Vesper is on the arty side of science-fiction, more focused on character and setting than in plot-driven thrills.

Nothing Compares stays confined to the six-year whirlwind when O’Connor was at her most famous, and steers clear of the decades of scandals that followed. This is clearly a conscious — and astute — choice by Ferguson, who means to show that even at the peak of her commercial powers, O’Connor was questioned, mocked and belittled.

Mona Lisa’s story is at first bizarre, and then tense, and then genuinely moving as the escapee figures out what she actually wants from the outside world.

Co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (who previously collaborated on the excellent mood-piece “The Fits”) create a strong sense of rhythm and texture, capturing the feel of this town and how it holds its inhabitants tightly.

At its best and its sharpest, this film is less about supernatural monsters than about the common fear of drifting apart from the people you love.

This is not an epic; nor is it meant to be. It’s a snappy story about a bunch of violent men — and one particular woman, anxious to get clear of them.

That it succeeds as well as it does can be chalked up to a lot of different things, including the pleasures of Provincetown in the fall, the sights of New York at Christmastime and the unerring perfection of Luke Macfarlane’s five o’clock shadow.

In the hands of director and co-writer Santiago Mitre, co-writer Mariano Llinás and lead actor Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), Strassera is the slow-but-steady one in the story of “The Tortoise and The Junta: The Little Prosecutor Who Maybe Couldn’t, But Wouldn’t Quit.” He’s what one might call “endearingly competent.” The characterization they achieve is something rare and commendable: a lead who is interestingly uninteresting.

By letting the archival material carry most of the weight, Pettengill creates an instructive kind of time-travel experience for viewers of all political persuasions, transporting them to a past hauntingly similar to our present.

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.

Hamm’s performance here as freelance journalist and investigative whiz Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher is a master class in effortless charm, a comedic turn that never sacrifices the character’s intelligence for a punchline yet steers clear of the smugness and smarminess so prevalent in contemporary comedy.

There is surely more to be mined from this extraordinary, complicated trailblazer’s life than one suitably enjoyable love letter to his brilliance and bravery.

Me to Play doesn’t make some grand pronouncement about living with illness or theater as therapy. It’s a small slice of life about a couple of guys trying to exemplify that classic Beckett quote: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

This is an unapologetic advocacy doc; and as such it’s likely to rub some viewers the wrong way. But even those who want to watch it just to argue should find that “The American Dream” is a worthy opponent.

Carmen relies too much on coincidences to keep its story going; and Buhagiar threads in a few too many impressionistic flashbacks to the heroine’s youth and to the romance her family forced her to abandon. But McElhone strikes a fine balance between humor and pathos.

Meet Cute falls into a rut fairly quickly, because it lacks the breadth of imagination that makes the best time-loop stories work.

The plot races from one tense outdoor confrontation to the next, as “Lou” tells a simple but effective story about two women enduring the harshness of the elements and the machinations of violent men.

Notwithstanding the embellishments, this undoubtedly remains a Tyler Perry film — occasionally for better, but often for worse.

I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

As a sustained piece of action choreography, then, Athena is frequently staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of modern French identity, the movie feels thin and overdetermined.

There’s more than a whiff of both Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund to the proceedings, except the characters never emerge as fully as they do in the best of those filmmakers’ works.

While the material here is thin and largely predictable (aside from one great jump scare), the cast is outstanding and the dialogue is snappy, delivered at a brisk pace.

The deep strangeness of Drifting Home can take some time to adjust to. But in this quirky and boisterous picture, the surreal predicament is ultimately just an offshoot of these kids’ common fears about growing up.

Mendes and Hawke bring a lot of depth and pathos to these characters, who gradually begin to wonder why they and their classmates are so fiercely dedicated to punishing each other.

Fans of the first Goodnight Mommy may find it a pale, pointless copy. Newcomers, though? They should be suitably creeped out … but, alas, not wrecked.