Fast-moving and slow-burning by turns, The Killing of Two Lovers suggests that real life — and real drama — so often unfold in the in-between moments, in the anticipation rather than the actual execution of the next move.

Less a hand-wringing dispatch from a repressive land than a judiciously glossy nudge toward a better world, The Perfect Candidate isn’t complicated, yet earns its mixed/hopeful conclusion.

The scenery’s gorgeous, Redgrave and Bergin are pros, Tom Everett Scott is fittingly gross as the selfish stage dad and Goodacre has some charm. But the film forgot to graft a personality onto its protagonist and seems so determined to be PG-clean that sparks between the leads are … hard to “find.”

For better or worse, it’s very much a Zack Snyder production: unwieldy but absorbing, awash in stilted dialogue, flimsy characters, bone-crunching violence, ridiculous-verging-on-sublime needle drops . . . and have-it-both-ways political subtext.

It’s a film to be watched not for its more literal filmmaking achievements, but rather for its ability to make you feel seen, with vulnerability and with love.

Burnette handles the genre film and the art film pieces of Silo fairly well but shortchanges them both by not committing fully to either.

A lot of big action pictures add “a little heart” between the thrills, but The Unthinkable reverses the ratio, centering emotions. Some genre fans may be impatient with this approach at first, but by the end, it really works.

Monster is a terrific film: a strong, absorbing, beautifully performed and crafted social drama that, unfortunately, proves even timelier today than when it was shot in 2017.

Ego-stroking bio docs being a cottage industry these days, Balvin is one of the more disarmingly open figures to get this kind of treatment. But it’s also nice that The Boy From Medellín makes the most of its allotted time with a busy phenomenon to at least dabble in the ins and outs of an artist contemplating his place in the world.

Heavy-handed acting from the young cast and Needell’s hackneyed dialogue further unmask the movie’s lack of visual wonder and narrative cohesiveness.

Among other things, “The Disciple” is a decades-spanning chronicle of an entertainment industry in constant technological flux, which means it’s fascinated by the ephemeral as well as the eternal.

Paper Tigers may not be a deep comment on aging or friendship, but it has enough humor and action to make it worth a few rounds.

An offbeat and life-affirming triumph, “Limbo” is the kind of original work of art that moves the needle on an issue by interrogating the human factor rather than hanging out on the impersonal surface. A movie born of our times but destined to outlive them, it deserves to cross the threshold from festival darling to audience favorite.

The story moves crisply, though with all the twists and the lack of introductions to the main players, it’s not easy to follow at first. The fights and chases are handled expertly (the “action director” is Jung Doo); they’re dynamic but believable and deliver emotional impact.

With a colorful blend of biting absurdity and copious dad jokes to offset the commonplace narrative, Rianda and Rowe optimize their dysfunctional family road trip for high-functioning enjoyment.

The absence of God, the trauma of war, the weight of history: None of these are new ideas for Andersson, a fact that reaffirms the wisdom of this movie’s title. But the implied grandiosity of those themes is dissipated, again and again, by the exquisite lightness of his touch and the startling tenderness of his gaze.

It takes a peculiar kind of ineptitude to cast an actor as good as Michael B. Jordan and wind up with something as decidedly not good as Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.

The film is a vital historical corrective, inscribing the names of these women into history as the innovators, independent thinkers and trailblazers they were.

Youthful self-expression is a joyride in a minefield in Danny Madden’s Beast Beast, an adrenalized, tone-shifting indie bringing the technology-fueled lives of three suburban souls of varying circumstances, hopes and concerns into pathways destined to converge.

Writer-director Chen, along with the two leads, delicately navigates this story, and the result is something deeply humanist and nuanced rather than sensational, though the rainy milieu adds drama to the proceedings.

Inextricably rooted in lead Arndis Hrönn Egilsdöttir’s quietly defiant performance, The County tells an immersive, timeless David vs. Goliath story set against a contemporary backdrop of shifting societal norms.

While the cast is great, the milieu is vivid, the images are polished and the atmosphere is effectively moody, Things Heard & Seen fails to connect on a visceral level.

King for a Day is never less than riveting.

