Naomi Kawase’s films don’t hammer toward arbitrary plot points but flow like water, so “True Mothers” doesn’t unfold like a Hollywood blockbuster, or indeed, even most arthouse films. It courses along softly and confidently, with unexpected ebbs and estuaries.

Penguin is the film’s most fleshed-out character. We know the bird’s origin story, but nobody else’s.

Our Friend is both a tribute to a friend and to those rare people that are too humble to realize their own wisdom.

Any Agnieszka Holland movie is worth seeing, even if Spoor isn’t up to the director’s best (“In Darkness,” “Europa, Europa”).

It’s entertaining enough, but you wish it had something quirkier, more messily human, more imaginatively drawn outside the lines to it.

The acting is uniformly strong, which says something about King as a director.

Certainly, the actors seem to be having a good time, even if the people they’re playing are utterly miserable. Hathaway’s comic timing has become a marvel in recent years, but Ejiofor, too, exults in the chance to throw off his usual gravity.

What’s fascinating about Kirby here is that even when she appears to be doing nothing, she’s worth watching.

Thompson and Asomugha are nicely paired. Too much is made by critics of the notion of “screen chemistry,” but there is something complementary in the personalities of these two actors, as well as in the roles they’re playing.

The beauty of Soul is that, just as animation is finding more being demanded of it, Pixar is answering that demand. It is making the case for animation as an ideal vehicle for exploring the grand, the general, the universal.

The last five minutes of Midnight Sky are touching and beautifully acted — if you’re willing to wait for it.

Apart from the excellence of this film, Fennell may have tapped into something tonally that truly expresses the moment we’re in. Point being, we’re in a time of horrible ridiculousness, and ridiculous horribleness. The revelation of Promising Young Woman is that its heightened reality feels more real — closer to actual reality — than comedy or drama.

It’s a grand bogus mess passing itself off as a philosophical statement. It has its moments, but they’re few. Often, it’s a beautiful-looking film — but it’s beauty without substance.

This is a bad film by a good filmmaker. It has the veneer of substantiality, but it’s unsubstantial. It is the product of sincere conviction and artistic confidence, but both were misguided. Every filmmaker needs to take the occasional chance, as Christopher Nolan did with “Tenet.” Not all chances pay off.

The main event here is Swank, who was a plaintive and sentimental figure in her earliest movies and has only fully come into her strength in youthful middle age. This strength makes Fatale an entertaining diversion and holds out the promise for something deeper and more satisfying in the future.

The gentle spirit of Wild Mountain Thyme envelops us early, to the extent that, midway through, even though there is very little left to resolve, we are in its spell.

Ultimately, Black Bear is about the price of art — not only the price the artist pays, but that the people around the artist end up paying, unwittingly. Yet in the actual experience of it, the movie doesn’t feel so lofty. It just feels tense and disquieting, like a thriller. In that sense, it is a thriller, but one of the emotions, and it’s riveting every step of the way.

The movie unfolds as a series of enjoyable, pressurized encounters between the lead character and everyone else — particularly, Bobby Cannavale as Carol’s ex-boyfriend.

Vulgarity is fine when it’s pure and democratic. But when it’s mixed with sentiment, it feels false. That’s the problem with Buddy Games.

Everyone in the movie is excellent, everyone is tonally spot-on, and no one has a single bad moment – which is another way of saying that Clea DuVall, best known as an actress (“Veep,” “Argo”), is a real director. She has made one of the best Christmas movies of the millennium.

So there’s a lot going on here, and director Joel Crawford and his teams efficiently keep the story moving along. There’s a wonderful “Flintstones” versus “Jetsons” vibe, the characters are, as usual, appealing.

San Francisco was the first major U.S. city to forbid the police and other agencies from using facial recognition technology — and the persuasive documentary Coded Bias makes it easy to understand why.

A fascinating documentary that seems to unfold over real time.

For the most part, this film has the disadvantages of Chinese action films, without the advantages. That is, it overdoes the action and it’s short on character, without attaining the manic, wild heights of Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and early ’90s. Still, it’s nice to see Chan once again in a Chinese environment.

Cage’s latest film, Jiu Jitsu must represent his career worst — and keep in mind, this is the man who made 1989’s “Vampire’s Kiss,” in which he ate a cockroach.

The important thing is that Dreamland accomplishes its main intention, which is to make us invest in this strange love story.

A tense, nail-biting thriller featuring powerhouse performances.

While Sound of Metal doesn’t venture to unexpected places, director Darius Marder — working from a script based on a story by “Blue Valentine” director Derek Cianfrance — keeps it all rooted in a heartfelt reality.

Come Away is an idea that never takes flight.

Freaky is, dare we say, soul-sucking?

In the humor department, Fatman’s is a scattershot but often clever affair thanks to the film’s director brothers, Ian and Eshom Nelms. Their last feature, the eccentric desert noir “Small Town Crime,” worked positive human connections into a dark, violent framework, so that seems to be a theme dear to the Tulare County-raised siblings.

It’s just fantastic. Sorry, fantastique.

