Ultimately The Ranger promises more than it delivers.

Lost Fare aims to tell a story that’s at once dark and heartwarming, but it never balances these two contrasting ideas. There is genuine feeling here, but the dialogue and plot make the proceedings plodding and contrived.

What Susanne Bartsch: On Top makes clear is that the art of being seen, as facilitated by Bartsch, can carry unexpectedly poignant depth.

Ambitious and well-executed, The Apparition is a kind of ecclesiastical thriller. An involving and intelligent entertainment, if it ends up somewhat less than the sum of its parts, it's not for lack of attempting something different.

By the end, as you dry your eyes, it’s their futures you want them to win — as scientists, optimists and change agents — not just a science fair prize.

Each character is given a chance at failure and redemption, which is what makes “Sierra Burgess” feel like such a well-rounded world. The smart script and butterfly-inducing romance captures those sweet moments of falling in love — whether it’s with your crush, or even better, with a friend.

A poky thriller that — eventually — delivers some decent scares.

Despite its clammy atmosphere and two credible and appealing leads, the movie is mechanical in its rhythms and unimaginative in its terrors.

Although it’s all bathed in a warmly nostalgic glow courtesy of cinematographer Darin Moran, and the cast, including Peter Stormare as an oddball shaman called the Rock God, is uniformly engaging, too often the familiar proceedings get bogged down by extensive slo-mo surfing sequences and pointless “Wonder Years”-style narration.

God Bless the Broken Road is a strange Frankenstein's monster of a film, trying to combine too many ill-fitting story elements while straining to incorporate the title of a popular country song.

While Alright Now threatens to spin off its foundations with all of its crazy, loose energy, the central relationship keeps the story on track.

Mostly, Lenz is committed to showing as much of Kusama’s considerable output as possible, often lovingly panned over with an admiring camera. Think an exhibition program at 24 frames a second. But Kusama – Infinity is also a genuinely felt portrait of the artist as a dedicated survivor, ever in service to her vision of the world and fighting for her place in it.

There’s an outstanding short film lurking within Diane, a sketchy, enigmatic thriller that writer-director Michael Mongillo (reworking a Matt Giannini screenplay) can’t quite fill out into a feature. Strong performances and some memorably dramatic moments suggest what might have been, had the movie been more focused.

The ensuing abundant gore is simultaneously gleeful and nonsensical as the filmmakers rope in so many monsters — from seductive vampires to routine zombies to killer clowns — the entire movie becomes literal overkill.

The story gradually finds its way to a predictable place, but the company’s interesting along the way, and the scenery can’t be beat.

Though sleekly photogenic in its depiction of cosmopolitan Europeans in permanent romantic neurosis, The Laws of Thermodynamics is better in theory than fact.

A slow-building shiver of a movie, The Little Stranger tells a familiar but pleasurably engrossing story.

Let the Corpses Tan — or, to use its even better French title, “Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres” — is a feverish, obsessive act of cinematic rehabilitation, a shoot-’em-up conceived in tribute to a peculiar strain of blood-spattered B-movies from the 1960s and ’70s.

My Favorite Year” meets “Nebraska” in An Actor Prepares, a comedic road movie that doesn’t take any fresh detours from its well-traveled route despite the presence of a very game Jeremy Irons.

Jack Bryan’s thorough, chilling rabbit-hole inquiry into our president’s connections to Russia — Active Measures — is as good a place as any to fuel one’s fear/outrage.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder may have worked together in the past (most notably in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), but Destination Wedding, a painfully indulgent anti-romantic comedy about a pair of miserable misanthropes who bond over their shared contempt of the universe, forces their screen chemistry well beyond any reasonable limits of tolerance.

This film — which follows the process as a litter of puppies make their way through training to become guide dogs for the blind — shows us the best in humanity, as well as the best in dogs.

An idiosyncratic, metaphysical meditation on tennis, cinema, human behavior, maybe even life itself, "Perfection" at times risks being too pleased with itself for its own good, but its one-of-a-kind credentials are never in doubt.

Though practically everyone involved invokes a winning-is-everything sentiment, it’s clearly not entirely true. O’Callaghan and the Sheehys obviously care deeply for the animals they train and the film’s ending will leave a lump in the throat of even the most cynical viewer.

All in all, just another boring genre exercise.

