So what’s the problem? For starters, It: Chapter Two is an ass-numbing two hours and 50 minutes. That’s a good half-hour longer than Chapter One, proving the adage that less is definitely more. The dragging pace diminishes the film’s ability to hold us in its grip.

Official Secrets remains a compelling tale of injustice on an individual and global level. It’s a shame that it hasn’t been told better, but give it points for being told at all.

The wow factor of Ready or Not helps you jump the hurdles of any plot predictability.

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles makes itself essential viewing by chronicling the turbulent genesis of a global sensation. But its real miracle is demonstrating why it continues to entertain and illuminate, from Tokyo to a Brooklyn middle school where an African-American girl now plays the role of Tevye’s wife, Golde, and back to Broadway.

A fun ride, spiked with touching gravity, is not a shabby way to end the movie summer. Thanks to Jillian Bell, a comic force of nature with real dramatic chops, that’s what you get in Brittany Runs a Marathon.

American Factory sets out to chart what’s supposed to be a test run for the future of the auto industry and an example of positive international relations. It ends up capturing a cross-cultural car wreck in slow motion.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call what Brügger delivers here a documentary, exactly — it’s a “true” crime story with an emphasis on the quotes.

This eyepopper from Russian director-writer-cinematographer-editor Victor Kossakovsky (¡Vivan Las Antípodas!) is like nothing you’ve ever seen. His free-form documentary on water opens by scaring us to death.

It’s the human devastation that gets short shrift in a movie that turns the hot, hilarious, out-for-blood Bernadette into the thing she hates most: conventional.

Sure it’s cornball, but Chadha revels in it. You will, too, as the movie becomes an irresistible blast of pure feeling.

Good Boys rides highest on the teamwork of its three young stars.

Whether the climax, which veers close to magical realism and even closer to cloying, undoes the good will its built up will defend on the filmgoer. But for a long while, the tour these unlikely dreamers take you on is worth the trip. Samuel Clemens would have approved.

What eventually emerges is a peerless portrait of collective trauma — a devastating look at how this law not only sociologically gutted a country but made everyone complicit in the crime.

The proceedings are raised when Hodge is onscreen, using every nuanced look and gesture to jump the hurdles of a banal script and reveal the pain tearing up Banks. Having made a mark in films like "Straight Outta Compton" and "Hidden Figures," and on TV in "City on a Hill," Hodge hits new heights of commitment.

The pity is that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark will mostly be seen by jaded genre completists and nostalgic fortysomethings. Wrong demographic. You owe it to your kids to take them to this. It’s training-wheels horror done right.

Even when Light of My Life feels like it’s straining under the heaviness of its storytelling, there’s something about the way he guides us to an inevitable endgame that suggests the filmmaker knows what he’s doing. It’s not a pretty picture he paints here. But it makes you want Affleck to keep picking up that brush.

The Kitchen is deadly serious — and worse, deadly dull, even when it tries to act tough by laying on the violence and a heaping side of gore.

This is Williams’ spotlight, and it’s worth slogging through some of the soapier-to-sludgier aspects to watch her ply her craft

When the movie stalls, it’s Enzo to the rescue. Since the film covers a decade in the lives of its characters, two dogs take turns playing Enzo, at age 2 and 9. They’re both picks of the litters. And Ventimiglia contributes an emotional honesty that serves him well even when the plot sinks into marshmallow.

Whatever this is, it’s not a movie — it’s a product more deserving of a road test than a review.

It’s riveting from start to finish.

The swerve into bizarre melodrama in the final third knocks the film permanently off course, reducing a potentially rich examination of religious extremism into a missed opportunity.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent creates a woman’s revenge tale fueled by a righteous anger at the evil men do. There’s not a whit of audience coddling. You’ve been warned.

Poetic is a word that goes thrown around easily and abundantly, especially when it comes to documentaries that forego any sort of standard interview-clip-context-rinse-repeat format. But it’s hard to think of a better adjective to describe the early sequences of Honeyland.

The actor has muted his usual um-ah-YES speech tics and other telltale Goldblumian gestures to a large degree, which works nicely against Sheridan’s revelatory performance. Their existential despair among the mental healthcare white-coat crowd plays and feeds off each other — it’s like discovering a "Waiting for Godot" production nestled in the middle of "Titicut Follies."

There are times when Skin can seem naïve and manipulative, almost in the same breath, which takes the film perhaps too long to get its bearings. But Bell is the binding force that locks us into Widner’s tumultuous journey.

You know you’re in the hands of professionals here — Noujaim was a director or co-director on such solid nonfiction works as "Startup.com" (2001), "Control Room" (2004), and "The Square" (2013) — even if the proceedings sometimes come off like Muckraking Moviemaking 101.

All the actors, in roles large and small, bring their A games to the film. Two hours and 40 minutes can feel long for some. I wouldn’t change a frame.