The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t judge viewers for what they do and don’t know, but rather encourages us to open our minds to history and see the connections between then and now.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t quite deliver on the sardonic promise of its catchy title, but its appealing cast and Verbinski’s flair for kinetic action set pieces make it a reasonably entertaining entry in the canon of gonzo sci-fi comedies fueled by existential dread about the dystopian techno-dominant reality we’re already trapped in.

Cheese and kitsch, with smatterings of blood and decapitated heads, are all on the menu in Dracula, which is a watchable if totally ludicrous version of the Stoker story. At best, the movie is another showcase for the always-interesting-to-watch Caleb Landry Jones.

The Friend’s House Is Here chooses to emphasize love, courage, community. It zeroes in on the sacrifices its characters make for each other, the community that builds around them, the resilience that keeps them going in the face of fear and oppression.

Filipiñana could have benefited from a little more story and a little less contemplation. But some of its images remain embedded in the memory.

Understanding the life and work of Luis Valdez is a way to broaden one’s understanding of what it means to be American, perhaps now more than ever. Watching this enlightening and entertaining documentary is a good way to start.

Perhaps if the film was more polished, and had some added depth, it might feel more substantial. As is, Hanging by a Wire is a gripping story not told thoroughly enough.

While it feels a fraction overlong, Gibney’s film is a vibrant testament to the intellectual life of its subject.

Though The Musical may lack a feeling of modernity, it could make up for that elsewhere: with tart humor, with unexpected plot developments, with compelling performances. But, alas, Bonilla and her actors can’t do much to leaven the leaden script they’ve been handed.

To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it.

It’s [Love's] unapologetic, unfiltered candor that makes her a great hang.

The film’s first-person approach and dynamic visual style make it more engaging and livelier than you might expect such a well-researched documentary about this serious subject to be.

In this film about war, told by those who survived it, it’s war’s futility that rings loud and clear.

There isn’t a predictable or hackneyed exchange in the drama, which understands not just the immense challenges its characters face but also the throwaway humor that can be essential to a family’s connective tissue.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.

Although The Weight is low on excitement, it ends on an affecting note that makes you wish the sluggish movie had been given more lucid storytelling, as well as more dramatic and emotional power.

No one enjoys beating up on a film in which the writer has invested so much of himself and his pain. But Cayton-Holland and Duplass have somehow made an authentic tragedy feel phony and unaffecting.

Overall, there is so little texture to these character arcs that the actors are mostly just working in service of a blandly uplifting message. It’s as if they’ve all been commissioned by a well-funded science museum to lend their bodies and voices to the cause of slickly comestible up-with-people infotainment.

What makes Segan’s movie so intoxicating, however, is not just the depth of its inside-and-out central character study but the granular textures of the world Harry inhabits and the incisively drawn secondary characters played by a deep bench of very fine and impeccably cast actors.

Blair keeps the strange comedy coming, but he also lets the film dip into moments of contemplative thought, into hardscrabble philosophy. The Shitheads simply becomes a far more interesting film — a suspenseful one, too.

The Wrecking Crew doesn’t set out to reinvent the formula, but rather luxuriate in it.

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind.

Josef Kubota Wladyka, the director and co-writer, shifts from poignant emotion to comedy to surreal scenes that take us inside Haru’s fantasies just as gracefully as the dialogue shifts from Japanese to Spanish and English.

Chasing Summer often plays as the most peculiar Hallmark movie ever made. I want that to be a good thing, but it unfortunately is not.

One in a Million feels both ultra-specific and universal.

So it’s a good opportunity to fall in love with Maria Bamford if you’re unfamiliar. And even if you know the story, the way Bamford tells it remains refreshing and fully involving.

The Gallerist is not without its occasional charms. There’s a chuckle to be had here and there, bits of zinging dialogue that actually find the right notes. Enough so that one roots for the movie despite its many missteps. The problem, ultimately, is that Yan chose a poor subject for her film, an environment that is an incredibly hard target to nail.

Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not.

