American Utopia arrives 36 years after Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense,” which documented three shows the Talking Heads played at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in 1983 and just might be the greatest concert movie ever made. Until, that is, American Utopia. Rank them 1A and 1B.

Harry Chapin: When in Doubt, Do Something is an uplifting tribute to an impressive human being.

It’s one of those pseudo-thrillers with car chases and shootouts in which it’s hard to invest yourself because its rules seem fungible.

The Kid Detective is an unexpected mix of disparate elements that in the wrong hands could have resulted in lumpy parody but, fortunately, pours out as something smooth, funny, dark and potent.

While it’s well-acted and slickly made, the movie’s derivative qualities — coupled with its inadvertent reminders of how crummy everything is outside our doors right now — make it less fun than intended. The light-hearted tone is often grating, working against the inherent drama of a world dominated by giant critters.

At a distended two hours, the film becomes a bit of a slog as it deliberately tracks Sobiech’s senior year of high school as he bravely marches — with equal parts humor and sorrow — toward his demise.

However one ultimately feels about Fisk’s reportorial compass, This Is Not a Movie presents a necessary, thought-provoking portrait of a dedicated truth-seeker.

Hopefulness and rawness, much like society and the self, are ultimately inextricable in “Martin Eden,” a work of art that abounds in its own beautiful contradictions. It might reject individualism, but it’s also a glorious singularity.

Though the film’s casual structure lulls you into thinking not much is going on, the gently shifting power dynamics between the characters, and a reversal of the traditional gender roles sets up an unexpectedly moving resolution.

The filmmakers seem curiously at sea over the purpose of their assignment, possessing neither the patience to plunge headlong into the story’s familiar depths nor the radicalism to reinvent it entirely.

Even its most surreal flights of fancy are tethered to a ploddingly diagrammed story whose indisputable lessons — cherish the ones you love, and also make room for more of them — are driven home with dispiriting obviousness.

Here you get a clear sense of each member’s personality — all but impossible to find on this month’s “The Album” — and of how the four relate to one another.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow is a pleasingly quirky outing that has fun with the mythologies of both monsters and men.

The “pranks” just aren’t funny. The whole premise isn’t funny.

Time can make you weep for a hundred reasons, from joy, pain or recognition, but its wounds and its glories are finally inextricable from one of the paradoxes of moviemaking itself. Cinema can magically compress decades into hours and transform lives into narratives, but what it erects here is ultimately a monument to something irretrievable. Cherish every moment of this movie, because each one stands in for all the others that have been lost.

Aggie is a well-made portrait of an admirable woman you come away feeling you’d like to meet.

There are nagging narrative gaps and some jumping around — while that’s a bit jarring, one supposes it’s apropos for the film’s handmade feel. This isn’t an official document; it’s a fan’s eyewitness account.

As with even the worst of Allen’s films, there is just enough to satiate fans and make the whole thing seem maybe, possibly worth the effort.

Is Faith Based the answer to the prayers of comedy-starved movie buffs? Not entirely, but it’s no plague of locusts, either.

Charm City Kings clearly knows what it’s doing; unfortunately, what it’s doing is often just as obvious to us.

It is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date. How could it not?

This is a funny film about death, which is to say it’s a wrenching film about life.

Cronenberg has a lot of high-minded ideas, but he grounds them in human behavior and has found the right humans to tell his story.

It’s refreshing to come at the spy genre from a different angle and rewarding to be introduced to these extraordinary women. Just don’t expect a pulse-pounder or even a particularly atmospheric, experiential film.

The sly achievement of The Forty-Year-Old Version is to turn a critical eye on the very idea of success (by whose standards?), and to ponder exactly what level of compromise is acceptable to secure it.

The filmmakers are tackling a broad, evolving topic and the documentary struggles to maintain a throughline.

Using every tool at her disposal, Taymor crafts an epic tapestry of a remarkable life, paying tribute to the glorious Gloria Steinem.

