Aside from the obviously unintentional humor, the quality of Kraven the Hunter is severely lacking. Perhaps that’s all the recommendation you need for some dumb fun at the movies.

I’ll give Schrader the benefit of the doubt that his dialogue is stilted by design, even though the female characters are particularly prone to clunkers. . . But it’s still irritating to sit through, and once we start questioning everything we see — would young Leonard really order a bran muffin at an ice cream parlor? — it gets harder to hand over our trust when the movie wants to get emotional.

Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.

The film is a harrowing and eerie horror fairy tale from another time, even as it feels startlingly fresh and always unpredictable.

Oppenheimer is after something that drives right at the heart of what a musical is. To harmonize means to agree. It’s a public display of solidarity — a pact to parrot the same delusions.

The potent image-making and performative ferocity turns what could have been a crime thriller into a near-metaphysical showdown.

The surface pleasures of Y2K are outlandishly fun, but plot-wise, the film is structurally unsound.

There’s a hushed profundity, especially in Binoche and Fiennes’ performances, expressing the kind of unspeakable grief and trauma one brings home from the battlefield, and what those who remain home suffer in absence.

What always rings loud and clear and true is the formidable Adams. When given a red-meat role of physicality and nuance — animalized, her eyes swinging between adoration and primitive fire — she can handle whatever Nightbitch needs to be at any given moment: light and funny, dark and stormy, feral and furious, and all combinations therein.

This soft-jab tragedy never finds the depth of expression to become a truly layered tale about choices, regrets and what we do with the rounds we have left.

I wish Larraín had cut Callas down to size more. He’s too protective of his fellow artist to slosh around in the fury that fueled her art. Callas could sing three octaves, but the film is mostly one note.

By making the political personal, Rasoulof warns us that repression starts at home.

Moana 2 is indeed a worthy sequel, with gorgeous animation, a thoughtful representation of Polynesian culture and another exciting adventure for our inspiring heroine. Does it go “beyond” the first film? No, but that would have been too tall an order. That it stands up as a sturdy and satisfying sequel is more than enough.

A sublime and stirring documentary.

It is messy and it doesn’t totally cohere (just how those Beat forefathers liked it), but it does stick to a guiding principle of yearning, expressed in achingly poignant, unforgettable moments of sound and image.

Happily absent are later-generation pop stars testifying to the band’s genius, or worse, singing their own versions of Beatles songs. Not even the Beatles testify to their own genius.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue.

In its simple, generous spirit of giving these creatures palpable narrative power, there’s a profundity: Flow might only be imagining their coping skills without us, but it’s a charming, poignant vision of community and perseverance we could stand to be inspired by.

Gladiator II maps closely onto the original film’s structure and style, so there’s not much about it that is surprising or unexpected. The film itself is a son, made from the same DNA, in the same image. It is the only “Gladiator” sequel that could possibly exist and exactly what you expect, for better or for worse.

The film may struggle to take flight, but when it does, it is undeniably moving, with a message of freedom and defiance that resonates now more than ever.

The world is full of ego-massaging celebrity documentaries, in which legends we know star in glorified tribute reels. But the zesty, illuminating The World According to Allee Willis feels like what the showbiz biodoc was meant for, to give voice to someone who was so much more than a ubiquitous album-sleeve credit.

It’s a dazzling, tune-filled collage of images, words and sounds, recounting the moment during the Cold War when Congolese independence, hot jazz and geopolitical tensions made a sound heard around the world. But also, how that music was muffled by lethal instruments of capitalism and control, still a factor on the global stage.

A miraculously subtle piece of work.

If it’s too much to ask of Arnold that her bid for heightened naturalism make a ton of sense, “Bird” at least maintains a heartbeat of ache and affection for youth in all its rudeness, revealing a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of losing her claws if she traffics in the thing with feathers.

Red One is a confounding project that is clearly trying to be for all audiences (it’s weirdly kiddie-oriented, but feels more aimed at adults) and is so bad it ends up being for none.

As far as family-friendly, faith-based holiday movies go, you could do worse than “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” though it might not quite connect with all young audiences, as the film leans more toward poignant than playfully riotous.

