More discursive than comprehensive, the film does seem to capture Thomas’ fierce, swashbuckling spirit.

[Anderson’s] movies have always proposed — sometimes ingeniously, sometimes exhaustingly, always sincerely — that we might benefit from looking at the world from a fresh vantage. And so it is with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which a revolutionary new way of seeing holds the key to an altogether deeper transformation.

The Creator itself eventually tries one’s patience with its incessant demands that you feel for characters and relationships that it hasn’t taken the care to develop.

As tributes go, the documentary is always lively. Archival clips zip by and nobody ever gets more than a sentence or two before the film cuts away, which means it never burrows in as often as you might want it to, considering the colorful, thick life on display.

That Neither Confirm Nor Deny doesn’t ignore the wider controversies of the CIA is welcome . . . But at heart, this is a heist saga designed to enthrall in its ingenuity and ambition, one of the more presentable cases of cowboy spycraft from an us-versus-them time.

It’s almost unbelievable that Carney pulls off films like this, which could easily tip over into maudlin. Instead, the winning Flora and Son is an utterly irresistible emotional ear-worm.

Proving her own star quality, a committed Suri guides Sam through a journey of identity and final-girl heroics that brings satisfying healing to her strained relationship with her mother.

Marnier could have taken another pass at the film’s secondary characters (the upcoming thriller “Saltburn” has the same problem with its dysfunctional clan), and whatever notions he’s trying to put across about the patriarchy don’t quite land. But he has a star in the sparkling Calamy.

It rewards the attention of a committed voyeur, which all proper cineastes and many of our best provocateurs are anyway. The pinched of mind and the humorless need not bother. Invariably more welcome (one imagines Oren thinking) are those who enjoy their senses and perspectives pried open while their heads get a thorough scratching.

While its ramshackle editing could be unintentionally humorous, and the obvious dialogue almost veers toward the inadvertently enjoyable, it’s the movie’s insistence on punching down that renders it more of a nightmare than a fever dream.

Although Pierre’s intentions remain debatable, the story becomes a subtle treatise on solitude, ecology and, it would seem, following your bliss.

The easy chemistry of Peña as the humble and brilliant aspirant and Salazar as the supportive, put-upon wife with dreams of her own makes their scenes together highlights. Salazar brings life and charm to a role that, in another biopic, could have been pretty thankless.

Cassandro’s maximalist image invites a big, outlandish treatment, but Williams keeps the tone quiet and grounded, centering García Bernal’s moving performance and keeping the focus on Saúl, the real person behind the celebrity.

In its thumbnail sketches simmering with risk, humor, and melancholy, illuminating a world of worsening disparities but spikier solidarity, it entertainingly takes stock.

Gorgeously shot on location by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, “A Haunting in Venice” is easily the best of Branagh’s three big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because it is also the most flagrantly unfaithful.

The movie, to its credit, harbors few illusions about Diana’s people skills. And it has, in Bening, an actor with a natural affinity for rough edges and sharp retorts, plus an ability to make emotional sense of a character’s fury.

As ever, Silva’s filmmaking — formally rough on the surface, carefully worked out underneath — depends on the steady upending of expectations. Social media is phony but potentially revealing. Bodies are hot and sexy until they’re gross and inconvenient. Jordan is insufferable, the worst kind of self-entitled Ugly American, but also endearing, perceptive and admirable in his tenacity.

With her feature debut, Alberto keenly understands that any story of self-discovery is as much a constellation as it is a journey, and that’s how her adaptation plays, as a mature accumulation of the tender, the uneasy and the clarifying.

It’s a rom-com both com-less and rom-less.

The movie’s achievement is to remind us that milestones are invariably the result of hard, often thankless work, preceded by conflict and marked by compromise.

Saltburn is shocking only in its puerility. No sophomore effort should feel this sophomoric.

Our Father, the Devil is the type of movie for which a satisfying ending is less about tidy resolution than potent insight, and in that respect, Foumbi delivers something befitting her grueling, clenched character study.

