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.

A film like Sing Sing is a rare, precious achievement — a cinematic work of unique empathy and hand-turned humanity, hewed from the heart, with rigorous attention paid to the creative process.

The inevitable head-butting, sexually tense banter between the super-serious (and frankly dull) Cole and the vivacious, near-magically-capable Kelly never quite takes off, nor, surprisingly, does the chemistry between the two leads.

As Lane wends her way to a conclusion of her own, it’d be a mistake to view “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” with its serious curiosity balanced by a quirky theremin score and humorous asides, as Lane turning personal experience into public advocacy. She’s cagier than that.

The result, anchored by enchanting performances and Kormákur’s reliably visceral storytelling, is an appealing pivot for a filmmaker who tends to gravitate toward adrenalized tales of survival.

From start to finish, it’s an original, wholly unpredictable experience. It’s also, by turns, gripping, provocative, head-scratching and disturbing, and is likely to divide viewers with its dreamlike ambitions and metaphorical musings.

Goth holds MaXXXine together through the sheer force of her charisma, despite the bumpy plot, an underwritten character and the plodding, perfunctory kills that arrive like clockwork.

Despite a few chuckles, some capable voice work and plenty of splashy color, it proves a largely empty and exhausting ride.

While it’s easy to view “Axel F” as a calculated cash grab, it’s clear that Murphy possesses an affection for the title character. From the get-go, Murphy’s portrayal hinged on Axel’s ability to warmly connect with everyone he meets.

Johnson’s well-rehearsed poise and Penn’s coasting boldness make them seem like the stars of a commercial for a scent called Common Ground rather than flesh-and-blood people. At times, they hardly seem to be sharing the same car interior, leaving Daddio feeling like a safe space, when what it needs is danger.

If anything, Last Summer is more commercial-looking and less shocking than much of Breillat’s previous work, but her eye and her insights are sharp as ever.

This is a film that seems to know a lot about future psychology. May we never know such mournfulness outside of an ambitious summer blockbuster.

What lingers is a collective misery and the invisibly masterful choreography of chaos, rage and death.

What unfolds on screen over the course of three hours and one minute in Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 can only be described as a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience. That Costner has promised three more installments feels like a threat.

Janet Planet is a brilliant debut for Baker, who doesn’t so much translate her artistry to the screen as discover a whole new frontier for her singular sensibility.

Schamus’ sensitive and funny debut brings its anxieties and pleasures to full bloom so they can be properly considered and found suitably fleeting.

Tremblay’s template for on-the-run suspense is effective, primarily by avoiding the exploitative in favor of scenes that drive home the feeling of lives susceptible to being uprooted.

Kinds of Kindness runs nearly three hours in length and reveals nothing more than our eagerness to give him the benefit of the doubt. We’re here for the sick thrills. Instead, what we’re served feels more like dirty limericks delivered at an excruciating pace by a bore with bad breath.

While the setting may be humble, Margolin captures the unlikely beauty of the Valley, and injects thrilling suspense into this yarn, one that transforms quotidian dramas — like making an unprotected left turn, or closing pop-up ads on a webpage — into nail-biting action sequences.

The film is an evocation of character, place and time, the tempo alternating between moody and lively, like our central odd couple, laconic Benny and chatterbox Kathy.

At a certain point, it feels as if scenes are missing, and what’s left reads as unconvincing.

With Tuesday, Pusić shows great promise as a visual storyteller and director of performers. Yet it is in her work as a screenwriter where the film falters. Without the power and nuance that Louis-Dreyfus brings to the role, the drama would not have nearly as much spine or impact as it does.

This is a beautifully life-affirming fable about the power of art to heal, but really, it’s the people making the art that do the work. Ghostlight is a stunning and incredibly moving tribute to that process.

The film’s representation of how emotions and memories create a belief system and sense of self are indeed useful for talking to kids about how their inner lives and brains work, and the imagery is smart, but it has the feeling of an educational children’s book.

It’s all music, Wilcha’s sweetly philosophical movie seems to be saying — and being present enough to listen.

Regrettably, the movie itself feels trapped by its airless gallery of carefully crafted images, familiar to the high-toned end of the horror genre: elegantly mood-thick surroundings, deliberately half-seen creatures, actors positioned as if in a still life.