It’s off-putting the way Velle bombards us with statistics and warnings and ominous music before settling in to his (mostly white) brain trust of researchers and experts expounding on population growth as the survival topic we shouldn’t be afraid to address.

Oberli and Ziesche, who’ve divided the story into three chapters plus an epilogue (the less said about the plot the better to protect a few solid twists), attempt to lay bare the thorny issue of outsourcing care work to migrants but don’t layer in enough heft or context to make a wholly satisfying statement.

The distinctive visual style is notably fluid and detailed. The layout artists craft lovely painted environments with rich textures. The action is enjoyable and character-specific. As one would expect from an anime this popular, the imagination is off the charts.

The craven commitment to fan service that has long afflicted big-budget adaptations is still in evidence. The wooden dialogue and indifferent performances aren’t bugs so much as features of a corporate mindset that sees IP fidelity and imaginative storytelling as mutually exclusive aims.

By the grace of a talented cast, especially the reliable Helms and the revelatory Harrison, Together Together is a sweet, albeit incomplete search for companionship in the unlikeliest of places.

For the most part, aside from a slightly slack start, and its stirring but simplistic ending, that kind of well-researched procedural detail is what makes Penna’s film such an engrossing and surprisingly touching addition to a genre already bursting with splashier, more extravagant and more overtly sentimental titles.

Kossakovsky doesn’t anthropomorphize the animals; if anything, he zoomorphizes us.

If every picture tells a story, the body of work displayed in the hauntingly intriguing documentary “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts” speaks volumes on the life and times of the artist in question.

This honest examination of a passionate, disastrous, adult relationship, might feel like a warning itself. Papadimitropoulos doesn’t offer easy answers, but what Monday brings is something tangibly real and profoundly human.

While We Broke Up is focused, lean and heartfelt, it does feel at times a bit insubstantial.

Wheatley’s film works on a purely elemental level; like nature itself, the film is a sensory event, the narrative often subsumed by the aural and visual experience.

Hope isn’t about getting you to cry, even as some of its characters occasionally do, but rather giving you an invigorating, even uplifting sense of what hearts can do under duress; nothing is forcibly tragic here, just experienced fully and openly.

The themes of Jakob’s Wife are a bit simplistic, but the lead performances are incredibly complex, drawing on the two stars’ decades of screen (and life) experience.

Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.

Between the forced artistry and the confused tones, it leaves this well-intentioned tale of transgressive imagination and transactional humanity more temporary in its effect than permanent.

Favier carefully dissects the complex power dynamics at play, as well as the emotional devastation that results from the abuse. It’s an honest, and surprisingly, even hopeful portrait.

Norbu charts an inspired, fittingly meditative journey to enlightenment.

Even if some segments are invigoratingly thought-provoking in the same manner that a young student feels engaging with classical thinkers for the first time, the format’s lack of stimuli beyond cutting between speakers soon turns tedious. In scenes conceived as static frames, Puiu plays with depth of field for slightly more visually layered results.

It lacks the cleverness or the panache to give its schtick the proper zing.

While Williams and Faith do a fine job of capturing the frustrating powerlessness of a low-wage-earning woman in a sexist and classist society, The Power never generates much in the way of shocks or excitement.

Hermanus, as a Black, queer South African, isn’t about to paint Nicholas’ predicament as on a par with apartheid’s true victims. But the emotional intelligence he infuses Moffie with — all the way through its inevitable march to the front line — feels personal nonetheless, and empathetically inquisitive about the kind of masculine indoctrination that fuels oppression through rituals of violence and the criminalizing of identity.

Burger presupposes all the right questions (and anxieties) about the realities of climate change-induced space migration; it’s just that as a film, Voyagers feels like a role-playing game rather than a character-driven story.

Truth and delusion intermingle within this space, materializing not as spectacle or doubt, but rather as an embodied, if not literalized, study of the ways in which women attempt to intellectually and emotionally make sense of their experiences of exploitation.

One is given to wonder what it is exactly that the filmmaker himself lends to this film other than a completely ordinary commercial veneer.

Poetic and painterly, personal and political.

Unfortunately, writer-director Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, despite its thematic acuity, loopy vitality and committed acting, doesn’t add up to enough in its too-brief 72 minutes (plus end credits) to warrant all the cross-wired mayhem that gets us over the movie’s dubious finish line.

