Fennell is adept at pastiche, and at least she goes for sources worth plundering. But this is a movie that’s all surface cleverness, with nothing terribly insightful to say about its rarefied milieu and those gazing in longingly from the outside. Even so, Saltburn is juicy stuff, a revenge thriller that’s often wickedly funny and wildly enjoyable.

Amplifying its force with thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be grossly over-simplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his “beard.” But Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a unique union, fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable — even when it’s broken.

It feels closer to Taxi Driver or the films of Gaspar Noé than to Kiarostami’s work, and yet Ahmadzadeh’s portrait of his country’s disaffected youth, especially during the current period of revolt, is just as socially vital.

Despite some amusing moments, it never really takes off, burdened by a tiresome romantic subplot that periodically stops the movie dead in its tracks.

The film, which is just over an hour long, dishes out some smart twists and a few good laughs, as well as a decent level of suspense. But like many of Dupieux’s movies, it’s also a strong concept in search of something more.

The film would have benefited from director Jeff Celentano perhaps picking up the pace a little, and the deletion of some extraneous subplots. But the climactic sequence, in which Rickey bats through the pain while encountering the toughest pitchers he’s ever faced, provides the perfect stirring conclusion.

The conclusions that Our Father, the Devil ultimately draws are powerful, redemptive and stirring.

Stuffed with rude delights, spry wit, radical fantasy and breathtaking design elements, the movie is a feast. And Emma Stone gorges on it in a fearless performance that traces an expansive arc most actors could only dream about.

While it unfolds in a hazy dream state rooted in Adam’s loneliness and the emotional suspension that has blocked him from moving forward, it’s by no means a downer. It’s a thing of beauty, heartfelt and unforgettable.

If Asteroid City was a too-rich 20-course tasting menu, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a deliciously calibrated amuse-bouche.

Ferrari is unlikely to go down as canonical Mann, lacking the glimmering, hard-edged stylishness of his best work. But admirers of the director’s high-intensity, muscular filmmaking will not go unrewarded.

While the investigative midsection slumps just a little, El Conde remains a spellbinding and mischievously spry spin on a deadly serious subject from a director who, in his tenth feature, continues to come up with audacious surprises.

While De Angelis knows how to create visceral action and moments of intensity, he’s incapable of the slightest hint of subtlety.

For those not motivated purely by a desire for cinematic bloodlust accompanied by an abrasive musical score that sounds like electronic fingernails on a blackboard, there’s some fun to be had.

It’s nonetheless the very slipperiness of Sakurai’s passion — to humbly become the god he worships — that continually compels.

The four lead performers display an undeniable chemistry that makes Vacation Friends 2 pleasantly engaging if not hilarious. But it’s the addition of Buscemi that provides the real comic spark, the veteran actor employing his well-honed persona of angry sarcasm to provide a much-needed edginess to the otherwise bland proceedings.

Director Nimrod Antal (Predators) stages the mostly vehicular mayhem with as much variety and visual excitement as possible, especially in a crucial scene in which Matt is cornered by the police in a tunnel. But there’s only so much he can do with the hackneyed premise.

Thanks to its well-observed, amusing depiction of teenage girl angst and a genuine sweetness at its core, it proves thoroughly winning. And if you don’t get all verklempt at the heartwarming ending, you’ve probably never had a best friend.

Moss tackles the idea from a more intimate and feminist perspective, questioning how far mothers are willing to go for their children, or simply to become mothers at all. If what happens in her movie seems altogether extreme, maybe it’s because the world we live in tends to push such women to extreme places.

It’s a credit to the cast and Rodriguez’s assured direction that we believe Miguel’s efforts stand a chance.

Medusa Deluxe is saved from its own potential waywardness by a series of stellar performances. The cast animates the strange, disquieting world of beauticians who describe their craft in profound, almost holy terms.

Even with its brief 93-minute running time, Strays feels thin and repetitive; after all, there are only so many times you can laugh at, say, a dog happily eating another’s dog vomit. But the film nonetheless delivers plenty of laughs, making up for many of its clunkers through sheer volume and the talents of its starry voice cast.

Aided by the dynamic cinematography of regular Ari Aster collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, a pulsing electronic score by Brit musician Bobby Krlic and sturdy effects work, Soto brings an assured hand, balancing action with character-driven scenes and comedy with suspense throughout. The pacing is brisk, infused with youthful energy, but never so frenetic that it doesn’t allow intimate exchanges time to breathe.

