"Mustangs,” which was shot in California, Wyoming, Texas, Colorado and elsewhere, is a lovely, essential portrait that’s also a little dull. It sometimes feels more like a promotional film than penetrating documentary.

For an adoptee, the notion of “family” is so much more complicated and layered than it might be for someone else, but what Found powerfully argues is that within these many layers, there is an abundance of a unique kind of love, and understanding, to be found. You just have to look for it.

She may have a terrible co-star inside trying to upstage her, but with humor, strength and messy honesty, Blair makes a memorable case for why her show must go on.

Odom, surely one of the busiest actors working today, gives a committed performance but lacks chemistry with either of his onscreen wives. A sense of lightness, of fun, of the alchemy between two people is missing, though it would seem crucial to drive the story.

A poignant, sometimes piercing triptych of tales, each one predicated on chance encounters and romantic possibilities (the original Japanese title translates as “Coincidence and Imagination”), it finds Hamaguchi in playful, beguiling and quietly affecting form.

In gaming terms, this movie’s characters find themselves on a screen where every move leads to a bottomless pit. The nightmare they’re in is as existential as it is visceral.

The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.

Hard Luck Love Song is a happy but gritty marriage of material, filmmaker and star. Much is asked of Dorman, and he delivers all.

A willingness to subvert expectations is one reason this ungainly, ingenious and altogether fascinating collaboration works as well as it does.

Through her unfussy direction and sly editing, Kingdon’s collection of vignettes is a reminder that the destructively frenzied cycle of consumption and waste always trickles down.

It’s a different register for Rapace, who remains controlled, with a few explosions of emotion. But she is present and instinctual, imbuing Maria with a steely but soft power: decisive, persuasive and feminine.

The Rescue is a gripping, unsurprisingly moving early account, one that emphasizes the pluck and ingenuity of its heroes and the resilience and beauty of its survivors. To say that it feels necessarily incomplete is to acknowledge the extraordinary and extraordinarily multifaceted story it has to tell.

When “Convergence” feels rushed for trying to squeeze in a global snapshot, its impact is diluted.

Elegantly intoxicating in its atmospheric construction, “Fever Dream” maintains its incantation to its very final twist. Even as clues inch us closer to a logical explanation for the collective malaise, the mystical undercurrent Llosa sets in place fosters our doubt.

Despite many fine moments and a valuable story to tell, “Golden Voices,” directed by Evgeny Ruman, feels like a missed opportunity.

What fascinates the director, and clearly also fascinates his four outstanding lead actors, is the possibility of grace in a seemingly impossible, inconsolable situation. With considerable intelligence and disarming moral seriousness, they confront the question of whether forgiveness and understanding can be honestly extended or received, and whether healing can ever be more than an abstract concept.

Leo and María — and, judging from their on-screen rapport, Amalia and Ale as well — spin on a wavelength where their irrational lifestyle and coping mechanisms are logical to their comprehension; we are only lucky to be invited to visit this two-people planet for a short while.

From a purely technical viewpoint, Lorentzen’s one-side-only methodology makes Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam a lopsided viewing experience, one that seems tailor made for viewers predisposed to agreeing with Ateş’s critical opinions on Muslims, and no one else.

Titane is nothing if not a triumph of engineering, to the point where the slickness and sophistication of its technique sometimes threaten to overwhelm the rigor of its ideas. Still, it’s hard not to admire the sheer verve with which Ducournau ultimately welds those ideas together.

Ponciroli shows natural flair for holstered and unholstered suspense (if not always story logic), plus he’s got a worthy partner in the muted exteriors and sparsely lit interiors of John Matysiak’s cinematography, and a cast that dutifully plays along with every stare-down and line of colorfully poetic cowboy dialogue.

The Many Saints of Newark might have played better as a limited series rather than a truncated self-contained production, with the potential for a deeper story to unfold over several impending episodes.

The parts of Coming Home in the Dark about confronting guilt aren’t what make the movie so harrowing. Instead, what matters is that Ashcroft and his cast — and especially Gillies as the menacing and charismatic Mandrake — excel at drawing out the moment-to-moment tension of a crime in progress.