The overall tension allows us to skim over the flaws and foibles in the script, especially when the resolution is so hard-fought.

War movies have always made use of spectacle to heighten existential dangers, but Blitz is a welcome reminder that a bruised, searching and flawed home front, in the waning days of empire, was its own fascinating emotional terrain too.

Ruizpalacios creates a visual style that continues to reinvent itself right up to the end, crafting an unpredictable feeling that matches the volatile plotting.

Anchored by performances that refuse to tell us what to think (especially Hoult’s cagey calm), Juror #2 skillfully depicts how, in practice, the ideal of blind justice too easily becomes the shortsighted, look-the-other-way kind.

The story of Here surrounding Richard and Margaret is relatable, entirely predictable and utterly dull.

Not only has a real filmmaker emerged with A Real Pain, with both the sensitivity and boldness that could launch a career, but Eisenberg has never let himself be this exposed as a performer.

Dahomey is at its most blazingly confrontational when Diop includes footage of a panel session in which students discuss the issues at hand.

None of it would work, however, without the command of this justifiably Cannes-honored cast.

Despite its intimate focus, Memoir of a Snail is a towering achievement. This touching animated film serves as a reminder that Elliot is a humanist who clearly sculpts his “clayographies” (as he dubs his films) from the very essence of life itself.

For anyone who needs a gut-punch primer in what the lack of reproductive freedom looks like now, the propulsive documentary Zurawski v Texas from co-directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault is here to put your voting decisions into sharply delineated, heart-rending focus.

Sober and heartfelt, Union lets us see what Amazon and the world would soon discover about the power workers have when they invest in their dignity first.

The richness of the filmmaking, including the powerful acting, obfuscates the fact that the story itself is a pretty thin and silly mystery with twists that cheapen the intellectual quandary at the center of the tale.

Thanks to the deadpan chops of the cast, the low-grade silliness is funny enough to offset the occasional feeling that a shorter, tighter version built around its biggest laughs might have been more effective.

In artist Titus Kaphar’s emotionally knotty, semi-autobiographical directorial debut about hurt and resilience — and, of course, making art — we get a refreshingly bone-deep view of how someone can be saved by the act of creation, yet flummoxed by its therapeutic limitations.

One wishes that space in Separated had been saved instead for real stories told by the policy’s victims, or perhaps more historical context. Nonetheless, what we glean from the totality of the interviews and research, and Morris’ well-honed style of coalescing information, is damning enough.

Nothing in The Universal Theory is going to blow your mind, but as it plays its fastidiously crafted notes of conspiracy and chaos, you’ll know the idiosyncrasies of the art house are alive and well.

Baker wrote the part for her, and Madison returned the favor with a star-making performance, leaning into Ani’s audacity while revealing the fragile façade, the vulnerabilities and self-deception lurking underneath.

Some may want “The Apprentice” to go further. It does humanize Trump. But it also presents a plainly obvious depiction of how a man can turn into a monster with the right personality, background and guidance. What more could it possibly need to say?

It’s so detached from the supervillain narrative that it’s almost meta. But as the musical numbers become lengthy detours rather than lending further insight into Arthur, the sequel doesn’t sing as a character study. And it sure ain’t a thriller.

The strength of White Bird lies in its young performers, especially Glaser and Schwerdt, who deliver complex, nuanced performances of young people experiencing their part of global atrocities on an intimate scale, while also trying to navigate the complications of connecting as young teenagers. They are both excellent, and keep the film emotionally grounded.

Pugh gives Alma an edgy unpredictability that almost makes you believe some of the implausible things she does. And the expressive Garfield can convey water-eyed empathy so deftly that you know Tobias would be laid low if Almut so much as stubbed her toe on the leg of a coffee table.

Piece by Piece is ultimately a surprisingly moving biography, and a resonant reminder of Williams’ outsize cultural footprint. The Lego format doesn’t cheapen the power of Neville’s message, but rather reflects the quirky, outside-the-box thinking of the artist himself, who has always marched to the beat of his own drum, steering the cultural ship according to his unique point of view.

The problem is that Ronan is also forging her compelling warts-and-all portrait of obliteration and recovery in another type of gale storm, that of undisciplined filmmaking at odds with the patient harvesting of characterization.

