Whatever its weaknesses, contemporary parents who want a nontoxic Western to show their children could hardly find better than “Spirit Untamed.” It takes the idea at the end of genre master John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and virtually rides off in its own, counter-mythic direction with it.

Although much of the footage is unseen, perhaps the freshest part of Apocalypse ’45 is hearing the veterans debate whether the U.S. should have dropped the atomic bombs, and how America has progressed in the decades since.

It presents a mostly sympathetic portrait of Mildred Gillars, the American actress who made propaganda radio broadcasts for the Nazis during World War II. Not an impossible task, but a tough one that the best efforts of producer-star Meadow Williams and director Michael Polish couldn’t make persuasive.

Oslo ultimately acknowledges that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is anything but resolved, and shows why even this first, limited step toward settling it was so immensely difficult. Whether we’re in the mood to find it entertaining right now remains in dispute.

Plan B is ultimately a gross-out sex comedy that has more than sex on its mind. It seems odd to consider a film with such familiar beats radical, but the word fits here, in the best sense.

The idea of a worldwide calamity returning with a vengeance is an awful prospect that audiences, at this moment in particular, might find dreadful. So, it’s especially easy to sympathize with the characters in these early moments. Yet after the opening, A Quiet Place II doesn’t show us anything new, and soon the movie’s energy flags.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

Port Authority is never in a hurry. It often feels like it’s being lived as you watch. That won’t satisfy viewers who need a tight narrative with recognizable beats, but if you’re looking for an immersive love story that takes you places you might not know, that challenges your conception of what romance looks and feels like, Port Authority is a great place to stop.

Art is either alive or dead, and this movie is emphatically and exuberantly living, energized by what can only truly be described as love. The movie’s love is for the place, for the characters and for all their dreams. In movies, as in life, love is rare. It makes everything better, and it must be respected.

Dream Horse is full of heart and interest. Throughout, Collette makes us believe in the human-animal connection between Jan and Dream Alliance, which is touching, mysterious and deep.

Bana is rock-solid throughout, able to convey sensitivity and moral probity through a not quite impassive facade — never overdoing it, never underdoing it — and yet fulfilling his duties as the movie’s locus of feeling and meaning.

In the end, the power of Final Account resides in the way it shows how human nature reacts to lies, propaganda and state-sanctioned atrocity. Some people, looking for an excuse to do evil, will jump right in. A very tiny faction will risk all to fight against them.

Snyder served as his own director of photography for the first time and, aided by terrific effects makeup and digital production design, he’s created a sprawling graveyard Vegas of detailed, decaying awesomeness.

At its heart, it’s a darkly comic drama about a man trained to be a killing machine who must rediscover his own humanity before his daughter loses hers. Along the way, a family of quirky characters is formed.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

Those Who Wish Me Dead pretty much works on the gut-level way it was intended, but it gets extra credit for being unintentionally funny.

Aside from the disgusting parts, Spiral is a fairly decent thriller.

If nothing else, The Human Factor demonstrates the tall task that awaits President Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Good luck.

If Monster occasionally shows its YA roots with flashes of simplicity, it also tells a lean, propulsive story with style and grace.

If Wrath of Man has a weakness, it’s that even when everything is explained, it doesn’t quite make sense. But a movie like this is about pleasure in the moment, and on that score, it delivers.

Undergirding it all is a light but ever present tension between living up to the philosophy the men were taught as teenagers and making their way through the realities and compromises of American adulthood. Tran’s not preachy about that, but the filmmaker’s killer move is showing how his heroes’ souls can be as fragile as their aging bones, yet resilient when the situation demands.

Here Today is a weird case — not mediocre, not lukewarm, but genuinely bad and good, cringe-worthy and moving. Take this as a recommendation, and a warning.

The film’s overall aesthetic is a pleasing blend of naturalistic drawings, cartoonier designs and Heavy Metal magazine futurism.

Based on Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 novel All Things Cease to Appear, Things Heard & Seen is a slow burn, and it spends a fair amount of time strewing elements of other ghostly tales throughout the premises. But then it takes a turn, those elements gel, and the characters come into sharper focus.

This character study, which was nominated for two BAFTA Awards, including outstanding British film of the year, is Sharrock’s second full-length feature. That he could make a film so warm and wise early in his career bodes well for whatever comes next.

