Trainer was MASS MoCA’s founding director of development. Which means that in many ways she’s essentially telling a story about her friends — and often, with friends, it’s easier to avoid uncomfortable questions.

Despite or perhaps because of its lightly sketched premise, To the Ends of the Earth emerges as the director’s most gracefully assured work in a while, though his natural gift for building tension is still made subtly manifest.

Allowed surprising access to Sotudeh’s life, the film achieves stirring results if not an always fluid narrative.

While Fatale isn’t special, it’s better than most specimens of the genre due to its turns (again, I recommend skipping the trailer — which also makes it look like a differently made film, one using bolder cinematic techniques) and Swank’s exploration of her character.

Handsomely mounted if never exactly stirring, Louis van Beethoven honors the struggles that gnawed at brilliance but is itself little more than an elegantly tailored time-filler.

The movie’s final act takes too grim a turn, leading up to an ending that’s overly dark and disgusting. But even as it goes way over the top, “Hunter Hunter” stays focused on the fragility of the Mersaults, who want to live by their own rules but discover that nature has its own agenda.

There’s a lot to see and to think about here, all well-curated by a documentarian with a clear passion for his subject.

The real stars of this picture are the kids, who in many ways represent the century following the Century Cycle.

This quietly engaging documentary is also subtly political, showing with clear eyes how good people are trying to patch gaps in our society that shouldn’t be there in the the first place.

Even at its most scattered though, Finding Yingying is haunting, largely because it’s so personal. In a way, this feels like Shi reflecting on her own life by honoring someone who had hers cut short.

While Assassins may be somewhat unsatisfying as a true-crime story, it’s provocative as an examination of power.

Its beauty lies in its empathy — something currently in short supply and therefore very welcome in the stories we consume.

For roughly two-thirds of its running time, the big-screen video game adaptation Monster Hunter feels like an attempt to answer a question no one has asked: What would the “Jurassic Park” movies be like if they were drained of all sense of wonder? The film rallies toward the end with a few genuinely spectacular images, but even its best scenes fail to justify a tedious first hour.

Gadot and Pine give great pillow talk, and their easy screwball rhythms provide not just levity but ballast: They ground a movie in which time, for all its malleability, always feels like it’s slipping away.

If it’s an Ip Man adventure you’re looking for in which he’s a full-on superhero, this one exists. Just know you’re getting the B Team.

Greengrass can be as shrewd and skillful a storyteller as his hero, even if News of the World finally inspires something less than total belief.

The riveting and superbly acted Iranian drama, based on a real variety show, poses a moral crucible born out of a theocratic system that disfavors women amid the heightened tension of the on-camera spectacle.

For all the struggle that takes place in this movie, it is its quiet grace that you most remember. Minari shares its secrets with a whisper, and as it unfolds, you find yourself leaning into it, enraptured.

Director Deepa Mehta ambitiously juxtaposes a teenage love story with rising political tensions and ethnic violence in a film that is ultimately about thriving and sometimes just surviving as someone deemed “different.”

Mason does a lot to make the characters’ distanced interactions — mostly via video chat — seem natural and not like a gimmick. But the real-world resonances are actually fairly dull. Though not especially objectionable, Songbird may suffer a worse fate: being forgettable.

The result is something refined, naturalistic, specific, enigmatic and funny — not unlike an Eisenberg story, for one thing — but also akin to any trip one might make in a reflective yet anxious state of mind, with people you think you know but might be unsure about.

The movie is Barrymore’s, of course. Even after the initial jolt of seeing her as a cursing hellion and an ambitious hanger-on wears off, she does not disappoint.

Although the whole thing’s a bit of a jumble, the L.A.-set film becomes more immersive as we slowly adjust to its ambitious conceit and unique rhythms. A solid third-act twist helps square the preceding puzzle pieces and takes us out on a satisfying and moving note.

Writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s old-fashioned, at times transporting, romantic comedy Wild Mountain Thyme has a lot going for it, which makes it a shame that it’s not a wholly stronger film. That said, as a stress-free chance to take in the lush, gorgeously green Irish countryside, you could do worse.

A first-time performer without formal training, Betancourt is a true revelation and the most accomplished player in an impressive ensemble of nonactors.

Ordinary but sufficiently effective in its execution, the film’s most resonant segments are those where the upstanding son reflects on his torn family and a rotten system in which paroling alleged offenders even after so much time is seen as an affront to the toxic institutional loyalty to police.

Watching [Frahm] at work — and hearing the audience react whenever he hits an especially tricky stretch of moving between keyboards — is little like watching an athlete at the top of his game.

Like White’s music, this film is catchy and engaging, and it leaves its audience wondering why there isn’t more.

Billie isn’t just about the stories we tell about great artists. It’s also about why we tell them — and whether we can ever really get them right.

It’s a rousing and illuminating tribute to a brilliant musician who burned out quickly, but burned so brightly.

We are likely to be watching films on this subject for years to come, but for it’s sheer in-the-moment rawness, 76 Days is one that will stick in your consciousness for some time.

[A] beautiful, engrossing and potently subversive new crime thriller.

Another Round itself often moves and swings like a piece of music: Staccato in its rhythms and symphonic in structure, it’s awash in Scarlatti and Schubert, bar tunes and patriotic songs, and climaxes with a jubilant blast of Danish pop/R&B. It sings, and it sparkles.

Rothe and Shum Jr. have such nice, authentic chemistry that they should put it to good use again. Perhaps there’s a jaunty rom-com out there with their names on it.

There’s a much appreciated sweetness and innocence to what we witness, a truly diverse group of Americans selflessly helping one another, joy being their only compensation.

In its modest, quiet maturity, Luxor avoids the cliché of presenting the East as exotic or renewal as a catharsis — it’s the rare travel story that understands how sometimes being someplace else is as much about the “being” as it is the “someplace else.”

It’s smart and engaging once it gets going and presents a tense, fun labyrinth for viewers to navigate. One just wishes the cheese at the end were more rewarding.

There’s much to like about the road-trip comedy Half Brothers. It’s funny, smart, topical and even touching at times. But it’s hard to overcome the inescapable rot at its center.

Mayor proves a unique, involving and edifying experience.

The highlight of the movie by far is the relaxed, easy chemistry between McCarthy and Cannavale.

An unremarkable if far from unpleasant sequel.

The new David Bowie biopic Stardust could be marketed as “Bowie as you’ve never seen him,” but it feels like “Bowie as no one ever saw him.”

A finely acted, often deeply emotional period piece that, despite its share of strong moments, stacks the deck too much for its own dramatic good.

The conventionality of Happiest Season might be the most radical thing about it. The movie boasts the usual surface delights and yuletide setpieces: It has competitive ice skating and a white-elephant-gift party, shticky running gags and acres of throw-pillow-heavy production design. It also has two lead performances of remarkable grown-up complexity and moment-to-moment coherence.

The stories here are of triumph and tragedy, from those who’ve grown up in a society where they felt free to be themselves to those who’ve been reshaping their faces and bodies since long before it was socially acceptable.

This intimate slice-of-life doubles as a haunting meditation on the meaning of “identity” to someone who has long felt discouraged from expressing every part of who she is.

Dylan allows his interviewees to refute some of the more slanderous and/or ill-informed accusations hurled at Soros; but his general approach is to focus more on the accomplishments than the backlash. He’s made a documentary that’s nobly informative, but — given the juicy subject — a tad dry.

Even more than describing her cause, the affecting I Am Greta introduces us to the person herself, digging deep into why she’s pushing herself so hard, to do what our planet’s adults apparently won’t.

The movie as a whole tends to circle the same points, becoming less bracing the longer it runs. Still, for the most part, Coded Bias takes something huge and scary and breaks it down into small, easily understood morality tales, featuring everyday heroes fighting to save our future.

