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.”