It’s a probing, searching movie by one of the medium’s best American directors whose reach, like his protagonist’s, exceeds his grasp.

Although this story line’s turns are easy to anticipate, the seriousness with which Fellowes approaches it is refreshing in an otherwise lightweight film.

The movie is nonetheless strongly written, with a game cast. Wu is especially a revelation, with a layered and often moving performance that shows off dramatic chops not seen by many of her fans.

For a film about an unexpected reunion between two daughters and their long-lost mother, there is shockingly little talk about family. We have no idea what these women see in each other, let alone want from each other. This strips the film of the emotional authenticity that it ultimately craves.

This project is in many ways a nod to the films of the French New Wave, and even if the surprisingly unsexy A Faithful Man doesn’t quite measure up, it’s never boring and keeps moving at a brisk pace.

Whatever one’s politics, it’s hard not to be charmed by Ivins’ feisty demeanor and, by extension, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins.

Watching The Goldfinch is like reading a novel where someone ripped out every third page from front to back. You can tell there’s a good story, with compelling characters, and maybe a strong mystery. But the connective tissue is missing to the point of constant distraction.

After watching her belt, blast and harmonize with power and precision through wildly diverse styles of music like an Amazon heroine, to see her struggle her way through this short piece is the kind of heart-string moment documentary filmmakers can only hope to catch.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about the filmmaking, but Becoming Nobody does its job: helping spread Ram Dass’ message in a polarized world in which we tend to emphasize our differences, not our similarities.

Were “Vita” better developed and edited, one might find joy in its rejection of the patriarchy. But the female-friendly dialogue relies too heavily on exposition. Nobody asks if anyone wants a cup of tea.

Call it Buñuel meets Blumhouse, a film that is flawed but so full of ideas that it doesn’t matter.

It Chapter Two is a messier production that barely seems coherent even with the first film as a primer.

What makes it brilliant is that it demonstrates how universal this distinctly Jewish musical has become, how it has been embraced by many cultures and how it is still influential today.

It’s a moving meditation about our unwavering need for creativity, and finding ways to express it.

Calaizzo’s script is sharp, funny and honest, and nicely avoids movie cliches about obesity. Bell’s performance is very good, both physically — the actress herself lost 40 pounds for the role — and emotionally.

It’s a good sign for the intelligence of your science fiction movie, when it’s easy to imagine the story working as a stage play with just two actors.

So while The Fanatic isn’t doing anything particularly new, it knows exactly the movie it wants to be. There’s a trashy, pulp energy powering us through the efficient 88-minute run time — long enough to invest us in the stakes, short enough not to wear out its welcome.

How much of it is true? Well, all of it. It happened, at least in the inner life of an imaginative boy, whose boundless curiosity served as the launching pad for a unique and productive life.

In fact, none of the performances here are phoned in. Freeman shows great aptitude for the presidency and should consider running — then he could play the president onscreen and off. And as the vice president, Tim Blake Nelson finally gets a role worthy of his depth.

Late in the extraordinary new Netflix documentary American Factory, Cao DeWang, the Chinese CEO of the Fuyao Group, wonders aloud, “I don’t know if I’m a contributor or a sinner.”

So just showing a glacier breaking off, or a hurricane in full force, doesn’t prove there is climate change. Perhaps if Kossakovsky had provided some context — something to indicate this is happening more frequently, for example — Aquarela might have had more impact. Then it would have been more than just a series of pretty pictures.

When you strip away the novelty of it all, we’re left with little more than a kids-meal version of “Scarface.”

Especially terrific is Rieger, who is a 25-year-old rising star in Israel. She displays a fierce intensity and an appealing vulnerability, and here’s betting that if she chose to, she could follow Gal Gadot’s path from Israel to Hollywood stardom.

The problem with Ready or Not is that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (“V/H/S”) don’t know what kind of movie they want to make, or what to do with their heroine. There are constant shifts in tone — is it a comedy, like the trapped-in-a-mansion “Murder By Death”? A satire on the rich? A kick-ass revenge picture?

Price has given us Yelchin’s most complete performance: himself. It is a cinematic gift to contemporary film fans everywhere.

You can watch 100 movies and never see such joyless joy as in Blinded by the Light.

