This is breezy stuff, a welcome respite in the hot summer months.

Scorsese and his production team have created an incredible document of one of the 20th century’s most complicated personalities, and one that feels close to being a great film.

The footage astounds, but the competing contextualizations breathe new life into the experiment, especially when Lindeen allows the surviving members free reign to confront past emotions.

Nothing Stays The Same is an important piece of Austin history with great performances but it feels as though director John Sandmann respectfully stuck to too narrow a mandate.

For better than worse, Covino directs it to within an inch of its life, presenting the modest narrative as a series of meticulously choreographed vignettes; each shot in what appears to be a single take.

It’s not a disaster, just a lukewarm bellyflop, and a series of X-Men’s loudness and longevity deserves more.

There has always been a lack of logic to these movies, but all pretense slips away here.

I do think it’s improved upon the original insofar as relying on narrative cohesion (episodic or not) above random acts of pandemonium. I still believe having three episodes of television to focus on one character at a time is the better way to go, but their convergence upon Snowball and Daisy’s adventure is authentically drawn regardless of convenience.

While the film provides a useful record of a specific chapter in this ongoing nightmare, as an investigation it comes up with few new insights that can help us make sense of it.

Trobisch’s screenplay hits all of the nightmarish beats you would expect it to ... but they never feel too forced or unearned.

While Ma mostly melds well from quasi-comedy into horror while keeping viewers on edge, it continually fails to investigate its most interesting ideas.

Matthias & Maxime lacks the raw, blazing energy Dolan can excel at.

With Egerton’s performance as its fuel, Rocketman’s efforts in delivering something that a least attempts an outside the box music biopic are worth commendation. It may not deliver on the truly cosmic fantasia it swings for, but the swing itself is something, to be sure.

Sorry We Missed You is, simply, one of his best films that links the personal and the political.

By the time Suleiman’s character finishes his world trip and returns home, all he leaves us with is the reassurance that the Palestinian people are resilient and, eventually, will be free as well. That’s a terribly lazy note to end on. Some might even call it trivializing.

Make no mistake, it’s mostly staged for campiness. More often than not that De Palma touch is zooming in on the specter of terrorism until it can find something ridiculous, heightened, thrilling in their possibilities. The rub is that Domino comes into a world with too many scarring reflections of itself to sit right. How amusing that a director so fascinated with the voyeurism-violence dichotomy would make a terrorist thriller about insurgents using the power of propaganda.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film of incandescent scenes and staggering wonder.

Indeed, this is not just a sporting film but, like Amy or Senna, a film about the volatility of fame and genius and what those two things can do to humans. An interest in the game is probably as essential here as an interest in Formula 1 was for Senna. Which is to say: not a lot.

Bong is perhaps the contemporary master of entertaining, intelligent and resolutely political cinema. In our age of assembly line blockbusters, he’s a veritable treasure.

The final third, especially, is by-the-numbers plotting. It’s a pity, as the film starts off promising some interesting overarching themes, especially Sibyl’s underhand ethics of mining her psychological examinations for fiction. As a metaphor for artistic invention, it’s an interesting, but unsuccessful one.

Brutal and bludgeoning, David Yarovesky’s Brightburn is a film designed to knock the breath from your chest and subvert expectations.

Presented as multiple chapters that cloak a structure of two discrete halves, the problem is less the film’s fiendish compulsion to shock its audience with sudden body horror or its corkscrewing narrative than its design being seemingly reverse engineered to complete that purpose.

This is a straightforward coming-of-age story from France, a country for whom this is almost a national cliché, but elevated by a key eye for gender roles of its protagonists and an up-to-date message for a teenage generation growing up in a #MeToo world.

Huppert is great at this, and of course she is. It’s elsewhere that the film falters.

It’s as if Herzog has made a narrative film based off a documentary film that doesn’t exist, which is obviously an entirely Herzogian thing to do.

They don’t make ’em like they used to, Tarantino’s film seems to say, but nobody makes ’em like this, either.

It may begin with a scattered, cartoonish approach, but Booksmart eventually blooms into something entirely and beautifully its own.

To its detriment, this has the feel of a film that has been constructed in service of one absurd idea.