Thrill-seekers should be warned that this is more a surreal, nightmarish and occasionally sexually explicit trip into an adolescent’s psyche than a spook show. Yakin uses genre packaging for an intense, personal film, which many viewers may find discomfiting — if only because it’s so hard to classify.

Screenwriter Robert Rhine and co-directors Devon Downs and Kenny Gage have made something polished, colorful and energetic but, ultimately, pretty disposable.

The efforts of an international cast including stars Oscar Isaac, Melanie Laurent and Nick Kroll notwithstanding, Operation Finale sounds more involving than it actually plays, ending up earnest and acceptable more than compelling.

It is a fine, if lightweight, little slice of throwback-’80s teen movie tropes with some high-tech flair.

Israeli journalist Amos Elon once wrote that the demands for justice presented by the Israeli-Palestinian impasse exceed the human capacity to administer it. The dramatic, involving The Oslo Diaries details the closest these adversaries have come to proving Elon wrong, a story that is heartening and heartbreaking by turn.

A bit slick, especially in its last half hour, Restoring Tomorrow nevertheless hits its emotional marks in reporting the renaissance of an important community institution, and Wolf’s personal connection to the subject elevates what may have simply been a well-made promotional film.

Last Curtain Call may lament the emptiness of its protagonist’s hedonistic and selfish lifestyle, but the film itself offers few pleasures with its poor pacing and cliched script.

Resolutely somber, and self-aware about its deliberately tight and opaque visual style, it’s presentational more than lived, a series of filmmaking choices instead of something deeply felt and conveyed.

Songwriter is intimate while oddly lacking insight into the artist himself, beyond the heart he pours into his lyrics.

Danny McBride is at his funniest and scariest in Arizona, a darkly comic film noir that works well as both a violent thriller and as a ruthless satire of over-extended American dreamers.

Crime + Punishment is a quiet documentary but a potent one. Though its approach is low key, its passion, drama and concern for exposing wrongdoing is unmistakable.

What the film mostly lacks is its own flavor.

Allen and Anderson are outstanding in roles that require a lot of levels and moods, as the central relationship goes from loving to shaky to … well, something else.

Writer-director Hadi Hajaig was obviously shooting for a mid-1980s indie vibe along the lines of Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” but aside from an overstuffed soundtrack that goes heavy on the B-52’s, there’s nothing particularly engaging or nostalgic going on beneath all the forced irreverence.

At a little over 90 minutes, Support the Girls has the brash trappings, if not the longevity, of a “Cheers”-style sitcom, and its generous humor is always in productive play with a tough, flinty realism.

Writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys is a heady, sexually charged take on “Lord of the Flies” — an exciting sail on the waters of gender fluidity that energetically skewers any notion of the binary.

Although it’s anchored by a deeply felt performance by the wonderful Emily Mortimer, with a marvelous supporting turn by the always-welcome Bill Nighy, the film, scripted and directed by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet (“Elegy,” “Learning to Drive”), is at times a bit too mustily mounted and told to keep us as fully immersed as we might like.

A curious film in multiple ways, Cielo does not always achieve its lofty ambitions of transcendence. However, accompanied by the eerie silence of the desert and the plaintive wail of Philippe Lauzier’s mournful score, McAlpine’s visuals transport the viewer to a state of reflection while reminding us of the sublime beauty of the space above.

A Whale of a Tale is an unfortunately directionless, low-gear rebuttal that hardly ever stirs up emotions as effectively as “The Cove” did.

Dead Envy is interesting for the way it plays off of Di Nardo’s backstory, but this lightweight stalker-thriller doesn’t deliver much else.

What’s missing is a more personal directorial imprint.

Searching is nothing if not ambitious, and its rapidly accelerating second half is jammed with bold twists, red herrings and breathless confrontations. It’s also here that the movie begins to slacken its grip — partly because some of the twists beggar belief, and partly because they strain the limits of the online-all-the-time interface.

The salt in the wound of this painfully out-of-touch film is the footage of real L.A. homeless camps and people, as if the film were saying something trenchant about the issue. What a gross misunderstanding of this glib story about a rich man who steals stories and inspiration from struggling people.

The film is alternately intriguing and frustrating. The visuals are often strikingly handsome and oddly funny. But the movements are stiff, the characters chatter endlessly, and the unnecessary songs bring the plot to a grinding halt.