It’s not the promised spectacle that cements Venom: Let There Be Carnage as touching, wild entertainment. It’s the themes of home, love, and companionship that make Serkis’ sequel another reason to want more “Venom” movies, and quickly.

The movie is also notable for featuring not just one but two unconvincing romantic dynamics.

Craig reveals himself as perhaps the most generous actor to have inhabited the role. And not only toward the rest of the cast, but toward the very idea of Bond itself. Craig sets Bond free from the prison of forgetfulness that has previously trapped him like a caveman in ice, though the price is steep, and it remains to be seen if future installments can continue to pay it.

The result is a cinematic curio in search of a more conclusive theme and emotional payoff.

Seth’s cinematography is stunning, meeting the mood of each contrasting moment but set within a cohesive look that gives the film a dreamy, unreal quality.

Perhaps the highest praise we can lavish on Fuqua’s solid, enjoyable, easily watchable remake, is that beyond the addition of Gyllenhaal, it doesn’t try to fix anything that wasn’t broken in the first place.

After a while all the tasteful images of undulating waves and pulsating jellyfish can’t help but underscore the inescapable naval-gazing that goes with the territory.

Special kudos go to Martin Ziaran’s innovative, at times vertiginous and even upside-down camerawork, which lends a you-are-there feel to the film’s already viscerally unnerving action. It’s a master class in cinematography.

The intimacy, warmth and humor of the memories give the footage of him teaching the feeling of watching home movies from the adoring offspring of a cherished father.

The ending is ambiguous enough to be refreshingly un-clichéd. While “I’m Your Man” is very romantic in its own way, the movie is elevated by pondering not just love but life and our impending relationship to advanced artificial intelligence, a question that is surely already upon us.

The film’s conclusion leans too closely to the melodramatic. But Kurosawa’s assured direction is enough to make Wife of a Spy an enrapturing, stylish wartime period piece.

Sorry, haters, the film isn’t a train wreck. This musical, which had its Broadway premiere in 2016, works better in the theater. But the translation to the screen is smoother than expected.

To the less patient viewer, the lack of clarity on the finer points of high finance and characters’ backgrounds and not getting period-orienting news updates about the political situation, might seem confounding. But Azor works without them, because those details would only disrupt the artfully portentous chill Fontana gets from the pitch-perfect performances and design, and Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography.

It may seem churlish to knock a film that works so hard to present everyday, well-meaning folks facing unspeakable, real-life pain. But between the picture’s uncertain tone, quirky-for-quirk’s-sake elements and such self-conscious dialogue as “What color is the sky in your world, kemo sabe?” it’s tough to be all that supportive.

Layered storytelling that tests the limits of the screen and the fourth wall allows for Clark and Brownstein to play at playing themselves, making for a sharp, comedic commentary on the way fame complicates identity.

Unfortunately, [Showalter] is often stymied by a pedestrian script by Abe Sylvia ( TV series “Dead to Me” and “Nurse Jackie”) that lurches from one defining life moment to the next and leans heavily on Chastain’s performance to establish a sense of emotional and psychological continuity.

With sun-kissed cinematography by Paul Guilhaume and the construction of the story in miraculously intimate closeups of touching moments, “Little Girl” plays almost as if it were an aesthetically verité, yet scripted fiction film from the Dardenne brothers. It’s only the handful of interviews where the family speaks to the camera that breaks the spell.

In eschewing directness of intent for the artful massaging of space, sound and rhythm, Beshir’s film — a very personal project for the Mexican Ethiopian director, which she shot over 10 years — stakes a richer claim to our sense of the place and the effect of its most lucrative crop.

The research is there, certainly, but it is presented as if it were just that, without thought for the ways it could be presented in a more expressive form. There is a sense here that film is at most a communicative tool to simply transmit this information, rather than a way to enliven and reactivate new ways of thinking about this galvanizing figure’s past and the resonance of their work in our present. This is a shame. Murray deserves nothing less than a history in full color.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is less a movie than an environment — not always hospitable but distinctly bizarre.

The simplicity of the story Eastwood is telling would seem to suit his unvarnished, unfussy style, though frankly, a bit more fuss — a few more takes to smooth out a wobbly performance, an extra light bulb or two in the interior shots — wouldn’t have gone awry. But “Cry Macho,” with its attractive but not indulgent landscapes (shot in New Mexico) backed by a spare, twangy Mark Mancina score, takes pains to reject anything that might smack of falsity or pretense.

