A warm, emotional and completely involving film about the celebrated tenor.

Avant’s skin color is one aspect of his inspiring story, for sure, but the heart inside The Black Godfather — and the ways an honorable soul with personal power can effect meaningful change — spins its own joyful melody.

The man is the movie, and the long stretch of lived road Frank describes as an immigrant grappling with his adopted country’s faults is revealing, at times heartbreakingly so.

Late Night is that rare thing: a deft and intelligent entertainment that can touch on serious issues because being funny is something it never forgets to do.

Amid all the clunky lines, the derivative plot turns and the surprisingly indifferent production values, you can sense this movie striving for something more sensitive and intimate than the usual blockbuster blowout.

This increasingly convoluted tale moves quickly but goes nowhere.

The cast is talented — and occasionally funny — but they run out of fertile material quickly.

It’s a little like a post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller, crossed with Lynn Ramsay’s impressionistic masterpiece “Morvern Callar,” crossed with a Radiohead video. Not all of those pieces fit together. But they combine into something strikingly original.

Halston places the designer at the top of fashion’s most influential artists, but it avoids hagiography, showing his ego and addiction. Unfortunately, just as Halston did in life, this documentary avoids delving deeply into the mysterious man.

An exceptional tribute.

As Gamal, himself raised in a leper colony, knowingly navigates the uncomfortable glares he encounters along the way, Yomeddine (Arabic for “judgment day”) takes an affecting path toward belonging and acceptance.

It’s as absorbing as a caper, as maddening as a broken romance, and as thought-provoking as an impassioned editorial.

As the true purpose of the quest becomes clearer, Huang raises the film’s stakes, aiming for a profundity that he can’t quite hit — though he takes a solid shot.

There’s just not enough of that good De Palma stuff here. The lush Pino Donaggio score and some well-choreographed chase sequences only hint at the movie Domino could’ve been, if a great artist had been granted access to his full palette.

Ultimately, Ferrara makes a convincing case for being Pasolini’s biographical caretaker, one troublemaker looking after another’s legacy, albeit with a more serious, thoughtful approach than a transgressive one.

Amazingly, somehow, an overstuffed Godzilla movie feels scant.

Spencer succeeds much more than the movie itself does; even when the writing and the filmmaking fail her, which is annoyingly often, she’s awfully good at using her beatific smile and tough-talking charm to elicit your nervous chuckles.

Always Be My Maybe is pleasant without being particularly powerful, appealing if not exactly transformative.

A numbingly obtuse experience, a feat of maddeningly indulgent non-storytelling hiding behind a symphony of bared midriffs and jiggling derrières. ... Kechiche doesn’t just sell out his characters, his story and his collaborators; he sells out his own talent.

Perfect also shows that striking images alone aren’t always enough. Alcazar and cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser have concocted some fine illustrations. Now all they need is some decent text.

Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.

Even with solid supporting performances by Morgan Freeman, Robert Patrick and Peter Stormare, this movie’s just … well, sad. Twenty-five years ago, this exact cast and creative team might have turned this material into something to rival “Harper” or “Body Heat.” Now, they all seem slower and lazier: as committed to making a taut mystery as they are to mastering a Texas drawl.

There’s nothing especially original about “Assimilate.” But director John Murlowski and a talented young cast — including Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy and Andi Matichak as the plucky high schoolers trying to save their town — do at least keep the action lively and unpretentious.

Avengement features a good balance of colorfully profane British gangster-speak and intense, explicitly gory punch-outs.

With its overly arch dialogue and characterizations, airless gentility and forced period trappings it seems that the harder writer-producer Karen R. Hurd and director Barry Andersson strive for authenticity — on what’s clearly a deeply limited budget — the less convincing the film feels. The often stodgy acting doesn’t help.

This is largely a well-made movie from the technical perspective, but a stronger hand in the editing room would’ve made for a more watchable one.

By keeping things short, sweet and dutifully tuneful, Echo in the Canyon is like the doc version of one of the period’s sonic nuggets, leaving you with a peace/love/understanding high and a desire to break out the vinyl for more of the same.

Both riveting character study and experiential glimpse at the Africa-to-Europe sex slave trade, Austrian-Iranian filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai’s “Joy” builds its reservoir of sadness with pulsing efficiency.