The movie isn’t unusual-looking or surprising, but my daughter assures me fans of the show will not want to miss it. The rest of us will be immersed in warm confusion as things we just don’t understand unspool before us.

Although the blandly nondescript title doesn’t exactly suggest the promise of deep intrigue, Philipp Stölzl’s Chess Story masterfully confounds expectations as a tautly calibrated, intricately constructed Chinese puzzle of a period drama set during Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.

It will be interesting to see what this capable filmmaker does his next time around with, hopefully, a larger budget and a few more objective voices helping to guide his choices.

As a micro case study about some acutely flawed 21st century strivers, When You Finish Saving the World has its well-turned moments, but when you want it to be gloriously messy about families and human interactions, it stays resolutely in lab mode.

There are fun characters and dazzling action sequences. The filmmakers’ approach to rethinking legendary figures and placing them in a kind of timeless, weirdly teched-out reality is intriguing.

The suspenseful Missing plows through nearly two hours of shocking plot twists at a breakneck pace. And while it’s entertaining to be sure, it also takes on a somber tone as it reckons with grief, loss and intimate partner violence in a way that’s very real, backed up by headlines ripped from the news, and yes, those true crime series and TikToks that are so very compelling.

If the movie feels a bit overstuffed, that may be because Poliner clearly cares about these characters, and — quite touchingly — has thought a lot about what would make them happy.

The cast is fine, but there’s a dispiriting dourness to the film. Nevertheless, after a slow start, Kitamura does offer up some impressive splatter scenes — peaking at the end, with a wild climax that partly justifies the movie’s existence.

The plot is pretty routine, but its finer points about religious faith and rituals give the creep-outs and jump-scares real nuance. What makes this such a satisfying horror film is its cultural specificity.

It’s possible Swab made this film just to tell a story about the more compassionate side of prostitution. If so, the movie’s guilty-pleasure thrills are just a bonus.

Ultimately, this is a movie with real personality, about a man coming to realize with no small amazement that he has an actual legacy to pass on — even if it’s a grim one.

Smith and Leonard spoof the presumptions and pretensions of people who like to outwardly project as kindly and enlightened; and they unsparingly illustrate how someone’s seemingly rock-solid reputation can be undone in an instant.

It’s the kind of movie destined to baffle and irritate as many people as it beguiles.

If you go into it expecting nothing more than to enjoy watching a sweaty Butler manhandle some bad guys while Colter manhandles him, you’ll be more than satisfied with the ride Plane offers — a well-executed hunk of pulpy entertainment.

Some not great things happen in Mars One. And there is agony. But there are also the good things done in response that keep families like these soldiering on.

Movies about the people who grow our food, who struggle as honest land stewards in a time of heartless industry, are few and far between, making Alcarràs a rare gem. In its unforced, plaintive artistry, it nurtures to a palpable ripeness the beauty and burden in these all-too-hidden lives.

Superhero fans exhausted by bloated blockbusters should check out director Victor Vu’s Vietnamese action movie Head Rush, which overcomes its incredibly goofy plot thanks to some dynamic fight scenes and a general unpretentiousness.

Ariel Phenomenon feels pretty repetitive, as it reiterates the details of the encounter and its aftermath over and over. The movie is missing a larger perspective. Still, there is undeniable power in hearing the recollections of people who shared something so remarkable and so inexplicable.

The movie’s “and then this happened” structure can feel a little scattered, as Rice bounces among different people’s personal stories without developing any narrative momentum. But those stories are still moving, especially given that nearly everyone watching Broadway Rising will have been through something similar.

When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? I think it sees a good actor giving a well-meaning, unevenly directed and often touching performance in a movie that strives to wrest something raw and truthful from a story that’s all bald contrivances, technological as well as melodramatic.

Loudmouth is better when it operates along parallel histories of strife and battle: galling incidents that expose America’s racial fault lines, and how Sharpton’s activism affected those spaces.

The overall vibe here ends up being less “good dirty fun” than “foul-mouthed teenager trying to look cool.”

What does make the movie a few degrees more entertaining than most is its cast.

A short, sweet fantasy film that works best when it leans into the possibilities of its situation — and less well when it tries to be funny.

The movie is mostly about Mustafa himself, a loving father and husband who endures whatever he has to in order to provide for his family. But as played by Suliman — with his kind eyes and thoughtful demeanor — Mustafa’s burdens feel especially undue.