The Monkey King is no exception. It mines rich source material for a widely accessible episodic adventure laced with rowdy martial arts clashes and fantastical detours. Even if its Americanization follows a standard template, the movie maintains a flavorful sprinkling of the material’s cultural specificity.

It gets the job done and is sure to pull solid numbers. It doesn’t hurt that Gadot has appealing chemistry with co-star Jamie Dornan.

[Ovredal] handles the darkly creepy atmospherics expertly and makes fully convincing the ship’s fateful voyage through stormy and vampire-besieged seas. But he’s not able to bring much spark to Bragi Schut, Jr. and Zak Olkewicz’s slow-paced, formulaic screenplay, which lacks the dark wit necessary to keep us invested in the gory proceedings.

In this case, it’s the thrills that sell, and Gran Turismo has plenty of those.

Greer, Gathegi and Maadi are all on-point as regular people facing spatial-temporal realities the impact of which they fail to fully grasp until it may be too late. Sure, they’ve changed the world, but be careful what you wish for.

The stories in Simon’s doc live in a French context, but the plight of its participants is near universal. In the face of resurgent attacks on bodily autonomy around the world, Our Body is an urgent and political project.

As much as it’s a joy to watch Statham slinging explosive harpoons from a jet ski, Meg 2 offers only scattershot pleasures. It’s too ridiculous to muster serious scares and too tonally uncertain to convince us that it’s consistently in on the joke.

From its very first minute, this searing drama of rural strife, xenophobia and cultural hostility is filled with almost unbearable tension.

The quiet but stirring effect is a dreamscape of eye-opening geography, existential longing and the enduring workaday.

Adopting a decidedly younger spin toward its teenage heroes, the hugely entertaining and funny film seems destined to reinvigorate the franchise and attract plenty of nostalgic adults as well as young fans.

The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.

I don’t think Meeropol’s formal choices always match the story she wants to capture, and After the Bite runs out of energy well before the end of its 90-minute running time. But I mostly enjoyed the idea of a more muted version of Jaws that suggests that if we have a contemporary shark attack problem, the solution is going to require more than a bigger boat.

Part of the attraction of Madeleine Collins is in seeing how far Barraud is willing take things until providing a reasonable explanation. It’s a tricky balancing act that’s one-third Hitchcockian intrigue and one-third Chabrolian study of broken bourgeois homes, with the final third bordering on kitsch.

At a running time of over two hours, the experience eventually feels as wearisome as riding the same ride over and over again.

Cage chews up every scene he’s in and seems to be having a blast — he’s always over-the-top and never boring to watch, in a film that delivers the goods for those who like him best when he’s just about lost his mind.

Corner Office succeeds all too well in conveying the deadening effects of office work, practically serving as a testimonial to the pandemic-created trend of working from home.

This is an elegiac story, a humanistic metaphor for a vanishing world seen through the prism of a vulnerable couple cruelly written off by their families as worthless encumbrances.

It proves more interesting in its chronicling of the business practices that made the Beanie Babies such a sensation, at least for a while, than in its portrait of personal dramas, the veracity of which obviously has to be called into question. Overall, the movie follows a by-now familiar trajectory, with the company’s mammoth success inevitably followed by its big fall.

The documentary that it chooses to be instead has appeal but, in the rush to get it onto screens before the next time somebody dares underestimate Curry, perhaps it lacks sufficient refinement.

This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed man, his legacy complicated by his own ambivalence toward the breakthrough achievement that secured his place in the history books.

Barbie is driven by jokes — sometimes laugh-out-loud, always chuckle-worthy — that poke light fun at Mattel, prod the ridiculousness of the doll’s lore and gesture at the contradictions of our sexist society.

As “Hitchcock” notes, his movies have been analyzed every which way and back again. Cousins’ fresh approach divides the work into six sections, an elegant capsule melding existential questions with the practical challenges and opportunities of big-screen storytelling.

While it’s a wisp of a movie, almost directionless at times and self-consciously quirky at others, Fremont contains enough poignantly observed interludes to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

A moving and complex homage to Barrett, Bogawa’s film also turned out to be his “goodbye to Storm,” who was ill with cancer during its making.