In Jason Reitman’s overstuffed, adrenalized Saturday Night, a dramatization of the windup to that fateful first broadcast, you don’t feel the buzzy air of revolution so much as hear the voice of present-day legacy curation getting in the way.

It’s a quietly shattering place All Shall Be Well goes to, in which a time of consoling devolves into petty matters of consolation.

This is a penetrating biopic, and while it may take a familiar shape, the pioneering woman at the center was anything but traditional.

The Wild Robot has a lot to say and its own way of saying it. It’s a big-studio animated feature that has its own look, feel and identity, wrapped around an unusual story with ample humor and plenty of emotion — all of it earned. The movie’s vocal performances, especially from leads Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, are excellent. It’s lovely on the outside and on the inside.

Never Let Go becomes an unpleasant slog for much of its runtime.

As respectful as writer-director Jon Watts is toward creating opportunities for wise-ass capering, the movie is curiously both a labored and lax attempt at restoring that luster.

Cooley’s film remains very much a mainstream product entrenched in the build-it-as-we-go mythology of these sentient machines, but there’s an attention to the motivations and desires of its characters missing in many Hollywood cash grabs. Animation can be a transformative, liberating force, even for stories that have been told ad nauseam.

Coming-of-age dramas may be a dime a dozen at Sundance, but one this tender and truthful can make an entire subgenre feel shimmeringly new.

The Kafkaesque reversal-of-fortune humor that follows — centered on how outgoing, beloved Oswald’s mere presence pours salt on Guy/Edward’s identity crisis — is as shrewdly conceived a comic bad dream as we’ve gotten since the heyday of “Zelig”-era Woody Allen or Charlie Kaufman (whose film “Synecdoche, New York” this feels like a cousin to).

If it weren’t for Moore and Qualley hurling themselves into the shared role, it’d be as flat as a scotch-taped pin-up. If it weren’t for Moore, I’m not even sure it would work.

Human connections are gifts, imagination is powerful and empathy isn’t a trick. These are the things Look Into My Eyes patiently communicates to us from its watchful perch.

The moment Park focuses her screenplay on — the weeks before leaving for college — is well-trodden territory for young-adult movies. To counter this, she has an uncommonly strong script for the genre, balancing the sappy and sentimental with a slangy skater-queer-cool-kid voice inhabited comfortably by both Stella and Plaza.

When you won’t speak the evil of “Speak No Evil,” then a disservice has been done to the source terror and how expertly it refused to deliver us to a safe place.

There are some cringeworthy moments watching the pair win at detective work while losing as vulnerable fangirls. But like any soulful quest worth its salt, Seeking Mavis Beacon makes the lows as meaningful as the highs, endorsing a wild web world in which mystery and exposure can peacefully coexist.

There’s an acting master class to savor, as one might expect from a cast that includes Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, each of them in career-best form.

The contrived third act notwithstanding, expect audiences in movie theaters to engage with The Front Room in audible gasps, one nauseating stunt at a time.

Hanging over the narrative is a sense of futility, that this can and will happen again and again. Another lawsuit, another life lost, another workaround. But for a moment, one man on a bike with a few expertly wielded weapons can wreak holy havoc on corrupt cops, and damn does it feel good to watch.

Certain qualities are undeniable, such as Keaton’s command of this character and O’Hara’s unique wit. Ryder has the heaviest performance lift, transitioning her character from teen to mom, but she finds her groove in the back half of the movie. But there’s something a bit bland and manufactured about this version.

Using a style of elegant lyricism, which enshrines tiny moments into glisteningly miraculous turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he’s conceived play out without the need to advance the plot.

There’s just simply nothing to hook into aside from Fishburne’s performance, which is the only captivating element of the film, and even that is derivative of his iconic Morpheus from “The Matrix.” Despite its many twists and turns, Slingshot shows no signs of life.

A childish slog of hero worship.

A comedy about learning to live with grief, Between the Temples has a lot going on in its head and heart.

[Woo] may have tamped down some of his more sentimental and tragic impulses, but he definitely flexes for the climactic melee in a deconsecrated church, which is beautifully bananas, but also, in a funny way, a personal statement on the intimacy that quality action filmmaking should create.

Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of The Crow.

Blink Twice is a big, bold swing, even if its message becomes muddled along the way. It’s clear Kravitz wants to make a statement with this film. What’s less clear is what exactly that statement might be.

One may not entirely understand exactly what is going on in “Cuckoo,” but there’s no denying how it makes you feel: rattled, unsettled, psychically imprinted with unforgettable images and sensations, which is how every good piece of horror should leave its audience.

Writer-director Chiwetel Ejiofor (following up his impressive 2019 directing debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”) proves more earnest than skillful at bringing heartfelt complexity to another tale of whiz-kid promise and resourcefulness.

Even the landscape speaks to an emotional duality. It captivates with its natural beauty and sweep at the same time it tragically underscores the remoteness of places like St. Joseph’s, where evil could keep secret.

Banks’ and Pullman’s deliveries of these tragicomic characters elevate what could have been merely a genre exercise into something more fascinating and satirical.

Alvarez gives Spaeny her hero moments, whether in her care of her comrades or destroying an invasive species, and she expresses the inner strength and utter determination to survive required of an “Alien” franchise installment. Sometimes, that demonstration of sheer humanity and grit is all that’s required to make one of these films sing.

In the film, Lily is delusional about her relationship and the movie blurs the lines of the abuse for too long to a frustrating degree that essentially robs our hero of her agency, and elides some of Ryle’s obvious manipulation.

The emotional acuity of a writer who felt things too deeply to stoop to cheap sentiment comes through.

In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, Good One is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.

Daughters culminates with an emotional father-daughter dance inside a Washington, D.C., jail. But its real potency, as both a portrait of families riven by incarceration and a call to action on prisoners’ rights, lies in what comes before and after.

An insipid mishmash of trite genre tropes, Borderlands is devoid of any real edge.

All in all, Burstein’s film feels big and perceptive, a love letter to a remarkable, interesting and very human human.

Every Irish speaker in Kneecap wants to be seen, felt and heard in their fight for freedom. That funny, funky riot of attention-seeking pain and pleasure, inspired by the pioneering voices of American hip-hop, makes for a bracing, entertaining transatlantic dispatch.

There are laughs and clever bits of business in “The Instigators,” but there’s never a reason to care.

Striking a fine balance between lurid voyeurism and grounded naturalism, Mäkelä’s film is a gripping wonder, perhaps a tad too literate, with its nods not only to Ellis but to authors like Jean Genet and Cyril Collard.

The premise still feels too thin and juvenile to grab audiences of any age. So what algorithm decided this movie would be a lucrative endeavor?

Clearly there’s no better narrator than an obsessive like Scorsese for an archival dive into the duo’s unusual and extraordinary oeuvre. It’s his heartfelt analysis as host of filmmaker David Hinton’s documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger that puts this rewarding, personalized master class above most movies about movies.

This fearsome foursome may be appealing, but the film is beyond formulaic, and far from fabulous.

Working from an excellent screenplay (by Chika-ura and Keita Kumano) that’s a finely tuned model of narrative empathy, and boasting an all-timer portrait of decline by the great Tatsuya Fuji (“In the Realm of the Senses”), it conveys both keen insight into a tough situation and, at the same time, intriguingly lets some workings of the heart and mind remain impenetrable.

Both the filmmaker and his cast are breakouts to watch in this Sundance standout, a heartfelt and hilarious entry in the coming-of-age canon that’s primed to find kindred souls in a wider audience.

While it will likely amuse its target audience of geeks and the terminally online, Deadpool & Wolverine is a whole lot of hot air and not much else.

Akin, a Swedish filmmaker whose family originally hails from Georgia, knows this is a story tinged with sadness for lives that have been ostracized and marginalized. But his wider view starts from a place of optimism about what curiosity engenders.

It is a worthy, if somewhat abbreviated, toast to the woman behind one of the most iconic Champagnes in the world.

The tension never lets up throughout Longlegs, though it is peppered with a dry, black humor that somehow just makes everything more disturbing.

Even if Chung does leave us wanting just a little bit more romance, he delivers a supremely entertaining summer blockbuster in Twisters, one with a thematic heft that makes it even better than expected, and better than the first.