Even if viewers can’t make sense of it all, they should be able to connect to the way Van Warmerdam revisits some of his favorite themes — including the idea that we’re all actors really, struggling to remember our lines and motivations.

Although Something from Tiffany’s was shot in a festive, lit-up New York City, there’s a flatness to the look and tone of the film that keeps it from crossing the line from “something to put on while wrapping presents” to “something to watch with the whole family every Christmas.”

It takes time to adjust to the movie’s style; and some may still find the “more talk less violence” approach too inert. But many of the conversational standoffs between Read and the Krays’ gang (including a few tussles with the brothers themselves, played by Ronan Summers in a dual role) are as brutal as any shootout.

Horror hounds should appreciate all the inside jokes and references — while also wishing the movie itself were as consistently good as its influences.

Kelly tries a bit too much, favoring shock and absurdity over consistency and coherence. But the attempt alone is exciting; and it offers a refreshing alternative for those who prefer their holiday entertainment to be spooky, not sentimental.

This moving, probing, beautifully written film doesn’t completely eschew nostalgia, but like Ernaux’s books, it treats the past as a prism, casting varying light depending on how, when and where it’s held.

Ultimately, it’s about the bonds of sisterhood and how those who know you best and love you most can help you heal, or at least start you on that path. Its vagueness serves almost as a Rorschach test. How effective it is as a drama may depend on your perspective.

It’s a film that ultimately feels less like a celebration and more like further exploitation of the star, leaving us all with much more unsettling questions about Houston’s life and legacy. Sadly, the disappointing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” doesn’t let Whitney rest in peace.

The film is made with a level of craft and simple competence that has become shockingly rare. A genuine movie star is allowed to radiate charisma and charm, and all the performances have character nuance and emotional depth.

A spirited, revealing documentary.

Overall, Corsage shows a tantalizing way forward for the hopelessly staid biopic genre: honoring, provoking and upending with verve and humor as it liberates a complex woman from iconography’s deadening glamour.

There’s certainly enough potential mayhem, desperation and danger here (including the gangsters on Sang-hyeon’s tail) for “Broker” to have become a dark, propulsive action-drama, in another filmmaker’s hands. But Kore-eda focuses on — and mines — the grace notes, better angels and soulfulness of his characters in such lovely and relatable ways that we’re grateful for his humanistic, more empathetic priorities.

For a movie that bristles with more revolutionary fervor than Dahl’s quieter, more inward-focused story, “Matilda the Musical” could use a little messier, more rambunctious energy.

For its visual appeal alone it’s worth a theatrical visit ahead of its Netflix premiere next month.

Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.

I’ll admit that I found much of Babylon mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

Joyride is a jalopy of a film. This Irish-set story of a brand-new single mother and a precocious 13-year-old boy who end up on the road together is so scattershot and far-fetched it overwhelms its better intentions — of which there are many.

On its exotic surface, Wildcat might hold all the trappings of a standard wildlife conservation documentary, but lurking beneath the lushly photographed camouflage is a tenderly moving, deeply empathetic human survival story that has as much to do with emotional trauma as it does with the physical.

The docudrama Framing Agnes is a fascinating, multidimensional, mosaic-like glimpse at transgender life from the 1950s to today as interpreted by — and through — a group of transmasculine and transfeminine performers and creatives and one uniquely impressive academic.

The cast is game. Unfortunately, what should be gut punches feel like glancing blows.

The actors all ham it up to a degree suited to a project so flat, cheap and derivative, which helps keep Mindcage at least watchable, if never exceptional.

Aside from some sections that deal with the studio’s financial ups and downs, there’s not really a narrative through-line. But the individual segments are often remarkably vivid, recreating Abbey Road’s unique vibe through vintage images and sounds, bringing the musicians’ memories to life.

The choice to limit the film’s scope also limits its impact; but the heart of “The Volcano” is still effectively harrowing, showing the moment when awe at nature’s wonders turns into mortal terror.

The revelations taper off in the film’s second half, sapping it of some energy as it hits the homestretch. But the characters’ despair and passion remains gripping throughout, as they force each other into some overdue reckonings with the past.

“Onoda” is an insightful portrait of fanaticism, illustrating how bad ideas can take root simply because people are naturally resistant to change.

Troll has a blockbuster polish without the Hollywood heaviness. The story’s nothing special; but the action is spry, the characters are likable and the emphasis on Scandinavian folklore keeps Troll from becoming just another generic “Godzilla”/“Jurassic Park” riff.

