What’s missing is a more personal directorial imprint.

Searching is nothing if not ambitious, and its rapidly accelerating second half is jammed with bold twists, red herrings and breathless confrontations. It’s also here that the movie begins to slacken its grip — partly because some of the twists beggar belief, and partly because they strain the limits of the online-all-the-time interface.

The salt in the wound of this painfully out-of-touch film is the footage of real L.A. homeless camps and people, as if the film were saying something trenchant about the issue. What a gross misunderstanding of this glib story about a rich man who steals stories and inspiration from struggling people.

The film is alternately intriguing and frustrating. The visuals are often strikingly handsome and oddly funny. But the movements are stiff, the characters chatter endlessly, and the unnecessary songs bring the plot to a grinding halt.

With its probing camera and spare piano score, the film effectively creates a clinically sterile environment that’s as spiritually devoid as the soul of its protagonist, and while the inevitable twist ending doesn’t land with the unsettling thud it might have, getting there is quite the page-turner.

Filmed in Nashville several years ago, it isn’t really surprising that this poorly paced production has spent so long on the sidelines.

Although it’s a serviceable enough story, the script by Blake Harris, who co-directed with Chris Bouchard, is often too earnest and forced to prove sufficiently fun or wondrous.

There are ultimately kernels of truth buried amid the film’s random yakking, mini-crises and bits of forced bad behavior, but they prove too little, too late.

Actor-turned-director Peter Facinelli makes his behind-the-camera debut, and beyond the film’s many script issues, it’s not entirely without its charms. Peter and Daisy might not make sense, but Gibson and Hinson almost sell it with strong chemistry.

Based on Lois Duncan’s gothic young adult novel, Down a Dark Hall is entry-level horror for teens. The scares might not satisfy those old enough to vote, but it should provide mild chills for its target audience.

Between the punchy dialogue, the skilled cast (some comic actors, some genre stalwarts) and the impressive animation, “The Littlest Reich” is good, sick fun. It’s got puppets, it’s got gore. Who could ask for anything more?

This is a different kind of monster movie, no doubt. It’s beautiful and magical, and as aware of the real world as it is of classic Hollywood. Good Manners is a haunting tale of love — and the burdens that come with it.

Madeline’s Madeline is the product of a lengthy, improvisation-heavy collaboration between Decker and her star, an astonishing teenage discovery named Helena Howard. It is also a skillful and imaginative blurring of fact and fiction, albeit one that insistently calls the act of such blurring into question.

Minding the Gap is an essay that never feels like an essay, an intelligent and compassionate grappling with some of the most painful issues presently haunting the body politic: toxic masculinity and domestic violence, economic depression and a deep, existential despair. But Liu doesn’t contrive a simplistic thesis on Middle American misery to suit himself and his friends.

Moselle’s movie is an empowering portrait of young women on wheels, but it proves no less surefooted when the wheels come off.

It’s a silly, fairly rote animated film, but underneath the hijinks and mishaps is a rather devastatingly sad story. It’s this poignancy that makes Luis & the Aliens a step above the rest.

Zagar, judiciously adapting the book with Daniel Kitrosser, submerges the audience into their world from the outset, presenting a fluid stream of bittersweet and vivid episodes from the family’s life that gradually build into something profound.

Centineo is the big beating heart at the center of the somewhat reserved To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. He’s a lot like his character, bringing out the best in this love story.

A charming film of an engaging, adult nature about two very different people trying to press reset in their lives, it is comic, heartfelt and smart as they come — a rare combination these days.

When Close and her costars command the screen, we can forgive problems and simply enjoy the proceedings.

Surprising and deeply satisfying.

Although this quietly daring, decidedly nonjudgmental film doesn’t ask or answer a lot of questions, it paints a cumulatively vivid portrait of young love and early motherhood.

There are more arguments than action sequences in What Still Remains, and though it gets more tense in its second half, the movie overall is a bit too sedate. Still, a great cast (including vets Mimi Rogers, Dohn Norwood and Jeff Kober) brings Mendoza’s ideas to life.

Action star and martial artist White is full of his usual charm and wit, but he and his sparks of humor feel out of place in this otherwise dour film.

40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie transcends the trippy nostalgia to deliver a moving message about the healing power of reconciliation.

In the cynical worldview of BuyBust, there’s no escaping this crushing cycle of killing and corruption. That real-life message makes this wild action film more powerful, but the violence is a hard pill to swallow.

Gutierrez is ultimately too enamored of his quasi-feminist, visually convulsive upending of damsel myths to let his actors enjoy themselves the way De Palma or Dario Argento would.

A story of implacable grief, unlikely companionship and stunning landscapes, Gavagai is as beautifully singular a movie as I’ve seen all year.