There are a lot of little things wrong with Where’d You Go, Bernadette, but one big thing right: Cate Blanchett. She takes the title role and has a party with it. The little things wrong can’t be summed up in a sentence, but they linger in the mind and intrude on the memory of the movie, once the bedazzlement of Blanchett’s performance starts to wear off.

The big problem of Good Boys is not that it’s harsh or nasty or outrageous or tasteless or shocking or appalling. The problem is that it’s none of those things, when it should have been all of those things. It’s safe and sentimental, with just a few mild laughs.

Director/writer Kim Joo-hwan (“Midnight Runners”) builds tension deliberately and slowly over the 129-minute running time, delivering some undeniably chilling and visually unsettling images along the way. The Divine Fury doesn’t revolutionize the exorcism movie, but it does manage to shake it up a bit.

There’s a Danish film called “After the Wedding” which was released here in 2007 and nominated for the foreign film Oscar. It didn’t win — it had the bad luck to be nominated against “The Lives of Others,” which was even better. But it’s a great film. The new After the Wedding is the American remake, and it’s fascinating. That is, it’s fascinating in that it’s not even close to great, despite using the same scenario. Indeed, it would be a real lesson in filmmaking to watch both movies back to back, just to see how to do things and how not to do things. And, just to clarify, the new After the Wedding would be in the “how not to do things” category.

Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up and the rest of the movie disappears.

It’s a clinical product crafted on the assembly line of the studio floor with pieces plucked liberally from better movies before it, and crammed so thoroughly with sight gags and wordplay it hopes you won’t notice that there’s no “there” there.

The film finally gets into gear around the midpoint and zooms to a satisfying finish.

It's so joyful and confident in its own premise that it practically dares you not to walk out of the theater with a smile on your face, strutting like a peacock.

Early scenes are unnecessarily horrific, and the final scenes falter from a disconcerting shift in tone. But this still leaves a significant stretch of beautiful acting, thoroughly engaging action and vital history lessons about the brutality on which some supposedly civil societies were built.

Director Sameh Zoabi relies on the old adage that we have more in common than not, but it’s a lesson that bears repeating — particularly when laughs come with it.

Speaking of female gangsters, no review of The Kitchen should overlook Margo Martindale, who steals every scene she’s in as a mob matriarch — a gravelly voiced monster with a gutter mouth and a big photo of John F. Kennedy on her wall. Martindale gets to be evil and has as much fun onscreen as she can without smiling.

The film is exquisitely acted, with Englert making Mara’s emotional pain real. It’s reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout role in “Winter’s Bone,” which was set in a similar geographic area. Throw in equally strong performances from Goggins, Colman and especially Mann, and the lean, stark Them That Follow ends up packing quite a punch.

These scenes of raving nonsense might have seemed radical in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re just tiresome.

The Art of Racing in the Rain, a sure-handed but predictable adaptation of Garth Stein’s best-selling 2008 novel, is a sloppy wet-kiss of a movie that demands nothing more from its viewer than to engage and empathize. Awww!

Despite some real virtues, Brian Banks as a whole, is only a break-even experience.

Late Night is a fairly agreeable experience, and every time Thompson is on screen, there’s a reason to keep watching.

“Hobbs & Shaw” is witty and mischievous, full of surprise and invention, and a total blast.

A brilliantly realized, Hollywood-sleek documentary produced by Cameron Crowe, A-list director and onetime boy wonder Rolling Stone reporter who not only conducts the film’s current interviews, but is also shown at age 16 in 1974 doing his first interview with Crosby.

What a talent Waad is. For Sama is a film made with the instincts of a journalist, the passion of a revolutionary and the beating heart of a mother.

Throughout the film, Pitt exudes charm and a philosophical nature, but also the possibility of explosiveness. He doesn’t show you everything. What do you say about a performance like this? Scene by scene, Pitt seems to know what to do, all the time — and he never makes it look like work.

If Zabeil didn’t want to deliver a formula picture, he needed to come up with something better than the formula.

At its best, The Great Hack will alarm you, infuriate you, and — hopefully — activate you.

This utterly tasteless crime film about Tokyo’s top madam, a drug dealer and a serial killer is one of the worst films of the year.

The Farewell has a special feeling about it. It’s full of truth and emotion, and lacking in sentimentality. It has an eye for absurdity and for the telling detail, and it marks Lulu Wang as a director with the rare but essential ability to make you care about what she cares about. It will go down as one of the standout movies of 2019.

