This isn’t simply a damning indictment of the nation; it is a hopeful celebration of one woman’s activism and kindness in the face of her own struggle with AIDS.

Awfully bewildering till the end, a final bombshell catapults the persistently nonsensical plot onto a level of implausibility that defies basic logic and ethics.

Melodrama and an overstuffed plot often overshadow the genuine feeling here.

It’s the banal dialogue, lack of tension, one-note characterizations and overly earnest acting — even by such veterans as Treat Williams, Bruce Davison and Henry Thomas — that conspire to turn this potentially moving and exciting picture into mush.

An undeniably heartfelt if overlong affair, especially for the uninitiated.

The Current War: Director’s Cut is an interesting yarn. But one just can’t shake the feeling that it’s just a Wikipedia article jazzed up with a lot of fun camera tricks and some cinematic wizardry, though Westinghouse and Edison would have to be proud of the amazing movie magic.

Although it may initially seem like a fairly wispy story of family dynamics and romantic uncertainty, there’s a subtle depth to the proceedings that creeps up on you in resonant ways.

This isn’t a subtle, moody film filled with a sense of unease; instead, jump scares are around every corner. If that’s all you want from a horror movie, you’ll have a very good time — and an elevated heart rate for its speedy 90 minutes.

The totality of Fantastic Fungi is so entertaining, informative and appealingly hopeful about the hard-working cure-all for our ailing world lying beneath our feet.

The visually poetic film offers an appraisal of Cash’s life and craft that is both painfully candid and often revelatory.

In lieu of poetry, [Ozon] has composed an exemplary piece of prose: clear, direct and quietly illuminating. At the same time, you would hardly describe this movie as neutral or devoid of anger. On the contrary, its moral outrage is all the more pronounced for being so controlled.

Though she’s a first-time director, Costin has put together a film that’s a savvy cinematic education as well as pure fun. If you care about the movies, don’t even think of staying away.

This indulgent, overlong film takes a solid hour for its bigger themes of love, loss and guilt to settle in. By then, however, the movie has tried our patience to the point that many may not care.

As metaphors for America go, it might just put a hopeful smile on your face after another stomach-churning political news day.

By the end, you almost want every recording artist with Springsteen’s compassion and lyricism to introduce their newest material the way he does in “Western Stars,” like a docent of everyone’s damaged soul, pointing to the parts that make not just the music, but the musician, too.

This riveting documentary should be required viewing for all.

Provides a timely reminder of the once unquestionable value of a shared viewing experience in this era of personal streaming.

Some distance between the source and the story would have benefited the themes at play, which end up buried beneath punches, slurs and bestial masculinity.

The nonstop mayhem will delight “One Piece” fans, but the uninitiated may find the film exhausting.

Krauss digs into the murky, uneasy morality of wartime, but The Kill Team doesn’t quite convey the brutality of these crimes with the same power that news accounts or even Krauss’ own documentary have.

Miller, like most directors, isn’t remotely in Cameron’s league as a maestro of action technique. But he gives the visual-effects-encrusted combat scenes a nicely visceral intensity, with just the right ratio of spatial coherence to logistical chaos.

A shockingly alarming investigation produced with the sensibilities of a social realist drama, Sarbil and Jones’ nonfiction warning should petrify U.S. viewers immeasurably.

Rezo Gabriadze comes across as a genial, unpretentious man. But the viewer sees too little of the internationally respected artist and leaves feeling shortchanged.

Though the narrative often lags or stops outright to revel in Nourry’s art, when the film dives into her struggles with identity in relationship to cancer through art, it’s fascinating, and very emotional.

The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.

Ultimately more a curio than a bona fide buried treasure, the forward-thinking production, with its animated opening credits and resourceful use of models, makeup and double exposures, nevertheless serves as a valuable reminder that imagination and creativity needn’t ever be limited by the going technology.