A sensitive turn by Olin combined with the script’s nicely delineated take on her long-suffering, creatively thwarted lead character, makes the film, set mainly in Long Island’s tony East Hampton, an absorbing, at times moving look at a woman caught between her own artistic and emotional desires and her devotion to a man who doesn’t seem to deserve her.

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is a moving portrait of a man taking deep stock of his life with great satisfaction and verve. It

You forgive much due to obvious budgetary constraints. But the excruciatingly slow, soapy storytelling stifles emotional energy. It’s not easy to follow, hampered by severe logical lapses. Character threads abruptly drop. How anyone feels about anyone is unclear at any given moment.

Kiss the Ground is the good kind of kale. It’s dense but nutritious. The science is explained in simple terms with plenty of visually striking graphics and animation.

Cohn, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, likely was aiming for subtlety, but these are not subtle times. Trying to get a spark from a damp match is a lot harder than holding a flame to dry kindling.

Good intentions, deft performances and vivid dollops of period style and sensibility go a long way to patch over the bumps.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, smoothly entertaining as it is, may also elude clear consensus. Democracy is a messy business, but an element of real, lived-in messiness seems beyond this movie’s purview.

Bit by bit, line by line, she [July] nudges you onto her characters’ wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions.

Though as leisurely as a summer’s day, this kaleidoscopic memory film has an intensity of purpose that wants to knock you on your heels — or maybe harder — in its take on gentrification.

Enola provides a richly fanciful, fresh perspective on the well-worn family name.

You see in Felix the deadpan anarchic streak that has made Murray a force in American comedy for decades. At the same time, the actor seems to be winking at his own reputation for off-screen mischief — the tricks, stunts and pop-up bartending gigs that have made him a kind of one-man flash mob.

While the result may be scattershot at times, the achievements of these badass professionals are worth a look — especially if, like this writer, you believe an Oscar category for stunt performers is long overdue.

The point of DiMaria’s absorbing and passionate documentary is there was much more to his uncle than being one of the “others” in an infamous murder spree.

Antebellum ultimately trips over its gimmicky plotting en route to a conclusion that rings false.

What makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin.

It’s a delight to see the director cut loose, along with his gifted behind-the-scenes collaborators (including production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Jacqueline Durran) and his captivating stars.

The film makes an ardent case to stay ever-vigilant against the ongoing threat to the electoral process.

The Eight Hundred fetishizes martyrdom, but for those seeking big-screen, epic violence, it’s pretty much the only game in town.

The genre elements are nicely balanced by the adult drama embodied in the lead quartet’s performances, especially Rapace’s turn that is part femme fatale, part damaged soul.

Director Miranda de Pencier and writers Graham Yost and Moira Walley-Beckett haven’t dodged hard sociological truths lurking beneath the gentle humor, engaging performances and stirringly photographed tundra, lending The Grizzlies a decisive, transformative edge.

You can reject the conclusions of Campos’ movie, particularly its unrelenting pileup of dead bodies, and still take pleasure in its atmospheric surface — in the persuasiveness of its small-town environs (shot on 35-millimeter film by the gifted cinematographer Lol Crawley) and the vigor of its performances. He may not persuade you all the time, but the devil is very much in those details.

There is no transcendence at the end of her long, harrowing journey, but there are unexpected gifts, guardian angels and places of refuge. It would be hard to overlook the spiritual presence — a good word for it would be “grace” — that hovers over every frame of this movie and the spare, wrenching story it has to tell.

Ammonite, a work of art rather than science or history, has no qualms about departing from the known record — and does so with wit, beauty and a modernism that feels all the more bracing in this Victorian context.

An arresting if somewhat wayward documentary.

A smart and absorbing new French comedy that initially unfolds like a series of psychotherapy sessions and eventually brings its story to a suitably mythic climax not far from a sputtering volcano.

Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma may be the most important documentary you see this year.

