There are turns and twists and multiple dashes of the unexpected, and it is all impressively arranged and justified.

A few things make The Adam Project a little better than bearable.

That its premise is a fundamentally corny one we’ve seen a million times before is a separate matter, but filmmaker Kuosmanen (“The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki”) and his two lead actors camouflage that well in naturalistic behavior and psychological depth.

As a whole, Turning Red succeeds in hitting all the right emotional notes — and its real magic lies in its unabashed celebration of the joyful chaos of girlhood within a proud Asian immigrant family.

While “Fresh” is intentionally not for every taste, it’s an uncompromising feminist horror/thriller with a fantastic lonely girl/victim/heroine for Edgar-Jones to play.

With “After Yang,” the distinctive filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie that is at once ambitious yet timid, asking big questions but providing no answers, not even clues. It’s a thought experiment, but a thought that meanders.

The film documents how Lucy used her clout to get her husband cast as her co-star. It was a way for them to see each other. The rest is history, but a really interesting history.

Nothing that works here adds up to anything worth a long slog in a movie theater, watching Pattinson punching guys and knocking guns out of their hands. From start to finish, The Batman is mostly just a collection of bad ideas.

Even if the idea of The Desperate Hour makes you uneasy, you will be engrossed by it.

In the end, the most valuable aspect of “Cyrano” is that it shows that Peter Dinklage can do anything.

The truth is, Studio 666 really is just one joke, and so McDonnell had only one play that he could make here — to take that joke, to hit it hard and keep hitting it, and then get out fast, while the audience is still laughing. He doesn’t quite do that. At 106 minutes, Studio 666 overstays its welcome.

There should be a special category for movies, like “Dog,” that are hard to enjoy but easy to take. They’re not entertainment. They’re more like a vague form of companionship. They aspire to little but demand nothing, and, if you like, they can keep you company. You can’t call that a good movie, but you’d have to be a creep to call it a bad movie.

What garbage. Seriously. What absolute, bereft, witless, unoriginal, unrewarding, soulless garbage that’s 40 years past scaring anybody. The only power this formula retains is the power to make you feel a little sad — at the ugliness, at the cynicism, and at the pathetic waste of your own mind as you watch it.

Ellis’ story could have used a little fleshing out, no pun intended. Instead, a terrific cast is left floundering in the dark, searching for the film’s human dimension. Cursed, indeed.

Uncharted isn’t a classic, but for an action movie coming out in the doldrums of February, it’s practically Citizen Kane.

Marry Me is entirely Lopez’s movie, and she’s terrific, right there emotionally in some difficult scenes. But it’s too much Lopez’s movie — too many (lousy) songs, too many dance numbers. A half hour in, there’s no mistaking it: Lopez was one of the producers.

Romance and comedy are part and parcel, and both are done with aplomb. But what gives the work its distinction are its intersections. To be Filipino in America is to have an ever-changing relationship with otherness. The otherness of being one ethnicity among many in a national melting pot. The otherness even among other Asian Americans. And the otherness of being American in nationality but of another culture and history at heart.

Decker proudly revels in Lennie’s scattered uniqueness, even as Lennie navigates the minefield of her choices and says some truly kooky things (“I wish my shadow could get up and walk beside me”). YA movies might not be your bag, but if they are, perhaps the NorCal vibe of “The Sky Is Everywhere” will strike a weepy chord.

The most glaring problem here, and the one hardest to explain, is Soderbergh’s failure to elicit any warmth or charm from Zoë Kravitz, who has been consistently appealing in her every other screen performance, from blockbusters like the “Divergent” series to little independents like “The Road Within.”

Overacting and silly lines sometimes distract, and the latter sound sillier in Branagh’s forced French accent (“Ah love, it is not safe”). Still, Branagh’s direction and screenwriter Michael Green, who also scripted “Orient,” add diversity and convincing emotions to the mystery mechanics.

The film has the measured and expansive quality of real life, which could have been dull. It’s anything but that. Instead, by making Julie so real and vivid, Reinsve and Trier accomplish something rare. They make everything that happens to her feel as interesting as if it were happening to you.

The only problem with this movie, a substantial one, is that there’s a major sag in the story about halfway through. For its first hour, Moonfall is a blast.

So it’s not my bag, but I went into Jackass Forever with the best intentions.

It’s an inward-looking film that seems to be saying something about life. Whatever it’s saying — and it’s not clear that it’s saying anything specific — it connects. It’s not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

It’s a school shooting movie for this particular moment and plays like a dispatch from the front lines. It’s past trying to figure out what these tragedies mean. It just wants to explore how a person might assimilate such a trauma and go forward in life.

Fortunately, Arbid didn’t want to make a movie about crazy people or about people going crazy, so she pursued a third option: She made the woman interesting. So “Simple Passion” is a movie about something that, sooner or later, happens to lots of people, but the fun of this story is that it happens to someone we want to watch.

To watch Rifkin’s Festival and Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York (2019), is to wonder whether this is a filmmaker who has ceased to understand the world.

The King’s Daughter has a script that reads like it was written in crayon, by someone using only their thumbs. But two good performances make the film watchable: Pierce Brosnan as King Louis XIV and William Hurt as his adviser and confessor, Pere Francois de La Chaise.