Slender but flecked with magical touches, Romería is so gentle it never quite qualifies as haunting. Nonetheless, Simón stirs up the ineffable sadness that comes with wanting answers to the mysteries of your family — and then, like it or not, receiving them.

It’s not just our recognition of the real-life parallels that make Jolie so touching in Couture — it’s that ineffable star power she’s possessed for so long. In a story about a potential tragedy, what’s saddest is that Winocour’s film cannot match its lead’s effortless command.

I’m no sadist. They’ve suffered plenty for our amusement. Still, it’s a shame that for the first time in two and a half decades of cringe comedy, the guffaws feel forced.

When we’re just focused on Early, hoping to outrun Maddie’s demons in manic aerobics sessions of deliriously complex choreography, the movie feels like a spell. All of the things that make him an unlikely ingénue — the flop sweat, the slight chunkiness, the desire to pass for a cute foodie — click into place. She couldn’t be more perfect.

It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

Alcock’s wildling Supergirl is the one reason to see the film.

This story of two strangers who take a job on a fishing boat — their lives are irrevocably altered once they return to shore — slowly pulls you inside its disquieting design. By the time you get your bearings, you’re ensnared in its net.

This movie’s nail-biting, sorrowful power comes from what internalized destruction looks like.

Mostly, Girls Like Girls wins us over with a singular type of first-film assuredness: a familiar story presented as the most personal reveal ever. If you can’t remember what it was like to try to tiptoe while swooning, your heart barely able to stay in your chest, you were never a teenager.

The Death of Robin Hood feels like a director thinking only of his ambitions and not whether he’s making a movie anyone wants to bother to see. The lesson is right there in the film: Audiences decide what gets remembered.

Lilypad’s creativity-zapping existence throws off Pixar’s ability to brainstorm a dynamic story.

Despite the character’s rocky path to sexual awakening, Herzi navigates toward a hopeful conclusion that doesn’t peddle phony uplift.

The action scenes in Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious are like nothing else in the multiplex.

I wanted to see more of the old Spielberg, the one who expressed awe in moments of silence rather than relentless motion.

Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. Time and Water is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.

I laughed 10 times, which makes this “Scary Movie” the best of the bunch — a pallid compliment.

Renoir may be a delicate wisp of a film, but it’s flecked with thoughtful questioning about whether childhood’s sorrows leave permanent scars on us as adults.

Obviousness is this film’s handicap — and the main joke.

Sparse yet gripping, “Backrooms” and its minimalist story accommodate the audience’s own free-ranging imagination.

Power Ballad nods toward a dozen interesting themes, none of which it bothers to explore.

Per usual with movies like this, spelling out the terror (the roots are in hobo codes and religious legend) becomes, regrettably, a shock absorber, not a facilitator. But the scares were middling to begin with because Øvredal — a game but overeager trickster — telegraphs his set pieces as if he were equipped with a flare gun and detour cones. Then again, it might be an attempt to distract us from thinking too hard about all the illogic in Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess’ screenplay

“Boosters” isn’t perfect and that doesn’t matter. The audacity of it — the exuberance Riley puts into making and loving movies — is what I want to see more of from every filmmaker, fashionista and human being still grinding at their own creative ambitions.

It’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].

The fluid, idiosyncratic charm of Silent Friend — which never feels like two and a half hours — is in Enyedi’s heartfelt belief that curiosity is simply a garden that grows progress. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this veteran dreamweaver’s key cast are entrancing, inviting specimens themselves, led by an inner glow of compassion in Leung that feels like its own natural energy source.

The problem, though, from its clichéd interview framing (Jeffrey Wright plays an American journalist visiting the retired Baranov at his estate) to the tediously narrated flashback structure, is that the movie never lives and breathes inside its stitched-together moments, preferring to be a relentless, country-hopping talkfest in which characters opine as if fully aware of the consequential era they’re in, fully ready to explain it.

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

Actually witnessing the audience’s emotional connection to her lyrics makes “Hit Me Hard and Soft” feel like an epic coming-of-age movie as much as a concert film. Still, by the 50th mascara-smeared face, I needed fresh air.

As the memory of it washes back over you, Omaha lingers, like a devastating short story — devastating because it’s about a pained father for whom the road ahead only seems to get narrower.

If One Spoon of Chocolate ultimately fails as a grindhouse banger, you still might understand why RZA developed this project for more than a decade. His rage at this inequitable country has only grown more acute as America’s racial divides widen and codify. But like Unique, RZA doesn’t know how to fight his way out of the hell that surrounds him.

What’s left is a visually unappetizing Animal Farm that plays as if someone sloppily traced over a masterpiece. And Serkis (who also voices a rooster) doesn’t so much direct it as twist some grand knob with settings like “Louder,” “Faster,” “Jokier,” “Bigger.”

Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.

The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé.

Sophy Romvari’s luminous debut feature “Blue Heron” is a loving and studious act of remembrance.