Copshop is an enjoyable, slow-burn action movie featuring a smart script, sharp direction, strong cast — and the emergence of a possible star.

As a curdled storybook, Bad Tales is highly watchable. The problem is that the brothers aren’t telling stories fueled by powerful characters; they’re staging awkward cruelties as if for a gallery show.

By cycling through humor, joy, sentimentality and surrealism, The Year of the Everlasting Storm reminds viewers of the myriad possibilities of daily life. The film’s poignancy comes from its confirmation that even in tumultuous times, our senses of wonder, love and loyalty remain integral to the human experience.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is big-hearted, with as much desire to put something good in the world as its hero wants to express himself.

This well-constructed film effectively highlights the key points of the Southern-born icon’s singular, often troubled life and proves a vivid, enjoyable portrait of a one-of-a-kind provocateur.

Feel-good yet not cloying, Language Lessons wraps its comforting graciousness around you and says, “No estás solo / You are not alone.”

If you can hang with the slow gestation of the first hour or so of Malignant, the final third may grow on you.

Kate has its charms.

Scene by scene, it pulls us into a world that coheres not just through plotting and dialogue, but through the sharp rhythms of Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.’s editing, the hard shimmer of Alexander Dynan’s images and the humdrum precision of Ashley Fenton’s production design.

It turns out that the screen provides a surprisingly hospitable frame for a musical that is quite purely and unabashedly — at times even downright earnestly — a work of theater.

Where the filmmakers’ approach sets itself apart in these days of image-massaged biographies is in juxtaposing the bookending health catastrophes of Fauci’s career as an especially illuminating lens through which to examine his drive, decisions and personality.

Queenpins does nothing other than waste your time with bad wigs and poop jokes, and that is the biggest crime of all.

Though not all its gyrating parts and magical realist flourishes congeal, this feverish visual parlance rouses.

Most of The Big Scary ‘S’ Word is about the past. But like a lot of calls to action, the film is most effective when it focuses on what’s happening now.

To call this Dune a remarkably lucid work is to praise it with very faint damnation. Perhaps reluctant to alienate the novices in the audience, Villeneuve has ironed out many of the novel’s convolutions, to the likely benefit of comprehension but at the expense of some rich, imaginative excess.

Nebbou and Peyr’s script crackles most with its observations about aging, sex and second chances, and Who You Think I Am spins a tale of love, attention, manipulation and obsession that is recognizably uncomfortable and summarily captivating.

It’s underwritten yet over-stuffed with songs, and the production itself feels chintzy and airless.

What we’re left with is, thankfully, sharp exchanges about loss and conscience, a director’s sincere approach to potentially melodramatic material, and in-the-moment actors like Keaton, who makes the humbling weight of adding up lives into the stuff of compellingly sober contemplation.

You’ll be pleased to discover the entertaining remake has its charms; it actually is all that, for the most part.

No Man of God is impeccably and carefully directed by Sealey, and the craft on display is remarkable.

DaCosta, who made her directorial debut with the remarkable abortion drama “Little Woods,” firmly announces herself as an artist at work with Candyman, a genuinely terrifying and artful horror film that speaks with a bell-clear voice to the current moment, the product of centuries of racist power structures.

Part biopic, part mystery, part exposé, Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed is ultimately a cooled celebration, one eager to acknowledge that gurus are complicated, showbiz is treacherous, and some landscapes hide things.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is most enjoyable when it shakes off the tedious franchise imperatives and forges its own path.

Anna’s interactions with Moody and Rembrandt are ultimately a double-edged sword: They give facets to Anna that show she is not just a means to connect the various (impressive) action scenes. But that makes you want more for Anna and Q than the cliched backstory the movie ultimately delivers

Momoa can believably howl in anguish and throw a devastating punch, but he can’t carry a script this muddled.

Page by page, frame by frame, it seeks to cultivate your wonder and awaken your outrage, to spin a work of unbridled fantasy into a depressingly relevant critique of human callousness and greed in any era.

As it stretches out, it also thins, its Malick-meets-Cassavetes ambitions never rising above clichés of technique and melodrama.