With its probing camera and spare piano score, the film effectively creates a clinically sterile environment that’s as spiritually devoid as the soul of its protagonist, and while the inevitable twist ending doesn’t land with the unsettling thud it might have, getting there is quite the page-turner.

Filmed in Nashville several years ago, it isn’t really surprising that this poorly paced production has spent so long on the sidelines.

Although it’s a serviceable enough story, the script by Blake Harris, who co-directed with Chris Bouchard, is often too earnest and forced to prove sufficiently fun or wondrous.

There are ultimately kernels of truth buried amid the film’s random yakking, mini-crises and bits of forced bad behavior, but they prove too little, too late.

Actor-turned-director Peter Facinelli makes his behind-the-camera debut, and beyond the film’s many script issues, it’s not entirely without its charms. Peter and Daisy might not make sense, but Gibson and Hinson almost sell it with strong chemistry.

Based on Lois Duncan’s gothic young adult novel, Down a Dark Hall is entry-level horror for teens. The scares might not satisfy those old enough to vote, but it should provide mild chills for its target audience.

Between the punchy dialogue, the skilled cast (some comic actors, some genre stalwarts) and the impressive animation, “The Littlest Reich” is good, sick fun. It’s got puppets, it’s got gore. Who could ask for anything more?

This is a different kind of monster movie, no doubt. It’s beautiful and magical, and as aware of the real world as it is of classic Hollywood. Good Manners is a haunting tale of love — and the burdens that come with it.

Madeline’s Madeline is the product of a lengthy, improvisation-heavy collaboration between Decker and her star, an astonishing teenage discovery named Helena Howard. It is also a skillful and imaginative blurring of fact and fiction, albeit one that insistently calls the act of such blurring into question.

Minding the Gap is an essay that never feels like an essay, an intelligent and compassionate grappling with some of the most painful issues presently haunting the body politic: toxic masculinity and domestic violence, economic depression and a deep, existential despair. But Liu doesn’t contrive a simplistic thesis on Middle American misery to suit himself and his friends.

Moselle’s movie is an empowering portrait of young women on wheels, but it proves no less surefooted when the wheels come off.

It’s a silly, fairly rote animated film, but underneath the hijinks and mishaps is a rather devastatingly sad story. It’s this poignancy that makes Luis & the Aliens a step above the rest.

Zagar, judiciously adapting the book with Daniel Kitrosser, submerges the audience into their world from the outset, presenting a fluid stream of bittersweet and vivid episodes from the family’s life that gradually build into something profound.

Centineo is the big beating heart at the center of the somewhat reserved To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. He’s a lot like his character, bringing out the best in this love story.

A charming film of an engaging, adult nature about two very different people trying to press reset in their lives, it is comic, heartfelt and smart as they come — a rare combination these days.

When Close and her costars command the screen, we can forgive problems and simply enjoy the proceedings.

Surprising and deeply satisfying.

Although this quietly daring, decidedly nonjudgmental film doesn’t ask or answer a lot of questions, it paints a cumulatively vivid portrait of young love and early motherhood.

There are more arguments than action sequences in What Still Remains, and though it gets more tense in its second half, the movie overall is a bit too sedate. Still, a great cast (including vets Mimi Rogers, Dohn Norwood and Jeff Kober) brings Mendoza’s ideas to life.

Action star and martial artist White is full of his usual charm and wit, but he and his sparks of humor feel out of place in this otherwise dour film.

40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie transcends the trippy nostalgia to deliver a moving message about the healing power of reconciliation.

In the cynical worldview of BuyBust, there’s no escaping this crushing cycle of killing and corruption. That real-life message makes this wild action film more powerful, but the violence is a hard pill to swallow.

Gutierrez is ultimately too enamored of his quasi-feminist, visually convulsive upending of damsel myths to let his actors enjoy themselves the way De Palma or Dario Argento would.

A story of implacable grief, unlikely companionship and stunning landscapes, Gavagai is as beautifully singular a movie as I’ve seen all year.

Hope Springs Eternal is fine as a leading role for Frampton, who has had small supporting roles in bigger projects such as “Bridesmaids,” but her star power far exceeds the boundaries of this limited project.