She is a great talent, a legend, someone who has made enduring classics, and just the fact that she’s still working at 86 is a gift. But somehow none of that makes The Life Ahead, coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. 13, an experience worth having.

Monsoon, an offbeat story about a man’s cultural dislocation in Vietnam, is more of a slow drip than a torrential downpour. It’s a lovely film that suddenly and magically can wash over you, then lose you in its opacities.

An exquisite achievement.

Adams, a six-time Oscar nominee, is likely headed to a seventh for an admittedly showy but nuanced turn that manages to bring Bev’s humanity bubbling to the surface even as her ugly side dominates — as Thoreau might say, a life of not-so-quiet desperation. Close is terrific as usual.

I Am Greta does show why she is a powerful voice. The key to her appeal is her honesty and her “innocence,” or as some would say, naivete.

The appeal of A Rainy Day in New York, to the extent it has any, is nostalgia.

For the most part, however, Proxima enthralls with its deep dive into the mechanics of astronaut training. Green presents a woman with the right stuff for it, but maybe she can’t give up the parts of herself the job demands. It’s a stress test the actress passes with flying colors.

Fortunately, director Thor Freudenthal (“Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) eventually finds some truth, thanks to an exceptional cast headlined by two rising dynamic young actors, Charlie Plummer and Taylor Russell.

It’s a busy film, so it holds your attention that way. But it’s busy checking off all of the crooks and crooked cops cliches it can, leaving the project little time to experiment with much that’s new. Or worthwhile.

In the end, Let Him Go is like a Southern Gothic, only set in the Northwest. It’s just a genre movie that delivers the goods, but the restraint and emotional insight of the direction and the quality of the performances bring it up an essential extra notch.

The humanity Snyder’s cameras capture is stirring as these young people work past their issues and together on shrewd political strategies.

The most shocking thing about Come Play, however, is that it has a pretty good ending after such a long, poorly paced slog through scary movie cliches.

This is the sequel to “The Craft,” folks. For what it is, the movie’s OK, except that it tried to be more than it is, and it isn’t.

Two things to know about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It is appalling. And I haven’t laughed this hard at anything in months.

But it’s also kind of a mess. Even as the animated film piles on mismatched funny animals, uninspired songs with on-the-nose lyrics and a plot-driving motivation that appears universal but is in fact hard to buy, the project feels both generic and misguidedly overstuffed.

When it’s not repulsive, The Witches drags, but for one brief yet gripping sequence, in which the boy and his friends sneak into the head witch’s hotel suite.

The film raises an intriguing issue not generally addressed by science-fiction films: time traveling into the past while white is one thing; time traveling while Black is something else entirely.

Rebecca has a couple of slow stretches, but James is always interesting and always sympathetic, if only because we see her struggling to do her best. After all, it’s much easier to not give up on a character when we see she hasn’t given up on herself. The movie further benefits from the absence of 1940s-style censorship, which suppressed a key plot detail that’s restored here.

Still, if you love this kind of movie, you will at least like Honest Thief.

Exquisite and moving documentary.

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the subject brings out everything that’s good about Sorkin’s writing — not just the clever banter, which is a constant delight, but his way of conveying who the good and bad guys are without succumbing to hero worship or moral posturing.

When the books are written, The War With Grandpa — the first family film to hit theaters since the pandemic — will have a special place in De Niro’s vast and varied cinematic legacy as the absolute worst movie he ever made.

Bloody good.

But that’s also the movie’s charm, painting a world where all you need is talent, a little luck and a couple of shoulders to cry on when things get tough. It’s a stripped-down “A Star Is Born” — without the rehab and suicide.

Long before the finish, Possessor descends into ugliness, with grotesque scenes of violence and lots of blood. You may feel creeped out, like you want to take a bath. But no, not in a good way.

As for Murray, it’s just a shame he can’t make a Sofia Coppola movie every year. As in “Lost in Translation,” Coppola brings out all of Murray’s many colors, sometimes all at once — his flippancy, his authority, his warmth, his isolation, his expressiveness, his inability to say everything he wants to say.

Ultimately is less a horror film than a valentine, from a daughter to a father, and a sweet portrait of a man going gently into that good night.

The dreaded question with a film like this is, “Wouldn’t a documentary have been better?” In this case, there’s a double answer. The first half of The Glorias is better told as a drama, because it’s fascinating to see (and not just be told) the obstacles in front of Steinem and how she overcame them. But the second half would have been better as a documentary.

The best thing about Scare Me is that, for all of its entertaining qualities and acute cuts at white male fragility, this is one excellent guide to writing and filming good horror.

Like all great works of art, the story’s point has resonances beyond its era and even beyond the specific subject of gay people, generally.

Dolby provides Dern with a chance to be cranky and vicious, but what else is new? The revelation here is Lena Olin, who gets her best role in years as the artist’s second wife, Claire, an artist in her own right who gave it all up to make a home with and for a demanding husband.

The watchable LX 2048 certainly gets an “A” for effort, including a creative take on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. I’m not sure how good a movie it is, but it would be an excellent basis for a streaming series, in which its ambitious ideas would have time to develop.