Some movies are meant to be messy, and some messes are strangely alluring.

Cooke and her character, Paige, inject some life into the proceedings, but the central mystery feels forced, the twists implausible. The screenplay strains for topicality, stuffing too many elements at once into this sad story in a bid for relevance that never quite resonates.

As a gorgeously conceptual art-horror object, El Conde frequently mesmerizes; as a proper evisceration of its subject, it can’t help but feel curiously defanged.

Lanthimos may have cobbled together a rambunctious psychosexual odyssey from many Frankensteinian parts — a little “Alice in Wonderland,” a dash of “Metropolis,” a soupçon of Voltaire by way of the Marquis de Sade — but he and his skilled collaborators have marshaled them into a remarkably coherent and purposeful vision.

More than any great movie I can remember, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers captures the eerie, disorienting and utterly sacred experience of encountering a lost loved one in your dreams.

It’s not uncommon that the most intriguing first films are the ones that stumble on their way to purposefulness, and Mutt easily meets that standard, presenting us with a vivid character we unabashedly root for as the day’s challenges try to pierce a newly armored soul.

Grief is universal, and yet no two stories about it are alike, a distinction that keeps Koji Fukada’s tender drama “Love Life” unpredictable as it mixes the mundane with the inexplicable, and empathy with alienation, to nuanced, if never fully stirring effect.

While Retribution is far from Neeson’s best, it still mostly works, so long as you tune out the dialogue and focus on the hero’s twitchy face, waiting to see which will blow to smithereens first: his car or his patience.

Open your heart and turn off your logic meter and you‘re going to enjoy “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.”

If it’s imperfect, or certain narrative turns are rocky, you forgive it because Bottoms is just so audacious, and most important, the jokes are nonstop. Perfectionism is a trap, anyway.

“Golda” feeds that time-honored tradition of watching a virtuoso screen performer vanish behind a famous name and a wall of cinematic artifice.

What sets this film apart from other docu-memoirs is the way Sahakyan articulates how being the spokesperson for an atrocity can foster dissociation.

The film’s chaotic structure and panting sensibility leaves Veil feeling more like the star of a fast-moving timeline than someone we get to know.

What rings truest and richest about The Eternal Memory, as exquisitely humane a film as you’re likely to see all year, is what abiding love and stewardship look like in the moment: to care so deeply for someone as to tend to their memories, and to be loved so deeply that it’s the last beautiful thought one may ever need.

Although Finley, who previously directed the Emmy-winning Hugh Jackman drama “Bad Education,” doesn’t quite manage to sustain the film’s irreverent energy, especially during its more melancholic second half, he handily succeeds in delivering a piece of entertainment that is at once wildly out of this world and all-too-relevantly down to earth.

The swearing and gross-out humor loses its bite after a while. We’re left with an at times heartfelt and enjoyably observed story that may hold interest with more patient viewers but, due to some episodic scene work and slack pacing, leave others restless.

The Biz Markie story is not framed as a tragedy here. It’s a celebration of a lovable weirdo who made people happy.

The slam-bang stuff in this picture is too tediously routine. The movie is much better when it gets philosophical, pondering a world where everybody’s surveiling everybody else but nobody can agree on how to use that information to keep us all safe.

Though the film is largely driven by Cera’s knowing, unsparing performance, both Gross and Lillis are also given plenty of room to develop nuance.

The documentary has an easy, anecdotal charm and acts as a welcome corrective to Baz Luhrmann’s scrupulously mimetic, factually whimsical biopic. Fans, it goes without saying, will want to see it.

López’s film smuggles queer ideas and images into spaces traditionally populated by straight people and shaped by straight tastes. Which is, to be clear, no more the “right” way of updating the genre for the 21st century than any other. It’s just nice, for a change, to come in through the front door.

It seeks to demystify the bodies we see, normalize the act of seeking medical intervention and remind us of the great swath of humanity — of different ages, colors, genders, shapes and sizes — passing every day through this ward and others like it.