Cultural distinctiveness, in tandem with stylistic boldness, renders it an unprecedented feat. Thankfully, the proficient English-language dub aids in our ability to register the plot’s intricacies.

Wallflower is a grueling viewing experience at times, and it never truly justifies its existence and the audience going through that pain.

The peek into this world, at this time, feels like a rare treat, an unearthed gem released from a vault.

This fanciful piece, written and directed by Alexis Michalik, based on his popular play “Edmond,” owes more than a passing debt to “Shakespeare in Love,” among many other stage-centric films, while staking its own claim as a brisk, funny, sneakily poignant love letter to words, plays, playwrights and actors.

The documentary doesn’t hesitate to reveal the dangerous reality facing elephants and the other animals, offering a frank look at their existence in a film that’s as entertaining as it is moving.

Greener Grass is a movie that’s not only immediately destined for cult status — it’s the rare movie that truly earns it.

In its most rewardingly complicated moments, this absorbing, incomplete documentary reminds us that there is nothing definitive about what we think we know.

The Cave reminds us of the horrors of a situation we have perhaps become numb to and shows us the unforgettable people who don’t have that luxury.

Through interviews with survivors of the massacre, loved ones and congregants, as well as reporters, politicians and activists, Ivie has made something heartfelt and messy, focused on what’s devotional in testifying about a joy that’s never coming back, and pardoning a malevolence that’s never gone away.

The Lighthouse is a ferocious battle of wills, a tour de force of cold, clammy suspense and a protracted descent into cabin-fever madness. It is also a gorgeous piece of film craft, a chance to savor the visual glories of a bygone era of cinematic artisanship.

Its so-called audacity smacks of calculation and emotional cowardice.

Like most sequels that exist for chiefly commercial reasons, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn’t a great movie; with its flat dialogue, overblown battles and cloying CGI critters, it’s not even a particularly good one. . . . But it’s also not without its pleasures.

El Camino isn’t horrible, but it’s not commendable either, and given the legacy of “Breaking Bad,” mildly entertaining isn’t good enough.

Jexi is such a dumb, lazy film that it might have even the most ardent cinephile reaching for their device, ready to defend their defection to the dark side when faced with this clunker of a comedy.

Cutting through the small-town cliche clutter is Kanters’ deeply felt turn.

This follow-up to 2016’s “High Strung” has its visual dazzle and performance highs but the story and characters are just too fake, chaste and grit-free to take seriously.

Even the weakest horror anthology films can be redeemed by one good segment; but alas, the semi-comic compendium Holiday Hell is pretty dire from start to finish.

There’s not quite enough new or exciting about the picture’s demon-haunting tropes to recommend it. But the connection between family dysfunction and supernatural evil at least gives the routine jump-scares and vaguely spooky atmosphere a firmer context.

There’s something admirably bravura about Beloved Beast, which just keeps going, hour after hour, grinding through dry, tedious scenes of lousy people misbehaving, with no end in sight. This is a movie about misery, which makes viewers feel every bit of the characters’ ennui.

The idea of this boat as a last-ditch play to save a marriage is fine as an inciting incident, but it ends up steering the story way too much. Oldman and Mortimer play the drama in “Mary” well. Too bad they don’t get much chance to play the horror.

Although it occasionally plays as a Statue of Liberty promotional tool (there are worse things), the film is a timely, engaging and well-assembled look at one of our national treasures and its eternal place as a beacon of light for anyone “yearning to breathe free.”

With its pummeling scenes of mud-and-blood combat, its majestic, nearly monochrome widescreen images and its beautifully broody Nicholas Britell score, this plainspoken but unfailingly intelligent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henriad demands and ultimately earns your surrender.

Ideal as follow-up to a meditation session, McKenna’s feature turns less gratifying as the sharp light of reality trickles into its philosophical cracks.

A mostly hackneyed lesson on racial biases desperately stumbling to appear provocative. It does, however, occasionally raise inquiries worthy of pensive consideration.