The Virtuoso covers well-worn territory — the assassin story is almost a genre unto itself — and director Nick Stagliano, hampered by a predictable script, can’t bring much new to the game.

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

As a woman struggling to define her own narrative, Yeo delivers a layered, heartbreaking performance. But she is ultimately ill-served by both the inertness of the story and Chen’s awkward approach to the material in the final half-hour (no spoilers here).

About Endlessness is like a bunch of Debbie Downer skits directed by Ingmar Begman, just not as entertaining.

Swedish documentarian Johan von Sydow lets Tim tell the story, mixing plentiful musical performances with narration drawn from Tim’s diaries (read solemnly by Weird Al Yankovic), illustrating the details with animation and a feast of vintage stock footage.

Those who just want to watch a cool, competent and only semi-dumb action movie, though, can thank god for small favors like that.

If you can buy the film’s unlikely core premise, you’ll be rewarded with persuasive speculative fiction in all its other aspects. Penna and company make it easy for audiences to do that, while putting four people whom they’ll come to really care about through all kinds of hell.

Beckwith, though, rallies with some memorable moments in the third trimester and nails the climactic scene with gut-wrenching efficiency. Her movie stays afloat because of Harrison (watch out for her in the future) and Helms, who both deliver a fitting finale that’s revelatory and emotionally satisfying.

Street Gang is a worthy celebration of a one-of-a-kind program. If you’re not careful, it might leave you humming your ABC’s.

Demon Slayer is sharply paced, colorful fun.

Farmers may wonder what the big deal is, but Gunda is quite a cinematic achievement whether you’re familiar with the livestock or not. Plus, the piglets, whom we see grow from birth to adolescence, alone are worth the price of admission.

Anyone wondering what 1960s TV show Ironside would have been like if Raymond Burr had been a dirty cop gets their answer courtesy of Morgan Freeman in the dreadful new thriller Vanquish.

Jeffrey Wolf’s exceptional documentary Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts seeks to tells its subject’s story in a deeply personal way, while also pulling back when needed to contextualize his work.

It’s an ode to the satisfactions of facing life head-on with whatever time you have left. And writer-director Maria Sødahl semi-autobiographical drama earns every iota of its hard-won uplift.

The likability of Lydia and Emily helps, but writer-director Ben Falcone’s tendency to milk emotion that isn’t there drags down the movie and some of the comic bits feel obvious and pushed.

The Man Who Sold His Skin may not be entirely believable, but its many great metaphors for multiple social ills create their own, withering truth. The film doesn’t ask us to turn our gaze away from the world’s ugly realities, but to see them in the very handsome images they inspired Ben Hania to make.

The technically elegant Voyagers, about a space colonization trip run amok, is easy enough to sit through, but it’s a story in need of more rocket fuel. There isn’t a bad scene in the movie, yet there isn’t a really good scene, either. It’s a quiet psychological thriller, even when it’s trying to stir mayhem.

Set amid a group of freshly arrived white army conscripts who will be sent to fight communist guerrillas along the Angolan border in apartheid-era South Africa, it’s a riveting portrait of a particular time and place while also being a broader assault on the type of pressure-cooker masculinity where torture, cruelty, humiliation and racism are the coins of the realm.

French Exit is worth seeing because it gives a juicy role to Michelle Pfeiffer, who is something to marvel at. But it’s a frustrating film because, as a whole, it’s just not nearly as good as its central performance.

Between the talking heads, Rothstein also uses kinetic imagery and spry cutting to keep the potentially eye-glazing subject matter as gripping as a true crime mystery, which it kind of was.

Beyond the superb acting, Concrete Cowboy gets a lot of mileage from its visually arresting riding scenes and its spot-on score, which is both haunting and inspirational.

Using footage mostly from the cameras of various passengers and crew, the documentary takes us inside the experience of being stuck inside a floating prison, unwanted by any port, as COVID cases and fears mount. It’s an experience you would not want to have directly, but it’s fascinating to watch.

If you’re looking for scenes of big, awful creatures fighting each other and knocking over skyscrapers — and for the spectacle of people scurrying below, running from the huge stomping feet — you will find little to dislike in Godzilla vs. Kong. It does its job. It’s a monster movie.