I appreciate that Manners and Battye are trying to add some extra flair to what is otherwise a fairly conventional growing-pains narrative, but too often Extra Geography seems located outside any map of the real world.

The movie is a one-joke premise, cute and colorful but unsatisfyingly fleshed out.

Ultimately, what distinguishes the film from the many Statham shoot-em-ups that have preceded it is Mason’s increasingly close relationship with the young girl, excellently played by Breathnach, who helps him get back in touch with his human side.

Though its unflashy style and delicate emotionality are unlikely to sweep viewers off their feet, its eye for fine detail and bittersweet tone make it an absorbing experience worth seeking out.

As answers to the film’s big questions begin arriving in slapdash fashion, one loses patience for Tuason’s evasive, cluttered storytelling.

The customary warmth and gentleness of Kogonada’s approach and the corresponding delicacy of the three actors makes you keep wishing Zi would build more substance, more lingering poignancy instead of wafting along on its cloud of melancholy with characters that lack dimension. But it only acquires life intermittently.

Sam Raimi’s darkly comic horror-thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien boasts an audacious concept that is superbly realized by Raimi’s filmmaking, which milks every bizarre situation for all it’s worth.

There’s integrity to the performances even when the writing falters, or when de Araújo gets overly literal in showing how haunted Josephine is by the incident, despite mostly maintaining an inscrutable expression.

When it’s cooking, which is most of the run time, this is a smart, sophisticated and incisively acted adult entertainment that savages the crumbling institution of marriage, dangles the promise of sexual rescue and then brings the walls crashing down in a bitter reckoning that seems irreversible — until a window of hope and healing gets cracked open.

This is designed to be a heartwarming comedy and debuting feature director Paxton is more assured with the outcome than he is about getting there.

In an indie landscape with an insatiable appetite for trauma and misery, it’s a breath of fresh air, a fun time that’s also a witty commentary on shifting sexual mores.

I doubt any movie, especially any documentary, will make me laugh harder this year, and many of its emotional grace notes land fully. Even with my high expectations, The History of Concrete is a small triumph.

Whether playing sexy comedy or hostility, raw emotional agita or hollowness, Chris Pine and Jenny Slate are so damn fine in Carousel that you keep wondering why we seldom get to see these gifted actors bite into characters of such substance and complexity.

You maybe have to be fully on board with the Charli xcx circus to really appreciate what a movie about it is trying to do. For the more casual viewer, The Moment is entertaining enough, for a while.

Directed by first-timer Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the leads, the film offers up nothing all that new under the sun, with a caper plot that’s too off-the-wall to be convincing. And yet Bunny successfully channels a downtown vibe that seems to be on the verge of extinction.

Taking place in real time, Mercy mercifully moves along fairly briskly. But after it’s over you’ll definitely feel the need for a digital detox.

Sleekly if routinely made, this classic whodunit is ultimately more interesting for what it reveals about the filmmaker’s homeland than for the mystery it unfolds.

Davidson’s essential likability shines through, thanks in part to Aramayo’s endearing, guileless performance and in part to writer-director Kirk Jones’ machine-tooled script, clearly fact-checked and vetted by the film’s exec producer, the actual John Davidson himself.

The Rip doesn’t reinvent the cops-in-a-pressure-cooker genre, but its mix of closed-quarters tension, car chases and gunfire gets the job done. Thanks to Carnahan and his accomplished cast, it’s both more convincing and more watchable than the average original streaming movie.

The director never sugarcoats life in the Big Apple for Lu, his family, nor for the rest of the striving migrant underclass. There are no moments of triumph or dreams coming true, no holding hands and cheering together at a Yankees game.

If You See Something is a flawed film that nevertheless reminds us of the selective cruelty that leaves so many struggling to survive.

Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.

Come See Me in the Good Light is relentlessly emotional and intentionally uplifting, with an intimate quality that makes it feel like a home movie.

The New Yorker at 100 is a commercial for The New Yorker and it isn’t masquerading as anything else. But at that point, it should at least be a commercial for the magazine that befits the voice, aesthetic and ethos of the magazine in a meaningful way.

