The way the editing (by Alain Dessauvage and George Hanmer) so gracefully unfolds from present to past suggests a kind of cinematic Proustian madeleine, conjuring how involuntary memories can be jolted again by encounters in the present.

While McCarthy and Spencer do their damndest to make the family-friendly feature work — McCarthy in particular brings real texture to her charming slacker with a heart of gold, a role she’s played so many times before — Thunder Force isn’t clever enough to break new ground in the superhero milieu, nor is it silly enough to mine its material for the kind of jokes that would make it distinctive.

The more bizarre The Man Who Sold His Skin becomes, the less original it gets.

The middling but enjoyable Voyagers is meant to be a timeless parable about the primitive essence of human nature; if its space-age shenanigans are broadly identical to the beats of a book William Golding wrote about a group of preadolescent boys who crash on a deserted island during World War II, that’s more of a feature than it is a bug.

The Power is built on subtle elements, but the director’s more ambitious jumps are just as electrifying.

Here, the same genre tropes that are ordinarily primed for cheap thrills and big twists are bent towards the opposite effect, as the film blurs the line between reality and delusion in order to make audiences question a trauma so disorientingly awful that it might otherwise be easy to dismiss altogether — even for the people who suffer it first-hand.

The rare moments when Shoplifters of the World isn’t tripping over its own cutesy fan service reveal a movie that’s listening for the real and mysterious friction that has always transmuted suicidal music into its own kind of salvation.

In the end, though, it’s all about the battles, and Wingard’s film offers some of the franchise’s best.

The film ultimately suffers from an overfamiliarity in not just construction but content; the “WeWork” documentary paints a broad portrait of what happened without expanding on (or even including) details that made previous exposés so juicy.

Its low-key religious underpinnings — truly, no one even hauls out a Bible during the entire film — likely won’t rankle the secular set, even as Christian kids will be happy to see their worldview reflected by way of a mild crowd-pleaser. It’s hammy, it’s predictable, it’s a little silly, but what YA musical isn’t?

Unlike Baron Cohen’s work, André seems to invite his targets to crack up with him, and they’re more than happy to oblige. Bad Trip is an extension of that all-inclusive approach: It’s a blunt instrument of absurdity, but that’s also what makes it so much fun.

The movie makes its points in grand, emotional gestures more than policy nuances, but what it lacks in sophistication it makes up in immediacy. The drama acts as a visceral of ode to the nature of activism under dire circumstances.

But Nobody uses its boundaries as an asset. This giddy approach to action in place of story has held appeal ever since Wiley E. Coyote chased the Road Runner off a cliff, and Nobody lingers in a ludicrous plane that works in bite-sized pieces.

Above all, the movie makes a case for the tremendous resources on display by attaching them to genuine investment in the stakes at hand. When the telescope gets to work, it may not deliver firm answers for a world that demands instant gratification. But it will provide many reasons to keep looking up, and The Hunt for Planet B captures many of them.

Purcell, as star, stays resolute to the last, but as filmmaker, her sharp ideas are dulled into something that barely leaves a mark.

The directors do a brilliant job of making its ad-hoc, mixed-media aesthetic into more of a feature than a bug. Glitched together from dozens of Charli’s boom-tastic PC Music bangers and punctuated with computer-generated animation (impish avatars and the like), the film nails the semi-digital existence that we all have come to understand as its own kind of reality.

While The Fallout allows for lightness to occasionally emerge, the film never forgets the experience at its center, one that can never be fully forgotten.

"Somewhere You Feel Free” doesn’t develop into a snapshot so much as a loving impression of a legend gone too soon. But the beautiful 16mm footage (with the new interviews shot to match) will trigger warm memories from Petty’s truest fans, and Wharton interprets the music in a way that should allow this film to serve as an irresistible entry point for neophytes who don’t realize how many Petty songs they already know by heart.

While Bateman’s more florid touches sometimes wear, Munn is so devastatingly good at selling Violet’s internal strife that it’s easy to forgive Bateman’s other creative impulses. With a star this well-suited for the role, Bateman has already proven her salt as a keen-eyed filmmaker.

Women Is Losers is an infectious and auspicious debut.

Trusting that her subject matter is fertile enough to merit such a scholarly approach, and also bewitching enough to survive it, Janisse connects the dots between “The Wicker Man” and “La Llorona” in a way that allows this multi-chapter epic to function as both séance-like spectacle and streaming-era syllabus in equal measure.

Kier gets the role of his lifetime as a fabulously snarky, acerbic, long-retired hairdresser in Todd Stephens’ Swan Song, a dark comedy that totters to and fro the campy and the melancholic with wincing laughs and real pain.

Introducing, Selma Blair often feels a bit messy and unfinished by its final act, but that’s also part of its charm (and realism).

While Gregg offers a cheeky sense of what it really means to gaslight someone, no one will feel as injured by the film’s final-act choices than its audience.

Alien on Stage captures lighting in a bottle. Like a real-life “Waiting for Guffman” with a fairytale ending, it’s one of the funniest documentaries in years.

In practice, City of Lies is so understandably overwhelmed by the sprawling mystery at its core that it never figures out what to ask of either history or itself. Or how.

Blending Wojnarowicz’s own audio journals with input from a handful of his contemporaries, Chris McKim’s startling and meticulously edited new movie captures the spirit of the artist as he was, bracing and in-your-face.

Truth to Power is a promotional film, not a work of journalism.