Conquering time travel may be a big deal, but Greer’s affecting portrait of a woman processing a second chance keeps the miracles of Aporia grounded and not flashy — a portal to human epiphanies, not digitally rendered spectacle.

In Barthes’ curiously distanced, muted handling, we only sense points being made, not lives being lived.

This absorbing, thoughtful film doesn’t take sides; that’s not James’ way.

Darkness is a harrowing and affecting story about young women trying to hold onto hope across the grim, unchanging days.

As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments.

A well-cast, modestly affecting drama of the kind studios regularly programmed in the before-IP times, it boasts a generous heart gently dusted with life’s complications as it beats a familiar rhythm of easygoing redemption.

A constantly surprising, undeniably entertaining portrait that proves anything but monochromatic.

Klondike is certainly not an easy watch, but it is a profound one — a film that feels both prescient and retrospective about Ukraine, locked in what seems a never-ending existential conflict with its neighbor.

As with all great moral dilemmas, Sorogoyen makes it impossible to entirely side with either party without considering that each of them has been victimized by larger social ills.

Even with all the metaphysical mayhem, the movie remains rooted in the lives and attitudes of its characters, and in the magnetic performances of Martini and Appleton.

Nimbly directed by Jeff Rowe (“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) from a funny, perceptive script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, this rambunctious action-comedy gives nostalgia-stoking, action-figure-selling, comic-book-derived franchise relaunches a good name.

Tomas is an inimitably singular creature. Loathsome and magnetic, infuriating and unforgettable, he is, by several bed lengths, the most dynamic protagonist Sachs has given us, a vessel of pure, untrammeled id.

This movie’s heart is in the right place, and its company is pleasant enough. But by its final half-hour, it starts to feel too much like a rote recitation from a rom-com to-do list.

If After the Bite ultimately has more questions than answers, it’s only because the film is reflecting the people it’s about, who see existential dangers everywhere and no easy way back to safety.

Like the movies covered within, Sharksploitation is undeniably entertaining — especially at its most preposterous.

The insights into influencer culture and the thirst for fame in Susie Searches aren’t exactly fresh. But as a Hitchcockian thriller with a slippery hero, this film can be ruthlessly effective.

The Beanie Bubble eventually runs out of steam. The snappy pace and colorful style — so attractive at first — later become alienating, keeping nearly all the characters locked into one dimension.

Its narrative flaws (and there are serious ones) are more or less overcome by its compelling protagonist and the loving marital relationship at its center.

Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.

Even when Talk to Me flirts with incoherence, Wilde pulls it back from the brink. More than just a great scream queen, she makes vivid sense of Mia’s ravaged emotions, revealing her to be a captive less to the spirit realm than to her own inconsolable grief. She’s the movie’s revelation, hands down.

While there are a few chuckles to be had here, mostly courtesy of Wilson’s gee-willikers delivery, the rest of the cast fares worse, including Haddish, whose bumbling clairvoyant is stuck cracking moldy jokes about PayPal and CVS.

With remarkable stealth and concentration, Diop rewires the generic circuitry of the courtroom drama, avoiding its natural inclination toward sensationalism and grandstanding. She also preserves, through a seamless meld of fiction and nonfiction, the contours and complexities of a terrible true story.

The realities of the situation are grim enough that a lesser work might have paled into insignificance, but No Bears — the best and bravest new feature I saw last year, a work of extraordinary emotional power, conceptual ingenuity and critical force — somehow manages the opposite.

That title, Cobweb, suggests only one cobweb, but why be stingy? This movie’s screenplay is strewn with them: dozens of dusty tendrils linking it back to older, better horror films, sometimes on a shot-by-shot basis.

As an exhibition of visual style and acting prowess, “Mother, May I?” is impressive.

The bluntness keeps the film from approaching greatness, although history buffs and genre fans might appreciate a World War II story told from a unique, non-Western perspective.

For the most part, Fear the Night feels like it could have been made by almost anybody. It’s crafty enough, but it’s lacking LaBute’s usual acid wit and fearless provocations.

