How refreshing it is when a small film with a big heart comes along unannounced and captures your affection.

Between its recreation of that Greenwich Village apartment, its use of archival audio recordings of telephone conversations and its fuzzed-out cutaways to vintage TV clips, One to One...often feels more like a museum installation than journalism. But its subject and its music would reward either.

Despite the danger of G-rated sentimentality, which everyone involved heroically avoids, The Penguin Lessons is a work of surprising depth and subtle, irresistible impact.

A carefully considered mix of humor and melancholy glows in the fragile sunshine that bathes an isolated Welsh coastline in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a wan yet affecting consideration of lost love, forgotten bands and the odd ways those entities manifest themselves in our hearts and on our turntables.

It’s self-reflexive at times, and occasionally pretentious in its high-brow approach. But writers and directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have not only made the story accessible onscreen, they have infused it with a raw emotional life that was less easily attained in print.

Though there are glimmers of greatness tucked away in this film, its full potential goes unrealized and this fantastical, pharmaceutical flick ends up surprisingly unmemorable.

Bob Trevino Likes It, the feature film debut from award-winning short film and web series director Tracie Laymon, wistfully and powerfully recaptures a more guileless era in our digital lives—which the Facebook interface and the lead character’s cracked second-gen iPhone put at around 2010.

Opus isn’t as superficial as the world it’s commenting on, but it’s not cleverer, either.

The Electric State is weighed down by a staggering tonnage of stuff, dozens of CGI robots wandering around and muttering off-camera jokes, clunky newsreels dumping details that end up contributing very little (but featuring MTV News anchor Kurt Loder as himself!), a total overload of boring, gray dreck.

Black Bag is light, unpretentious entertainment for grown-ups, a solid 90 minutes of pure, mostly bloodless fun.

Comparisons aside, Mickey 17 is a remarkably solid and compelling sci-fi flick, with an absurdist flair that can only come from a filmmaker like Joon Ho.

There are questions and uncertainties that linger once the movie ends. But like difficult, repressed memories, there is no easy resolution to be found.

Perkins’ take on the short story The Monkey certainly shows that he’s a filmmaker with a unique eye for horror (and comedy), though his attempts at grounding the story are less assured.

Even the film’s title lacks a much-needed punch. Ridley is a strong action heroine, but she deserves better material than this.

The Gorge is chaotic and fun, despite some narrative and design hiccups. It’s too bad it’s not heading for the big screen. This is the sort of thing you want to experience with a lively audience with the sound turned all the way up.

Not particularly good or bad, it is “another Marvel movie” — certainly not the cure to what’s been ailing the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Endgame.

It’s hard to label a film this empty, but the word “worthless” comes to mind instantly.

It’s both a pretty good post-Kevin Williamson slasher movie and a pretty good post-Nora Ephron studio romcom. The finished recipe isn’t much more than the sum of its ingredients, but when one of those ingredients is in such short supply, the result is some welcome — if blood-splattered — comfort food.

A film can exist for aesthetic value alone, but only if it doesn’t try to expand itself to unreached depths. In the end, Parthenope seems to assert is that beauty is unappreciated until it vanishes—a lesson we all learn too late—but like its lead character, the film remains too shallow to fully understand.

The enterprise snaps to life only sporadically, primarily when its well-chosen character actors manage to steal moments of vitality away from the profound indifference that surrounds them.

Companion offers a relatively surface-level thriller that asks far bigger questions than its easygoing vibe might suggest.

Credulity is strained on every level in scene after repetitive scene. The shallow screenplay robs the actors of success whenever they strive for any kind of badly needed comic relief, which is probably why the acting seems so bland and unconvincing.

This long-anticipated, patiently awaited film revelation doesn’t tell it all, but almost. What there is tells and shows more than anything you’ll ever see anywhere else.

Diaz and her co-star Jamie Foxx are genuinely charismatic, often delivering lines with a winking sarcasm and likeability. But Back in Action muddles its tone too much to be actually funny, a detriment to the cast’s best efforts.

Sensitively directed by Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter, Gia Coppola, it’s a film about a familiar subject, but with a heart as big as the Vegas strip and a style of its own that holds interest from start to finish.

The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim is a safe bet, a mostly rote medieval fantasy tale that doesn’t have the widespread appeal of Peter Jackson’s trilogy but does keep the spirit of Tolkien’s words alive.

The issues the film raises about journalistic integrity and broadcast morality make September 5 the most rivetingly responsible film about journalism since Steven Spielberg’s The Post. Not to mention the obvious fact that in light of the current political climate, this is a film of gravity that screams relevance and is one of the best achievements of the year.

It’s occasionally diverting, sure, but so is killing time while you wait for your flight to board.