Carruth’s troubled performance holds the piece together until it loses the thread on its own tenuous mythology, descending into incoherent cacophony.

No matter how many (presumably non-computer-generated) tears Smith sheds, he and Lee never transform this baby hit man into a plausible science-fiction conceit, let alone invest him with a soul.

Veering between sentimental and salty, philosophical and goofy, writer/director Gilles Lellouche’s Gallic stab at a “Full Monty”-style uplifter is too waterlogged with the genre’s well-worn staples (training comedy, bite-sized humiliations) and too uninterested in story/character details (turning paunchy mopers into athletic competitors) to offer anything truly refreshing about the solution to middle-aged dejection.

Chopra and Akhtar have great chemistry, and though the nonlinear storytelling is somewhat unnecessary, Bose deftly manages the challenging tonal shifts within this lengthy film that never drags.

As wannabe Tarantino misfires go, at least one can say that Avary, who in addition to sharing story credit on “Pulp Fiction” also contributed (uncredited) to “True Romance,” comes by the affectation more honestly than most.

Fiendishly researched and smartly constructed, A German Youth is a formidable piece of documentary detective work focusing on a small but significant historical moment that continues to matter.

That raw looseness is too often just sloppy filmmaking, and the gangster clichés ultimately win out over even Rezaj’s roiling, ripped-from-the-streets vitality.

Prolific actor-comedian-musician Tim Heidecker may have a sizable cult following but it’s doubtful he’ll find many new fans with his latest effort, the tedious and laugh-free mockumentary Mister America.

The main reason why Little Monsters recovers well from its off-putting start is because of Nyong’o, who is so bright and funny as a capable caregiver, with a catchy song for every occasion.

Despite the handsome Craig Wrobleski cinematography, and despite a typically fine performance by Patrick Wilson as the lost kid’s dad — slowly going mad in the bush — “In the Tall Grass” runs too long and repeats itself too much to be as gripping as its source material.

This movie’s a reminder that even abstract concepts can have a dark, persuasive power.

At its best, Cuck emphasizes those moments when Ronnie is reachable: when he’s treated like an ordinary person and tries his best to respond in kind.

The movie’s most memorable material is also more grounded.

This story of a lonely kid in need of a father figure seems stubbornly small, given the creators involved. It’s a premise in search of a plot.

Some of the stylistic fillips feel excessive, and at the end of the day, this is just a tawdry, gory B-picture, with little to say about human behavior. But it’s often funny and generally suspenseful — a fine afternoon on the water, all things considered.

A rich and diverting piece of film scholarship.

It is the gift of Midnight Traveler to allow us to feel this family’s fate in the pit of our stomachs. If the plight of refugees has ever seemed abstract, this film makes sure you know how real it is.

While Scared of Revolution offers intimacy with Umar, it is otherwise unmoored from the important cultural history it could have been.

Unfortunately, it’s an anticlimactic conclusion at best, full of tacked-on thriller shenanigans that, once they’ve petered out, make you wonder exactly why this story drew the filmmakers’ attention to begin with. The answer to that, happily, can be found in Portman’s every glimmer of nuance.

With its deeply creaky gender and racial themes, this strained film evokes something unearthed from several decades ago, if not before.

A surprise in all ways except its surpassing quality, Pain and Glory reveals master Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar forging dazzling new paths while being completely himself.

Despite the inherent familiarity, the quietly observed Low Tide, graced by a mournful, undulating score by composers Brooke Blair and Will Blair, nevertheless packs a genuine depth.

Genèse concludes as a sober reminder that the young always feel intensely, but that the years between the crush that shines and the ardor that confounds are short ones, indeed.

The flatly visualized characters and tinny, stiff English-language voice performances are busts, often creating the paradoxical vibe of a cartoon with an uncanny-valley problem, as if you were watching the rough specs for an animatronic theme-park installation.

