It’s still undeniably clever, buoyed by a great cast who know what to do with this sharp satire of world politics, but it feels a bit like a lark, a movie that is content with a chuckle instead of really biting its teeth into some of its complex subject matter.

Megalopolis is a film drenched in its science fiction and classical influences, captured with insane filmmaking choices that often place shallow performances against a backdrop of deep cinematic flourish.

On the whole, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure movie magic— his smartly interwoven urban machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the sorrow that is bound to rise to the surface.

Aside from its breathtaking underwater cinematography, Kim’s documentary is very plain in execution. At home and on the land, she uses simple camerawork to follow their everyday lives and a basic straight-to-camera interview style to capture their stories.

Regardless of its structural flaws, “Rez Ball” manages to be inspirational without ever feeling pandering.

It’s designed to quicken your pulse and your mind at the same time, which is too rare in genre filmmaking. It’s also gorgeously made, and wonderfully performed.

One could watch The Wild Robot with the sound off entirely and still have a rewarding experience—turn it on and you have one of the best animated films of the decade.

We Live in Time is a film that looks you in the eyes as it tugs on your heartstrings, a movie that would almost certainly fall apart with lesser performers to make this kind of shallow script feel organic. Luckily, this one has Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

When it comes to broad comedies and unabashed melodramas, I’m usually not satisfied unless the moviemakers commit to exhausting whatever genre movie clichés or tropes that they’re futzing about with. The Greatest of All Time comes close enough to that ideal and on a fairly consistent basis.

The Substance works as well as it does because of Moore’s unbridled performance as a woman struggling with self-hatred, society’s treatment of her, and a newfound dependency on a miracle drug.

It may seem fragmented, elusive, or “arty” to modern audiences who aren’t into older movies and have no reference point for what they’re watching. Hopefully not, though, because it’s an often profound and touching documentary that engages your attention differently than movies usually do.

It’s passable for an easy watch and some uncomfortable chuckles but is bearable only on behalf of Hunter’s loyal antagonism while falling short just about everywhere else.

The film offers no easy answer for their situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden.

The Thicket may enthrall those Tubi watchers looking for an icy, gunslinging thriller that wears its savagery and mercilessness with ghoulish, gruesome pride (the same folks who dig those DIY hood movies might get a kick of this). But the unlimited amount of Sturm and Drang on display will turn away those looking for a fun, engaging shoot-’em-up–like readers of the guy who wrote the book this bad ol’ time is based on.

This strange and creative approach to storytelling and family therapy is a small wonder to see in action.

Zephyr-light and plenty zany, Michael Duignan’s “The Paragon” serves up space-time shenanigans with a smile on its face, in a manner quaintly reminiscent of sci-fi and fantasy B-movies from a bygone era—think “Krull,” “Flash Gordon,” and “Masters of the Universe”—when stilted action sequences, preposterous plots, and kitschy costume design added up to mad spectacles of cheesy, cornball grandeur.

My First Film is very emotional, but it’s also filled with ideas about cinema, being a woman, and creating art. Anger is willing to acknowledge her flaws and shortsightedness, and brave enough to recognize it is our flaws that make us artists, not our perfection.

I can only recommend “Don’t Turn Out the Lights” so much, mostly because the characterizations and the dialogue are so cliched and unlovable that it’s often hard to enjoy all the twists and turns that Fickman (“Race to Witch Mountain”) tiptoes past throughout this diverting Choose Your Own Adventure genre exercise.

Screenwriter Jim Beggarly deftly combines believable characters with a solid narrative structure.

Gariépy reveals very little about her character’s state of mind in these moments, and this ambiguity is what makes “Red Rooms” so intriguing.

Anchored by three of the best performances in a very long time and a graceful script from Jacobs himself, this is one of the finest films of the year, a movie that moves me so much that I can get emotional just thinking about it. Because it’s not just a showcase for powerhouse acting at its finest. Because it feels true in ways that movies about death are rarely allowed to be.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a return to form for director Tim Burton only in the sense that, like Burton early in his career, it’s not interested in form except at the immediate level of the image and the scene. It’s an overstuffed toy bag of a movie: every minute or two, the director digs into the bag and produces a new toy.

This is neither a trifle nor a truly Major Motion Picture; it’s an entertainment maybe in the sense that Graham Greene used the term. But one needn’t be so hifalutin about the matter.

Most of all, Rebel Ridge is just a reminder of how thrilling it can be to see a genre piece with this level of artistry.

Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.

We could use much more insight into what made [Reagan] “the great communicator,” but this movie is a poor communicator about the history and the man.

The interviews are the best part of the film, which lacks the sleek, focused, concentrated quality of the best Merchant Ivory movies but succeeds on its own terms as sort of a “hangout” movie, non-fiction division.

The Deliverance would have worked just fine if it had functioned solely as a domestic drama infused with the thorny, real-world issues of addiction, poverty and racism.