Rock ’n’ roll mythologizing is one of the subjects of Squaring the Circle and Have You Got It, but it’s not their method. Rather than reaching for a neat or aggrandizing summing-up, they grapple with the passage of time and the perspective it brings.

Directed with pedestrian competence by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, The Miracle Club is about secrets that are all too obvious, and forgiveness you can see coming from the start.

When Foxx is onscreen with Parris, a certain kind of magic happens. The pair treat their characters’ verbal tussles like rappers in a cypher: Their metaphors are smooth and their egos huge.

The result is a sly, often playful but ultimately moving study of community, generational anguish and atrocities covered up by the state that blends documentary technique with originality and polished storytelling skill.

Lakota Nation vs. United States is a visually dynamic documentary, and it’s also one that delves into the power of language and how we use it.

The movie is technically accomplished, well-acted, atmospherically unsettling and certainly watchable. . . But as genre material, it’s generic.

Gariépy, masterful in her emotional and physical exactness, is a revelation as the enigmatic Kelly-Anne, whose stringent control over herself and her environment masks a sick compulsion whose origins we can only guess at.

There’s a good story at the heart of The Out-Laws about Parker coming to terms with her family’s long criminal history. But that’s more or less tossed aside in favor of all the nonstop gags, in a film that starts off like Meet the Parents and ends like a goofier The Expendables, some excessive violence included.

While Hugo Perez and Cathryne Czubek don’t tell a perfectly crafted story in Once Upon a Time in Uganda, their film captures enough of Nabwana’s resourcefulness and enthusiasm to make one wish his movies (which have played some fests in North America) were easier to see here — not on YouTube, but in theaters where their shout-at-the-screen, howl-with-your-seatmates vibe would be just the thing to remind you how essential the communal experience of cinema is.

The strong cast, high-gloss production values and constant wow factor of the action offer plenty of distraction from the storytelling deficiencies.

Alberdi makes her directorial hand virtually invisible, observing her subjects from a discreet distance that allows them to be narrators of their own story while never speaking directly to the camera.

The impeccable selection of closing clips allows us to reimagine him as a man not just idolized as a star but accepted for the entirety of who he was.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken charms and woos in a predictable manner.

Emerging from this extraordinary theatrical happening like a weary but still commanding oracle, Mac has shared a vision of America both personal and probing — tender, bruised and yet defiantly, magnificently hopeful. It’s simultaneously delirious and graced by what seems almost like ancient queer wisdom from somewhere way out there in the cosmos.

Foster’s research and storytelling are very satisfying, even if the results aren’t. Many of those involved wound up serving prison time, but of course it was far too short, too gentle and not served in the same cells as the Big Pharma execs who made this horror story possible.

Every Body is primarily an informative documentary, one that takes a cursory glance at many facets of the intersex awareness conversation to give viewers unfamiliar with the material a new perspective.

This exercise in brutal nihilism ultimately proves as empty as the inane philosophy that provides the film its title.

Perrier’s direction — which pays sweet homage to romantic comedies and vintage Hollywood — makes up for the underdeveloped narrative and occasionally stiff performances from the supporting cast.

One of the captivating paradoxes of Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s lovingly assembled chapter of queer history is that while it never downplays the marginalization, persecution and physical danger of being a trans woman of color making a living through sex work, it gives equal time to the resilience, the sense of community, the proud sisterhood and shared survival skills.

This airy and refreshingly low-stakes comedy will have you steadily chuckling, if not necessarily rolling on the floor laughing. But it also has a surprising amount of heart.

Cheap commentary is scarce here, and empathy runs deeper than a first glance suggests.

Suffice it to say that if you enjoyed Extraction, you’ll have a fine time with this one, which, in typical franchise fashion, busts its butt attempting to outdo its predecessor. And it does.

A chilling story told in a disjointed manner.

It’s Hamm’s emotionally wounded small-town top cop who gives the film its engine, especially in his dealings with Mohammed and Fey’s characters. The schemes and cover-ups and collateral damage spin round with little dimension, or, as Police Chief Sanders sums it up, “Just a bunch of people that deserve each other.”

The whole collaboration feels undeniably stagey, but it’s still an empathic and frequently moving work that touches on the sheer volume of callers that workers like Thompson’s character, often unpaid volunteers, must contend with every day.