It’s a daughter’s ode to her mother at a particularly perilous time, designed to humanize a leader who has been viciously targeted.

The Quiet Girl is both the best reason movies should look to more compact narratives for adaptation and, in a few instances, indicative of where cinematic choices can leave unnecessary footprints. But everything in this heartfelt tale is made with the deepest sincerity, and gently packed with soulful portrayals and lovely imagery.

With its mix of collected video, on-the-ground scenes in more than a dozen cities, interviews with Ukrainians (including some dissenting Russian voices), and media coverage, “Freedom on Fire” is a pulsating jumble of hearts and minds making do amid war and wreckage.

“Dreamers Never Die” becomes an honest, evocative and at times viscerally exciting look back at one of heavy metal’s headiest and most creative eras.

While their movie may not be all that original — in fact it actually has a few blatant homages to Quentin Tarantino that border on theft — it is strangely absorbing to see every mistake Milly has ever made pile up into one huge catastrophe.

In Avatar: The Way of Water, the director James Cameron pulls you down so deep, and sets you so gently adrift, that at times you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie so much as floating in one.

Hunt works fine as a slam-bang action movie; but at heart it’s more of a cautionary tale.

Segan doesn’t force anything. He takes each situation and imagines what might realistically happen — and then what might happen next. He builds a world that feels real, and anchors it with a relationship so wholesome that its easy to see why a lonely vampire would upend his whole existence to preserve it.

The film is really all of a piece in the way it toys with expectations, keeping viewers off-balance. Stevens and company put the audience in the place of both the predator and prey. They’ve built a clever little anxiety-generating machine.

[A] beautifully bittersweet and generous movie — which, like life itself, draws no distinction between the significant and the insignificant.

Guzzoni’s directorial hand chooses to move with restraint where others would exploit the despair on display for melodramatic manipulation. His focus is on the moral grays.

The film hits its stride about halfway through its running time before sputtering down the stretch. But for the most part it’s pretty snappy.

As Leonor Will Never Die parties to its close, Escobar reminds us that while life is unerringly finite, cinema is the complicated, messy, riotous love affair that never has to end.

This is a movie that could probably have done with less chronological vérité or media moments and more wide-ranging interviews drawing out observations from Prakash, Gunn-Wright, Rojas and AOC, because whenever we do get to hear them, we can see how smart, interesting and perceptive they are, and why they’re needed for the challenges ahead.

Deakins’ work is beautiful, Colman is incredible, and the role of Stephen proves to be a breakout for Ward. But the story is too scattershot and contrived for an audience to be swept away and moved in the same way that Colman finds herself swept away by the experience of the Peter Sellers classic “Being There.”

In EO, the camera doesn’t just follow the story or record the action. Its restless, exploratory movements express a kind of shared consciousness, a spirit of communion among different members of the animal world, whether they’re running together in a field or sharing the same tight enclosure. It’s the grace of this movie to extend that communion to the human beings who pass in front of the camera, and whose fates are tightly bound up with EO’s, whether they realize it or not.

Rare archival footage is intertwined among the film’s historical narrative with an all-too-rare grace — the images we see here lend themselves to a deep and nuanced understanding of Lowndes County at the time; not just the shared, communal efforts but the mapping of both community and anti-Blackness as it materialized through the everyday.

The result is amusing enough, but it’s as cinematically substantive as a sugar cookie.

A staggering masterwork that reveals itself unhurriedly, one permutation at a time, Chou’s third feature is perhaps the only film this year in which every single scene and every line of dialogue within them feel absolutely indispensable. The richness in every detail, and their unexpected ramifications over time, make for a one-of-a-kind character study.

As crafted by Bahrani, this fascinating portrait of a hero/villain who comes across as both affable and unpleasant, often simultaneously, is a Greek tragedy and a Shakespearean comedy with a touch of “Tiger King” all expertly rolled into one all-too-pertinent cautionary tale.

If you’ve ever doubted how art, rage or action can make meaningful change, Goldin’s combination of all three fighting an opioid crisis that nearly killed her is exhilarating proof of the power of “screaming in the streets,” to borrow what the queer artist David Wojnarowicz — one of many close friends of Goldin’s whom the AIDS epidemic took — wryly described as a necessary ritual of the living in a time of too much death.

The result is both a study in historical amnesia and a kind of epistemological detective story, in which the grim truth is as hard to refute as it is hard to prove.

