Copious blood-spatter aside, I’ll Take Your Dead is about as poignant as any movie with vengeful gangster ghosts can be.

For anyone over 5, it’s best as mild, inoffensive background noise, but no more thrilling or satisfying than that. It turns out to be nothing more than a merchandising opportunity after all.

It all comes together on election night, as Lears shadows Ocasio-Cortez and captures her disbelief as she nears her post-election party and suddenly realizes she has in fact won. It’s precisely the kind of you-are-there moment, one of many, that makes Knock Down the House so satisfying.

Rattlesnakes imagines itself as a neo-noir, but that genre is more evident in its themes of revenge and ambiguous characters rather than in its nondescript style. This is a bland, unpleasant watch, all set to an equally grinding score.

Masterfully directed by Martín Rodríguez Redondo, who wrote with Mariana Docampo and Mara Pescio, this brief, if deliberately paced picture, features far more silence than words: Dialogue is doled out “as needed” while those silences, which simmer with loaded looks and pointed observations, speak volumes.

Vidal-Naquet’s film knows that every wound and balm to the flesh is also one to the spirit.

Veteran performer Schull, perhaps best known as Fay on TV’s “Wings,” gives a towering, fearless turn; the other main actors are fine as well. Still, one must yield to the film’s flat shooting style, lengthy monologues, dangling questions and awkwardly rendered, dubiously earned ending.

While not exactly uncharted documentary territory, the Iraq conflict is thought-provokingly portrayed in “Mosul,” an up-close-and-personal examination of recent events that puts a human face on a land that remains vulnerable as a result of clashing ideologies.

Although The Most Dangerous Year sometimes gets bogged down with explainers, it’s a powerful educational tool and empathy-building story.

Where Dern and Stewart kick-start something worth exploring, the movie around them is pleased spectator instead of engaged participant.

Subject and style could not be more different than in The White Crow, but that fusion of opposites has resulted in an involving biographical drama that rarely puts a foot wrong.

This movie’s a shoddy copy of something that was pretty tawdry to begin with.

while the action stalls too often, the look of “Yamasong” is enough to recommend it. The puppetry’s lo-fi but remarkably expressive, with craftsmanship and design that puts most computer animation to shame.

At its best, Scary Stories explains why these books endure: because they let their young audience know that even in their worst nightmares, they’re not alone.

While Feldman — a veteran screenwriter making his directorial debut — brings plenty of storytelling craft to the picture, Know Your Enemy falls short of being as eye-opening as he intends. A strong sense of mystery and two searing lead performances can only counteract so much of the contrivance here.

Lobo overdoes the sudden shifts between the real and the surreal in the last act, refusing to answer any questions definitively until he has to. But the first-time filmmaker shows an impressive amount of confidence in his methods. He knows how to make audiences uncomfortable — first with tedium, then with terror.

Though Benjamin struggles to fill her running-time, the movie mostly reaffirms that she’s a talented genre director.

As long as he maintains his focus on the notoriously private Land and the painstaking efforts of Impossible Project’s chief technology officer and Polaroid vet Stephen Herchen to recapture lightning in an SX-70, Baptist delivers something reasonably compelling. Unfortunately the bulk of the overly artsy production is preoccupied with the exploits of others.

Individual scenes work, but it lacks cohesion as a whole.

In a divisive era, Okko’s Inn carries a welcome message of acceptance and inclusion.

The inside jokes and fan-service digressions are blatant and relentless, but also pretty effective. The conflicting narrative priorities that often bedevil an epic series finale — how to tell a story that builds with inexorable momentum while also staging the mother of all cast reunions? — are cleverly and resourcefully reconciled.

Grass, true to its title, is small, sharp and bladelike. It may strike you as more of the same until you see it and its implications and possibilities begin to grow and multiply.

By the time the noirish thriller Naples in Veils draws you into its enigmatic web — which is pretty much from the start — you’re sufficiently invested to enjoyably coast through the rest of this hypnotic, if ambiguous, Italian import.

Fast Color is a nifty little film, a smart, adventurous and surprising production made with visible care and considerable love.

A moving testament to the boundary-shattering language of music.

While director Penny Lane (not a pseudonym) energetically goes about shattering our preconceived notions at every intriguing turn, the film is at its most potent tracing society’s history of “satanic panic,” from the Salem Witch Trials to the rise of the evangelical lobby on the shoulders of the Red Scare to the 1980s when Dungeons & Dragons was viewed as a demonic gateway game.

This charming, shaggy story of embracing oneself to authentically connect with others is peppered with appealing performances from Brian Tyree Henry and Kate McKinnon, and a truly bravura turn by Schilling as a woman frazzled to her wits’ end.

With a confident eye and economy of storytelling, DaCosta crafts a fiercely feminist and sensitive family portrait that fearlessly takes on the capitalist rot at the core of the American healthcare system.