In its most moving and offhandedly momentous moments, The Inspection becomes a chronicle of not just persecution and survival but also solidarity, in which the all-American brotherhood in which Ellis finds himself actually can function as advertised.

Part horror film, part coming-of-age tale, part romance, the adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ young adult novel Bones and All is a small marvel, unsettling and heartbreaking in equal measure.

The Menu is a tightly wound, sharply rendered skewering of the dichotomy between the takers and the givers, or in this case, the eaters and the cooks.

The result is a fairly cerebral genre hybrid that still connects on a gut level.

Anyone gripped by “The Good Nurse” won’t be surprised to learn that the film followed what actually happened pretty closely. But whether dramatized or presented as journalism, it remains shocking to hear how the problem of Cullen kept getting passed from one institution to another.

The stars can’t save it.

Bar Fight! is so low-stakes and small-scale that at times it feels more like a TV sitcom pilot than a film. But this would be a pilot worthy of a pickup.

The result is something visually dazzling and emotionally resonant, though likely to appeal primarily to youngsters and genre buffs.

This doc is a welcome reminder of how Mays’ very presence in American popular culture was a game-changer, given that only the most virulent of racists could deny his superiority to nearly everyone on the field. It’s also a gift to hear from Mays himself, still kicking at 91.

Spirited, the umpteenth screen incarnation of Charles Dickens’ evergreen “A Christmas Carol,” is such an amusing, buoyant and good-natured entertainment that it’s not hard to forgive this flashy musical-comedy-fantasy’s missteps. Grinchy viewers, however, may sing a different tune.

This is a tumultuous and ultimately tragic tale about the exploitation of athletes.

There’s a tear-jerking moment roughly every five to 10 minutes in this movie, as Gomez reveals her essential dilemma of being someone who loves making fans happy and loves being creative but lives in fear — as many people do — of disappointing their benefactors and loved ones.

Viewers who can endure the at-times tediously dour first hour of “Next Exit” are rewarded with a tense and emotional final stretch, with a lot to say about what gives life meaning.

The leads have a wonderful chemistry, with Bell hitting the right notes of anger and confusion and Morales maintaining the alien’s comic deadpan. Everyone involved has clearly thought through how such a wild fantasy situation might play out — and more importantly, how it would feel.

Yankovic diehards will likely enjoy this movie since — like his parody songs — it takes self-serious pieces of pop culture and changes the words to something silly. Those songs though are usually under four minutes. This picture runs 108.

The story’s a bit convoluted, though no more than most detective plots. Ultimately, it’s a solid mystery, explained well by Enola in her fourth-wall-breaking chats with the audience. The pairing of actor and role here is just about perfect, and as much a star-making turn for Brown as her breakout performance in “Stranger Things.”

The structuring theme of The Novelist’s Film may be artistic frustration, the kind that can spur a writer to call it quits, an actor to take a break and even an established director to reconsider his calling. But it’s also very much about finding creative renewal in unexpected places — a bookstore, an outdoor trail, a movie theater — and learning to embrace, rather than resist, life’s beautifully meandering flow.

It’s all plenty inventive and heart-conscious, grim without being punishing and, in its openness about impermanence and humility, could spark some significant parent-child exchanges about love, flaws and the necessity of meaningful time together.

It’s telling that both the first “Black Panther” and this messier if seldom less engrossing follow-up are at their strongest when they resist or even flat-out ignore their franchise obligations.

Distinctively incisive on an emotional level, the film applauds the bravery of its participants to relive a painful shared trauma and create a permanent testament of what they endured.

It’s not funny, it’s not satirical, and it’s not worth your time, or Toni Collette’s

The story does build, in its second act, to an unsettlingly persuasive indictment of a society that teaches even its youngest members to hate, condemn and destroy women. But did the movie have to fixate so lovingly on that destruction, or make its chief destroyer so compelling?