So while director Evgeny Afineevsky practically makes the case for Francis’ sainthood — immersing the viewer in a nonstop barrage of swelling violins and inspirational music, featuring interview after interview of people who have been touched personally by the pope — his bloated two-hour film leaves many unanswered questions.

As you enjoy the movie’s gleeful outrageousness, take a moment to appreciate the strategic sophistication of some of these bits. These scenes were well planned.

The best thing you can say about this “Moment” is that, at a breezy 92 minutes, it’s a brief one.

In the Taken movies, the hilarity of mild-mannered Neeson going on a family vacation with hand grenades in his suitcase was never acknowledged, but it was there and part of the fun. Here, the comedy is closer to the surface, thanks to the wit of Kolstad’s screenplay and of Ilya Naishuller’s direction.

Tom O’Connor’s script hits all the right notes, and Dominic Cooke’s direction brings out unspoken subtleties of the characters and their interactions.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League may not be a great film, but it has the madness, strangeness and obsessiveness of a real work of art.

As a piece of filmmaking, the trick of Operation Varsity Blues is that it provides first-rate entertainment even as it incites sputtering rage.

Other documentaries have made this point in grander, more artistic ways, but there is value in seeing this raw footage that accompanies an adolescence spent in front of the camera.

Come True should be an exhilarating discovery for anyone it doesn’t put to sleep. But even if you do find yourself nodding off a little during this deliberately paced, low-humming, sci-fi horror movie, that means it’s working, too.

It would be nice if there were more movies like this, but few have the talent to make them this well — to take a human scale story and make it feel, not bigger than life, but as grand-scale as life actually is.

By the end, “Coming 2 America” has us. It’s strange, these movies that create a warm feeling. It’s hard to say why or how. But when Murphy sits on the throne watching a bad lounge singer (also played by Murphy) perform “We Are Family,” it feels like the summation of the three decades of virtuosic silliness that Murphy has brought to the screen, and of all that has meant to us.

The Truffle Hunters takes us to a part of the world where time appears to have stood still.

My Salinger Year, which is basically The Devil Wears Prada set in the literary world, is a film that feels like it’s ready to take off at any moment, but stalls every time it tries to do anything.

It’s nothing groundbreaking, just good-humored bloody action directed at a frenetic pace, clocking in at about an hour and a half. Sometimes you need a little bit of fun, and Boss Level delivers.

Boogie has some hops. But its all-around game could use a little work.

Aside from being annoying, depressing and repulsive, Chaos Walking has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Doug Liman (“Go”) and takes place in a fully imagined other world. Plus, it stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, who are smart and watchable, and the movie does get better as it goes along.

Sure to be an instant animated classic as it expertly balances emotion, humor and social politics amid a backdrop of surreal, eye-popping visual beauty.

The film simply wouldn’t be much, however, without Cooke’s quick-witted performance. She’s formidable and disarming at the same time, all the time. The character’s always got a line and, usually, a good move for any situation.

Sponge on the Run is very much a members-only affair. Then again, three movies and several hundred TV episodes into a 22-year-old franchise, it’s not unreasonable to think the audience for this adventure is pretty well baked into the cake.

The new documentary, Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell was made in the spirit of the earlier work and the younger man, the hungry hustler hanging out on Brooklyn street corners with his friends.

A movie that seems to have been made by people who don’t understand the history, true nature or appeal of their iconic characters.

There are so many rich, colorful scenes that it’s a worthy watch just as an ethnographic record of our planet in a moment of time.

Setting political movies in the past is an easy, usually safe way to signal virtue. But with its eerie resonances of 2021 reports from Moscow to Washington, D.C., this monochrome aesthetic object looks like something that draws real blood.

Using movie clips, animation and news footage, Ascher creates his own alternate universe in A Glitch in the Matrix and explores phenomena such as the Mandela Effect, a real-life wonder in which masses of unconnected people claim to “remember” something that is simply not true.

This day-after-tomorrow fantasy, made before anybody had even heard of COVID-19, is touchingly romantic and emotionally credible. It’s an escape that resembles our current locked-down lives, with feelings as relatable as they are fictionally heightened.

The first feature by Rose Glass, Saint Maud delivers shocks with confidence.

