This almost unclassifiable Brazilian horror film is one of the most assured, unconventional genre pictures of recent years.

Shéhérazade wins us over with what we love about love: its strength in even the direst of circumstances.

This frequently fascinating, frustrating study in naiveté, personal turmoil and self-discovery leaves the viewer stranded in process.

The step-by-step examination of how so many smart people with such a good idea failed so badly results in a film which offers up not only a crackling story but also enough lessons that it could be a Harvard Business School case study all by itself.

[An] engrossing, propulsive film.

Carmine Street Guitars is a leisurely Sunday stroll of a documentary.

The Hustle nods to its predecessors and feels at times like “To Catch a Thief” meets “Absolutely Fabulous.” But what makes “The Hustle” work is its stars.

What makes Non-Fiction stand out is the adroit way it keeps everything in balance. The writing and the acting, the questions about contemporary society as well as personal relationships, they all exist in enviable harmony to create an incisive snapshot of the present moment.

The experience of watching Ask Dr. Ruth is a bit like that of meeting someone unaccountably delightful and almost being knocked backward by the gale-force strength of her personality, and then wanting to go out and buy one of her books so as to actually learn something about her ideas.

Charlie Says is a fascinating and feminist exploration of Manson’s first victims: the girls themselves.

The combination of technique and message is ultimately winning. It’s tempting to think of Biggest Little Farm as the real-life equivalent of an epic pastoral storybook tale, but with the kind of happy ending that suggests a blueprint for saving the earth.

The story is thin and merely serviceable at best, and it often feels like the film has barely been written.

To merely describe what happens in Rafiki would be to overlook its transporting sense of place, its striking visual pleasures and its credible and moving performances.

It isn’t good, exactly — as boozy friend-reunion comedies go, it’s no “Girls Trip” or “The World’s End” — but it has its ticklish grace notes, plus some first-rate second and third bananas, despite a script that seems to be working both too hard and not hard enough.

What Tolkien offers instead is a picturesque, amber-soaked balm for armchair Anglophiles: the manners and mores, the crisp witticisms and stirring, stiff-upper-lip sentiments. These pleasures aren’t negligible. But neither are they a substitute for a genuinely cinematic window into a genius’ mind.

Though well shot by Justin and Ian McAleece, the narrative is a disjointed mess that ends in an eye-rolling conclusion. Its spiritual insights feel like a mishmash of appropriated sentiments from a variety of philosophies.

Go For Broke unfolds across Hawaii with lo-fi charm but introduces more characters than it can balance, falling into uneven and overly earnest stretches.

Less would have been more here; a less scattershot approach would have yielded a more resonant film.

Modern dance devotees and fans of legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham will find much to appreciate in the lovingly crafted documentary If the Dancer Dances. For others, the film may prove too repetitive and narrowly focused.

An intimate, intensely dramatic film that holds us in its grip like a page-turning novel. Except it’s all true.

Directed by Deon Taylor with a cheeky sense of fun and deep knowledge of the genre, The Intruder is the kind of schlocky yet satisfying genre filmmaking that makes you jump and laugh at the same time.

Less a journalistic endeavor than an admirer’s tour — with room for blackly funny Herzog-ian touches in his choice of archival clip or patently demonic voice-over.

Fortunately, both the film’s gorgeous look and its meticulously choreographed action sequences keep us more than occupied until the plot pieces fall into place.

One of the most dramatic and emotional of sports stories gets the expert film it deserves in The Russian Five, a documentary that is moving in ways you won’t see coming.

Paquin, in one of her strongest performances since The Piano, and especially Grainger (best known for a substantial résumé of British television) shoulder the film’s dramatic burdens with grace and ease. They’re a pleasure to watch. But the unassumingly square and overly familiar film simply isn’t the buzzworthy vehicle their work deserves.

Unfortunately, the film, costarring Erik LaRay Harvey, Robert Ri’chard and Ian McShane, turns overly violent, raw and showy, undermining the glorious music (written, arranged and performed by Wynton Marsalis), superb period re-creation and Carr’s powerful lead turn.