Even if he couldn’t summon the experience of walking in Ferragamo’s shoes and getting to know him deeply, Guadagnino makes one appreciate the shoemaker’s indelible footprints from afar.

For the first 90 minutes or so, there’s remarkable vibrancy and spontaneity to this picture, as its creators and stars seem to be coming up with their story on the spot, with the cameras rolling. They seem inspired and excited. The mood is infectious.

The Wonder undeniably resonates in these confounding times concerning belief, fact and manipulation.

Director Tommy Boulding and screenwriters Ray Bogdanovich and Dean Lines do deliver a lean, effective action film, with lots of shooting, stabbing and clever traps. It’s ideal for anyone who enjoys the sound of tortured screams in a bucolic English countryside.

The Lair doesn’t finish as spectacularly as it starts; but that just means it’s a good genre picture and not a great one.

Lee structures the film like a mystery, which gives it a sharp hook in the early going but leads to an inevitable letdown in the final stretch when the answers prove less interesting than the questions.

“Black & Blues” isn’t a straightforward biography so much as a collection of engaging anecdotes and keen observations, meant to spark a renewed appreciation for someone too often misunderstood.

Feste handles the action and horror in Run Sweetheart Run well; and for those who can handle its more preposterous twists there are trashy pulp kicks to be had here. But given that this movie is also trying to say something honest and angry about how the powers that be protect abusive men, its silliness is a setback.

As offbeat and personal as the director’s best.

As deliberate as the image-making often is, it’s always to train us in looking as the brothers do, to consider the breadth of life and interconnectedness in our world: Wherever you are, All That Breathes is asking, can you see what’s there, what needs your attention?

Henry is such an earthy, captivating presence that he holds the center of gravity in Causeway — when he’s not on screen, the film drifts, rudderless, as Lynsey does.

A glossy and breezy summation of Black cinema history this is not, and thank goodness for that.

While it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.

Though the film is politically and culturally urgent, it’s too much of a challenge to connect with the void of character at the core of this screenplay. We may all have the power to be Jane, but the image of Jane remains frustratingly hazy in Nagy’s depiction.

What it isn’t is especially insightful or memorable. Just because evil is banal doesn’t mean a movie has to be.

My Policeman is an absorbing, resonant, deeply wistful adaptation of the 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts that will probably be best appreciated — stylistically, thematically, romantically — if judged more within the context of its mainly mid-20th century setting than by contemporary expectations.

The teen-targeted fantasy-romance The School for Good and Evil is an exhaustingly long, overstuffed movie that probably would’ve worked better as a TV series.

Each segment runs too long; and none of them has the kind of killer ending an anthology film deserves. But they do all deliver what they promise: a 1999 look and vibe, with moments designed to make audiences squirm.

It’s the moments of more personal observation — about how the girls relate to each other, to their elders, and to a culture that’s a sometimes uneasy blend of Canadian and Indigenous — that gives this picture its spark of originality. There are lots of genre movies like this. None are this one.

Garcia holds back too much, perhaps trying to avoid any phony epiphanies. As a result, his two main characters are too preoccupied with re-litigating old grudges to do or say anything notable.

Like Ari Aster’s similarly slippery “Hereditary,” Steiner’s film shrewdly shifts back and forth between the real physical threat of dark supernatural forces and the more elusive harm done by a lifetime of bad parenting.

If Wells has assembled a note-perfect evocation of a highly specific chapter — the end of a millennium and possibly something else — it’s when she deliberately breaks with realism that this gently aching movie achieves an overwhelming emotional force.

With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.

Part of the appeal of Ticket to Paradise is seeing Roberts and Clooney together before they — and this type of glossy studio entertainment — become extinct.

One measure of the movie’s skill, and its generosity, is that it embraces the wisdom of both its protagonists. You’ll share Colm’s exasperation and defend his right to pursue an unimpeded life of music and the mind, but you’ll also concede Pádraic’s point that kindness and camaraderie leave behind their own indelible if often invisible legacies.

This profoundly moving movie covers a different kind of success, as a great musician takes pains to make sure her idol receives some proper respect — the only currency that always matters.

It isn’t one of her better movies, but like even her lesser achievements, it warrants more than easy dismissals. It’s a fascinating confluence of talent and tedium; it’s also a story in which tedium — the day-after-day frustration of a stalled, thwarted existence — may well be the point.

This is a movie for adrenaline junkies who want to watch as many slapstick fights as can fit into about 90 minutes of screen-time.

Even with the Gen Z-friendly touches — and Dever delivering a winning performance — Rosaline still feels frustratingly stale.

Despite a clever premise, decent special effects and an amiable tone, the horror-comedy The Curse of Bridge Hollow never makes the jump from “mildly pleasant time-killer” to “entertaining.”

This film is a superior example of how flavorful dialogue, talented actors and excellent staging can make something familiar really pop.

There are set pieces scattered throughout Dark Eyes that are as strange — and as strangely beautiful — as the best of Argento, starting with an unnerving opening sequence that sees a group of people in a park gazing at a solar eclipse.

Piggy is a masterful mix of dark comedy, social commentary and raw suspense.

The impact of the narrative hinges on Perelman Striks’ fierce performance that conveys the character’s desperation to fulfill the promise of his talent and the frustrating inner battle to suppress his truth.

A love story by turns sprawling, despairing and invigorating.

Halloween Ends has the feeling of dour obligation, and it’s clear that no one’s heart is really in this anymore, the limits of narrative possibility in Haddonfield stretched beyond their max.

Till is more understatedly effective, and Deadwyler’s performance at its most powerful, when Chukwu resists and even undermines the template of the prestige biographical drama she only appears to be making.

Ultimately, and perhaps most beautifully, the film makes a case, à la the musical “Rent,” about how, in the end, we must measure our life in love. On that score, Eli Timoner left the world a very wealthy man.

No moment on this anything-but-love boat has the impact of, say, the seasickness sequence of “Triangle of Sadness,” but slaughter stans will get their butchery bellyfuls.

It’s not scary; it is instead an alternately touching and haunting story.

It’s more a feel-good recap of an impressive championship run. But the game analysis is keen, and the arc of this story is undeniably inspiring, arguing that victory is sweeter when it springs from a common purpose.

Based on Jessica Knoll’s best-selling mystery novel, the Mike Barker-directed Luckiest Girl Alive — with a script by Knoll — falls into the trap of trying too hard to capture not just the book’s flashback-heavy plot but also its distinctive voice.

It’s a story often told, but this movie tells it well, energetically dramatizing the in-the-moment experiences Leslie has and showing how they inform the choices she makes. And Riseborough is a dynamo, making sure that even at her worst, Leslie has enough personality and humanity that the audience roots for her just to get through another day.

For all the flayed flesh and impaled skin in the picture, this Hellraiser isn’t sharp enough.

In its interlocking parts and willfully impenetrable details, Serebrennikov wants you to know that being Russian is too complicated to foreground one emotion or experience, or to rely on the safety of the linear when one day can feel like nothing and everything. This brazenly packed movie isn’t for everyone. Neither, we grasp, is being Russian.

Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning social satire, Triangle of Sadness, is many things: a cautionary tale about the perils of slurping shellfish on rough seas, a blunt (as in dull) critique of the one percent, a (wasted) opportunity to hear Woody Harrelson espouse the tenets of Karl Marx and a pessimistic suggestion that people — both the oppressors and the oppressed — share a fundamental willingness to exploit each other given the right circumstances.

Unlike “Hustle,” Amsterdam only fitfully locates the moment-to-moment comic verve — or the bittersweet sense of longing — that would give these characters and their farcical shenanigans the deeper human resonance it’s clearly aiming for.

The movie is a thin but painless retread, cloaking its derivative storytelling in a familiar cloak of fan gratification.