The main pleasure of Sword of Trust is in watching an ensemble of expert comic actors play off of each other. The movie was improvised, based on a tightly constructed story, and every scene has some comic jewel in it, some unexpected touch or moment.

The upshot is a film that is stunning to look at, even inspiring at times, but dramatically bizarre. Obviously, this technology has its place, but it makes too strong a statement to be casually used in remakes.

A fascinating and unsettling look at the ramifications of marital infidelity when shone through that specific geopolitical prism.

Leonard & Marianne suggests that these were two immensely intelligent and talented people who never found happiness. The total love each person sought over the decades may have been right there all along. Or at least, it was there, in decades past, on Hydra.

Written and directed by Riley Stearns, The Art of Self-Defense brings out a particularly skillful performance from Eisenberg, whose job is to harmonize the film’s odd shifts in tone and make something real and heartfelt of the central character’s journey.

This film is like cynicism transformed into celluloid, a movie made without love and with no vision, except of dollar signs.

Shot almost entirely within a hotel, the film operates as a low-budget answer to “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón’s much-lauded film that also centers on the life of a domestic worker.

Ultimately Maiden is very much a feel-good movie, a tale of underdogs finding their strength, combined with a character study and a sprinkling of social history. After the Maiden, women in sailing had to be taken seriously.

Don’t be misled by the middling rating attached to this review. Midsommar is anything but mediocre. It’s horrible and brilliant, a crashing failure but one with many good moments. What do you say about a movie that’s both a disgusting, tiresome and predictable endurance test and an irrefutable demonstration of real directorial talent? Perhaps, this: Ari Aster is definitely someone who should be making movies. But maybe not this movie.

It’s mostly delightful; a fun movie that successfully hits the reset button for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Diamantino is one of those movies that looks super fun to make but is mind-numbing to actually watch.

Buckley’s naturalism, combined with her abundant charisma and wonderfully warm-toned, slightly gritty singing voice, make her irresistible here.

One thing Yesterday does is rather miraculous. It forces us to hear these Beatles songs as if for the first time.

A smart, controlled film, made with considerable integrity. It doesn’t try to scare you with loud noises or threaten you with the imminent certainty of seeing something disgusting. Instead, it throws a handful of characters into a simple, yet harrowing, situation and then explores that situation in depth.

While the format as such doesn’t allow for a critical push-and-pull, that’s not a debit. This is about time well spent on a life well lived. A series of pieces adding up to much more than the whole.

A banquet for Stones aficionados, an insider’s scrapbook of memories and glimpses of an illustrious history that Wyman, without his vast collection, would be little more than a footnote to.

Asako’s only appeal seems to be that she’s very pretty. Her depth of character she apparently keeps to herself.

Lakin’s screenplay veers so wildly between sitcom antics, pitch black comedy and heartwarming family drama that it leaves you feeling whiplashed. The film never quite merges its divergent tones, leaving Being Frank a frustrating mix of promising elements and appealing performances shackled to an unwieldy central premise that dispenses with joy the way a black hole dispenses with light.

If there were any justice in the world — there often isn’t — Alice Guy-Blaché would be remembered alongside D.W. Griffith as one of the great pioneers of the early screen. The good news is that she is becoming better known, but as the new documentary, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché makes clear, not nearly as much as she deserves, nor for the right reasons.

Toy Story 4 is genuinely gripping for most of the way, with just a couple of minor dips. But it arrives at a lovely place, with an embrace of life in all its danger and uncertainty.

By the time the credits roll, we don’t achieve a much deeper sense of who John DeLorean really was — only a better understanding of why this complicated figure continues to befuddle screenwriters. DeLorean probably would have preferred it that way.

Indeed, it's hard to figure out why this film was even made, beyond the fact that it could be made, that there was a loose idea and talented people willing to join in the fun. It's neither serious nor funny enough, and it adds nothing to Jarmusch's reputation. If anything, it might hurt it retroactively.

This is a tale from the front lines, before the disease had a name, through the early days when no one knew for sure how it was transmitted.

Despite lapses in the script, there is a palpable chemistry between Usher and Jackson, and the humor that sparks between the two is what carries the film through its fairly predictable paces.

