It’s the moments of more personal observation — about how the girls relate to each other, to their elders, and to a culture that’s a sometimes uneasy blend of Canadian and Indigenous — that gives this picture its spark of originality. There are lots of genre movies like this. None are this one.

Garcia holds back too much, perhaps trying to avoid any phony epiphanies. As a result, his two main characters are too preoccupied with re-litigating old grudges to do or say anything notable.

Like Ari Aster’s similarly slippery “Hereditary,” Steiner’s film shrewdly shifts back and forth between the real physical threat of dark supernatural forces and the more elusive harm done by a lifetime of bad parenting.

If Wells has assembled a note-perfect evocation of a highly specific chapter — the end of a millennium and possibly something else — it’s when she deliberately breaks with realism that this gently aching movie achieves an overwhelming emotional force.

With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.

Part of the appeal of Ticket to Paradise is seeing Roberts and Clooney together before they — and this type of glossy studio entertainment — become extinct.

One measure of the movie’s skill, and its generosity, is that it embraces the wisdom of both its protagonists. You’ll share Colm’s exasperation and defend his right to pursue an unimpeded life of music and the mind, but you’ll also concede Pádraic’s point that kindness and camaraderie leave behind their own indelible if often invisible legacies.

This profoundly moving movie covers a different kind of success, as a great musician takes pains to make sure her idol receives some proper respect — the only currency that always matters.

It isn’t one of her better movies, but like even her lesser achievements, it warrants more than easy dismissals. It’s a fascinating confluence of talent and tedium; it’s also a story in which tedium — the day-after-day frustration of a stalled, thwarted existence — may well be the point.

This is a movie for adrenaline junkies who want to watch as many slapstick fights as can fit into about 90 minutes of screen-time.

Even with the Gen Z-friendly touches — and Dever delivering a winning performance — Rosaline still feels frustratingly stale.

Despite a clever premise, decent special effects and an amiable tone, the horror-comedy The Curse of Bridge Hollow never makes the jump from “mildly pleasant time-killer” to “entertaining.”

This film is a superior example of how flavorful dialogue, talented actors and excellent staging can make something familiar really pop.

There are set pieces scattered throughout Dark Eyes that are as strange — and as strangely beautiful — as the best of Argento, starting with an unnerving opening sequence that sees a group of people in a park gazing at a solar eclipse.

Piggy is a masterful mix of dark comedy, social commentary and raw suspense.

The impact of the narrative hinges on Perelman Striks’ fierce performance that conveys the character’s desperation to fulfill the promise of his talent and the frustrating inner battle to suppress his truth.

A love story by turns sprawling, despairing and invigorating.

Halloween Ends has the feeling of dour obligation, and it’s clear that no one’s heart is really in this anymore, the limits of narrative possibility in Haddonfield stretched beyond their max.

Till is more understatedly effective, and Deadwyler’s performance at its most powerful, when Chukwu resists and even undermines the template of the prestige biographical drama she only appears to be making.

Ultimately, and perhaps most beautifully, the film makes a case, à la the musical “Rent,” about how, in the end, we must measure our life in love. On that score, Eli Timoner left the world a very wealthy man.

No moment on this anything-but-love boat has the impact of, say, the seasickness sequence of “Triangle of Sadness,” but slaughter stans will get their butchery bellyfuls.

It’s not scary; it is instead an alternately touching and haunting story.

It’s more a feel-good recap of an impressive championship run. But the game analysis is keen, and the arc of this story is undeniably inspiring, arguing that victory is sweeter when it springs from a common purpose.

Based on Jessica Knoll’s best-selling mystery novel, the Mike Barker-directed Luckiest Girl Alive — with a script by Knoll — falls into the trap of trying too hard to capture not just the book’s flashback-heavy plot but also its distinctive voice.

It’s a story often told, but this movie tells it well, energetically dramatizing the in-the-moment experiences Leslie has and showing how they inform the choices she makes. And Riseborough is a dynamo, making sure that even at her worst, Leslie has enough personality and humanity that the audience roots for her just to get through another day.

For all the flayed flesh and impaled skin in the picture, this Hellraiser isn’t sharp enough.

In its interlocking parts and willfully impenetrable details, Serebrennikov wants you to know that being Russian is too complicated to foreground one emotion or experience, or to rely on the safety of the linear when one day can feel like nothing and everything. This brazenly packed movie isn’t for everyone. Neither, we grasp, is being Russian.

Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning social satire, Triangle of Sadness, is many things: a cautionary tale about the perils of slurping shellfish on rough seas, a blunt (as in dull) critique of the one percent, a (wasted) opportunity to hear Woody Harrelson espouse the tenets of Karl Marx and a pessimistic suggestion that people — both the oppressors and the oppressed — share a fundamental willingness to exploit each other given the right circumstances.