Inspired but overwrought, “Scarlet,” an anime adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, begins with stunning style before falling off a major cliff.

This new holiday chiller mostly idles when it should charge at its most unsound ideas.

The whole film feels like a production of calling in favors, as the relatively hotshot cast it drew seems incongruent with its content: a clichéd story of a disordered family over the holidays.

Not Without Hope is a respectful and impactful dramatic interpretation that feels true to the real-life events.

At its heart, it’s an assured tale of queer resistance, blended with the supernatural rhythms of the folktale, and it feels suitably transgressive for its gender-nonconforming characters. It’s sweet, and affirming, and hopefully opens a few people’s eyes (and hearts).

Merv is heartwarming, in the abstract, but the heat generated is strictly lukewarm.

Whatever your feelings about Tarantino and his work, this is a tremendous visceral experience, with radiant colors, slate-somber black-and-white, and geysers of crimson blood. To quote the end of another Tarantino film, it just might be his masterpiece.

This is a hypnotic, invigorating film, and a step up for the duo—much like the diamonds that shimmer so seductively through their frames, it has a cold, bright, gem-like brilliance.

Julia Jackman‘s beguiling feminist fairytale “100 Nights of Hero” is an enchanting tribute to the power of storytelling.

It’s not just another ghost story; it’s a story of malevolence that happens to be told through home recordings, YouTube clips, and CCTV footage. Hall and Gandersman play a little fast and loose with their genre—as so many of these movies do—but it’s forgivable given the pace they maintain in their blissfully short film (under 90 minutes with credits).

Even with all the sexual trauma, The Chronology of Water manages the impossible, making a lot of the sex Lidia has as an adult look not just fun and playful, but mind-blowing and revelatory. Reclaiming your sexuality after having it stolen from you as a child is a huge, huge deal.

The film does not offer excuses for violence, and neither should we; instead, it prompts reflection on where compassion and control are needed and where the pursuit of them falters.

Sorrentino and cinematographer Daria D’Antonio color coordinate each and every frame to a fare-thee-well. Even scenes set in an Italian prison have real visual flair.

Come Closer is a unique take on grief, containing insight into projection and transference, as well as the way obsession is almost a relief from having to face the unfaceable. Nesher’s script belabors the point at times, but as a director, she captures the rhythms of Tel Aviv’s social swirl, the alcohol-spiked bell jar of clubs and dancing and music, all the things that make up the manic nightlife of a lost twentysomething who has no idea the party is already over.

This is filmed theater in the purest sense.

One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty.

It’s a profoundly Catholic work, whose slippery sense of sin and living instils great confusion and consternation to those occupying the narrative’s solemn monastery setting.

It’s a predictable and straightforward accounting of events, featuring interviews with 1985 stalwarts Mike Singletary, Willie Gault, Jim McMahon, and Gary Fencik (who all look great some four decades later), and a treasure trove of archival footage in era-perfect, beautifully imperfect analog—slightly grainy, with warm color palettes and that “mildly smeared” look that screams mid-1980s.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 not only has a more involved story, but also features more engaged filmmaking throughout, with more camera setups and visual brio.

While “Oh. What. Fun” has an excellent director, Michael Showalter, who also co-scripted, some nice music, and top performers, including Danielle Brooks as a delivery driver Claire meets on the road, and the exquisitely lovely Havana Rose Liu, very appealing as Jeanne’s daughter, it keeps undermining our sympathy with off-kilter stakes and inert efforts at humor.

Aniskovich clearly loves her subjects, but the lack of tension is noticeable and a bit of a letdown, even if everyone else remains engaging and worth following.

Unlike its predecessor, “Troll 2” doesn’t have enough canned dramatic or comedic incidents to make it seem particularly eventful.

Safdie’s daring choices merge with the best performance of Timothee Chalamet’s career for a story of a man who thinks he’s the best in the world at something, and that thinking is as important as actually being it.

These movies are not WHOdunits as much as WHYdunits, and it’s everything that’s under the murder and its resolution that makes this sermon so entertaining and so powerful.

David Freyne’s charming afterlife comedy “Eternity” takes a simple premise of a person forced to choose between two prospective suitors and elaborates the concept with clever world-building and emotional relationship dynamics.

By fashioning a kinetic work that pulls together references and sources from Black literature, music, politics, and meme culture, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” stands as a seismic intellectual awakening.

What comes across most vividly in this movie, ultimately, is the fact that what happened almost half a century ago is a trauma that still weighs heavily on the people of Vietnam. And many Americans.

An intriguing doc that juggles ’90s nostalgia with an optimism for student journalism that avoids over-sentimentality.