The quiet character-based scenes are often mesmerizing, as are the dreamy sequences where time seems to stand still. When the plot makes its demands, the spell is broken.

It’s hard enough to watch performers struggle to pump up thin material, even though the main cast’s members all seem capable of the physical business required of their roles. It’s harder to watch as the makers of this scrappy, low-budget production give away too much whenever they rely on effects-driven action or drama.

This film doesn’t rumble through its 156-minute runtime; it flies by. And though “F1” has little to say about the sport’s past, present, or future, the propulsive ride it engineers isn’t a wasted diversion.

It works not because of its focus on what the wildly famous British band Blur was in the ‘90s (that’s been done in other docs), but on what they are now in the 2020s. It’s about aging as much as it’s about “Song 2,” and about trying to find something that hasn’t faded away inside of an artist.

Schmaltzy yet sincere, “Elio,” the latest from Pixar, is as predictable as they come but as tender as they can get.

Stern, herself deaf, crafts an intimate and moving documentary that takes us through the legendary life of Marlee Matlin, uncovering a legacy of advocacy, activism, and perseverance.

Familiar Touch is a gorgeous drama with an open, aching heart.

The Queen of My Dreams is a well-intentioned but tonally all-over-the-place look at how frustrating things can get when you’re a queer Muslim trying to live your best life.

Inspired by the humor of Christopher Guest comedies, found footage horrors, and “cabin in the woods”-style scares, it’s a deliciously unhinged mix that works more often than it doesn’t.

The 95-minute runtime also aids the dramedy’s success: Short, silly, and sweet, the perfect recipe for audience satisfaction.

Bride Hard makes it easy to grab your girls, some snacks (or drinks), and enjoy a little fluffy fun at the cinema.

28 Years Later is a deeply earnest film, a picture whose sincerity is initially off putting until it’s endearing.

Maple and her team succeed in giving us a compelling self-portrait of Harlem, which is still a pretty rare thing to see. She also tells the story of how so many souls were lost between the giddy optimism of the early ’70s and the harsh dawn of Reagan’s morning in America.

With “SALLY,” Costantini delivers a doc that speaks to the heart and goals of someone who redefined what it means to break barriers.

The premise is innately powerful and offers a lot of room to bring the world beyond the arena into the arena, expanding the horizon of the sports picture. There isn’t anyone anywhere who can’t relate to “Tatami” on some level, even if they’ve never competed in sports.

The mission statement is right there in the title. Whether it succeeds will be up to the viewer. As is so often the case with these types of non-fiction films, the people who stand to benefit the most from watching it are likely to avoid it after hearing what it’s trying to do.

If you’re seeing it with hopes of glittery escapism, based on its A-list stars and a trailer that prominently features a cover of Madonna’s “Material Girl,” be prepared that the result is a little sadder, a little more substantial. And that’s much of what’s so wonderful about it.

Michael Pearce’s grim thriller “Echo Valley” is a melodramatic mess redeemed by the performances of the film’s exceptional cast.

The movie’s not a barn-burner or future classic, but new Westerns are thin on the ground these days, and this ultimately is a better-than-decent one.

In many ways, the documentary is as unprecedented as Ardern’s career.

Despondent and gloomy even while it’s against a backdrop of bucolic beauty, director Yûta Shimotsu’s debut feature “Best Wishes to All” is the type of unsettling, high-concept horror film that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it with unforgiving verve.

Dialogue does most of the heavy-lifting here, just like in “Love”, the first and most recently released entry of Haugerud’s thematically related series. Haugerud’s knack for visual storytelling also makes a difference, specifically in how he presents the city of Oslo and its features as an enriching backdrop.

The film falls victim to the subtlety of a ten-car pile-up. Neither the characters, all archetypal, nor the sequencing of the story, choppy and ham-fisted, inspire any engagement in its subject matter.

It’s not an especially deep script in terms of character, but there’s something inspiring about seeing a comedy production in which everyone is on the same page, harmoniously working off each other’s personalities like a choir.