Society’s rampant sexualization of preadolescent girls is one topic that Doucouré subjects to tough critical scrutiny; she’s made an empathetic and analytical movie, not an exploitative one.

You are advised to pay close visual attention, especially to Robert Frazen’s pinpoint editing and Melissa Toth’s subtly shifting costumes, even as you lean in to catch every word of Kaufman’s torrential dialogue and each detail of the mercurial, tinnitus-evoking sound design.

One of the movie’s persistent problems is that it often seems to be nothing but lessons — most of them bluntly spelled out, swiftly absorbed and almost automatically rewarded, in ways that short-circuit tension and emotion.

Boone’s film does demonstrate that there are different ways to approach these franchises outside of the binary of lighthearted/fun and dark/gritty movies that permeate the superhero genre.

The feature debut of music video director Ninian Doff is probably best viewed late at night under the influence of a mind-altering, preferably hallucinatory, substance.

It’s both an overstuffed box of postmodern delights and a classically Dickensian repository of whimsy and charm.

The story is simple but what makes the film remarkable is how Haley effortlessly, earnestly marshals performance, tone and style.

For anyone missing this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, postponed to March, Rising Phoenix is a fitting bridge for one night, resoundingly demonstrating that an athlete is an athlete. You will never watch the games in the same way.

In a pandemic, some might call the film a beacon of hope; others might prefer science to prayer for salvation. As a piece of cinema, though, Fatima is unlikely to be canonized.

Wilmott’s affecting historical drama “The 24th,” inspired by the Houston riot of 1917, bears both the weight of that history and the filmmaker’s passion for the subject matter.

It takes some big swings at a big subject and almost — not quite — pulls it off.

Tanne, who tackled the relationship of a young Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama in “Southside With You,” also hits the physiological explanation of the pain of heartbreak (from which the book and movie draw their titles) pretty hard.

The sequel is a stab at world-expanding that veers off the rails as it reaches for dazzle over depth, rounding out the hit film series somewhere between a whimper and a bang.

It’s basically espionage adventure, but with a science fiction backbone: Nolan ups the ante on “Mission: Impossible” by making the impossibility not just physical but quantum physical. And he goes about it expertly, bullishly and with giddily perverse intent to bewilder.

The action sequences are almost an afterthought. “Cut Throat City” is a more thoughtful and personal film, concerned with how systemic racism — and zoning ordinances — can kill more people than a gun.

What comes through most in Hawke’s brilliantly internalized performance is Tesla’s intense commitment to his work, as well as his weariness about having to continually explain and defend it to men of deeper pockets and lesser minds. The progress of human civilization can be infuriatingly banal, which doesn’t mean our biopics have to be.

Despite its bullet-point nods to toxic masculinity and some glib armchair sociology about the rage-fueled society we have become, “Unhinged” doesn’t have much on its mind. Its sharpest subtext derives from the casting of Crowe himself, whose malevolent glare and low, insinuating growl are scarily believable here, even as they suggest a self-conscious dig at his own past persona.

Sharrock’s directing is unshowy, focused on the characters and performance moments that make this film a simple, yet effectively moving story about dreaming of a life beyond the walls, something we can all appreciate at this particular moment.

With this film, Bustamante creates a Llorona full of self-assertion and intent, an indigenous woman assuredly facing the source of her pain. This is a Llorona who is no longer trapped in the past. She has landed fully in the present. And she is ready to extract what is due.

Its most memorable effects, though, are not technological in nature. They are the wary side-eye glances and unexpected smiles that cross Fishback’s face as she banters with Foxx and Gordon-Levitt and also the streams of hip-hop poetry — carefully scripted but thrillingly delivered — that come pouring out during a few welcome stretches of down time.

The film swerves from sci-fi to horror to psychological thriller to melodrama, but in a way, it works. It’s clear Abramenko wants to serve a full-course meal of a movie, and in stretching the dynamic range of emotion he hits on moments that are at times operatic and at others somewhat soapy. But in doing so, brings a new layer of story that makes Sputnik feel epic.