The modern noir style and genre innovation are such a neat cinematic twist that it’s a bit of a letdown that the world doesn’t always feel fully fleshed out.

The director, David Bruckner, doesn’t just mindlessly apply the electrodes; even when he jars you to attention, he always seems to be drawing you into something deeper and more atmospheric. He delivers a scare you can sink into.

To very young kids who like cartoon dogs driving shiny vehicles, PAW Patrol: The Movie may be awesome. To grown-ups, it may be an aggressively under-written, 88-minute toy commercial.

Larraín crafts a mesmerizing cinematic rhythm that alternates between montage and slow camera movements; the film’s push-pull tempo mimics that of Ema’s own intimate machinations.

It’s a tale of profound isolation and thrilling connection, alert and alive and gorgeously sensual even as every moment carries a bittersweet reminder of time’s inexorable passage.

Álvarez and Sayagues have delivered a blood-spattered potboiler that’s no work of genius but is much better than average.

Respect is fine, fitfully rousing, even respectable. And sometimes, it’s something more.

It’s a ‘70s paranoia movie in the best sense. And this is no hackneyed tribute; it’s complex, murky, propulsive.

Because Heder — whose previous work includes the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” and “Glow” and feature “Tallulah” — is so adept at establishing the emotional bonds between the film’s close-knit family, the presence of all these conventions doesn’t matter.

Reynolds is a bit too glib and smug to buy as the romantic lead. It’s actually a relief that the movie salvages the romance by relegating it to the game world. But the whole film remains a bit too glib and smug anyway.

At the simplest level, the stories of trauma and loss told in In the Same Breath exist as a necessary corrective.

With every added account of shameful contrition, the realization that this issue exists very much in the present tense weighs heavy on the viewer.

Never Gonna Snow Again, Poland’s submission for the 2021 international film Oscar, is an intriguing, hypnotic, often beautiful but ultimately inconclusive dramedy.

It’s also worth remembering that someone as complex as Alvin Ailey isn’t going to be captured in any one film. Ailey is, therefore, best absorbed as an elegant, impressionistic primer, a chance to bask in his mastery of movement and dance, as framed by those near enough to him to know what it took out of him to gift it to the world.

Narrative bumps and all, The Evening Hour gives Ettinger a full stage to parade his unassuming virtuosity.

A little too broad at times, Swan Song smartly balances its excesses with small, sweet moments that leave an impression on the audience just as significant as Pat’s imprint on Sandusky.

Quibbles aside, Whirlybird proves a memorably evocative time capsule of 1980s and ’90s Los Angeles and the people who made — and captured — the news, as well as a stirring portrait of regret.

Vivo takes off with a cute kinkajou, some good music and some interesting visuals, but ultimately doesn’t stick the landing.

Whether snarling behind shades in uniform or off hours in elegant dresswear, Chen is a rule-breaking hoot, never more so than when she’s gearing up to heap abuse on a near-tears little girl in order to break her.

Kennebeck’s handling of the labyrinthine narrative is commendable, particularly since the realigning she needs to do in the final act requires a deft touch, like changing the flavor of a dish already prepped, spiced and cooked.

Written by Scott Wascha, the script is simultaneously crude, rude and whip-smart. Wexler‘s direction is a rapid-fire attack of highly stylized skirmishes and aestheticized action.

With Sabaya, we witness documentary filmmaking at its boldest; we find hope in seeing not only the triumphs of the Yazidi Home Center but also what the medium can do.

Good intentions aside, this sluggish film never soars beyond its innate contrivances and frequently flat, knee-jerk humor.

This is a messy, riotous film worthy of Lunch herself, and just like Lunch, it isn’t asking to be liked.

The plot chugs along with no surprises, but that’s beside the point. While it’s not exactly a laugh riot, the film’s humor tends to land.

What does it mean to be a knight, or even just to be human? It isn’t an easy question, and The Green Knight, in taking it seriously, isn’t always an easy film. But by the time Gawain reaches his journey’s end, in as moving and majestically sustained a passage of pure cinema as I’ve seen this year, the moral arc of his journey has snapped into undeniable focus.

“All the Streets” feels niche to a fault.