetic naturalism of its drama.

Shortcomings isn’t revolutionary, but it’s authentic, resonant, and laugh-out-loud funny.

This decades-spanning drama — a lyrical and probing adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel about two siblings coming of age under the care of their Trinadadian single mother in the suburbs of Toronto — is so unstuck in time and shot through with raw emotion that its clunkier moments tend to function like tender maps back to the heart of the matter.

It’s right there in the title: Claire Simon’s stunningly personal documentary “Our Body” might generally be about her own health journey, but it’s really fixated on the communal experience of occupying a female body. Our body.

The attempts at spectacle never quite land, as Maggio’s ambitious car chase sequences and shootouts seem to stretch his resources and give the impression of a filmmaker biting off more than he can chew.

Yet another seemingly unassailable combination of story and filmmaker that fails to capitalize on any of its obvious promises.

No movie has so literally reduced basketball to “just a game,” and no movie this side of “Hoop Dreams” has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.

The heart of “Mutant Mayhem” is pure, and the look of it is sprightly and unique, making it a worthy new addition to a franchise that clearly still has new stories to tell.

This veritable “Eat, Pray, Hike” leaves no trace of originality or dramatic consequence. The advantages it has over the likes of “We Wish You a Married Christmas” and “Royally Ever After” are twofold: A likable cast, and dignified source material.

The material simply isn’t strong or self-interested enough to support a cast as rich as the one Simien assembles here, a fact made all the more obvious by the director’s natural facility for staging ensemble comedy in the face of mortal danger.

It’s only towards the very end, when the film’s satire and surrealism pull apart from each other like a party cracker, that the tension brewing in Orson’s department becomes compelling enough to justify the busywork of creating it.

Despite building their adaptation around the cyclical predictability of American capitalism, Gore and Kulash can’t help but twist history’s biggest toy craze into a hollow and half-invented corporate fantasy about three women who bought low, sold high, and reinvested all the profits in themselves. If only it were that easy.

Curry has had a fascinating past two decades, something that “Underrated” does an effective job of capturing. But in harnessing what was always there in full view, there’s not much else here to add.

Like “The Prestige” or “Interstellar” before it, “Oppenheimer” is a movie about the curse of being an emotional creature in a mathematical world. The difference here isn’t just the unparalleled scale of this movie’s tragedy, but also the unfamiliar sensation that Nolan himself is no less human than his characters.

This trite Irish trifle about a girls trip to Lourdes is so chalky and underbaked that its all-star cast (Laura Linney! Kathy Bates! Stephen Rea!) is left no choice but to chew on the scenery.

The end feels somehow both slow and rushed, but Gray Matter showcases its strengths earlier on.

“Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.

With My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, Cousins powerfully makes the case that there’s nothing better than cinema itself for elevating a lie into art.

The title “Mutt” suggests something in between, caught between worlds and languages, genders and sexualities. But Feña doesn’t seem caught at all; he seems quite self-assured. It’s the conditions of his life that are causing him stress. That is as illuminating a message as any.

Despite trafficking in a wide array of Sundance tropes — from its modest but ethereal monochrome cinematography by DP Laura Valladao, to Mahmood Schricker’s Sqürl-adjacent guitar score — Fremont is always more delicate than it is precious and mercifully never quite as cute as it sounds.

While the stirring visual fluidity of “The Unknown Country,” her first fiction feature and a kindhearted triumph, provides further arguments pointing to Malick likely being an influence, what distinguishes Maltz’s approximation to that style of evocatively loose filmmaking is that it’s grounded on the personal victories of real individuals. Based on that, she forges eclectic narrative devices for a tone poem with substantial dramatic meat on its bones.

The winning cast allows Taylor to exploit the formula that the Coen brothers have made careers out of: watching lovable dimwits investigate a mystery that they’re completely unqualified to solve is always a blast.

While much of the film is built on repressed pain, there are moments of celebration, some reconciliation, and even laughter.

A furious yet resiliently hopeful documentary about white America’s long and ongoing history of colonizing the Očeti Šakówin (along with the rest of this land’s indigenous people), Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s vital Lakota Nation vs. United States doesn’t waste any of its 121 minutes, but it also boasts a number of moments that effectively squeeze the film’s entire perspective into a single unforgettable image.

Bird Box Barcelona has strayed so far from what made the first film interesting, scary, and yes, timely! that it remains but a distant memory, as if someone pulled a blindfold over our collective cinematic memory, for no real reason whatsoever, with no answers to ever be found.

As a living record of the history of the Negro Leagues — it’s role in shaping America, in the prospects of upward mobility, in providing a playing field for Black folks to express themselves — Pollard’s The League is a rich, engrossing, and necessary tribute to a critical early wave in the Civil Rights movement.