The central mystery hinges on an audacious structural coup that produces a succession of giddy, breathless moments in the movie’s second half, as cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay excel at reframing earlier plot points from revelatory new perspectives.

Like all great storytellers, Spielberg knows the value — the beauty — of artifice and embellishment, as well as the permeability of truth and fiction. The Fabelmans is as slick, transporting and painstakingly orchestrated as anything in his filmography, and also as funny, stirring and implacably sad.

The film is a unique kind of procedural, with fascinating information about how the FBI cracks cases, combined with an admission that some crimes may never be explained.

More than anything, Our American Family gets across how exhausting this kind of life can be, as loved ones waver over whether they should be hands-off in their relationships or if they should be intensely involved.

Herbulot and Diop have made a movie that is bold and exciting, combining bits of reality with outsized myth, in a tale of crime, revenge, and literal monsters, set in a wonderland where it seems anything can happen.

Ruth Wilson gives an outstanding performance.

It’s as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on one complication to set the action in motion, so they picked six. That much narrative congestion keeps the story from really moving.

Loving Highsmith is a well-intentioned effort; a respectable start. But perhaps a more definitive and dimensional documentary — or even narrative feature — about this singularly intriguing talent will still be made.

Zemeckis’ Pinocchio prompts one to wish upon a star that Disney would stop diluting the legacy of its beloved animated features with these soulless knockoffs.

Even as she preserves the essential particulars of an oft-told story, de Clermont-Tonnerre draws out Lawrence’s feminism and class rage with a welcome forthrightness that occasionally translates into some overly emphatic dialogue. But as in any decent reimagining of this story, the emotional and sensual force of the central romance renders language irrelevant, body language excepted.

Lelio and his co-writers have made a smart, subtle disquisition on the necessity of both skepticism and faith, with a particularly keen understanding of religion’s uses and abuses.

The movie, set across a broad swath of Middle America in the late 1980s, is filmed in a rougher, less polished style than Guadagnino’s Italian-set dramas (“I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash,” “Call Me by Your Name”), but it exerts its own earthy, dreamlike pull. It casts — and sometimes violently breaks — its own lyrical spell.

Don’t Worry Darling, for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie.

While Colman peels back Hilary’s layers of grief and rage with all the ferocity and subtlety you’d expect from an actor of her caliber, even she can’t sell the joyfully beaming pivot required of her in an interminable sequence in which Empire of Light essentially becomes the ’80s equivalent of Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial.

Because each moment serves at least two purposes — "Tár" is both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building — you may well find yourself marveling at Field’s economy.

Iñárritu, rather than answering them or leaving them provocatively unanswered (either one would be fine), does what he seems to do with most of his stories and ideas nowadays: He flings them around, roughs them up and rearranges them into an imposing, finally insufferable monument to his own awesomeness.

What Polley achieves here is an artful, incisive distillation of Toews’ arguments, effectively if somewhat visibly engineered for clarity and brevity.

This kind of movie can easily become ponderous and pretentious, but Putka keeps everything wide open, in the spirit of his befuddled protagonists.

The film is a case study in why critics say “show, don’t tell.” It’s 90 minutes of people talking about routine gangster stuff, peppered with occasional gunfire.

What really gets under the viewer’s skin in Surrogate is Natalie’s particular predicament — well-played by Morassi — of a parent who right down to the film’s shocking ending feels pushed past her limits, judged by others for troubles she didn’t invite and can’t explain.

Julie and Charlie make a winning couple, which goes a long way toward making Love on the Villa watchable. But they’re so boxed-in by the movie’s clichés, their love affair rarely gets the chance to breathe.

Whenever the energy starts to flag, Anvari can always come back to Bonneville, who is magnificently oily as Blake: a man who has convinced the world he’s a nice guy, though every now and then the mask slips and we see the anger and bigotry bubbling beneath.

A first feature that is fresh as it is concise, “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” presents a toothy vision of evangelical life without losing sight of the feeling that remains when the facade of it all finally falls.

The real point of “Since I Been Down” — and what makes the movie so powerful — are the scenes that show these still-incarcerated men and women today.

It’s brutal and exceedingly bloody, as one would expect from this kind of lean genre picture. But “Burial” also is packed with meaty philosophical questions about gods, monsters, and men at war, and it’s exceedingly well-executed.

Specific as Ozon’s approach here may be (nothing feels accidental or arbitrary), his lovingly made curio, which often borrows verbatim from its predecessor, comes off a bit tired and trifling.

By the end, Maneater has walked right up to the edge of being a fun, silly, “so bad it’s good” time-killer. But after taking way too long, it never really arrives there.

Buckles’ greatest asset is his subjects, many of whom have never spoken before about the trauma that the adults and authority figures in their lives have expected them to endure, bravely and stoically.