Wright is perfect, and Edee is an interesting character for her to play, but it’s fair to say that when Bichir first appears he livens up the film considerably. They work well together, and there is an economy of words between the characters that tests both actors’ ability to communicate visually.

It is not just about the American dream; it is a search for America’s soul.

Despite the terrific set design in The World to Come, the characters don’t feel at home in it; they do very little farm work, for example. Still, Waterston and Kirby do achieve an intimacy that operates as a warm fire warding off the chilliness around them. It’s too bad we were left out in the cold.

To their credit, To All the Boys films haven’t shied away from serious topics. They’ve been good at teasing out the way teen drama can actually harm young adults (cyberbullying, social anxiety). The films have also engaged with trauma, as the death of Lara Jean’s mother — who represents the sisters’ connection to their Korean heritage — is always part of the films’ focus. But earlier films began and ended in high school, with a smaller scope for character growth, and Always and Forever really wants us to look forward.

Twilight’s Kiss is a fragile film of quiet moments and tender feelings, and although it runs out of gas near the end, it takes us on an engaging journey.

Still, Silk Road remains watchable because both Robinson and Clarke are interesting screen presences. And there’s some humor, which consistently lands better than the thrills.

It’s a more modest Traffic in several ways, adequate at what it tries to say about this dirty business but light on the wider scope of the suffering that it causes. Because there actually is a crisis, maybe it should be addressed with more of an emphasis on authentic details than on genre conventions.

Ultimately, no matter what angle you see Bliss from, the story converges on a choice and a question: Which world do you choose to live in? And what can bring a person back to reality?

The drama builds and builds until the last seconds and never really lets up. It’s a striking debut from Meneghetti, in his first feature film.

As Baby Boomers continue to dominate the culture through sheer numbers, you can expect more movies about demented parents. But a good rule of thumb for those who’d attempt such a story in the future should be this: If you want us to care about crazy old Dad, show us that he was once something more than an abusive sperm donor. Show us that he was once a decent father.

Judas and the Black Messiah quietly announces its modern relevance by presenting as sophisticated a depiction of systemic racism as you could hope to see in a movie.

Sure, The Mauritanian is better than staring at metal bars and better than two hours of rigorous legal preparation. But it isn’t better by much.

The goal here was to be absurdist, relentless and light. Well, Barb & Star is light — so light it floats off and vaporizes.

I Care a Lot is notable for its colorful supporting and featured roles — Chris Messina as a mob lawyer, Peter Dinklage as a Russian mobster and Eiza Gonzalez as Marla’s girlfriend. But the main attraction is Pike, who doesn’t try to make us like her. She commits to the character’s nature and holds us with her honesty, her intensity and her unmistakable pleasure in getting to play someone appalling.

Stevens, Fisher, Mann and Dench are all fine. All have good moments. The problem is the script, the script, the script.

Going into The Violent Heart, you must understand that the ending is insanely ridiculous. This is not to say that it’s not entertaining — in a way, it’s even more entertaining for being insanely ridiculous. But by the end, you will in no way be able to regard The Violent Heart as anything resembling a serious movie.

I hated this film. I hated every minute of it, and at times it even made me angry.

So The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a misfire, and what a shame, because Andra Day had it in her to be great in this. The movie just didn’t let her bring it out.

Hopkins makes himself transparent. He lets us see both who this man was and what he is now. There’s dignity in the crumbling facade and child-like terror in the eyes — and a warning to those who’ll be lucky enough to live so long.

Cherry is like three different movies in one: the teen years, the war experience, and then life as a drug addict. It’s held together by the smart writing, by the overarching tone of tragic absurdity, and by Holland, who hits every bump on Cherry’s way down.

Nomadland is too singular a film to dismiss on technicalities. It’s very much its own thing, very much an original experience, and must be counted as some odd kind of good movie.

All of it works. All of it holds together, guided by the sure hand of director Simon Stone, who subtly imparts his sense of the story. His idea is that everyone involved mattered, and so we come away with an impression of an entire moment of time.

Writer-director Harry Macqueen puts the fate of his film on the shoulders of his two leads — Colin Firth as Sam, Stanley Tucci as Tusker — and both actors deliver some of the best work of their careers.

in addition to the quality of its dialogue, Levinson’s script is a testament to the value of talking and listening, past the point of discomfort, past the point it hurts.