It’s a film that’s constantly painting in the lines. If you’re going to remake a film, especially one as recently beloved as this one, it requires something new in the tracing.

Although charming, the slight “I Don’t Understand You” struggles to sustain its spark. It’s a series of silly events that get progressively ridiculous and bloodier.

The documentary “We Are Guardians” tracks the constant conflict between the ecological and spiritual significance of this crucial section of Brazil and the commercial forces that brazenly invade to strip it of its resources.

Nina Conti’s delightfully crude and disarmingly heartwarming directorial debut, “Sunlight,” adds an intriguing hook to the two-wayward-souls-on-a-road-trip subgenre.

The documentary features some archival footage, but its power lies in the vivid, heartfelt interviews with the surviving twins and Richter and her husband, who respond to sensitive and sympathetic questions from filmmakers Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill.

Ritual cuts a lot of corners on screen and in the story.

As it is, “The Gardener” suggests that Van Damme still doesn’t know how to both give his audience what they want and show off his range.

Barron’s Cove is a pulpy thriller awkwardly tied to a soapy story of bad dads and the wreckage they leave behind.

What Trachtenberg seems to get about the Predator franchise, between “Prey” and this, is that the central appeal of the Predator is conceptual: How would we fare, we at the top of the food chain, if placed in competition with a hunter far more well-equipped than we?

This is a musical movie, not just because it features musical numbers. It weaves its spell not merely by what it does, but how it moves, and what it chooses to say or not say, and when it decides to proceed to the next scene.

Ballerina is a halfway decent action movie that will suffer because it lives in the massive shadow of John Wick, one of the best modern franchises.

It may not meet the high watermark of the brothers’ first outing, but “Bring Her Back” is still quite the wild ride and shows the pair still have plenty of spooky tricks up their bloody sleeves.

Armstrong’s version of tech-bro bantering is a lot more literate and zingy than actual tech-bro bantering would be, otherwise the picture would be rather a bore. After a while, it begins to evanesce, like ice-breath does in the mountain air.

Your enjoyment of “Tornado” depends on how much you want to root for thinly drawn characters who don’t look strong enough to carry an entire movie. They can and they can’t, depending on how patient you’re feeling.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a romantic comedy for the quiet, thoughtful lovers who yearn for the sincerity of the past.

Ghost Trail is an intimate study of trauma that plays with the gripping suspense of a globetrotting spy thriller.

The movie is so relentless in its desire to pull everything together and not leave any threads dangling that it sprints through scenes where you might’ve wanted it to linger, rushes through the final tournament, and rarely gives any character or subplot its full attention.

When future generations of media scholars need an example of a work that gathered up and displayed with peerless skill all of the techniques yet devised for a new medium—in this case, second-screen entertainment, which superficially resembles cinema or television, but is meant not to make any demands on anybody—”Fountain of Youth” might be the work that they they name-check.

If the characters aren’t three-dimensional and the plot is so predictable it creaks into motion by the five-minute mark. you haven’t done the work necessary to pull in your audience. You’ve got to give us something to hang our cowboy hats on.

The Surrender accomplishes a lot with a sketch-sized story and matching compositional agility and precision. It’s short (less than 90 minutes!) and sweet and the best kind of upsetting.

Bathed in darkness and warm tones, “The New Boy” feels like a classic melodrama with modern sensibilities.

Problem is, this doesn’t reinvent the formula as much as follows it by rote, which makes it an enormous step down.

Children new to the story will enjoy some gross-out humor, slapstick naughtiness, and the reassuring theme that families of all kinds, including those we choose, can be devoted to the idea of ohana.

It’s an efficient, clever genre mash-up that works because of how well Byrne blocks its action, employs an old-fashioned score, and directs his actors to visceral performances.

Similar to Lee’s public persona, “Highest 2 Lowest” is a chaos agent of a movie, the kind of lavish, unpredictable crime thriller that zips when you expect it to zoom.

Roger Ebert famously described cinema as a machine that generates empathy. This movie is that machine: a relentless engine field by idealism and craft.

