What ensues amidst Jia’s indelible, gliding visuals of modern Shanghai are ruminative testimonials from the breadth of an older citizenry — former soldiers, descendants of gangsters and politicians, and (lots of) artists who endured the city’s turbulent evolution, and who in their stories of family, love and survival form a tapestry of memory and wisdom.

To its credit, the script, by director Sara Zandieh and Stephanie Wu, works hard at inclusivity. Unfortunately, while a lesbian couple is fun, the gay men feel like a throwback and Alex’s bisexuality, which could have provided an intriguing and credible complication, goes nowhere.

Very little about this movie feels fresh or original; but a talented cast, a solid Alex Carl script, and director Andy Palmer’s energetic pace and playful tone do make Camp Cold Brook unusually fun.

For the most part Hank’s heartbreak resonates. By the end of After Midnight, he and the audience both may wonder whether the bogeyman and true love are equally mythical.

This is a fast, fun watch that succeeds largely on the charms of its star and the able hands of its director.

At once frank, tender and unapologetically funny, Come as You Are is a sweet surprise.

Olympic Dreams is a wispy, quasi-romantic dramedy whose affecting moments are eclipsed by its overly random, sometimes awkwardly played and constructed narrative.

There’s some overreach and muddle here — you wouldn’t want a pop quiz on the plot — but “Last Thing” remains an intriguing, visually diverting piece, well shot by Bobby Bukowski.

Sonic the Hedgehog is legitimately funny, heartwarming and entertaining.

The real draw to the “To All The Boys” cinematic universe is the connection between Condor and Centineo, who have intoxicating chemistry, keeping things interesting as “P.S. I Still Love You” ambles to its inevitable conclusion. They bring the charm, but one wishes it had a more exciting movie to support it.

A probing though ponderously episodic drama that ultimately feels as stitched together as Sawchuk’s frequently unmasked mug.

Approaching the world in his own specific visual way, Geyrhalter also gravitates toward exploring big ideas, and here he takes on one of the biggest, an exploration of, as he puts it, “the wounds we are inflicting on the Earth.”

A chilling portrait of how fanaticism can grow and be enabled, this is a matter-of-fact film that moves with an awful inexorability toward its foregone conclusion.

The movie’s strongest asset is Keough, an actress who can seize and hold the screen with electrifying force (check out her terrific turns in “American Honey” and the forthcoming “Zola”), but who is no less powerful in her quieter, more recessive moments.

The film’s heart appears to be in the right place, but its missteps and melodrama make this a fromage unworthy of savoring.

The one-sided film’s wheels come off when covering Thomas’ fraught 1991 Senate confirmation hearings.

Ostensibly, this is a tragedy about mental illness, and the way that someone can slip through the cracks in society without family, friends and a network of support. But Horse Girl is far more subversive and playful than just that, allowing for Sarah’s peculiar reality to envelope our own.

José is hardly the first movie to spotlight a young person navigating their homosexuality in a repressive and perilous environment. Nonetheless, this sophomore feature from Chinese-born director Li Cheng, who co-wrote with George F. Roberson, feels like a singular and essential entry in that subset of LGBTQ coming-of-age films with an international beat.

The best movie twists — like the ones in “Psycho,” “The Crying Game” and “Parasite” — aren’t just unexpected, but also change the direction and meaning of the story. Director Ant Timpson’s blackly comic thriller Come to Daddy isn’t in the same elite class as those films, but it does deliver a good, sick twist; and sometimes that’s enough.

Birds of Prey, directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson, is an impudent blast of comic energy. Light on psychology and devoid of prestige, it’s a slab of R-rated hard candy that refuses to take anything, least of all itself, too seriously.

As it explores the intersection between the occult and mankind’s brutal cruelty in relation to women, The World Is Full of Secrets grips us with its minimalist, calibrated and cerebral scare tactics.

By the time the film finally gets to Fletcher’s dark and stormy, death-defying stunt, its greater liability is a talking heads-intensive structure aimed squarely at aficionados while certain to leave the uninitiated a little surf-bored.