If the idea was to tell the story from Liz’s perspective, the movie botches that perspective badly: Abandoning any sense of narrative rigor, it can’t keep hunky, charming Ted from becoming the protagonist of his own hideous story.

As informational as it is inspirational, Patrick Creadon’s Hesburgh is a thoroughly engaging documentary chronicle of the life and turbulent times of longtime Notre Dame president Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, whose tenure coincided with a particularly pivotal stretch of American history.

Reminiscent of Hollywood cop movies from the ’80s, when masculinity came only in a macho shade, but propelled by the fresh winds of inclusion, El Chicano stands as a solidly acted and technically accomplished spectacle, the latter likely the result of Hernandez Bray’s time delivering stunt magic behind the scenes as a stunt coordinator.

Director Ben Masters’ compelling, gorgeously shot, super-timely documentary The River and the Wall should be required viewing of anyone charged with making a public case for or against a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

At times it might remind you of a slightly edgier version of the genteel White House romances that flourished in the mid-’90s, like Dave and The American President. Long Shot may nod overtly to a world under threat by terrorism, corruption and climate change, but it also yearns for a gentler, less polarized moment in our political discourse.

It’s not the easiest movie to watch; but that’s only because Shaye’s admirably unafraid to tap into the parts of herself that weird people out.

The film’s well-made, thick with spooky 17th century atmosphere. But it’s also as dreary as its setting, with little original or exciting to add to an already limited horror sub-genre.

Writer-director Akash Sherman gives the film a handsome look, and gets two strong lead performances, but his picture still comes out too static and somber.

What makes “Tough Guy” such a good sports-doc is that it’s unusually honest — both about how much fans loved seeing an old-fashioned bruiser terrorize the NHL, and how that player's demons inevitably devoured him.

Copious blood-spatter aside, I’ll Take Your Dead is about as poignant as any movie with vengeful gangster ghosts can be.

For anyone over 5, it’s best as mild, inoffensive background noise, but no more thrilling or satisfying than that. It turns out to be nothing more than a merchandising opportunity after all.

It all comes together on election night, as Lears shadows Ocasio-Cortez and captures her disbelief as she nears her post-election party and suddenly realizes she has in fact won. It’s precisely the kind of you-are-there moment, one of many, that makes Knock Down the House so satisfying.

Rattlesnakes imagines itself as a neo-noir, but that genre is more evident in its themes of revenge and ambiguous characters rather than in its nondescript style. This is a bland, unpleasant watch, all set to an equally grinding score.

Masterfully directed by Martín Rodríguez Redondo, who wrote with Mariana Docampo and Mara Pescio, this brief, if deliberately paced picture, features far more silence than words: Dialogue is doled out “as needed” while those silences, which simmer with loaded looks and pointed observations, speak volumes.

Vidal-Naquet’s film knows that every wound and balm to the flesh is also one to the spirit.

Veteran performer Schull, perhaps best known as Fay on TV’s “Wings,” gives a towering, fearless turn; the other main actors are fine as well. Still, one must yield to the film’s flat shooting style, lengthy monologues, dangling questions and awkwardly rendered, dubiously earned ending.

While not exactly uncharted documentary territory, the Iraq conflict is thought-provokingly portrayed in “Mosul,” an up-close-and-personal examination of recent events that puts a human face on a land that remains vulnerable as a result of clashing ideologies.

Although The Most Dangerous Year sometimes gets bogged down with explainers, it’s a powerful educational tool and empathy-building story.

Where Dern and Stewart kick-start something worth exploring, the movie around them is pleased spectator instead of engaged participant.

Subject and style could not be more different than in The White Crow, but that fusion of opposites has resulted in an involving biographical drama that rarely puts a foot wrong.

This movie’s a shoddy copy of something that was pretty tawdry to begin with.

while the action stalls too often, the look of “Yamasong” is enough to recommend it. The puppetry’s lo-fi but remarkably expressive, with craftsmanship and design that puts most computer animation to shame.

At its best, Scary Stories explains why these books endure: because they let their young audience know that even in their worst nightmares, they’re not alone.