The film is mildly diverting, occasionally engaging, certifiably workmanlike and altogether too flat an experience to inspire any strong feelings, positive or negative. It’s just there. Some people watch movies for the same reason others climb mountains, because they are there. Well, this is a movie for that audience.

The relentlessly downbeat drama American Woman is a star vehicle that lets Sienna Miller (“American Sniper,” HBO’s “The Girl”) really show what she can do. But she does too much.

Scorsese has done nothing less than rescue this evanescent moment and brought it into the light, 45 years later, a glorious and slightly miraculous resurrection of a transcendent enterprise that would have otherwise passed into the mists of time.

With Pavarotti, director Ron Howard serves up a straightforward documentary about the great tenor’s life and career. It’s just a birth-to-death saga, featuring interviews with colleagues and loved ones and a catalogue of greatest hits, so nothing fancy here. But if you can find a better way to spend two hours, take it — I’ll stick with this.

To an extent, the movie waters down its moral complexity by introducing a flat-out villainess, who begins to guide Jean’s actions, thus absolving Jean of some moral responsibility. Still, it’s hard to complain when the villainess is played by Jessica Chastain, the best person in the world to play a cool, coiffed, composed entity of evil, looking for a new planet for her displaced people.

There is simply too much going on, in these separate storylines, for too long. There is a literal “meanwhile, back at the farm” quality to the movie, because it becomes so involved with subplots that you only remember Max and Rooster at the farm when the action shifts back to it.

What follows is everything a story like this demands — car chases, shootouts and trying to stop an explosive device by cutting the right wire — but there’s little fresh here.

So politics and social commentary aside, we are left with a crime film. One that isn’t very suspenseful or particularly clever.

If you don’t expect it to be something it isn’t, it’s hard to see how partisans of pop music could fail to enjoy Echo in the Canyon. For rock ’n’ rollers of all ages, it’s mandatory viewing.

A strikingly immersive movie, a slow burn filled with subtleties and nuance, with its message nestled in the details as much as the greater story. While other filmmakers have effectively captured San Francisco’s landmarks and topography, story co-writers Fails and Talbot seem to be filming San Francisco’s streets with a microscope.

John Lithgow and Blythe Danner make an offbeat and winning combination, with total belief that they’re in a really good movie. Unfortunately, they’re not.

Audiences will walk out with that good chiropractor feeling, the one that says, “Yes, I have been manipulated. I have been nothing but manipulated and pounded on for the past 90 minutes. And it was a very satisfying thing.”

What we have here is a small, delicate mini-masterpiece, and bright new talent behind the camera.

This conventional PBS-style piece intends to deliver the story behind the event without much more than the slightest nod to the music, which is shunted to the side in this telling of the already oft-told story.

What little pleasures the movie offers are small and intermittent. Kyle Chandler gets to unleash his inner Shatner by acting intense every moment that he’s on screen.

Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.

With Brightburn there’s not even the pretense of idealism. It’s a superhero movie with the soul of an ’80s slasher film.

The most passionate love affair in The Souvenir is with film. Hogg utilizes an almost cinema verite style, with a visual look of the grainy kind of 16mm film an ’80s film school student would work with. Her style is reminiscent of early Olivier Assayas or Éric Rohmer’s “The Green Ray” (1986), an acknowledged influence.

Aladdin, the live-action remake of the 1992 Disney animation, is more than a pleasant surprise. It’s a complete delight that stands up its own and is, in many ways, an improvement on the original.

The experience of watching it is rather like swooping down and catching people living their lives.

You know what movie is even better than this? “Never Goin’ Back” (2018) from writer-director Augustine Frizzell, about two 17-year-old girls trying to raise money for a weekend getaway. It’s something like Booksmart, minus the rich Californians and the faint whiff of politically correct self-congratulation. Unfortunately, no one saw “Never Goin’ Back,” because it’s about working-class girls in Texas.

A big, juicy bone for canine-focused humans, but much less of a treat for others.

Aniara has an intriguing premise, and it’s even fascinating at times, but despite an excellent production design, it never gets off the ground even as it speeds through the cosmos. The characters are not fully formed, so we’re not invested in their futures.

It’s like combining the anything-can-happen excitement of playing a slot machine, with the grace of a ballet, and the prolonged and escalating violence of a good gladiator battle. Reeves has sustained his career through consistently trying 20 percent harder than most of his contemporaries.