All in all, one walks away from Rustin enchanted with Domingo’s performance, while feeling that a character as larger than life and momentous as Bayard Rustin surely deserves a film less dutiful and more inspired.

It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness.

Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

There’s life boiling under the simple surfaces, which is both Kaurismäki’s aesthetic mantra and his great theme. At their best, these quiet, cool films tear you to pieces. Fallen Leaves already feels like one of his signature works.

Saltburn’s seductive imagery outweighs its obvious attempts at provocation. And while it does end up making being rich look pretty sweet, that’s not exactly a revelation worth hanging a whole movie on.

Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starts off with a rich, surreal premise, and for much of its running time, it mixes playful, cringe-comic energy with an undercurrent of existential anxiety. But it eventually manages to undo much of what made it so tantalizing by turning metaphor and subtext into a more narrow-minded satire.

The best parts of What Happens Later are when it lets its characters just be people who still want to find love and find some of its warmth in the embers of this long-ago relationship. It’s too bad there aren’t more of those moments.

As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.

The marvel of Priscilla is in its dual awareness, how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, the movie, is the kind of hollowed-out exercise in atrociousness that pretty much forces you to mull other things, be they what you’re having for dinner, the decline of American community, or the heat death of the universe.

The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center.

When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Dicks: The Musical is never as outrageous as it clearly would like to be . . . But its determination to avoid any trace of self-importance or greater meaning is admirable in its own right — embracing the freedom to just be ridiculous.

Green has a talent for depicting the way women constantly recalibrate their behavior when moving through male spaces, trying to figure out how to attract enough attention but not too much, to come across as pleasant without inviting unwanted intimacies.

The most compelling moments come from watching Braun and Jones advancing toward and retreating from each other. It doesn’t sound quite right to say they have good chemistry; it’s more accurate to say that both actors understand how to make the lack of chemistry between their characters real and tangible.

The Delinquents works its magic on us the way that the promise of freedom works on its characters. It’s a vision of a life unlived — as impossible as it is intoxicating.

It’s not hard to see why Triet’s picture resonates. It has both suspense and intellectual ambition; plot revelations don’t just send the story in new directions, they expand the film’s cultural scope.

It’s a logical expansion, another exercise in big-league capitalism from an artist who has used pizza boxes and UPS trucks as promotional platforms. But it’s also a showcase for the pen and pain that animate Swift’s finest compositions, the fuel that keeps the pistons in her well-oiled business apparatus pumping year after year.

Once Within a Time runs 52 minutes, and it’s so lovely, funny, and charming that it feels like 15. But when it’s over, you feel like you’ve seen the world.

Chloe Domont’s film divides the entire world into binary moments of understanding and misunderstanding — without the shades of gray that would make Fair Play and its characters more tangible and its central tension less didactic.

Even with its complicated moral vision, Wouk’s ending reoriented the story’s emotional focus; some might argue it clarified it. Friedkin’s ending leaves you unsure of what to think or feel. It sends you out questioning your beliefs — about war, about service, about madness, even about right and wrong. In that sense, despite the lack of ornament and the reduced scale, this Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is pure Friedkin.

The Creator may be an effective interrogation of American imperiousness and imperialism, but it also has a tender, anguished heart.

What comes through are Vaniček’s expert orchestration of suspense, and the cast’s ability to make their characters’ fears feel genuine.

This one is a celebration of Cassandro, and like so many great sports movies before it, it’s an underdog story. But it’s one steeped in the grittiness of reality that avoids leaning too hard into easy sentimentality.

You’ll remember Anaita Wali Zada’s eyes. As Donya, an Afghan refugee in the wry and wistful Fremont, the first-time actor is a steadily building wave, a maelstrom of intention and purpose.

This is an eerily silent work, full of long pauses and distant, baffling sounds; even the score seems to be mixed low, as if it were drifting through a window, a dark memory. Branagh also plays with the rhythm, using pace and composition to set us ill at ease. Vast stretches of darkness in the frame are cut through with shocks of color.

For all that Nyad is happy to show its subject’s personality flaws, it has trouble finding her humanity,

There are surprises to be found in The Holdovers, but they come from the characters, not the story — from the ways each of the three main figures reveals new depths and confounds expectations.