While Feldman — a veteran screenwriter making his directorial debut — brings plenty of storytelling craft to the picture, Know Your Enemy falls short of being as eye-opening as he intends. A strong sense of mystery and two searing lead performances can only counteract so much of the contrivance here.

Lobo overdoes the sudden shifts between the real and the surreal in the last act, refusing to answer any questions definitively until he has to. But the first-time filmmaker shows an impressive amount of confidence in his methods. He knows how to make audiences uncomfortable — first with tedium, then with terror.

Though Benjamin struggles to fill her running-time, the movie mostly reaffirms that she’s a talented genre director.

As long as he maintains his focus on the notoriously private Land and the painstaking efforts of Impossible Project’s chief technology officer and Polaroid vet Stephen Herchen to recapture lightning in an SX-70, Baptist delivers something reasonably compelling. Unfortunately the bulk of the overly artsy production is preoccupied with the exploits of others.

Individual scenes work, but it lacks cohesion as a whole.

In a divisive era, Okko’s Inn carries a welcome message of acceptance and inclusion.

The inside jokes and fan-service digressions are blatant and relentless, but also pretty effective. The conflicting narrative priorities that often bedevil an epic series finale — how to tell a story that builds with inexorable momentum while also staging the mother of all cast reunions? — are cleverly and resourcefully reconciled.

Grass, true to its title, is small, sharp and bladelike. It may strike you as more of the same until you see it and its implications and possibilities begin to grow and multiply.

By the time the noirish thriller Naples in Veils draws you into its enigmatic web — which is pretty much from the start — you’re sufficiently invested to enjoyably coast through the rest of this hypnotic, if ambiguous, Italian import.

Fast Color is a nifty little film, a smart, adventurous and surprising production made with visible care and considerable love.

A moving testament to the boundary-shattering language of music.

While director Penny Lane (not a pseudonym) energetically goes about shattering our preconceived notions at every intriguing turn, the film is at its most potent tracing society’s history of “satanic panic,” from the Salem Witch Trials to the rise of the evangelical lobby on the shoulders of the Red Scare to the 1980s when Dungeons & Dragons was viewed as a demonic gateway game.

This charming, shaggy story of embracing oneself to authentically connect with others is peppered with appealing performances from Brian Tyree Henry and Kate McKinnon, and a truly bravura turn by Schilling as a woman frazzled to her wits’ end.

With a confident eye and economy of storytelling, DaCosta crafts a fiercely feminist and sensitive family portrait that fearlessly takes on the capitalist rot at the core of the American healthcare system.

For those who can embrace Hagazussa more as an experience than as a spook show, this film is utterly absorbing and hard to shake.

An enlightening, lively, perhaps not unfamiliar outing.

All in all, the characters in Lost & Found are no smarter or luckier than they need to be, and their travails and coincidences manage to be just comic and human enough to make us happy for the time we spend together.

Keene made only a couple of films in her abbreviated life, but The Juniper Tree is absorbing enough to make one rue there weren’t more.

Cinematically, there isn't much of a breakthrough, or breaking of a mold, when it comes to how these stories are told. But what distinguishes the film is the daring depiction of a complex, flawed, fierce and faithful woman.

The film gets laughs from a script emphasizing Steve’s awkwardness and the soundtrack’s use of ’80s power ballads. Of course, nothing in it is as endearing as the birds themselves. The mere sight of their fat bodies waddling across the ice gets the warmest response of all.

Made Me Do It shuffles among different visual styles, as it bounces between its villain’s backstory and one desperate night in the lives of the brother and sister he’s targeted. The movie looks ugly and feels uglier, without much sense of a larger intent to mitigate the meanness. Koppin's right that his movie is different from a typical slasher. It’s far, far worse.

Thriller falls back on the old horror formula of bland, often mean-spirited young folks, getting slaughtered one by one … and without near enough flair.

The problems may lie in Todd’s novel, but regardless, characters act illogically, as though written by someone who napped through most of Intro to Psych and skipped English 101 altogether. Character motivations go either unwritten or left on the cutting room floor.

A Land Imagined never congeals into anything intriguing or compelling enough to earn our required patience.

From the casting of Centineo to the climax at a school dance, The Perfect Date feels engineered by Netflix algorithms. The resulting film, directed by Chris Nelson, feels as inauthentic and unsure of its identity as its hero.