Laboriously paced, the indulgent jolts and bloodless scares, neither deeply rooted nor artfully raised, float as lifelessly as a lily pad on a bog.

After so many tentpoles that have insisted on being metaphors for this or that, the abundance of sound and fury here — take a bow, Tom Holkenborg, composer of the majestic synth score — blissfully signifying nothing, qualifies as a colossal, giddily escapist relief.

Part tribute, part reconciliation, "Tina" makes a beautiful case for why survival sometimes means saying goodbye.

Nobody gathers from the familiar blood-soaked stream of “John Wick,” “Death Wish” and the “Taken” franchise to fashion a savage ode featuring the same mettle of its inspirations but with far greater humor attached to the well-worn beats.

The laughs are certainly there, but Andre’s almost trademark sense of intentional derangement is missing and in many ways, this is one of his strengths as a performer.

The movie is too ponderous and dry — neither endearingly trashy nor effectively scary.

Shoplifters of the World, in fact, belongs to Cleo, not just because Howard is such a dizzyingly charismatic actress but because her story, which unfolds parallel to Dean’s, is a heartfelt coming-of-age drama that perfectly embodies the youthful angst, ennui and romantic longing expressed so well in the music of the Smiths.

It’s a potentially intriguing bit of fiction that plays out in, at best, serviceable ways.

Afineevsky’s by-the-numbers, for-hire production feels unnecessary. Even if one can’t argue with its distilled message of loving thy neighbor, Francesco just serves to remind us of all the horrors unfolding simultaneously.

Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have crafted a morally complex film that mingles sex and violence in ways that are meant to make the audience uncomfortable.

A deeply aware film, Rose Plays Julie allows for the fantastic as a means and space of catharsis.

Subtly sensorial more than conventionally narrative, The Fever inhabits an ethereal plane that centers Indigenous beliefs and cultural practices not as primitive but valid modes of engagement.

Restless and bracing, Wojnarowicz gives a notorious life its due. Even at its clunkiest, it leaves you breathless at the heights of personal expression he achieved.

As the piles of Biggie-related material has proven, it’s perhaps impossible to cover everything this story is really about in under two hours. City of Lies makes an honest effort but doesn’t get the job done.

The brawny Enforcement doesn’t shy away from brutal action, but the film is more in line with recent police thrillers like Deon Taylor’s “Black and Blue,” and Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables,” which fuse overt sociopolitical commentary with genre thrills.

The vibrant, absolutely vital documentary “Martha: A Picture Story” introduces audiences to the now-septuagenarian photographer as she’s suiting up for a night out, strapping on a backpack with her camera to tag along with taggers, keen for the perfect shot and to avoid getting caught.

What Snyder has contrived here feels less like a vital re-energization of the form than a ponderous guided tour through a museum’s worth of familiar superhero-movie tropes and conventions: Look at this, look at that, try not to look at your watch. Like the Flash himself, Snyder wants to slow time to a crawl, to deconstruct every gesture, to make his obsessions your own. He wants the movie to go on forever. Mission accomplished.

It is didactic without losing its sense of organicism; it is radical without losing its sense of humor; it is intentional in its visual and formal design without flattening itself to the status of aesthetic image emptied of its politics. It is, in all ways, a reminder that any radical future must trust in the transformative potential of the communion between past and present.

Swinton manifests, with magnificently nuanced modulation, an emotional tangle; at times, it is raw with a cathartic force, while enmeshed with meekly conciliatory moments of codependence. Wielding a hatchet with violent purpose or begging for a final rendezvous, Swinton’s every scorching word cuts deep.

This would be tough material for anyone to tackle, and the Russos take aesthetic chances that — while admirably bold — flop more often than they fly.

It’s clichéd, falling back on the old pulp premise of the culturally diverse “ragtag team” of tough guys and gals, barking out clumsily expositive dialogue in between unimaginative fights.

Grünberg effectively incorporates archival photos and footage, drawings, and lyrical, illustrative bits of animation into this brief but rich documentary, which ends on a lovely note that brings Elbaum’s journey full circle.

In any genre, a distinct filmmaking voice and clever avoidance of cliches earns a closer look; perhaps even more so in the realm of sci-fi/horror. And no spoilers, but where Come True lands is extremely satisfying.