In her film debut, [Pankiw] delivers a full and fulfilling narrative arc that is anchored by a surprisingly complex performance from Sennott. Rooted in a specific sense of place, character and emotional truth. The movie is a rare indie gem worth discovering.

Hit Man makes for an undeniable good time. Sometimes all you really need is a couple of impossibly attractive people enjoying each other’s company, captured by a filmmaker who knows when to stay out of their way. And if that’s not a movie, well, then, I don’t know what is.

Hong invites us to look beyond story parallels into something simultaneously deeper and more quotidian.

The supremely watchable pairing of these magnetic actors is what helps lift this lyrically crafted frontier love story above the usual efforts to restore the genre’s appeal.

If the details of “Kidnapped” aren’t familiar, do yourself the favor of withholding an online search until the full thunder and rigor of Bellocchio’s dramatic instincts can work you over — equivalent to a lavish ’60s period costume drama burnished into an engine of galvanizing narrative intention.

It’s a thin tapestry of lore with some interesting creative embellishments, but without any real interest in character, it feels flimsy and disposable. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better.

These filmmakers clearly have a knack for capturing nautical adventure and the delusional yet undeniably human desire to conquer the seas.

While there are pops of piquancy in Landon’s script, her direction and the performances (with the exception of Woodard) fail to inspire much more than a shrug. “Summer Camp” is only mildly interesting as another entry in the Keaton-verse.

Each character choice in “Ezra” is plausible because it comes from a place of emotional honesty, both in the script and the performances.

Though the film is formulaic and somewhat annoyingly energetic, it’s cute and irreverent enough, and manages to bridge the generation gap, offering up a kid-friendly flick that can keep adults somewhat entertained for the duration, proving that even after all these years, Garfield’s still got it.

Running less than two hours at a time when four-hour rock docs are not unusual, this is a swift, compact telling, with surprisingly little in the way of music and whole swaths of recording history skated over. But it looks fantastic, with a bounty of archival photographs and home movies, many of which are new to me, even as a veteran of these things.

The story embedded within it is an important one. A historic shift did occur. The account is well-told and worth knowing, even without conspiratorial murmurs.

This wild, vicarious ride through youthful adventure is absolutely worth taking, for your own nostalgia and for the reminder that the kids are indeed alright.

Once you let go of the understandable dream of Coppola returning with another masterpiece, there is much to enjoy in “Megalopolis,” especially its cast members, leaning into their moments with an abandon that was probably a job requirement.

With a visual style that is straightforward and serviceable at best and a frustratingly limited emotional range, Back to Black never captures the beauty of Winehouse’s talent, the heartbreak of her performances or the horror of her tragedy.

Glazer and Buteau make their characters deeply believable in their differences as well as their connection, the jokes are plentiful, beautifully, er, delivered and at times painful in their truth-telling.

For the first time in Miller’s now-five-film franchise, he seems to be falling shy of the immediacy he’s sustained, often deliriously, for an entire feature.

There is a journeyman’s proficiency to “Chapter 1” but little in the way of real spark.

What comes through are highs and valleys seen from the inside, a clarifying memoir from an unsentimental woman who endured being called every shaming name, with powerful grace notes of understanding from a son whose eyes betray a tough childhood.

Power could just as easily have benefited from the docuseries treatment, although at under 90 minutes, it lands plenty of hard truths and harder questions.

There is beauty among the terror and an element of anxious unpredictability thrashing our characters like the waves that crash against the cliffs. But the deft spectacle would be nothing without the characters and performances.

Pine’s Poolman is sort of the physical, emotional and spiritual embodiment of Los Angeles itself: earnest, silly and a little (or a lot) ridiculous, but insistently charming if you decide to surrender to the experience.

It’s a soulful, pointed and unconventional grappling with the mysteries of the deeply Catholic, norm-shattering Georgia native’s life and work.

After so fruitful a collaboration on “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi and Ishibashi may have topped themselves with something even more compelling.

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

You expect that the film will boast exceptional stuntwork — and it does. At its best, though, it’s a romantic comedy that coasts on the charisma of its two appealing leads, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

This tale of parents and poultry more than earns the exclamation point in its title. It sweeps you into a whirlwind of ingenuity, bite after animated bite.