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

Despite Segel and Weaver’s best efforts, they can’t make this bickering duo deliciously awful, the characters proving more grating than hilariously combustible.

Thanks to the latest impressive turn from rising star David Jonsson, “Wasteman” even finds a few new notes to play within a familiar stark melody.

Instead of bothering much about dialogue, Fuze is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace.

For all its careful evasions, I believe that the Michael this movie reveals is true and worth watching. But ultimately, it’s the music that breaks down our resistance, from the opening funk beats of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the climax, which essentially cues a greatest hits tape right when we know the bad times are about to begin.

The film is tangled in its mess of references: a possession thriller that also wants to dish out some grainy video footage à la “The Ring” or “Bring Her Back” along with the expected mouth-to-mouth vomiting.

The edgy appeal of Erupcja is in the way it maps humans as molecules and electrons, fizzed by location, inspired by connection, driven to hover, fuse and release. The characters may get bounced around a bit and some will feel stranded, but you’ll know you’ve been taken somewhere new by this charming indie.

It’s a well-meaning impression of a soul-searching documentary (and only an impression), but impressions can still be plenty entertaining.

Franҫois Ozon, with abiding respect for the high-wattage brilliance of his countryman’s spartan masterpiece about an apathetic killer, has given us a movie adaptation that does daylight-noir justice to its alluring mysteries, while threading in some freshly necessary political context.

It wants you to feel that nightmare scenario of being stuck, but it also wants to be meditative. It’s not always successful at merging those experiences — as experimentation it falls short, and the horror label is also a stretch — but it ultimately earns a liminal fascination as it fuses your perspective to the protagonist’s.

As a satire, it’s almost too implied — the filmmakers barely bother to develop their ideas, figuring correctly that people already agree the internet is, at best, a neutral-evil. I liked it and was impatient with it in equal measure, the way a teacher feels about a lazy, gifted child.

Out of magnanimity, I’ll liken this trifle to a Rothko. The more I think about The Christophers, the more I imagine it has interesting layers. But I won’t fault anyone who just sees a simple square.

Ultimately, The Drama is the movie equivalent of a half-glass of Champagne: a toast Borgli trusts us to decide whether its ideas are half-empty or half-full. I’ll raise my cup to full, but only because of how pleasurably it bubbles.

This is a rebellious, empathetic adventure story about a grandmother who catches on that her society needs to learn how to think freely.

Jude is hardly precious about his craft. But that’s because he’s confident you’ll leave bursting with thoughts and feelings about the price of progress, the weight of history and the ways we struggle to do right amid so much that’s wrong.

That Shear knows how to bring the storyline’s seasonal time frame to a cyclical close with humor, warmth and hope is the grace note that makes Fantasy Life feel like the start of a promising writing-directing career.

It’s a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here.

Dead Lover, in all its stinky, sexy, queer and grotesque glory, is one of the grossest and loveliest films about love I’ve ever seen. This one’s for the horny, hopeless goth inside all of us.

While her previous pictures never shied away from tenderness despite their outré scenarios, her latest is a far more melancholy affair. Sadly, it’s also easily her least accomplished.

“The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

As overdue tales of history go, Palestine ‘36 (currently one of the last films with access to its real-world locations) is certainly more of a blunt instrument than a novelistic endeavor. But its broad strokes and rooted passions easily earn their place, and deserve to inspire more such stories.

There are many ways to portray authoritarianism, but Two Prosecutors is penetrating in its depiction of a society being slowly poisoned. The film might be too much to bear if it wasn’t so brilliantly conceived and executed.

Somewhat miraculously, we’re carried out of this consequential collision of hearts and minds on the lightest of notes, with the sense that our capacity to rediscover harmony will always be beautifully mysterious.

Despite this sequel’s thin and rote stretches, it once again closes strong with a few images that will stick in your head for at least a week or two. No spoilers, but it’s no coincidence that “Here I Come” finally gets more interesting once it tires of hide and seek. Finding a fresh plot twist is the only way it ekes out a draw.

Project Hail Mary is wholesome science fiction that satisfies like a jumbo serving of apple pie and milk.

We’re left with a nightmare of identity that feels slighter than it should, unsure of where to point its knife.

The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.

Once you realize what the heck it is you’re watching, you might just settle in for a more diverting — or less terrible — time than first expected. But the lower your entertainment bar, the better.

Reminders of Him could use a little more swooning, a little less of the endless middle stretch of driving and talking, interrupted by wet sprints through thunderstorms.

The film is so committed to its rigors — the two-person cast, the glacial camera pivots, the moody lighting — that it teeters on the line of becoming monotonous.

There are many heavy hitters still to come, but Hoppers feels like the first great animated movie of the year. At a time when our right to protest is under siege, this sci-fi yarn exalts the way an individual’s conviction can plant seeds of change, leading to a stronger sense of community.

Under Komasa’s direction, the mix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play in Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving Heel enough psychologically twisted juju to nearly always feel like more than the sum of its parts.