Despite the morbid preoccupation with diving’s dangers, The Deepest Breath is an intense and often beautiful movie, likely to appeal to fans of extreme sports documentaries like “Free Solo” and “Riding Giants.”

Even if the narrative feels a little forced, the movie still works.

The story takes a while to get going, then rambles a lot once the premise has been established. And the dialogue zooms along so fast that it can be hard to follow. But young filmmakers are supposed to take chances like this.

A lyrical, edifying and blistering plea for Indigenous justice.

Acrid and harrowing, it’ll slap you awake.

Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of [Nolan's] storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold. That might be a rare failing of this extraordinarily gripping and resonant movie, or it could be a minor mercy.

Whatever you think of “Barbie,” the mere existence of this smart, funny, conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy speaks to the irreverent wit and meta-critical sensibility of its director.

The effects look cheap, the Louisiana accents are broad and the characters are one-dimensional, but veteran B-picture stars Nicky Whelan (as a tough sheriff), Casper Van Dien (as a notorious criminal) and Louis Mandylor (as the raiders’ leader) all throw themselves into the film’s cheesy spirit.

A rushed, muddled ending — and a general lack of any cogent point — keeps “The Attachment Diaries” from being an Almodóvar-level success. But for fans of those seamy places where art and smut intersect, this movie is a nasty little treat.

It’s fascinating to hear the details of how prolific Blanchard was, before the law caught up with him. If he saw a vulnerability in a store, a museum or a bank, he felt compelled to exploit it. He’s half crook, half Type-A task manager.

This madcap mockumentary works beautifully because Gordon, Lieberman, Platt and Galvin take care to imbue this setting with a real sense of culture and place, populated with wonderfully eccentric characters.

The “Barcelona” edition is essentially a repeat of the first film, flaws and all.

Hazanavicius has made a movie that tests our ideas of creative genius.

A film that boasts about as much edge as a digestive biscuit (translation: oatmeal cookie) too long dunked in milky tea.

The bitter truths in Black Ice paint a sobering picture of a sport with a lot to reckon with, especially in a country that prides itself on embracing its diversity of culture.

If the filmmaking feels poetic and subdued, it’s the opposite of coy. Leaf is confident enough to let her images, as much as her written dialogue, do much of the narrative lifting.

Hawco and Gaitán are gifted enough actors to give a dialogue-heavy movie some layers and dynamism; and Beltrán and Pitts throw some intense challenges at their heroes, including bad weather, a poisonous snake and a terrifying corpse.

Ultimately, Pollard’s film is equal parts tribute and lament, as complicated as this country.

Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.

In the thoroughly capable hands of Grant, Delpy and McCormack, whose interplay has been playfully choreographed to the 1-2-3 tempo of a waltz-infused score by composer Isobel Waller-Bridge (Phoebe’s sister), the film proves as pleasingly undemanding as a typical summer read: neither a legit page-turner, nor easy to put down.

Having two main characters suffering from hauntings separately works against this movie’s narrative momentum, but it does allow Wilson and Teems to bounce from scare to scare, without much setup — or respite.

As much as Amanda may seem like an irredeemable antihero, you come to appreciate her unspoken dream of finding fulfillment in the company of at least one other person on her crooked wavelength.

It’s as though we’re supposed to already know these people — as if The Crusades were a sequel to a movie we haven’t seen. There is some visual panache here, and scenes that show promise. But too much is missing.

Peter Nicks’ documentary Anthem is a broad-strokes film about a nuanced topic: the promises and failures of the American experiment.

No situation or character really gets a chance to breathe or grow here. Even the best casts can flail when the vibe is more antic than comic.

Joy Ride, an amusingly rude and high-spirited romp from the debuting director Adele Lim (a co-writer on “Crazy Rich Asians”), has a way of turning predictable story beats into spiky, revealing cultural distinctions

All the elements are there — writing, performance, themes — but there’s not enough plot to sustain a nearly two-hour feature, and as the situation escalates, it becomes clear that they don’t quite know where or how to end things, and it lands with a thud.