Are we looking for the human in the Sasquatch? Or for the Sasquatch in us? The movie works either way, but in its refusal to hew to a familiar plot trajectory, it holds up a mirror to our own narcissism.

Equally brazen and ambitious, Drew’s film is committed to embracing the zany undertones that have always bubbled under the surface of a comic book tale in which secret identities, arch performances and fabulous outfits (all worn in the dead of night, no less) have always felt like lifelines for queer and trans kids worldwide.

Apart from mistaking energy for exhilaration, the movie is a mostly flavorless puree of dark humor, comic-book sentimentality and ultra-bloody combat. But it’s the relentless and banal video-game aesthetic that may get you involuntarily reaching for a controller in hopes of finding a pause button.

It’s a humble story, one with the capacity to inspire in its simple message of perseverance. But the film itself, as an artistic product, feels limited in its observational scope, because the filmmaker doesn’t have any distance from the material.

It lacks the control of Guadagnino’s earlier work — or rather, I should say, it takes subtlety and restraint and thwacks them over the fence and into the bushes.

There’s a glee in the Nazi killing and an exceptionally dry humor that is English through and through, but Ritchie strikes a tone that rides the line between self-serious and self-consciously humorous.

Set in the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992, when the beleaguered complex’s decline was palpable, it sounds like a recipe for doleful poverty-gazing. But in Windy City native Baig’s solid hands, it’s a resolutely poetic, at times even golden-hued portrait of lives unafraid to hope amid growing despair.

Abigail is at times a bit too flippant, over-the-top and even protracted in its ridiculous Grand Guignol of exploding “meat sacks,” but it’s very much in line with the unique Radio Silence sensibility, en vogue with audiences right now.

As things play out, however, Loach and Laverty are realistic enough in their tale of invigorating compassion to grasp that, as difficult as it is to find and nurture hope, just as essential is recognizing the danger lurking in festering grievance.

The idiosyncratic earnestness of an experienced horrormeister playing with the classics still makes for a substantial midnight snack.

The takeaway isn’t exhilaration; the unease is what makes Garland’s film valuable. You watch it with your jaw hanging open.

If Coup de Chance is an exit for Allen, it’s at least a gracefully made one. To see where it’s heading doesn’t devalue its breezy appeal as a shaggy-dog tale about regret, power and luck.

Let’s credit debuting feature director Arkasha Stevenson (a former photographer for this paper) with the stylishness to pull off a potent sense of atmosphere and the kind of lovely period detail that deep studio pockets can fund but rarely have cause to summon.

Within "Housekeeping’s” restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the playacting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes.

Thanks to its actors, there’s a credibly heavy sense of the personal prisons within literal ones that only a wretched war can foster.

This caper-slash-personal essay is an admirable endeavor that honors, above all, a filmmaker’s fixation on a medium that makes him whole.

The film’s Lynchian surrealism and time-jumping adventurousness, although occasionally hobbled by narrative digressions, are lifted up by the two leads.

Within that funhouse mirror of an erotic-thriller premise, Femme proves to be a gorgeously mounted meditation on queer and queered performance.

Condon is utterly captivating as a brutal villain, and no one plays a valiantly chagrined hero like Neeson, sorrowful and suffering. In the “Neeson skills” canon, In the Land of Saints and Sinners proves to be a gem, the performances elevating a enjoyably pulpy thriller.

Zhang uses quiet to suggest an active calmness, so when a particular sound punctures the air — gurgling water, the music on a videotape, a child’s questions — it feels like the notes of life, the stuff that’s supposed to spark us.

The blessing is that Buckley, Colman, Spall and Vasan are expert enough that dimensional character work still peeks through the vibe of cookie-cutter idiosyncrasy.

As with Rohrwacher’s previous movies, there is an exquisite blurring between the tangible and the ethereal, the urban and the pastoral, life and death, past and present — all of it overlapping with the same ease as the hues of a twilight sky.

Jones, never winking at the rampant absurdity, gives the proceedings a little grounding. But Besson wants off the leash and his instincts lead him astray.