Vesper is on the arty side of science-fiction, more focused on character and setting than in plot-driven thrills.

Nothing Compares stays confined to the six-year whirlwind when O’Connor was at her most famous, and steers clear of the decades of scandals that followed. This is clearly a conscious — and astute — choice by Ferguson, who means to show that even at the peak of her commercial powers, O’Connor was questioned, mocked and belittled.

Mona Lisa’s story is at first bizarre, and then tense, and then genuinely moving as the escapee figures out what she actually wants from the outside world.

Co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (who previously collaborated on the excellent mood-piece “The Fits”) create a strong sense of rhythm and texture, capturing the feel of this town and how it holds its inhabitants tightly.

At its best and its sharpest, this film is less about supernatural monsters than about the common fear of drifting apart from the people you love.

This is not an epic; nor is it meant to be. It’s a snappy story about a bunch of violent men — and one particular woman, anxious to get clear of them.

That it succeeds as well as it does can be chalked up to a lot of different things, including the pleasures of Provincetown in the fall, the sights of New York at Christmastime and the unerring perfection of Luke Macfarlane’s five o’clock shadow.

In the hands of director and co-writer Santiago Mitre, co-writer Mariano Llinás and lead actor Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), Strassera is the slow-but-steady one in the story of “The Tortoise and The Junta: The Little Prosecutor Who Maybe Couldn’t, But Wouldn’t Quit.” He’s what one might call “endearingly competent.” The characterization they achieve is something rare and commendable: a lead who is interestingly uninteresting.

By letting the archival material carry most of the weight, Pettengill creates an instructive kind of time-travel experience for viewers of all political persuasions, transporting them to a past hauntingly similar to our present.

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.

Hamm’s performance here as freelance journalist and investigative whiz Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher is a master class in effortless charm, a comedic turn that never sacrifices the character’s intelligence for a punchline yet steers clear of the smugness and smarminess so prevalent in contemporary comedy.

There is surely more to be mined from this extraordinary, complicated trailblazer’s life than one suitably enjoyable love letter to his brilliance and bravery.

Me to Play doesn’t make some grand pronouncement about living with illness or theater as therapy. It’s a small slice of life about a couple of guys trying to exemplify that classic Beckett quote: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

This is an unapologetic advocacy doc; and as such it’s likely to rub some viewers the wrong way. But even those who want to watch it just to argue should find that “The American Dream” is a worthy opponent.

Carmen relies too much on coincidences to keep its story going; and Buhagiar threads in a few too many impressionistic flashbacks to the heroine’s youth and to the romance her family forced her to abandon. But McElhone strikes a fine balance between humor and pathos.

Meet Cute falls into a rut fairly quickly, because it lacks the breadth of imagination that makes the best time-loop stories work.

The plot races from one tense outdoor confrontation to the next, as “Lou” tells a simple but effective story about two women enduring the harshness of the elements and the machinations of violent men.

Notwithstanding the embellishments, this undoubtedly remains a Tyler Perry film — occasionally for better, but often for worse.

I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

As a sustained piece of action choreography, then, Athena is frequently staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of modern French identity, the movie feels thin and overdetermined.

There’s more than a whiff of both Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund to the proceedings, except the characters never emerge as fully as they do in the best of those filmmakers’ works.

While the material here is thin and largely predictable (aside from one great jump scare), the cast is outstanding and the dialogue is snappy, delivered at a brisk pace.

The deep strangeness of Drifting Home can take some time to adjust to. But in this quirky and boisterous picture, the surreal predicament is ultimately just an offshoot of these kids’ common fears about growing up.

Mendes and Hawke bring a lot of depth and pathos to these characters, who gradually begin to wonder why they and their classmates are so fiercely dedicated to punishing each other.

Fans of the first Goodnight Mommy may find it a pale, pointless copy. Newcomers, though? They should be suitably creeped out … but, alas, not wrecked.