Whatever Gyllenhaal wants to do, she does, which becomes its own act of captivation and reckless empowerment. It helps that Buckley and Bale are terrific, as is the ensemble at large. The full force of Lawrence Sher’s cinematography, Karen Murphy’s production design and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s orchestral score is fabulous, combining to make something seedy, moody and extravagant.

The intended message is that B.J. must stop chasing the spotlight to let his son be the star. But his character can’t do it and neither can he. In fairness, the title is a clue that technically the focus was never Korean music. The story was always about Pops learning to be a dad.

From abandoned panic rooms to flubbed Ghostface executions, the characters make so many dumb choices that eventually we’re convinced that Williamson is frustrating us by design. Maybe in the boldest meta twist of all, the inventor of "Scream” wants to kill it off himself.

Without gimmicks or pomp (save a picturesque setting) and through the supreme talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, it offers up an affecting two-hander about a couple on the brink who’ve never really acknowledged said precipice. As directed with low-key confidence by Polly Findlay, the movie is both good and, in a certain way, good enough.

Kokuho is a hearty melodrama with a little bit of everything — sex scandals, betrayals, unlikely comebacks, health scares — but the film’s gaudy plot twists (which shouldn’t be spoiled) belie the filmmaker’s unsentimental attitude regarding stardom’s perils.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

While the promise of that gangbusters opening sequence goes a tad unfulfilled, “Killing” has two strong twists and plenty of reasons to enjoy the romp.

Johnson is nothing if not a punchy ringmaster of deadpan humor and his grab-bag mindset generates enough goodwill to appreciate the DIY brashness of it all. I’m one of those who had no clue of this act’s history and I’m fairly certain I’d look forward to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Sequel.

Touzani, an unfussy, patient director with a fondness for the simplicity of human interaction, implicitly trusts her star to carry the film’s effervescence and complexity, although you may wish the filmmaking was a little less straightforward.

A mixed bag of eye-catching imagery and formulaic writing, Goat disappoints because it follows every expected path toward a triumphant conclusion.

The screenplay gets so intricate and angry — and so shamelessly ambitious — you can’t believe someone in today’s Hollywood was willing to put up the money to get it made. Even helmed by proven hitmaker Verbinski of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, it’s a feat akin to convincing someone to fund a skyscraper-sized cuckoo clock that has a bird that pops out and heckles the crowd.

Though Wuthering Heights is a phony tease, I’m grateful that Fennell wants to titillate audiences.

Despite any narrative quibbles, the movie deserves praise for its genuine call for compassion. Scarlet’s final encounter with Claudius radiates with the complicated poignancy expected of real, difficult catharsis.

Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.

Filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s snaky, surprising fable starts with a sneeze and explodes into a saga about bureaucracy, modernization and moral corruption. It’s electrifying.

I’m hesitant to call Melania propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well. If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed.

Even if you don’t know her music, the film still works an acidic sketch of fame.

A Poet rides its wave of misfit compassion so beautifully because its contradictions live inside Rios’s howling, pitiable shambles of a character, who at times looks like someone sketched by a cynical animator but finished by a sympathetic colorist.

At its best, when theme and visuals are in sync, Arco has the easy charm of something half-remembered from one’s cartoon-packed youth: beguilingly earnest and awkward in equal measure.

Such questions are central to this elusive marvel, which invites the viewer to complete the drawing that Schilinski evocatively sketches.

Honestly, Primate’s kills are great. The problem is the dead space between them when we realize we’re bored sick.

As A Private Life moves along, with Lilian negotiating a break-in, threats and lapses in judgment, it never exactly coheres. Yet it somehow entertains, which is a testament to Zlotowski’s energy juggling her various theme-colored story balls.

What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.

With a breathtaking eye for one-shot scenes and unwavering confidence in the demands he makes on our monkey-brained attention spans, Diaz has crafted a stunning piece of time travel, its languidness and exquisitely hued imagery working in perfect sync.

Despite their clear affection for these women, the Dardenne brothers never sugarcoat their characters’ unenviable circumstance or latch onto phony bromides to alleviate our anxiety. And yet Young Mothers contains its share of sweetness and light.

If we lived in a rational world, Fiennes’ bravura comic-manic performance would earn him an Oscar nomination.

The movie is most cutting when it moves away from the big set pieces and, instead, examines the small ways that employees lose their humanity to a capitalist system that’s out to destroy them.

The result is a faintly comic curio that hurtles along without much impact.

A most unusual musical and a genuinely remarkable movie.

What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and The Chronology of Water, arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish.

Each new segment of All That’s Left of You is its own self-contained drama, but they build on one another, the past’s invisible weight bearing down on children who cannot fully comprehend the sorrow that came before, but have grown up knowing nothing else.

The actors sell it, especially when Dern is unafraid to mix revitalized pleasure with pushing for answers. But the stand-up storyline, so promising, is dropped and it feels like a missed opportunity. Still, the highs and lows of marriage aren’t merely a punch line in “Is This Thing On?” — and that’s good.