Where Finding Susan Powter works best is as a near-vérité glimpse into the life of somebody who seemingly had everything, seemingly lost everything and is now living in a limbo that would be sad except that the doc treats it as matter-of-fact, rather than tragic — a distinction I certainly appreciated.

If audiences can accept a sequel that has veered into something closer to folk horror than its zombie-adjacent roots, they should be able to plug into its peculiar wavelength.

Premo’s commitment and grit are palpable — especially when one notes how close to the action he gets during the Capitol insurrection, so that the camera shows every jostle and bump. The sequence, full of shots and footage never seen before , is as chilling, horrifying and disgusting as the many other clips we’ve already seen shot by others.

As a creature feature, Primate gets the job done and has its share of asinine wit.

It’s a romantic comedy, and whatever its flaws elsewhere, it works best where it counts most — in the chemistry between the two leads.

With strong performances and a fresh premise about an unexpected friendship in middle age, but far too many creaky comic tropes, the uneven film is always watchable but never pops off the screen in a gripping way.

Zenovich does a better job of acknowledging contradictions in complicated human behavior than reckoning with what those contradictions mean. Her documentaries are particularly flimsy when it comes to linking difficult men with bigger institutional failures. Still, there are worthwhile conversations that I’m Chevy Chase might allow viewers to have.

At a time when people feel obliged to choose which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they stand on, Holding Liat takes a thoughtful middle ground that exposes the situation without exploiting it.

Even Fiennes, who delivers a typically expert, understated performance, doesn’t manage to make us fully invested in the stagey proceedings.

The film leans into action-comedy, and for a while, coasts by on the pre-sold likability of its cast.

There’s a sense that this gently meandering, sketchbook-like work is aware of its own cinematic precedents. It certainly seems to suffer from an anxiety of influence as it tries to carve out a space for itself somewhere in the region of Eric Rohmer wistful romances, Richard Linklater ensemble stories, and Sixth Generation semi-underground Chinese filmmakers like Jia Zhangke.

It’s a trippy, meandering journey, but the moments of amusement and insight are ample.

A lobotomy might be useful to buy all the shock twists and turns of this preposterous story and director Paul Feig too often holds back rather than fully leaning into its campy sensationalism and arch comedy. But holiday counterprogramming doesn’t get much juicier.

Yes, the movie offers gargantuan-scale spectacle, imposing technological wizardry and virtually nonstop action involving over-qualified and mostly unrecognizable actors in motion-capture suits. But it’s easily the most repetitious entry in the big-screen series, with a been-there, bought-the-T-shirt fatigue that’s hard to ignore.

As an appreciation of birds and our connection to them, it’s engrossing and endearing — a fresher take, certainly, than yet another weepie about dog or cat owners. But as an exploration of grief, it’s hindered by a 128-minute run time that spreads its emotional potency too thin.

The film is lovely in the graceful way it executes its unsurprising content, and the actors make it soar even at its most predictable.

Anyone nostalgic for the director’s more memorable work might get a kick out of seeing him reunite with past collaborators Kavner and Albert Brooks. But almost everyone here is trying way too hard, with the exception of Mackey, who’s appealing and natural even when stuck in a phony world full of phony characters.

This is a story of national identity and resistance with contemporary resonance, but it’s also a classic genre movie, its historical tapestry populated by a strong ensemble of screen stars as well as impressive newcomers.

The casting proves an inevitable distraction for Frontier Crucible, a competently executed but unmemorable oater.

[Gibson's] charisma keeps the formulaic movie afloat, while director Collins displays a flair for action scenes.

Much of the original cast and creative team have reunited for this wholly unnecessary sequel, which once again proves that oversized animatronic animal figures, no matter how homicidal their behavior, are more laughable than scary.

With superb performances across the board, particularly from her two young leads, and an adventurous use of visual and aural elements, Djukić has conjured an alluring fusion of spiritual awakening and adolescent confusion.