The monster is kind of cheap looking and not particularly scary, the gore is non existent, the acting is variable and the characters tend to make boneheaded decisions. Yet, for all of that, Shortcut does sport a certain moody charm, and at least it has the good sense, at a brisk 80 minutes including end credits, to not wear out its welcome.

At its best, Kajillionaire provides a chance for Rodriguez to play a breezy extrovert and for Wood to play a damaged introvert, and for their characters to alter and deepen through contact with each other. They’re both excellent, but they can’t make the movie any less slow, and July’s relentless whimsicality occasionally sounds some false notes.

A bright young actress, a movie-star actor and a potentially interesting concept gets smothered in 128 minutes of colorful, empty nonsense.

The whole movie is kind of like that: direct and devastating without overdoing it. The Nest unfolds in the way smart people tend to express their deepest disappointments — get it out, regain emotional control, divert for a while if you can.

Unfortunately, there’s a gulf between a great idea and competent execution, and this first feature, from writer-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, can’t bridge it.

The Devil All the Time is really a portrait of a place, told through the lives of several people across a span of about a dozen years, and the thing that makes it interesting — from start to finish — is that this place is so brutal and appalling and unexpected in its various cruelties that we cannot stop watching.

A sweet, innocuous romantic comedy.

The issues of aging and familial relationships and the appealing nature of this family would make “Our Time Machine” worthy of a look in any case, but what puts it over the top is Maleonn’s fascinating visual inventions.

Still, I Am Woman, while it doesn’t roar, effectively tells Reddy’s story and speaks strongly about the women’s movement and the struggle that continues.

The Social Dilemma should be mandatory viewing for everyone who has a social media account. After seeing it, you may look at your phone differently, as something that isn’t really your friend.

Sibyl is for people who like French movies even when they’re a little ridiculous.

Jones uses Furie’s story, and some gorgeous animation, as a wonderfully succinct window into the way social media has changed the country. By letting 4channers speak for themselves, the film also puts a face to the bad actors without ever letting them off the hook.

The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.

It all makes for a very different type of summer-movie experience, one far removed from superheroes and special effects. Best of all, you need not have read a word of Dickens to be captivated by the world that Iannucci has created.

Mulan is a spirit lifter, and though it doesn’t arrive as planned, it could not arrive at a better time.

Robin’s Wish, of course, can’t lessen the tragedy of Williams’ death, but it helps us better reconcile the suicide of such a joyous, irrepressible soul.

Any movie that celebrates the power of music, friendship, family and all of that scientific stuff Kid Cudi keeps jabbering about has got to be somewhat welcome at this particular point in the space-time continuum, right?...Oh, and stay past the closing credits for a little extra excellence.

There is a “Good Will Hunting” vibe to the film, a gifted young person sliding toward obscurity who is helped by the intervention of friends and colleagues. And the film may end with all the lose ends tied up into fancy bows, but its heart is pure.

Doff is a music video guy who’s made a deceptively well-crafted feature debut here. While Get Duked! may lean on stupidity too much for some tastes, it’s nevertheless that rarest of movie creatures: a smart dumb comedy. Perhaps they can only be spotted in the Scottish Highlands these days.

With its bigger budget and wider scope but less gripping story, “Peninsula” is much more of a generic, CGI-reliant action movie that often feels like a video game coupled with a few pages ripped from the scripts of “Mad Max” and “Escape From New York.”

What makes Chemical Hearts so good is it’s unafraid of its feelings. It tackles complicated emotional issues such as depression, suicide, sex and love with a straightforward honesty. For once, a film about young people is completely free of snark and irony.

The One and Only Ivan has within it a much more interesting film waiting to break out that really could have been for the whole family, but alas it is trapped within the cement walls of Disney’s cookie-cutter formula.

It’s a simple, sick, ridiculous story told with relentless tension and forward thrust.

Hawke is effectively brooding, which recalls his first collaboration with Almereyda, a 2000 adaptation of “Hamlet” set in modern-day New York City.

Bachelder’s fly-on-the-wall approach reveals great details, and she picked compelling subjects.

Boys State is the most depressing film about boys since “Lord of the Flies.” If anything, it’s even more bleak, because it’s not fiction and it’s not allegory. No, this is a documentary about actual boys.

That none of this seems snarky, but sweetly human, is largely thanks to Rogen, who never makes Herschel ridiculous, but aspirational, as if he has a vision he’s working toward.

Things get quite Gothic in the film’s final stretch, with genre add-ons that “Garden” purists may also find distasteful. The extra melodrama can feel unnecessary. However, it leads to moments of life-restoring beauty (core theme here again) and love.

As the documentary shows, while it lasted, it was really something.

The film is deadly slow and uneventful, with brilliant scenes bursting to life, here and there, like roses in a wasteland.

Shot primarily in Africa over the past year (primarily before the coronavirus pandemic swept the world), the big-budget film plays out like a collection of opulent music videos. It’s not a live concert film, but it does take cues from the theatrical pacing of Beyoncé’s tour performances.

Despite most everything else in the movie being predictable, Bray’s mystery is hard to guess.

An occasionally powerful, yet occasionally frustrating documentary.