This isn’t the anodyne, awards-baiting film about disability that viewers might be used to; instead, Hikari’s feature debut is sensitive and empathetic, showing a young woman who is more than just her cerebral palsy. Yuma is a wildly creative, sexual person who deserves more than her society often gives her.

It ultimately seems as if there was a more economical, propulsive and entertaining way for a master such as Bellocchio to recount this explosive and pivotal chapter of Mafia history.

Treating an incendiary issue in an austere, minimalist manner has turned The Assistant into an arresting independent drama.

Gretel & Hansel is Perkins’ biggest film to date, and it cements a filmmaker in full possession of a visual prowess that few others with far longer filmographies can claim. But while he offers a stunning feast for the eyes, the substance is likely to leave viewers still hungry.

The willingness to let Stephanie be human and react as such brings a sense of reality and authenticity back to the action-spy genre, which has become too slick.

The movie’s sympathies, much like its political convictions, couldn’t be clearer. But paradoxically, what makes “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.

As funny and ferocious as much of Zola is, it’s let down by an increasingly haphazard script that doesn’t know how to either sustain its humor or negotiate its turn into darker territory — and so, disappointingly, it waffles.

There’s nothing notably new — or especially scary — about any of it.

John Henry is a lead-footed revenge thriller that lands with all the subtlety of the mighty steel-driving man’s sledgehammer.

What might have worked in theater doesn’t translate here, particularly the repetition of words and phrases that feel true to the original medium but grate here on screen.

In Elsewhere, Jiménez has made a humanist film that deals sensitively with the processes of grief and moving on.

Redoubt is slow going but not uninvolving. Barney’s filmmaking is less about the manipulation of image, or the roiling power of editing to create emotional states, than it is about dutifully documenting what he’s created, what he’s seeing, what’s on his mind.

As an evening’s entertainment, it’s almost passable — genially diverting one minute, sour and self-satisfied the next. As a men’s fashion showcase, it’s exemplary — a parade of neatly tailored charcoal waistcoats, colorful flannel tracksuits and a lovely ribbed cardigan that Charlie Hunnam wears like a second skin.

The movie is most successful when it ditches the particulars of the text and just grooves on how it feels to be displaced and disgruntled, stranded in a surreal mindscape that in some ways makes just as much sense as any other day on a dreary alpaca ranch.

Director McMillin effectively interweaves the involving profiles into the lead-up to the big game, as the young players deal with the pressures placed on them by their respective schools and the expectations of family members, some facing the threat of deportation and other realities of living in Trump-era America.

It’s Jasmine’s inept and unprofessional behavior during the film’s climactic trial that really sends the film into absurdist territory. It’s outdone only by a final sequence of events with a horror-show twist that might best be described as bonkers.

This ambitiously titled documentary never really makes the reasons for its existence clear.

This movie is gripping from start to finish, largely because of Marsan, who makes Jarvis both charismatic and complex.

While Long gives it his trademark amiable best and Klabin and longtime collaborator Patrick Lawler cook up a heady cocktail of lively though budget-conscious visual effects, at the end of the day the Carl W. Lucas script feels more like a concept pitch than a fully-plotted proposition.

While Pearce is typically superb as the hero — a self-doubting U.S. marshal named Jim Dillon — the film itself is otherwise utterly unremarkable. The combination of stiff, overwritten dialogue and flatly functional action sequences wastes a good lead performance.

Some testimony here may rankle certain viewers, despite — or because of — Bloch’s attempt at evenhandedness. No matter, it’s a timely and essential portrait.

Director Andy Newbery — working from a script credited to four writers — makes the story look classy but can’t find its beating heart.

Lawrence doesn’t just steal scenes; he brings things back to earth, sometimes by expressing open contempt for the plot he’s mired in. His comic instincts are exactly what Bad Boys for Life needs as it tilts toward third-act grandiosity.

While German actor Fürmann and especially Kingsley engage in a nimbly calculated game of cat and mouse, the film’s coup de grace fails to land with the intended punch.