The movie’s overlong and the humor’s too broad, but given that this would-be cult film is aimed at audiences who want something silly and trashy, it’s hard to fault Skiba for just mindlessly mashing those two buttons, over and over.

A Dark Place is earnest enough, but it comes across as phony. It’s hard to do a “local color” drama when everyone’s from out of town.

Despite how good-natured this movie is, it just doesn’t stand on its own. It has the right kind of soul, but a shapeless body.

Whatever the film has to say about the sketchiness of modern financial wheeling and dealing remains frustratingly non-specific. The characters all feel like they’ve been copied and pasted from hundreds of other movies that end with armed standoffs in some featureless field or warehouse.

There are moments when it feels aimless, incorporating new story lines about the current administration and deportation deep into the running time. But in simply observing this courtroom and the affect it has on lives, the film is deeply moving and quietly revolutionary.

In Disney’s hands, William eschews freak show theatrics for something much weightier.

Despite the juicy details and fascinating topic, it’s disappointing that the stilted tone makes it so difficult to connect emotionally with this important story.

Writer-director Max Minghella’s U.K.-set fairy tale Teen Spirit — which takes Elle Fanning’s lonely immigrant adolescent from karaoke dreams to singing contest heights — is somewhere between feeling abbreviated and wearing out its welcome.

At its best, when we can live Dogman through Marcello’s eyes, the movie keeps reminding you of that opening, of people and animals, menace and kindness, and the cages we sometimes don’t realize we’ve made for ourselves.

Master Z: Ip Man Legacy, like any old-school popular entertainment, contains sentimental moments and broad comedy as well as all that action. If you don’t already have the Ip Man habit, it’s a fine place to start.

This disjointed, though consistently tense retelling dives full force into ostentatious pathos more often than it opts for narrative prudence.

With considerable grace and beguiling modesty, the movie frames its subject as one of Christ’s most discerning followers and a crucial witness to his ministry, death and resurrection.

Working Woman is more than a feature that makes compelling drama out of workplace sexual harassment; it’s an excellent work by any standard, a subtle and insightful character-driven drama that will compel anyone who cares about the interplay of personalities on-screen.

There are several uniquely impressive elements to the adventure drama Mia and the White Lion, but they’re undermined by a choppy, at times contrived and implausible script by Prune de Maistre (wife of director Gilles de Maistre) and William Davies.

Sadly, Laika’s new feature, Missing Link, fails to match the striking visuals and compelling characters in its Oscar-nominated 2016 film Kubo and the Two Strings.

This Hellboy can be something to see. It can also be a giant bore.

Although this cleverly shot and edited picture (it began as a short, grew into a digital miniseries and was then expanded into a feature) doesn’t shy away from its eccentric side, it remains a convincing, relatable look at one woman’s inner workings and the vicissitudes of love and friendship.

Sex Trip tries to tell its audience that what’s inside is what matters, but this comedy is rotten at its core and sure to offend most people unlucky enough to watch it.

The problem is that for all the ways this story is entertaining as a magazine article or Dateline segment, it’s an awkwardly bloated bore when Love makes the affable, naïve Hyden not just his key interviewee but also his reenactment star.

With its solid production values, Unplanned has all the appearances of being a real film, but viewers in favor of abortion rights will find it to be pure propaganda. Writer-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon spend more time making their talking points than developing their characters, who exist merely to make their arguments.

The material is breezy and amusing with a few piercing moments of emotional truth, but the tone never quite feels right for the issue at hand. There’s a tendency to rely on incredibly hacky material, like extended bits about the complexities of sperm collection and well-trodden jokes about alternative healers.

With its good use of a single location and just three characters, Long Lost almost works, though its fun twist would have felt fresher a decade ago.

And so while Gilliam has undoubtedly made better films and certainly greater films than The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, there is something about the ridiculous effort and mixed results that make this arguably the most Gilliam-esque. For anyone struggling with whether to give up, concerned that the result will not match the effort, Gilliam seems to be planting a flag — or more accurately charging a windmill — to say the effort is the reward.