Intellectually intoxicating and stylistically sumptuous, this romantic oddity about the passage of time (for an individual and for a country) evokes the grand elegance of a Wong Kar-wai epic infused with mature droplets akin to anime like “Belladonna of Sadness” or “Millennium Actress.”

Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.

The horrors of Collective are sickeningly specific; the implications, as suggested by its comprehensive indictment of a title, are universal.

Boseman, evincing the same integrity he clung to his entire career, refuses to soft-pedal the destination. He imparts to this seething, shattered man the gift of a broken soul, riven by anger and trauma, and makes him all the more human for it. His final moments of screen time are among his darkest, and also his finest.

Think Guy Maddin as the long-lost seventh Python. But it’s also one of the more vivid and amusing excursions in a year marked by unclassifiable realities and the need for diverting art.

By zooming in and out of his protagonist’s consciousness, Marder casts aside any pretense of omniscience; he empathizes, but he also knows when to detach. Ruben’s journey is a privilege to witness, but it’s one he’ll ultimately have to walk alone.

Given that “Ghosts” runs a compact 80 minutes, there was room to further explore the many tentacles of the film’s intricate, delicate topic. Still, this is vital territory that will open less initiated viewers’ eyes to the deep commitment and dramatic lengths it can take for many gay couples to become parents.

Chloe’s determination and smarts make Run much more enjoyable to watch than the vast majority of specimens of the genre. She credibly thinks her way through problems. When things are dire, she ratchets up her courage — and Allen sells us on it all.

In Embattled, the human side feels explored, as if the film could have been made without the MMA scenes and still been a worthwhile watch. But it does have those adrenaline-injecting fights, so … all the better.

It is the type of stirring entertainment that delivers both the thrill of the moment and the kind of sophisticated ideas that can lead to discussion and even debate long after viewing.

Laden with bittersweet sentiment, the film packs a muted but lasting emotional wallop.

With sci-fi touches and sanctimonious eroticism, the incisive satire intently takes on the influence of evangelical Christianity on the state — namely the far-right movement that elected populist Jair Bolsonaro.

Fatman isn’t a lump of coal. More like a fruitcake your neighbor dropped off in early December that’s left on the counter through the new year, its red and green cherries hardening into buckshot before being hauled out to the curb with the Christmas tree.

With every line and look, Loren both reminds us of her legacy playing tenacious women and paints Rosa’s distinctive fire and grief like an artisan. It’s a compact master class in the movie star’s craft: exquisitely tailored glamour and deft characterization working seamlessly in tandem.

Fascinating stuff is at play here amid the heady theorizing and arcane references (panspermia, anyone?). But it’s blunted by Herzog’s clipped, Bavarian-tinged narration that’s by turns logy, deadpan and florid. Maybe his trademark voice-overs have simply worked better in the past.

Not all of the ancillary characters and their stories are fully developed in the film’s quick 92 minutes, but Dating Amber convincingly channels the angst and awkwardness that can be a part of teenagers’ struggles with their identity.

Polak’s film is an unflinching exploration of beauty, identity, sex and self in the wake of a life-changing event.

A masterpiece of bromantic woes, the movie subdues toxic masculinity and makes a case for men’s often dismissed necessity for platonic companionship.

The new Margot Robbie vehicle Dreamland seems to be about legends, the price of escape, maybe unreliable narrators — but ends up not saying much about any of them.

The ending that seems meant to be wistful, even magical, reads instead as appalling, lamentable, gloomy, however you want to say “the opposite of wondrous and happy.”

Freaky has a lighthearted tone and a bouncy energy that keeps it watchable, even though writer-director Christopher Landon and his co-writer, Michael Kennedy, don’t do as much as they should have with a killer idea.

If tension was the filmmakers’ aim, they decisively miss — especially if it was meant to come from the puzzlingly casual sniper situation. Any possibility of buying into the story’s reality is defused by the soldiers being so dang gabby, and loudly so.

It’s an insightful, deeply felt film that lets us in on a personal evolution.

Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.

Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.

The film mixes horror elements with surreal fantasy and the crushing realism of a serious family drama. It’s metaphorical, vague but also precise in its specificity for the horrific trials these people are to face — their personal hell.

Winocour shows us smart, sometimes insensitive and fundamentally decent people navigating an extraordinary situation and the sacrifices that are made in service of a grand collective undertaking.

Writer-director David E. Talbert’s marvelous, groundbreaking musical-fantasy Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey stands to join the ranks of holiday movie classics. Smartly conceived, lovingly mounted and beautifully performed, this Victorian era-set extravaganza nearly sings out to be enjoyed as a communal, big-screen experience.

In the end, what we’re left with is an exceptionally well-acted motion picture that mostly fails to move.

Fire Will Come is a pithy and devastating masterstroke from an auteur astute in his calibration of subdued emotional impact. Its discourse on forgiveness simmers in one’s mind inextinguishably.

It isn’t exactly terrifying, but is well-acted and sinister enough to rise (levitate ominously?) above the pack.

This dire and dreamy road movie is impressive work from director and co-writer Winkler (he co-wrote with Theodore Bressman and David Branson Smith).

The Informer isn’t bad. It’s just nothing special. It relies too much on familiar elements. It’s the same throbbing score, the same expected betrayals and the same smiling, sadistic bad guys.

In many ways, it feels like the midcentury pulp thrillers it emulates: well-plotted and grisly, but almost ephemeral. It is Lane’s performance that lingers, one that dares to be uniquely hopeful about the future, and letting the old ways die.

The filmmaker deftly moves backward and forward in time to chronicle Ngoy’s remarkable journey from war-torn Cambodia to the strip malls of Orange County while becoming a multimillionaire.

For its merits as a dynamic nonfiction piece incisively dealing with a pivotal issue from heartbreakingly human angle, Us Kids is indispensable viewing for anyone who genuinely cares about the future of this country beyond “thoughts and prayers.”

A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.

The story is deceptively simple. However, built around a universal quandary of our tech-obsessed modern world, underpinned with a folkloric tale that appeals to our most primal child selves — yearning for acceptance and connection — it has a heavy metaphorical resonance.

“Wolfboy” is a compassionate film with some insight into being different and into the destructiveness of letting the world’s unkindness shape one’s self view.

If scares are the movie’s raison d’etre, though, it’s hard to imagine Spell will frighten anyone but those vulnerable to a few bits of graphic gore.

“The First” is a zippy 93-minute comedic adventure that embraces all the familiar building blocks of classic “Lupin III” stories: impressive car chases, impeccable disguises, impossible escapes and Lupin taking on an evil organization.

In such troubled times, one supposes there’s comfort to be found in the lack of adventurousness of Holidate, but it’s like opening the same present again and again.

With City Hall, his 45th feature, he [Wiseman] has composed another epic from a series of intricate, carefully arranged miniatures, a four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of a movie that will leave you admiring its agility and concision.

Everything hums along until it abruptly crashes and burns, and one can’t help but wonder if the film was picked apart to fit a PG-13 rating (the original is R) and a sub-100-minute runtime.

Sometimes when the moment comes to reconcile our feelings, we freeze or fumble the opportunity; other times, when we finally process the emotions and can articulate the thoughts, it is too late to communicate them. Coming Home Again, sweetly, sometimes painfully, evokes this experience.

With a few exceptions . . . Borat’s satirical jabs don’t land with quite the same cringe-making force this time; the setups are too convoluted, the anonymous targets too genial, the payoffs too meager.

Little attention is paid to the vernacular or physicality of the period. The depths of emotions aren’t plumbed.

Throughout the film, Springsteen lavishes his bandmates with praise (“they can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee”) in voiceover segments that feel a bit more shopworn than when he unleashes them from the stage. But when Zimny lets the images speak for themselves, “Letter to You” achieves a moving power.

For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty . . . The Witches is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients.