Tariq began his career as a documentary filmmaker, and now he has made a drama that rings with truth, about a musician’s ambition, a son’s relationship with his father and how the immigrant experience shapes following generations.

Directed by Mark Waters, cast members seem to operate on the belief that they can best deal with the plot’s improbabilities by grimacing their way through and not giving anyone time to react to them. Pesky details brushed aside, the film can play to its strength, which is the charm of its leads.

Of course, DaCosta’s restraint keeps its interesting. There’s an elegance to her storytelling, always giving us just enough to keep us moving forward without signaling too much of what’s to come.

“Shang-Chi” gives us Shang-Chi, a likable, thrilling-to-watch and ultimately very welcome addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As good as both actors are, watching characters sitting around talking gets old. But the film perks up considerably midway through, becoming a taut beat-the-clock thriller as it covers the days just before Bundy’s 1989 execution, the tension lying in whether Ted will fulfill his 11th-hour promise to confess.

Both McAvoy and Horgan handle the rapid-fire dialogue with gusto, and for a while, their devastating banter is amusing. But eventually the effect begins to wear thin: These vocal diatribes need a more developed story to hang on.

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, produced by husband-and-wife team Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, paints a picture of naked opportunism that shattered Ross’ legacy. It’s the story of how a man became an industry, and how his family was gradually, systematically left out in the cold.

To be sure, Big Pharma execs make for natural movie villains these days, but this story could have used a tad more subtlety, something that was in short supply here.

Maggie Q has been in good movies before, but The Protégé is the first movie that’s good because she’s in it.

In every way, Cryptozoo is a more ambitious achievement than Shaw’s coy but pleasing first feature, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016). And while its hippie-era setting and hallucinatory imagery give a nostalgic kick, the film’s darker conflicts speak to dire issues of today.

It’s not an exciting film, and it’s not a film with some wider social relevance. But it’s a film that’s wise about people in a way that’s rare. It also launches Dylan Penn, and someday that will matter.

Reminiscence is never not interesting, but Joy leaves a lot of the intriguing issues unsatisfactorily explored.

We don’t always get a full picture of Barbara Lee, however, there’s no doubt for a single frame that this consummate politician — a pragmatic firebrand — is long overdue for recognition beyond the Bay Area.

CODA is lovely. If you want to see a movie that will make you feel good, this is it.

Apart from a few lapses, Filomarino is straightforward and gets the job done. Along the way, he taps into everyone’s most paranoid fantasy about foreign travel — where the police and authority figures turn on you, and the Constitution or Bill of Rights are a few thousand miles away.

Free Guy is an ode to independence, creativity and the nicer aspects of anarchy.

Aided by the star magnetism of Yen and Tse, and back in his element on the colorful streets of Hong Kong, Chan goes out with both guns blazing.

In the end, Homeroom lacks impact, taken as a whole, but anyone who sees it will derive something from the experience.

The concept might have worked well on paper. But on screen, at least how Chase Palmer has directed and co-scripted it, those clashing elements exert weak gravitational pull.

Respect has everything you could hope for in a musical biopic. It has a good story and great songs and, best of all, it has someone in the lead role who can put those songs over.

Ailey weds forthright interviews and archival footage of abstract beauty with those sweeping dance sequences to conjure a haunting portrait of what it means to be an artist — from the triumphs to the empty, lonely feeling that you’re never as good as you’re supposed to be.

At the very least, it marks the arrival of a filmmaker with great potential. It also presents a metaphysical vision that’s quite peculiar and not very persuasive if you can’t get on its generous wavelength.

On its own terms, Escape From Mogadishu makes for an engrossing, nail-biting Korean history lesson.

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

Mixing in citizens’ harrowing cellphone footage and heartbreaking emergency call recordings, Walker’s teams immerse us in the flaming terror as few features have before.

In The Suicide Squad, writer-director James Gunn has done the seemingly impossible: He has found the fun in the Suicide Squad. He has come up with a way to take what seemed like a dead concept and turn it into an action-packed joke machine.

The film is kindly and well-intended, but it’s also sentimental and lifeless. Swan Song is a rare movie without a single good scene.

Like practically every other animated movie meant for mass consumption, the movie gets lost in the chase — the point where story flow is interrupted so that characters get lost as they try to achieve their objective and a manufactured villain is trying to keep them from their goal.