Too much of the film (an official selection at 2020’s Cannes Film Festival and Colombia’s entry in the 2021 Oscar race) lacks sufficient conflict and an organic sense of storytelling.

The depiction of teenage acute depression settles for shallow character development and self-indulgent tropes that distract from a strong Hugh Jackman performance.

Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

The Eternal Daughter is haunting, as all the best ghost stories are. The best love stories too.

Despite the narrative elements that are part of Michael’s coping mechanisms, Aldridge and Field effectively salvage the emotional core of “Spoiler Alert,” bringing us back to the heart of the matter, and giving space to the feelings that should flow freely in a film like this.

The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension. And even with a physically impressive production at his disposal, Fuqua’s filmmaking instincts are clumsy and prone to cliché.

Sometimes challenging and frequently moving, this movie considers the deeper reasons why Santa Claus inspires people — historically and now — while reminding viewers that the only reason traditions are traditions is because someone did them once and then did them again. We can always create new ones.

Like its predecessor, it is enjoyably episodic, jumping from one comic vignette to another. Some of these connect, while others land with a thud. But so it goes with Christmas. Not every present is a winner.

Garcia and Prinze are so likable that it’s satisfying to see them spend an hour or so of screen time figuring out what the audience knows right away.

The overall mood is warm and cheery, and Lohan brings a spontaneous sincerity to even the corniest scenes. The movie’s wrapping is shiny and plastic, but its star quality is genuine.

Overall, this picture is a refreshing alternative to the synthetic, simplistic Christmas movies that proliferate this time of year. Ditch the mistletoe and holly and it would still be a well-crafted, well-balanced character sketch, following two lost souls as they discover what they’ve been missing.

A dazzling suite of emotions plays out within the confines of Boutefeu’s subdued, sensitive, gradually mesmerizing performance. At times she stares with laserlike focus into the camera, as if she had located the object of her scorn seated just behind the lens. Mostly she stares pensively into the middle distance, lost in the phantasms of memory.

Tonally, Devotion remains steady, never going for over-the-top emotion or sensation, simply seeking to express something authentically moving and human. It unmistakably achieves that, delivering a stirring story of friendship during war, and beyond, that is both rare and real.

In her elegantly unsettling portrait of an invisible woman straddling two notions of home — far from what she’s known, working inside a perilous system — Jusu is letting us know she’s got all diasporic women employed by wealthy families on her mind. And that their fears can easily become nightmares.

Sr. proves a tender portrait and fitting tribute to an offbeat hero and creative pioneer.

Clermont-Tonnerre’s emphasis on playfulness and energy is understandable, but an opportunity to bring back a layered epicness to sex on film feels lost.

One of Strange World’s triumphs is the vibrant, weird, visually stunning subterranean world that the film’s heroes stumble upon during their quest to save their way of life. From its lush palette to its cute and deadly flora and fauna, this strange, mysterious world is very much deserving of its status as the film’s title character.

At its best, Taurus captures the tumult of the artistic process, where happy accidents and unpleasant truths are perpetually in conflict.

The lingering trauma of Morton’s upbringing is an ongoing challenge for him, even with all of his success; and this quietly moving movie examines how the right opportunities or the wrong expectations can make all the difference in who a person becomes.

We don’t learn much about how the government or politics work in Afghanistan; and there’s very little in the way of historical background. But by giving a voice both to Ghafari and — in a few scattered scenes — her fierce opposition, In Her Hands does capture with direct immediacy how hard it can be to loosen up a culture with a tradition of rigidity.

What makes this film so fascinating is that its subject remains an enigma: a pioneer who did a lot of good and inspired a lot of people, then faded quietly away, leaving questions about who he really was.

This film has a worthy goal: to change the perspectives of people who might be hurting right now. For those willing to go with its flow, it has a real power.

Adams is still an absolute dynamo as Giselle, fluctuating between preternatural cheeriness and storybook meanness. As in the first film, the actress strikes a graceful balance between the silly and the sincere, embodying and even humanizing everything people love about fairy tales.

With care, thoughtfulness and rigor, Schrader and the filmmakers of She Said craft a film that shows the process of building this paradigm-shifting piece of journalism in a manner that is simultaneously thrilling and grindingly methodical, aided greatly by Nicholas Britell’s score.

Being privy to this proud, close family at such a heavy, teetering moment is naturally emotional, which means Sbarge’s occasional voice-over commentary and the overactive music score can feel superfluous. But it’s well-intentioned empathy.