The best nuggets come from the interviews, as when a lawyer remarks that when it comes to white-collar criminals, they historically have no filter on the phone.

Like its juvenile characters, Yes Day sometimes goes too far, with over-the-top scenes that lessen the impact of the genuine emotions elsewhere. But will kids whine about it (other than for their own Yes Day)? Probably not, and parents likely won’t mind either.

Quo Vadis, Aida? re-creates history in the present tense, with a gut-clutching immediacy that Žbanić makes bearable through sheer formal restraint.

It’s a modest coming-of-age period piece that incidentally diverges into over-the-top dreamscapes.

The best thing The Devil Below has going for it is its stark, remote location, which evokes the feeling of a world unto itself, hidden away in rural America. But what happens in front of this striking backdrop is too blandly familiar — and not nearly hellish enough.

This is a pretty rote slasher premise, the Utah setting aside. And Devane doesn’t do himself any favors by making his potential murder victims — a techie nerd, a social media influencer, a boorish jock, a pot-head and a prickly lesbian — so gratingly cartoonish.

Kavanagh and Matichak do a remarkable job of capturing an amped-up version of everyday parental paranoia. This is ultimately a movie about a woman who loves her child so intensely that she becomes irrational — and dangerous.

This story of a lonely Kansas City hairstylist (something Gevargizian knows about) is creepy in unexpected ways, poking at the audience’s rawest nerves.

Grant and Kermani skillfully keep the audience in suspense from start to finish, even if it’s just by withholding what the heck is actually happening.

The plainness of Kinkle’s style makes it all the more shocking when the story gets increasingly gory, as the gentle and mundane alike are shattered by the disturbing echoes of past trauma.

The People vs. Agent Orange has a gripping urgency, especially as a reminder that the history of chemicals’ effects on our bodies is still being written and fought over, and that what a secretive industry is allowed to cover up, it will.

The delightfully daft, dialogue-driven result makes for a languid farce that mischievously flips a funhouse mirror on jaded audiences to welcome, if fleeting, effect.

Subtly moving, Adam is a beautiful expression of untainted sorority.

This two-part, three-hour film is marked by immediacy and breadth, as if an on-the-fly news bulletin had naturally morphed into the richest of character-driven sagas.

Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.

Boss Level takes a well-worn gag and injects energy, showing the genre is still a game worth playing.

Pixie isn’t exactly magical, but amusing enough whenever Cooke’s character casts her spell

Lo’s humane film helps us glimpse the lives of those who are often overlooked, whether they walk the streets of Istanbul on four legs or two.

Joanna’s journey of creative and emotional enlightenment — including the balancing act of trying to write when consumed by a day job — is managed with grace, tenderness and touching credibility by a wonderfully winning Qualley in concert with Philippe Falardeau’s smart, engaging direction and screenplay.

We get slivers of moments and feelings described rather than experienced.

Boogie tries to appreciate its own contradictions, and also to complicate the audience’s expectations. It positions Boogie as an underdog of the underrepresented, a potential breakout star in an arena where the odds are stacked against him. But it also resists the temptation to turn him into an easy emblem of success, while neatly sidestepping the feel-good uplift and predictable, reconciliatory outcomes that tend to hold sway in the sports-movie genre.

Liman, who has a reputation for reviving troubled productions and salvaging films in postproduction, excavates an hour and 48 minutes of relatively engaging action-thriller material. It moves quickly enough to gloss over plot holes but leaves the impression that the novel was stripped for parts.

This trip is filled with goofy fun, though it wanders enough to occasionally test the attention spans of those neither young enough nor high enough to be in the film’s target audience.

For all its energy and charm, this overlong film contains its share of undermining missteps.

To say that not everything coheres in this swift, propulsive 93-minute film is to suggest that the filmmaker has done justice to the unruliness of his subject: In capturing and preserving a long-standing oral tradition, he has arrived at both a persuasive vision of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. Like all good storytellers, he leaves you wanting more.

As far as shutdown-inspired projects go, Erēmīta (Anthologies) has a certain felicitous intimacy, proof that when called to action, artists can meet a given moment — and the boundaries that come with it — with ideas at the ready, their eyes primed to see.