Like most movie spoofs, this one relies on quantity over quality, meaning that if you don’t find one joke funny you can rest assured there’ll be another one just a few seconds later. The team of five writers pack so many visual and verbal gags into the proceedings that some of them inevitably land, compensating for the profusion of groaners.

Over 96 minutes, you’ll be horrified and saddened. You’ll probably also want more information on a lot of the broadly sketched details, because this project is an overview and not an in-depth thesis. It’s limited, but it’s convincing.

A forgettable blend of unearned saccharinity and unacknowledged sourness, the Michael Showalter-directed dramedy capably proves that Mom is the true angel of the season but falls well short of proving that Christmas is worth all her fussing in the first place.

There’s swaggering confidence in the filmmaking to match that of the title character, along with adrenalized visuals, fine-grained production design and scrupulous attention to casting, down to the background players.

Sutherland makes it all work, delivering a thoroughly winning performance that makes you buy into the overall hokum.

This sequel to 2016’s smash hit Oscar-winning animated film proves more than worth the lengthy wait, knocking it out of the park with its dazzling visuals, sophisticated humor and doses of genuine emotion.

The interconnected structure lays the ground for a gripping mystery attentive viewers will be eager to solve.

It’s all dumb beyond belief, of course, but the film (efficiently directed by Simon Cellan Jones) is so fast-paced that you settle into its now well-honed formula as if it were a recliner equipped with an eggnog dispenser.

Sure, all but one of the show’s most memorable songs are in the first act, but the investment in character, story and sumptuous design more than compensates in Wicked: For Good, which again shows that casting stellar vocal talents Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande was a masterstroke.

The Alabama Solution is difficult to watch, and impossible to watch without escalating anger. There isn’t easy catharsis or an easy non-Alabama solution, but it’s impossible to deny that something better must be done.

Amazingly, very little of this is played for laughs, except of the unintentional variety.

Even when the explanations don’t pass muster, the pictures strike a chord.

Being Eddie isn’t a great piece of documentary filmmaking, nor does its DNA include an iota of journalism. What it is, though, is consummately polished and affectionate, taking an actor who rarely seemed vulnerable or especially comfortable in the spotlight at the peak of his stardom and making him seem, for 103 minutes, thoroughly at ease.

For all its visual stylishness, The Carpenter’s Son feels like such an essentially misconceived project that it seems destined for future cult status, with audiences at midnight screenings shouting out the more outrageous lines in unison with the actors. Which may not be what the filmmaker intended, but sounds like a lot of fun.

Wright seems almost constrained by a film that ends up neither as compelling nor as deep nor as wildly entertaining as it seems to believe.

This is a slight film, but the jolts do stay with you, and the two stars offer a humanity that many horror movies lack.

It’s definitely an over-the-top finale, and not everything ultimately seems real in King Ivory. But what makes Swab’s latest rise above your average drug thriller is how he tries to make each moment feel like it’s been drawn from a certain reality.

While Now You See Me: Now You Don’t proves undeniably entertaining, it’s more than a little exhausting as well.

The film wears its sincerity proudly and, despite its imperfections, has a sense of its purpose. Dorfman’s direction relies on intimate close-ups and only really differentiates itself from the traditional mechanics of a smaller-screen endeavor when it chronicles Ben’s emotional life.

Featuring enough slightly rambunctious humor to amuse younger viewers while providing a relatable, moving portrait of adolescent angst, sibling bonding and marital tension, In Your Dreams showcases consistently imaginative computer animated visuals (with one segment reverting to hand-drawn) and the sort of original storyline that’s increasingly rare in animated films.

Charlie Polinger opens his thrilling and uneasy directorial debut feature The Plague with an arresting sequence that quickly establishes the haunting undertones of this adolescent psychological thriller.

Selena y Los Dinos remains a slick doc most likely to appeal to her fans.

An absolute charmer, The Tale of Silyan is an affecting look at the human-avian bond, with all its mysteries, warmth and ungainly practicalities.

The problem in this beautifully shot but rather murky affair, which attempts to combine recent history, ethnic struggles and magical realism into one troubled family story, is that we never quite grasp all the stakes at hand, nor do we know what to actually believe.