It’s a comedy, a heartbreaker and, above all, a twisty and suspenseful piece of political theater. Its rough-and-tumble snapshot of American youth in action is somehow both troubling and exhilarating.

As the film focuses more tightly on [Ressa], it becomes a more gripping document. And it certainly is gripping, as the cloud of menace threatening her becomes firmer.

One of the most atrocious viewing experiences of the year, “The Tax Collector” relies on a trite visual language built on obvious flashbacks and bland imagery that match the unimaginatively dreadful writing where every Latino in sight is a gangster.

How might Crawford have brought cinematic life to pages full of words? No clue. But the director who took up the job simply relies on people who were there to tell us how great it all was. And that keeps Creem trapped in history — a fading memory as opposed to a useful example.

This is proficient, measured filmmaking from a director who has already peered more deeply, and persuasively, into colonialism’s heart of darkness.

It’s full of missed opportunities and lacking in telling details.

The concision of its story and the elasticity of its themes are crucial to its peculiar potency: Operating within tight narrative and budgetary confines, Seimetz seeks to reshuffle our perceptions, to alter our sense of how movies can represent the unrepresentable.

It gestures toward controversial ideas but always swerves back to a simple but profound message of togetherness and family, and the personal importance of honoring tradition and memory.

The message — explore and embrace the rich legacy of your ancestors because it’s part of you — may sound simple, but in Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s hands, it’s hardly a rudimentary platitude. With Black Is King, she creates a pageant of sight and sound honoring the Black diaspora, weaving a collection of vibrant, profound and defiantly creative scenarios into one abstract and mostly cohesive narrative.

The documentary, based on Cooper’s self-published memoir (he connected with Mazzio on Twitter after she’d read it), illustrates the differences that can be made through the efforts of a few and draws attention to the high levels of trauma experienced by residents in our poorest neighborhoods.

It’s competent filmmaking in the service of lousy storytelling.

While the filmmaker keeps his eyes peeled for every possible shred of good news in the wake of disaster, he has little interest in peddling easy inspiration; the stakes are too colossal, the devastation too raw.

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is a thoroughly engaging retrospective of a hard-working, hard-living performer who survived to tell the tale.

While the performances ensure that the movie is always watchable, the hesitant storytelling makes it far from compelling, a bad trip about a bummer vacation.

It starts throwing details at you almost immediately, each one building on yet also undermining the last, as if it were deliberately trying to confound your sense of what kind of movie you’re watching.

Maine’s film captures something indelible about adolescent female desire, without condescending or objectifying, because she understands, subjectively, what that looks and feels like: all the confusion and shame, but yes, also the pleasure to be found there. She beautifully depicts something that has been rarely seen on film: the lustful gaze of an adolescent woman (as opposed to the lustful gaze being directed at her).

A breezy, energizing and fun look at the hip-hop and improv theater collective

Father Soldier Son is a demanding film, a sometimes brutal story told with immense empathy. There is sorrow and joy; success and failure; marriage, birth and death. The Eisches are a tough crew, absorbing the challenges and even tragedy with a fragile resilience.

The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.

Nothing here is especially revealing or deep; but the doc is pleasantly positive, and it does have something to say about how the expectations for dads today are higher than ever.

What emerges is a chilling portrait of what happens when people in power just ignore sociopolitical norms and behave as though the rules don’t apply to them.

The story of that one miserable shoot is still a useful way to consider both the brilliance of Sellers and the damage he wrought, as well as demonstrating the ludicrous leeway granted to celebrities and the ways that obvious warning signs of possible mental illness often went unheeded.

Like a lot of recent documentaries about the overdue reckoning for sexual predators in positions of power, Athlete A is a reminder that the rot is sometimes within the system itself, not just within the criminals it benefits.

The whole point of this illuminating and often moving film is that all of these people have a tale to tell — and one that’s not as simple as Hollywood would have it.