A timely, undeniably compassionate but ultimately underwhelming production reflecting on a profoundly American issue.

Dassler’s personification of the real-life infamous and misogynistic character — his walk, his speech patterns — consistently startles.

Murphy is back, and both his old gifts and some new ones are on engaging display in the rowdy, raunchy, inescapably funny Dolemite Is My Name, a gleefully profane biopic and a passion project the star has been nurturing for years.

James Franco’s Pretenders begs the question: is this a film about bohemian artists or a parody of a film about bohemian artists? Because if we’re supposed to take this laughably trite and sexist claptrap seriously, one has to laugh.

Madison’s work aside, this picture isn’t all that exciting. It’s 80 tedious minutes of shouting, swearing, nudity and gore, cut together with the deftness of a chainsaw.

10 Minutes Gone is clumsy and cliché-ridden, and populated by two accomplished action stars who look like they just want to get through this job as quickly as possible.

Director Matthew Currie Holmes (who also cowrote the script) has a hard time controlling this movie’s tone, which ranges from tongue-in-cheek to deadly serious, with some well-meaning but poorly executed attempts to examine the racial component of the old Buckout Road tales.

The filmmakers sometimes fail to follow through on the more interesting parts of their story, but a novel approach to the material mostly compensates for the drier stretches.

This is an appealingly polished thriller, with something modest but profound to say about how selfish choices can ripple across decades.

To watch it is to feel Miike’s industriousness and partake of his pleasure: The cinema is his first love and likely also his last.

The triumph of this performance is that Zellweger is not so much presenting a Garland we’ve never known as portraying the one we’ve read about with the kind of nuance and depth that insures hearts go out to her, as they always have.

Overwrought but nonetheless thoughtfully creepy, The Lake Vampire emerges as a new and formidable calling card for genre cinema in Venezuela and for Zitelmann as a creator.

[A] brainy, niche, often arcane documentary.

The movie is both a lesson and a diversion, a movie that seeks to educate by means of trickery and misdirection. It is thus best approached as a kind of cinematic shell game, in which the focus of the story keeps shifting and the full scope of the corruption on display remains just out of view.

A small gem of focused filmmaking, Ága tells a minimal story so beautifully it holds us completely.

The result is a kind of rolling theater of racially targeted, manufactured peril that exploits the underprivileged, rewards corruption and ultimately — when the farce plays itself out — isn’t actually funny. But that’s only after it brilliantly is funny, producing plenty of acrid, world-upside-down laughter about the ridiculous truth behind some serious modern delusions about whom we should be scared of.

Kallos’ tough, austere, often Bergmanesque debut feature (he’s an admitted fan of the Swedish master) also offers a vivid window into South Africa’s churchgoing, agriculture-dominant Free State region, as well as of several lingering effects of apartheid and the cultural decline of the nation’s Afrikaner population.

With the colorful Allison — he’d fit right into one of KFC’s revolving Colonel spots — and narrator Woody Harrelson at his disposal, Haney could have easily done without all the glossy dramatic recreations and frequent shout-outs to Bristol-Myers Squibb, which occasionally create the undesirable effect of a corporate promo video.

The film isn’t the most cohesive look at startling global transformation. It’s strongest, however, as a dizzying, dimensional tour of scale and time, forcing us to wonder how a sense of earth-centric balance can be restored.

A finely observed documentary.

Its imaginative fantasies and enchanting acting won’t solve our ageless woes of the heart, but will certainly trigger a smile for their relatable absurdity.

The movie could have used a more thorough, gram-for-gram comparison of plant-based and animal proteins. No matter, there’s much fine food for thought.

It’s a truly epic wallow in the sins of a charismatic and indulgent strongman, even if it never exactly balances out its lurid shimmer with lasting psychological resonance.

The impact of hearing Danny Glover’s calm voice reading published invitations to lynching parties remains chillingly undiminished.