It has good style and a handful of fun ideas, but it’s ultimately as superficial as the puff pieces it’s attacking.

As a dark techno-farce with a violent wit and some daring empathy (coming as it does in a time of suspicious excitement about our modeled, molded future), Companion is a sleekly designed, well-powered date-night package.

Thankfully, filmmaker Bruce David Klein finds the sweet spot between admirer and honest broker with the warm, engaging tribute biodoc Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story.

If the genre trappings seem familiar, it’s the prowling, ghostlike vantage of the camera that makes all the difference: Soderbergh has elected to tell this haunted-house story entirely from the perspective of the haunter. Shooting in wide-angled long takes that range in tenor from voyeuristic languor to nerve-shredding anxiety, he transforms a domestic horror exercise into another Soderberghian tour de force.

When Masear dedicates herself to something as simple as an impaired hummingbird’s hesitant first jump from one stick to another, the tension is both unexpectedly beautiful and poignant. These are small, scary steps for hummingbirds, seeding faith in giant leaps for humankind.

The film’s most disorienting and wondrous realization, however, is that Shakespearean acting can exist even within “Grand Theft Auto’s” limits.

I’m Still Here brilliantly distills an agonizing chapter of a nation’s recent past into a sophisticated portrait of communal endurance.

Lamont trusts his movie is personality-powered. He’s calibrated each performance to fit together like a 12-piece band, and he knows that some jokes are even funnier when whispered. But I’m in the mood to speak up: I’ve missed this type of satisfying junk food. Waiter, bring me another.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

To watch Santosh is to feel the undeniable power of a discerning, resonant case study. To fully know this character, however, is a goal just outside this otherwise intelligently wrought movie’s considerable reach.

While it is fun to reconnect with Big Nick and watch him try new foods, there’s just something missing in this rote “Ronin” ripoff — a danger. It seems Gudegast and his cast of characters alighted for Europe with only a few ideas in place, and the tapestry of this world is not woven as tightly as the original.

Only Anderson’s part with all its hazy contradictions — neither comic nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, neither subtle nor showy — seems, to transcend. More than the film around her, Anderson earns our respect.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths invites you to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world. (If you personally know a worse one, my condolences.) That the unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about miserable jerks and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others.

Superfans aren’t necessarily going to love this. It’s a movie made with affection, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be jerks.

Babygirl’s erotic scenes are hot. But really, Reijn is doing her damnedest to get a moral rise out of us. Romy and Samuel have safe words, yet our own national conversation about sexual ethics gets tongue-tied whenever it tries to define right and wrong. Instead, we have Reijn asking uncomfortable questions.

Even as the movie captures Williams’ recklessness, it’s also a convincing sketch of his artistic growth and commitment.

While the boxing is kinetically directed, Morrison grasps that the movie’s fiercest stands are taken outside the ring, when Claressa — faced with tough choices about her future — asserts herself to the people who need to hear it.

The film is a feat of maximalist and moody production design and cinematography, but the tedious and overwrought script renders every character two-dimensional, despite the effortful acting, teary pronunciations and emphatically delivered declarations.

Delaporte and De La Patellière understand that Dumas’ type of novelistic revenge, whether froid or chaud, is best served onscreen in the most picturesque European locations, with cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc’s cameras ready to swoop and soar as needed, and paced to gallop, never dawdle.

As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound.

Sight gags baked into the production design (the books the Gromit reads or the signs that populate the sets) and gnome puns aplenty make for a ride in which every frame packs a dense layer of comedy, at times conspicuous, others not so much.

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature travels across the landscape of that most potentially treacly of genres, the cancer drama, locating something tough, tender and brittlely funny in this portrait of two women facing their own impasses.

This is a guaranteed blockbuster that nobody needed except studio accountants and parents. I’ll accept it on those terms because it’s a good thing when any kid-pleaser gets children in the habit of going to the movie theater.

The Brutalist argues, and proves by its very existence, that the maddening thing about major works of art is that they demand invention and resources and cooperation.

In a world increasingly obsessed with the notion of homelands and borders, it’s good to be reminded by a chill hang with an open-arms message that the world is strongest when we get to make our best lives anywhere we choose.

Aside from the obviously unintentional humor, the quality of Kraven the Hunter is severely lacking. Perhaps that’s all the recommendation you need for some dumb fun at the movies.

I’ll give Schrader the benefit of the doubt that his dialogue is stilted by design, even though the female characters are particularly prone to clunkers. . . But it’s still irritating to sit through, and once we start questioning everything we see — would young Leonard really order a bran muffin at an ice cream parlor? — it gets harder to hand over our trust when the movie wants to get emotional.

Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.