Poetic, painterly work Users looks and sounds stunning, but remains thematically a little too diffuse for its own good as it meditates on our children and the future they will inhabit, where perfect machines replace imperfect parents.

While the cast’s dancing is very good, on the whole, the acting suggests less training. But that fits the semi-professional vibe even better, creating a work that feels light, quick and quite dirty in every sense.

This long-gestating stand-alone showcase for the Fastest Man Alive is enjoyable entertainment, even if it spends more time spinning its wheels than reinventing them.

The many, many action sequences are spectacularly conceived and executed, including a car chase on the Williamsburg Bridge that’s probably still tying up downtown traffic.

The story was already told in the 2008 documentary More Than a Game, but that won’t stop the GOAT’s fans from wanting to see this lovingly rendered adaptation that covers all the early career highlights, albeit sometimes in sanitized form.

In this way Across the Spider-Verse gets even more serious about recreating the experience of reading a comic book. The animations are not just striking, but incredibly absorbing in each new dimension.

Had Pixar perhaps taken more risks with that plotline, they might have pleased a smaller demographic than such a project requires to be profitable, but they might also have delivered a movie on par with some of their best work. Instead, the elements all fit perfectly into place — so much so that water eventually puts out fire, and we’re left without much of an impression.

Engrossing enough but also a bit meandering and underpowered.

The inevitable North American remake will no doubt pump more technology into its iteration, but a more efficient, streamlined approach toward pace and editing wouldn’t have hurt this original and striking work.

On the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

What Loach adds to this scenario, as he’s done in most of his films, is a natural intimacy that goes beyond the issues to bring something human and emotional to the table. In its best moments, The Old Oak hits those powerful notes without pulling too hard on your heartstrings, with lived-in performances from a nonprofessional cast, including a few actors who were in the director’s most recent movies.

Rohrwacher makes movies you sink into rather than watch dispassionately, taking time to establish the milieu as her characters and stories reveal themselves in layers.

Wim Wenders’ latest documentary Anselm offers a mesmerizing, cinematic catalogue of German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s deeply tactile, maximalist oeuvre.

Youth (the parenthetical subtitle Spring heralds a projected series of films) is consistently engaging, even if it’s not always easy to see what the whole package is trying to say that couldn’t be said with more brevity.

While its stylings are purposely retro, its aims are very much of the here and now. This is a film that digs deep into Chile’s colonial past — especially during a closing section that transforms the story into one of historical reckoning.

Tràn Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu (La Passion du Dodin-Bouffant) is a movie that captures its mouthwatering dishes like edible tableaux, combining culinary marvels with a moving tale of middle-age love.

The director has crafted a film of deceptive simplicity, observing the tiny details of a routine existence with such clarity, soulfulness and empathy that they build a cumulative emotional power almost without you noticing.

This challenging, extremely violent, ravishing-looking, intricately plotted adaptation by Kitano of his novel is of interest for its fresh take on a musty genre. That said, it could feel like a slog to watch for viewers who aren’t fans of sword-wielding, screaming samurai movies.

Filled with the director’s typical operatic flourishes — cameras floating down corridors or over balconies as characters race toward disaster, emotional crescendos set to a racing score by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso — it can also be a rather stuffy affair, with lots of dramatic speeches and religious symbolism that runs the gamut from satirical to heavy-handed.

Running just 81 minutes, Fallen Leaves is slight compared to many of Kaurismäki’s more complex narratives, but its well of feeling creeps up on you and it delivers a good share of laugh-out-loud lines with droll aplomb. Besides, who are we to quibble about any gift from one of world cinema’s greatest treasures?

Slowly but deliberately paced, the movie builds to a crescendo in a closing act where a movie itself — a real movie shot and projected on celluloid — plays a pivotal role, resuscitating forgotten lives and memories as only the cinema can do.

The film’s wistful hope for the future of cinema and its healing power ends up being too self-satisfied to register as an expression of collective faith.

The Boogeyman, in both its literary and cinematic forms, is undoubtedly relatively minor King. But when it’s done this well, even minor King is major scary.

The film’s genuine sweetness and affection for its characters go a long way toward compensating for its numbing overfamiliarity.

As usual, Butler brings a convincing humanity and vulnerability to his action movie heroics.

It’s hard to engage with characters and situations that feel so studied, so stuck in a script that rarely allows them any emotional development — especially when the director himself seems so removed from them.