It’s not just about the divisiveness of 2020; it’s designed to be divisive itself in 2025. To that end, even if you hate it, it’s kind of done its job.

Buoyed by a traditionally spectacular ensemble, The Phoenician Scheme feels unlikely to be anyone’s favorite Wes Anderson flick, but it’s so easy to like that it’s equally difficult to hate it.

While the autobiographical elements are incredibly light, there’s enough humility here to make the viewer surrender to the film’s melodic charms.

There are laughs aplenty, even as “Sister Midnight” begins to lose creative steam, with the wheels falling off, and the further it falls into the repetitive macabre. But Apte remains the glue holding it all together as the film imagines its prototype of the monstrous feminine.

The setting is more than a century ago, but the longing for love and the struggle for intimacy are universally human.

Somehow, Yamanaka finds a balance for her complicated character to navigate her tantrums and tender moments.

Love remains distinct, given its unsparing view of people as flawed and not very sure of themselves.

By taking itself so seriously, “Final Reckoning” loses the cheeky ingredient in the recipe. It’s less fun, and that’s truly disappointing for a series that has given us some of the most exhilarating setpieces in action history.

Hurry Up Tomorrow takes its star’s caterwauling about how hard it is to be famous and heartbroken for granted, and expects its audience to roll with every self-inflicted wound. It’s vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity as a tale of an artist reckoning with fame.

It’s a tour-de-force of voluptuously bloody slapstick that knows that we know how these movies work.

This is a quiet classic. Every choice is just right.

At heart, Caught By the Tides is an experimental romantic drama, though that makes it sound unapproachable and a little gimmicky. It’s neither, thankfully, and that’s largely thanks to Jia’s typical focus on the material signs of time’s relentless passage.

Mamet’s stark existentialism comes to a shudder-inducing yet mordantly satisfying head in this expertly rendered picture. The text might not be vintage Mamet, but it’s a real meal.

The sitcommy scenes of family arguments and droll wisecracks clash with the grimmer aesthetic Carnahan wants to give it, so “Shadow Force” feels like an action film serving two masters and fulfilling neither’s needs. It’s laughable, all right, but in all the wrong ways.

Sew Torn marks an auspicious debut for MacDonald.

Absolute Dominion is a high-concept sci-fi flick whose many pieces move but rarely settle in satisfying positions.

It isn’t a prestige film; it’s the kind of story that reminds us we can heal through connections to the past and each other.

It it will be refreshing when filmmakers stop going back to the well and begin to make newer observations about young women, making these stories feel more unique. In the meantime, “Summer of 69” is a fun, chill time.

With “The Moogai,” Bell wrestles with the horrors of the past and acknowledges the history of the Aboriginal children who never had a chance at a future.

In filmmaker Yael Melamede’s biographical film about her mother, pioneering Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede, the two ways of seeing the world and telling a story come together.

It’s a story we’ve heard many times, but it always feels triumphant, similar to Marcella’s approach to cooking: it’s “very simple but not easy.”

A kind of mash-up of “Interstellar” and “Stranger Things,” the extraterrestrial coming-of-age sci-fi flick “Watch the Skies” is a passably enjoyable story about loss.

I’m not convinced that “Friendship” is the corrosive comic masterpiece that early festival raves primed us for. But it’s impressive, not just for the leaps it makes but the assurance it displays.

Last Bullet puts a decisive capper on the previous movies’ action-intensive gearhead-cop saga, though it’s hard to say how much closure one might need from these characters. They’re charming enough thanks to a committed ensemble cast, but nothing about the movie’s by-the-numbers narcotics cops vs. dirty cops story demands further extension.

It’s a mid-budget riff on “Bullet Train,” after all—but meet it on its altitude, and it’s a bloody, funny good time.

The only request you can make of a documentary is for it to be as interesting as its subject. Alex Ross Perry’s slippery experimental mockumentary “Pavements,” a film about the 1990s slacker band behind Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, is as gleefully idiosyncratic and as suspicious of mainstream success as the band and its fans.