Troop Zero is bursting with personality and stylistic flourishes; it might be too twee for some, but it’s better to let yourself be won over by its sincerity and sweetness, tempered by just enough sadness and quirk.

Jezebel is a reminder that in everyday human stories is proof that the world is wide, and that in going behind the doors that movies rarely open, there are even more worlds worth discovering.

“Weathering” is a luminously beautiful film. Shinkai’s artists capture both micro- and macroscopic: the wonder of a raindrop acting a prism, casting refractions onto the surrounding surfaces and the glow produced by light shining through clouds.

Do little? They could not have done less. The only appropriate adjective for this Dolittle is “hasty.” Everything feels slapdash and half-rendered; the plot proceeds in a fashion that could be described only as perfunctory. Everyone on screen seems to be in a stumbling daze, especially Downey as the frazzle-dazzled doctor.

The filmmakers materialize a fascinating cinematic language that interrogates itself about matters of spontaneity and manipulation, man-made products and earth-given treasures, simplicity and sophistication, and how these all intersect.

While Disco’d is an unvarnished, moving look at the lives affected by the rising crisis of homelessness, it could have used a bit more polish and structure in telling these stories.

Even ignoring the fact that it was completed back in 2017, Reality Queen! a punishingly shrill, unfunny mockumentary about a social media darling of a Paris Hilton-type celebutante, can’t help but feel totally so yesterday.

Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

The Sonata is well-made but not exceptional. It could use fewer long, expository conversations and more heart-stopping horror set-pieces. The actors have a lot of verve, but because their characters are so straightforward — bordering on archetypal — their situation is hard to connect to on an emotional level.

Its emergence from the dark waters of studio oblivion is far from unwelcome: It’s solid enough by the diminished standards of January, when the multiplex becomes a cinematic dumping ground, and it’s visually slicker and more sophisticated than its setup would seem to warrant.

At both its highest and its lowest, Inherit the Viper lacks excitement. The action sequences are sparse, and the plot is underdeveloped.

If there’s one word to describe the girl-power comedy “Like a Boss,” it’s incomprehensible. Structurally, industrially, philosophically and emotionally incomprehensible. What should have been an easy breezy buddy comedy is rather a flabbergasting tone salad.

This is not a “fun” horror picture. It’s about miseries both supernatural and mundane. And, yes, it’s scary. Pesce’s art-film roots are evident in the movie’s slow-burn first hour. But in the final third, The Grudge piles on the explicit gore and jump scares — all leading to a final scene and final shot as terrifying as anything in the original series.

The most gripping parts of Advocate are the film’s fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité sequences of Tsemel at work, meeting with clients’ families, navigating the legal system and conferring about cases with fellow attorneys and her staff.

Playfully taunting title aside, Mullinkosson’s film is an affectionate portrait of a fraternal bond that no tribal council could ever tear apart.

One of the unexpected pleasures of Ip Man 4 is a warm montage of highlights from the previous three films that plays at the close. Star Yen has said there are no more Ip films in his future, but no one would be upset if another one happened to come along.

It’s a profound, affecting and beautifully told chronicle of faith, family, obsession and the language of music.

The film portrays the ferocious resistance of some people to the possibility that this man had nothing to do with the crime. And that’s when Just Mercy is at its best.

While the escalation in anti-Semitic violence and rhetoric is justifiably alarming, Hate Among Us, which spends a lot of screen time covering attacks in Paris and Berlin, would have made for more incisive viewing had its exploratory journey kicked off closer to home.

Reflected in its native language title (“My Lens”), Chinese Portrait is a personal reflection on the country’s past and present. Brimming with humanity, Wang’s contemplative, minimalist approach forces us to consider the day-to-day lives of these people, and perhaps our own.

The freewheeling, DIY quality of Lost Holiday works both for and against this quasi-caper comedy.

Schmaltzy, overlong and a bit tedious.

It’s a drama of resilient women, thoughtless men and crushingly unrealized dreams, told with supple grace, deep feeling and an empathy that extends in every direction.

For the most part, Cats is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.

The Rise of Skywalker nakedly offers itself up in the spirit of a “Last Jedi” corrective, a return to storytelling basics, a nearly 2 ½-hour compendium of everything that made you fall in love with “Star Wars” in the first place. The more accurate way to describe it, I think, is as an epic failure of nerve. This “Rise” feels more like a retreat, a return to a zone of emotional and thematic safety from a filmmaker with a gift for packaging nostalgia as subversion.

Unfortunately, much of the acting (save by Bagatsing and Rachel Alejandro as Quezon’s vigilant wife, Aurora) is so spotty that it undermines the story’s potential tension and emotional heft.

At the center, Gyasi is an oasis of stillness and solemnity in a naturalistic performance, but the surrounding action never hangs together in anything authentic, especially with the unnecessarily flowery script and laughably heightened score.

It’s impossible to overstate what Fraser brings to this movie, with his imposing frame, manic energy and slangy dialogue. The other leads are strong too — including Abhay Deol as an undercover cop. But Batra doesn’t do enough fresh or surprising with the plot or action scenes, both of which are merely functional.

In Mob Town, the cast’s definitely got the goods, but the writing and direction consistently fail to seal the deal.

Low-key indie First Love has some interesting but fleeting moments in its story of twins in crisis, but it feels like a first draft whose script could have used more fleshing out, particularly in the characterization of its leads.

The key reason Richard Jewell works as well as it does is the perceptive nature of Hauser’s lead performance. His sense of who this character is, how he thinks about himself at his core, leads to scenes with both Rockwell and Bates that are unexpectedly powerful.

Black Christmas is a fun film that gets its kicks out of literally smashing the patriarchy.

Dealing with a personality this strong could not have been easy, and director Garver, whose background is in short films, does a balanced job, giving space to Kael’s partisans while finding time for the other side.

Writer-director Alec Tibaldi pays more attention to the setting than the story; but the heroine and her surroundings are so artfully sketched that a thin plot isn’t a major liability.

The film reveals its truest self as a cinematic act of negotiation, acceptance and farewell between mother and son.

The movie feels disjointed and made up of parts that Dolan couldn’t bring together as it shuffles between three story strands.

What’s indelible in this visceral chronicle is that more than profiting from human suffering, the Ochoas fill the gaps of economic inequality while doing good without reservation.

An uneven but often energizing remake of David Cronenberg’s 1977 cult classic.

Although writer-director Steven Luke’s reach often exceeds his grasp, he’s managed to present a meaningful, largely involving, if decidedly small-scale and fictionalized story about race, courage and comradeship.

It’s not bad for an hour’s entertainment; too bad it runs for two.

Stewart is enough of a force to give Seberg’s darkest moments their due, but it’s too little, too late for the superficial soup that is the movie that bears her name.

Cunningham makes good on its stated goal of doing justice to the man’s spirit of inventiveness.

It is as harrowing as it is triumphant in its depiction of the way it all came to pass.

After a strong start the movie steadily declines, one set piece after another, and there are many moments where the mind wanders and then asks: “Is this still going on?”

While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and 63 Up in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.

Although vital and intriguing, the film could have been more seamlessly assembled.

Travis Hodgkins’ script strives to inspire, but it’s trite even for a drama about the magic of Christmas. Unfortunately, A New Christmas receives little help from either the amateur acting or first-time director Daniel Tenenbaum’s hand.

It’s rare to see a horror film so devoted to intricate plot mechanics and so concerned with driving to a satisfying payoff.

We’ve seen many versions of this kind of story before, but there’s something so spot-on and involving about the film, written and directed by Daniel Schechter — and performed with such a lived-in rhythm by its talented cast — that it proves surprisingly refreshing.

A penetrating, mournful portrait of sexual identity in contemporary Guatemala City.

The limited location here appears to have been strictly a cost-saving measure, not an opportunity to get creative.

For the most part this movie is a tightly constructed and sensitively rendered conversation-starter, comparing grief and loss to the sensation of faulty memories. It takes a strange and fascinating meme, and makes it personal.