Despite all the familiar faces, Simulant still feels too bare-bones. It asks some pretty remedial questions about freedom and humanity; and it is ultimately too tasteful and earnest to get pulses pounding and minds racing.

There are really two movies happening here: one, a cat-and-mouse game between two manipulative schemers; and another that skewers self-involved, “anything for a click” influencers. Both have their merits; but they don’t mesh well.

The idea behind this film is to celebrate James’ first and best teammates. In the real world, what they achieved as a basketball team was remarkable. But dramatized? On the screen? It’s stubbornly undramatic.

Concerned Citizen is light on plot but filled with insight into what people expect of themselves and their peers.

This quietly powerful film is a way for Harkness to reopen some of his family’s wounds, but always with the understanding that the more he pokes and digs, the longer it may take to heal.

For those willing to stretch a little to connect with Ferrara, Padre Pio is often as rewarding as it is challenging.

A work of surprising, commanding depth.

Unable to rise above this internal conflict, it’s a film that’s both dull and disposable. Though it sets up the opportunity for more interconnected franchise filmmaking, this is a beast that needs to be put down.

This is at once the loftiest and the most grounded love story I’ve seen in some time, a movie that feels lingering and contemplative in the moment but is over as quickly (too quickly) as a drink with a long-absent friend.

The race to the end is certainly technically proficient, and all the actors gamely play out the ride (including an acid-tangy Marin Ireland making the most of her two scenes). But it’s not horror anymore — more like a medical drama with a race-against-time diagnosis and cure — and ultimately no memorable deepening of King’s ruthlessly efficient, vividly sketched black hole.

Barth’s story is enjoyably twisty, filled with surprises about all the mischief that Elsa’s neighbors have been up to during the war; and Thorwath’s direction is dynamic without going too far over the top.

Reality reaches beyond Winner’s experience on one momentous Saturday afternoon to prod us all into contemplating our own relationship to actions over words, and the powerfully wielded consequences that keep many — but thankfully, not all of us — from doing nothing.

The Wrath of Becky delivers satisfying action, as this underestimated heroine — well-played by Wilson — makes some terrible people look like absolute fools.

This is a different kind of prison escape picture, focusing on the stifling confines of a life devoid of possibility.

Though the movie falls a bit short in character and theme, Harder preserves the story’s shocks by having the players remain aloof and unknowable from moment to moment, which keeps the overall picture’s meaning vague.

There’s a lot about the whole sorority phenomenon that could never fit within the narrow rectangle of a cellphone app. So “Bama Rush” widens the frame.

Armed with a perceptive ensemble cast, Del Paso formulates an intellectually rich critique on a thorny subject for a country still reluctant to face its entrenched moral vices.

Writer-director Jamie Sisley’s autobiographical first feature strikes a genuine, sobering chord.

The solution, the filmmaker argues, is a spiritual communion with the unknown, because there’s healing in surrendering to one’s perfect insignificance as part of something bigger.

It opts for too many broad, clunky or far-fetched beats to move the story and its requisite emotional needs forward, rather than weave a more organic, effectively lived-in and, yes, genuinely funny tale.

Unabashedly theatrical in presentation but broken up with interludes of nature, this Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape.

Yes, You Hurt My Feelings explores the incident of its title and the risks and limits of total honesty in a relationship. But it’s also a funny and incisive look at middle-age malaise

It’s a pleasure to see Butler do his thing opposite a talented array of international performers — Fazal and Fimmel are standouts — and stretch his specific set of skills into more complex contemporary storytelling, making “Kandahar” worth the trip

The conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, The Zone of Interest leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.

While The Fire That Took Her offers a broader perspective on these kinds of cases, Gillespie always brings everything back to Malinowski and her family, who led full lives before one reckless moment of cruelty changed everything.

This riveting and righteously furious film is about two subjects: the worrying phenomenon of police departments discrediting and even arresting sexual assault victims; and the more promising trend of journalists doing their own research into cases that may have been closed too hastily.

Williams and Sudano don’t try to sell their audience on Summer as a musician, because the music itself still does that. This is more a portrait of a passionate artist who kept pushing herself and reinventing herself — sometimes at the expense of those who loved her, at home and on the radio.

Corsini leans a little too hard on narrative convenience, but she also has a gift for illuminating everyday racism — the matter-of-fact microaggressions, the unspoken anxieties — in a story of youthful alienation and restlessness. Whenever believability falters, Corsini and her fine actors manage to pull you back in.