Director and co-writer Jason DeVan assembled a good cast, and has solidly constructed scare sequences strewn throughout Along Came the Devil. But even at its best, the movie feels stitched together from incomplete, ill-fitting pieces.

A migrant worker’s journal opens up a world for a disaffected teenager, and us, in Araby, a beautifully turned Brazilian movie that carries on as if a social-cause documentary and a folk song confessional had entered into a poignant embrace.

Schwentke’s grim history lesson carries an undeniable propulsiveness. But it’s ultimately too ugly a story to be truly resonant.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an old-school, old-fashioned entertainment, a romantic drama bursting with scenic vistas and earnest charm that contains just enough mystery to keep us involved.

In its own modest way, it’s one of the year’s bravest films.

Beautifully performed and penetratingly photographed, Jalilvand’s assured second feature bears the probing precision of one of those meticulous autopsies.

The Island runs hot and cold, with clunky comic set-pieces alternating with moments of genuine wonder and surprise. But even at its most misbegotten, the movie’s always thoughtful, examining what we value — and why.

It’s a haunting and masterful effort, but be warned: This is tough stuff.

There are no spies who “dump” or “shag” anyone here, much less jump out of airplanes or buildings, but The Spy Gone North, based on the exploits of a true-life double agent code-named Black Venus, remains a taut, slowly engrossing, effectively old-fashioned Cold War thriller.

In a crisp, authoritative, sometimes startlingly vulnerable performance that never lapses into dragon-lady stereotype, Yeoh brilliantly articulates the unique relationship between Asian parents and their children, the intricate chain of love, guilt, devotion and sacrifice that binds them for eternity.

The Meg, stolidly directed by Jon Turteltaub (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “National Treasure”), winds up proving a fairly obvious theory about its chosen sub-genre: the more massive the shark (and the budget), the lighter the scares and the lower the stakes.

As any dog lover will tell you, our four-legged friends make everything better. That’s especially true when it comes to the genial if overly familiar ensemble comedy “Dog Days,” whose four-legged stars bring out the best in the movie’s crisscross of humans — and in the film itself.

Working with longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown, the director casually but fearlessly stirs things up, balancing brutal satiric comedy, unapologetic social commentary, convincing jeopardy, even appealing romance.

As much a commercial for Royal Caribbean cruises as it is a dramedy about a bumpy daughter-dad reunion, Like Father swamps its workable emotional core and adept lead turns with some slapdash plotting and a raft of floating festivities.

Christopher Robin finds ways to distinguish itself within its generic confines.

Though made by different directors, there’s a visual language of urban detail, intimate gesture and expressively animated lighting that connects all three — they’re like sweet, sad pop songs from a supergroup with many lead performers.

Dyrholm, an actress of formidable presence who expertly handles her own singing as well as the acting, gives a strong, truthful, unflinching performance that powers the film the way Christa's energy powered the bands she was in those late days.

The emotional momentum...is carried along easily by Mozhdah, making a remarkable screen debut: In an instant, she can melt from trembling vulnerability to hair-pulling defiance, and in nearly every scene, we see her not just emoting but also thinking, continually renegotiating her position in a world that perceives her as tainted goods.

Well-shot and well-intentioned, this drama will likely please its core faith-based audience who won’t roll their eyes at the protagonist’s name or the earnest, hackneyed dialogue. However, most others will find the movie’s script from Gianna Montelaro bland and lacking both nuance and specificity.

Like its determined heroine, Night Comes On burns with a smoldering fire, a heat that is no less intense, no less effective, for remaining largely beneath the surface.

Kore-eda is too polished a filmmaker for The Third Murder not to be of interest, but its focus is finally too fuzzy to compel the way the best of the director's work does.

To say it’s all over the place, a frenzied collection of hits and misses, is to both capture its shortcomings and deliver a fairly cogent plot summary. But as directed by Susanna Fogel (“Life Partners”) from a script she wrote with David Iserson, the movie also has a playfully vicious screwball energy that consistently locates the violence in every joke, the humor in every kill.

Anchored by a pair of effervescent and authentically lived-in performances from Mitchell and Morrone, Never Goin’ Back is a sweaty, silly summer adventure, and a sincere shout-out to the power of best friendship.

For those already jaded by the onslaught of YA fantasy universes, The Darkest Minds is on the forgettably “safe” end of the genre’s coded spectrum.