Slender but flecked with magical touches, Romería is so gentle it never quite qualifies as haunting. Nonetheless, Simón stirs up the ineffable sadness that comes with wanting answers to the mysteries of your family — and then, like it or not, receiving them.

It’s not just our recognition of the real-life parallels that make Jolie so touching in Couture — it’s that ineffable star power she’s possessed for so long. In a story about a potential tragedy, what’s saddest is that Winocour’s film cannot match its lead’s effortless command.

I’m no sadist. They’ve suffered plenty for our amusement. Still, it’s a shame that for the first time in two and a half decades of cringe comedy, the guffaws feel forced.

When we’re just focused on Early, hoping to outrun Maddie’s demons in manic aerobics sessions of deliriously complex choreography, the movie feels like a spell. All of the things that make him an unlikely ingénue — the flop sweat, the slight chunkiness, the desire to pass for a cute foodie — click into place. She couldn’t be more perfect.

It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

Alcock’s wildling Supergirl is the one reason to see the film.

This story of two strangers who take a job on a fishing boat — their lives are irrevocably altered once they return to shore — slowly pulls you inside its disquieting design. By the time you get your bearings, you’re ensnared in its net.

This movie’s nail-biting, sorrowful power comes from what internalized destruction looks like.

Mostly, Girls Like Girls wins us over with a singular type of first-film assuredness: a familiar story presented as the most personal reveal ever. If you can’t remember what it was like to try to tiptoe while swooning, your heart barely able to stay in your chest, you were never a teenager.

The Death of Robin Hood feels like a director thinking only of his ambitions and not whether he’s making a movie anyone wants to bother to see. The lesson is right there in the film: Audiences decide what gets remembered.

Lilypad’s creativity-zapping existence throws off Pixar’s ability to brainstorm a dynamic story.

Despite the character’s rocky path to sexual awakening, Herzi navigates toward a hopeful conclusion that doesn’t peddle phony uplift.

The action scenes in Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious are like nothing else in the multiplex.

I wanted to see more of the old Spielberg, the one who expressed awe in moments of silence rather than relentless motion.

Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. Time and Water is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.

I laughed 10 times, which makes this “Scary Movie” the best of the bunch — a pallid compliment.

Renoir may be a delicate wisp of a film, but it’s flecked with thoughtful questioning about whether childhood’s sorrows leave permanent scars on us as adults.

Obviousness is this film’s handicap — and the main joke.

Sparse yet gripping, “Backrooms” and its minimalist story accommodate the audience’s own free-ranging imagination.

Power Ballad nods toward a dozen interesting themes, none of which it bothers to explore.

Per usual with movies like this, spelling out the terror (the roots are in hobo codes and religious legend) becomes, regrettably, a shock absorber, not a facilitator. But the scares were middling to begin with because Øvredal — a game but overeager trickster — telegraphs his set pieces as if he were equipped with a flare gun and detour cones. Then again, it might be an attempt to distract us from thinking too hard about all the illogic in Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess’ screenplay

“Boosters” isn’t perfect and that doesn’t matter. The audacity of it — the exuberance Riley puts into making and loving movies — is what I want to see more of from every filmmaker, fashionista and human being still grinding at their own creative ambitions.

It’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].

The fluid, idiosyncratic charm of Silent Friend — which never feels like two and a half hours — is in Enyedi’s heartfelt belief that curiosity is simply a garden that grows progress. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this veteran dreamweaver’s key cast are entrancing, inviting specimens themselves, led by an inner glow of compassion in Leung that feels like its own natural energy source.

The problem, though, from its clichéd interview framing (Jeffrey Wright plays an American journalist visiting the retired Baranov at his estate) to the tediously narrated flashback structure, is that the movie never lives and breathes inside its stitched-together moments, preferring to be a relentless, country-hopping talkfest in which characters opine as if fully aware of the consequential era they’re in, fully ready to explain it.

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

Actually witnessing the audience’s emotional connection to her lyrics makes “Hit Me Hard and Soft” feel like an epic coming-of-age movie as much as a concert film. Still, by the 50th mascara-smeared face, I needed fresh air.