Rifkin’s Festival is a romantic farce, with ideas that long-time fans will recognize from a range of other Allen films, but with one difference. The movie ends on a surprisingly sweet note.

The film adds an authentic emotional resonance to an important story about an exceptional human who was singing her mind at a pivotal moment in 20th-century pop-culture history.

Where a lot of films, particularly in this genre, fall apart in the third act, Scream 2022 holds out for a satisfying payoff. But Scream 2022 spends more time winking to the audience than building tension. And for a horror film, tension is a trope too significant to be overlooked. Even if it is just one more requel to add to the list.

Esthetically perched somewhere between a low-budget TV biopic and a soap opera - with occasional flourishes of bonkers-cheesiness worthy of cult status - Aline is the Celine Dion hagiography no one could have dreamed up except its director.

Despite some exemplary action sequences, including an impressive chase scene through the streets of Paris and into the subterranean tubes, The 355 fails to shed the tropes of male gaze and the kickass female fetishes of Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels, and every film Luc Besson has made with a female lead.

A lavish, deeply silly movie targeted at the adolescent girl market, The King’s Daughter features Pierce Brosnan as The Sun King, Louis XIV, looking like an aging glam rock star, traipsing about the Palace of Versailles in a wavy wig and pouffy sleeves.

Oscar-nominated Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), with his powerful and perceptive tale A Hero, shows us universalities, from the complexities of human nature to the modernized way we’ve manipulated right and wrong.

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

The film is blessedly short, which does allow for its quirky pace and oddball plotting to play out without exhausting the viewer’s curiosity, even if it is just a series of head-scratching WTF? scenes leading to nowhere.

Okita keeps a firm grip on the film's action, maneuvering the story through its layers of twists and possibilities without putting too much of a strain on our disbelief.

With brilliant work by Colman, The Lost Daughter is a haunting work about choices, motherhood, and memory.

Death to Metal is something of a fresh breath of stale air. In a genre long familiar with demonizing nuns, having an evil priest is a nice change of habit.

Led by performances by Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, the production makes this story of treachery, murder and the psychological cost of crossing moral boundaries feel both era specific, and frighteningly modern.

Madcap, complex, and already controversial — bursting with fabulous acting from two newcomers and some of the best cameos of the year — it’s a character study, a (sort of) coming-of-age story, a platonic rom-com, and a tribute to life in the suburban San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles where Anderson grew up, among other things. In short, it’s one of the most exhilarating movies of the year.

The Matrix Resurrections is an incoherent, narratively sloppy mess.

If you were never interested in medieval Danish history, it’s unlikely that director Charlotte Sieling’s historical drama, Margrete: Queen of the North, will change your mind. Still, there are rewards to be found in this lavishly produced and well-acted costume drama, led by Danish actress Trine Dyrholm.

The King's Man takes known characters and events perverting truth with fiction. It's an amusing enough exercise even as it can jog free a few lost but freely interpreted high-school history lessons.

Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.

Baker has pitched this as a dark comedy. And thanks to the relentless energy of Simon Rex, the film feels like a comedy.

It’s not clear what Clooney’s hope for his film was, but presumably it was grander than what lands on the screen.

Throughout, Rasmussen never loses focus on the humanity. He’s telling the story, not of a refugee, but of a fellow human being whom he knows personally. The rapport between the two, the quiet honesty with which Amin speaks and the respectful and obviously deeply affectionate way in which Rasmussen tells the story, makes this film something special.

Visually opulent as only a Guillermo del Toro movie can be with gorgeously detailed, period-perfect costumes and interiors and a marquee cast, the noir thriller Nightmare Alley checks all the grand boxes of the genre. Yet the film feels emotionally inert, stacked with unsympathetic, strangely uncharismatic characters that defy empathy. Or worse: defy abiding interest.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is a comfort-food present to long-time fans, like a cross-over episode of one or more beloved TV series, with winks, call-backs, trivia, cameos, super-villains and copious destruction.

Given the devotion Ball continues to inspire in fans, it was perhaps too great a challenge for anyone to live up to casting expectations. Still, Being the Ricardos hits all the right notes, making these larger-than-life people seem at once pointedly human and even more ground-breaking than ever.

Running a long 145 minutes, it’s bleakly cartoonish polemic with few laughs or dramatic peaks, despite a climactic mad-as-hell speech from DiCaprio, some ineffectual pantomiming from Streep, and some third-act forced solemnity.

Agnes is a genre breaker that veers into unanticipated areas of drama, some of it absurd, some street-wise, and yet inescapably entertaining.

Though not a deep musical dive and offering little new to Wilson’s well-documented and extreme biography, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road is an welcome chance to spend time in the company of pop music genius. And it’s a reminder how surprisingly simple geniuses can be.

This West Side Story retains its ‘50s feel, while polishing this venerable gem of a musical to a greater gleam.