The true heart of “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted” is not simply the impressive biographical bullet points, but rather the gift of witnessing its subject being unapologetically himself.

The film’s cinematography is the best thing about it. There are solid performances, some believably purplish dime-novel dialogue, and other compensatory pleasures, but “Rust” is a saddlebag full of scenes and moments borrowed from great Westerns and embellished.

Bonjour Tristesse works best as a sustained mood, as an evocation of long summer days that might not actually exist outside Eric Rohmer films and fashion magazine photo shoots.

Ultimately, “The Surfer” proves to be not much more than an audience endurance test that offers up plenty of upsetting imagery and moments of emotional torment but never quite manages to make them pay off.

It is remarkable how often movies, which usually take years from the first word of the script to the opening date, can be uncannily timely.

Electra‘s subject matter is heavy (the title should clue you in), and the emotions are very dark. Still, the film itself shimmers with a kind of free-floating hilarity, and the team’s sense of creativity and pleasure is catching.

If we were supposed to take this movie literally, the metaphors would feel unforgivably heavy-handed. But if we think of it as a poetic, impressionistic meditation on life, death, love, art, and, yes, light, with excellent performances from the entire cast, we can be invited into its world.

Said maintains plausibility throughout, never plotting far-fetched tribulations, but just outrageous enough to cause the viewer to cringe nervously.

Director Joshua Erkman shows promise throughout “A Desert,” his first feature, but his movie’s unyielding scenario, co-written with Bossi Baker, makes it hard to want to hang around while thinly drawn characters vaguely establish the movie’s themes.

Written by Franklin, “Salvable” struggles to find its footing as both a family and crime drama, but it does one better than the other.

The entire movie feels like something out of a dream, probably one that struggles to work through something real that keeps getting hijacked and twisted by the mischievous unconscious.

Thunderbolts is an odd duck of a superhero flick, one that almost leans into the skid of the MCU, and, by doing so, might actually straighten it out. It can’t quite shake loose of the consistent problems in the MCU’s recent output (turn a light on!). Still, it challenges blockbuster fans in unexpected ways, presenting them with richer acting than we’ve seen in these films in some time and, perhaps most shockingly, a final act that’s emotionally grounded instead of just “CGI things go boom.”

Even those who admired the “Raid” films for their style and heedlessness might find this to be little more than an accumulation of action movie cliches that they have seen enacted to much greater effect in other and certainly better films.

Told in a style that could be called old-fashioned due to its lack of cynicism in an era when heartfelt melodrama is often mocked more than celebrated, it’s fair to call this engaging drama a throwback, a movie that wants to sweep you away on the back of its passion and heartbreak.

April is as exquisite as it is excruciating: a film that will linger with you long afterward, but you’ll probably never want to watch it again.

Tsang has made a small, affecting, and studiously minimalist film here, with lived-in and tactile visual and design elements signaling a major auteur in the making.

Magic Farm is eye-catching with its high saturation and punchy editing choices, but the seduction of bright and bold visuals is incompatible with Ulman’s unwieldy script. Her hands are full, and oftentimes clarity slips through her fingers.

One is hard-pressed to understand why grown-up thrillers like this one don’t get bigger pushes, but if you’re a “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” type when it comes to genre, do have a look at this. It’ll very likely hit an old-school sweet (or sour) spot or two.

Drop Dead City marshals a tremendous amount of information and footage, moving at a swift clip with the help of well-chosen interview snippets and deftly cut montages.

The script, by James Handel and director Matt Winn, is tightly constructed.

It feels like all the good ideas during the pre-production of “Until Dawn” were sanded down until the film lost almost all of its edge, wit, and actual horror. All that’s left is a depressingly repetitive exercise in hyperactive editing, overheated sound design, and forgettable characters.

With Bullet Train Explosion, you get a straight-down-the-line crowdpleaser, replete with duty-bound authority figures in well-pressed uniforms, anxious and often self-absorbed passengers, Macgyver-like problem-solving, seat-of-your-pants close calls, that sort of thing. There are no real surprises here, just what you’d want from this sort of cheeseball entertainment.