Led by an almost unrecognizable Simon Baker as a jaded cop, Limbo weaves in themes of racial inequity, broken individuals and fractured families to build quiet potency.

The modulation in the final stretch from extreme sorrow to regeneration and then a possibility of reconnection in the open ending is lovely.

The film is thematically a bit thin but doesn’t stint on genuine scares, intensity or revulsion.

It definitely delivers the goods, making it fairly obvious that DCI John Luther isn’t going away anytime soon.

Shinkai never skimps on the human level. Suzume, who at first seems like just another standard-issue anime ingenue, grows and becomes more interesting throughout.

A touching reminder of music's ability to change the world.

In the spirit of its predecessors, Creed III gears audiences up for a fight of the century: The battle between Adonis and Damian is billed as one between an underdog and a man with nothing to lose. But the implications of those categories are murky and unsettling.

It aims for maximum entertainment, reveling in farce and gnarly killings to create an experience that keeps you on your toes even if the details get murky upon further reflection.

Faltering storytelling and sloppy visual technique aside, the pas de deux of tenderness and violence, passivity and aggression between Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay keeps you watching, with both actors mostly overcoming the clichés in the way their characters are conceived. But Femme ends up being less subversive than it seems to think it is.

Performances are what ultimately sets Bruiser apart as a debut and signal Warren’s potential as a director.

The film is so refined and filled with good taste, not to mention poetry citations and dialogue rendered with quotations marks, that it often feels inert.

Despite being entombed in all that prop flesh and wrinkles, Mirren manages to emote very effectively with her voice, mimicking Meir’s midwestern twang, gait and posture.

The action flows with the rhythms of play and labor, joy and grief, thanks to sensitive editing by Lucrecia Gutiérrez Maupomé and Huezo and the sound team’s evocative work.

Although the storytelling conveys deep compassion for the plight of persecuted peoples, and Hussein’s unflinching performance speaks volumes, mostly without words, there’s a grim inevitability to The Survival of Kindness that becomes wearing, making its 96 minutes feel longer.

A committed, intensely physical lead performance by German actor Franz Rogowski (recently seen in Ira Sachs’ Passages), luminous cinematography courtesy of ace DP Helene Louvart, and stirring electronic music by composer Vitalic all come together to make this a sensuous, striking film experience. But, yeesh, that script by director-screenwriter Giacomo Abbruzzese is a mess.

Even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

Satter shows unfaltering command of the medium for a first-time film director, notably in her penetrating use of the closeup, which makes the steadily exposed raw nerves of Sydney Sweeney’s remarkable performance in the title role all the more disturbing to witness.

What Ralphie goes through over the course of this absorbing enough but bludgeoning portrait of corrosive masculinity makes him both victim and monster.

She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.

It’s an affectionately told story of Canadian innovation, loss of innocence and of unlikely bedfellows making entrepreneurial magic.

Punchy delivery styles, shimmering personalities and kaleidoscopic perspectives make up the soul of D. Smith’s gutsy documentary Kokomo City

Although Tomlin (for whom Weitz wrote 2015’s Grandma) and Fonda are thoroughly capable of taking their characters in any direction required of them, Moving On ultimately strands the actors — and the audience — at an awkward impasse.

Through an affecting mix of comedy, romance and drama, A Radiant Girl sounds a warning about the perils of not looking directly at tough realities. And yet it’s so alive from moment to moment, so finely attuned to the emotional lives of its characters, that it never feels like a history lesson dressed up as narrative.

For all the authentic genre tropes on display, Marlowe never comes to life on its own, lacking the verve or wit to make it feel anything other than a great pop song played by a mediocre cover band.

For better or worse, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is the most overtly sci-fi film in the series, and on that level, it succeeds very well.

It’s a breezy charmer — the kind of movie these obits have been mourning over the years. The film returns to the genre’s blueprint and sticks with it. There are a couple of instances of subversion, moments when Your Place or Mine winks and pokes fun at itself. But for the most part it doesn’t want to surprise or be more clever than the viewer; it aims to please, and in doing so helps re-energize the romantic comedy.

Somebody I Used to Know, written by Brie and her husband Dave Franco (who also directs here), is a sharply conceived and smart romantic comedy — the kind of film that might inspire hasty accusations of trying too hard to be different. It takes the narrative skeleton of the genre and enhances it with its own subversive elements.

This is a film best experienced in a group setting, among friends, the kind of project that fosters conspiratorial thinking and could inspire multiple watches — if only it got out of its own way.

But the film is so baggy, so preoccupied with its own ambitions — re-establishing its support of women’s desires, addressing a new generation, etc. — that it deflates into flaccid fluff.

The new film doesn’t match the tightly wound narrative complexity or power of its predecessor; nor does it escape the occasional feel of actor-y self-indulgence. But the artistic rigor of the undertaking remains striking, as does the invaluable contribution of Danish sound designer Peter Albrechtsen in sculpting the disquieting atmosphere.

The film struggles to maintain the verve of this opening sequence (which nails a specific anxiety of liberal middle-class Black people), subsequently becoming a series of set pieces — some more energetic than others — in search of a thesis.

While Body Parts is a smart film and a useful primer on big questions about filmic representations of sex and desire, one wishes its conclusions were more nuanced.

The bigger problem is that the movie leaves itself nowhere to go but deeper into biblical doom and gloom, with an unwavering sense of purpose that highlights Shyamalan’s able craftsmanship but also exposes the pointlessness of this claustrophobic exercise.

With great delicacy, [Maryam Touzani] shows how Moroccan society censures a woman who gives birth outside marriage — not a terribly original theme, but here it is made heartrending by the superb performances of Lubna Azabal and Nisrin Erradi in the lead roles.

Maybe it isn’t exactly that Pamela, a love story is unrevelatory. It’s just that what it reveals is that once you get past the tabloid-friendly headlines from the ’90s and ’00s, the actual Pamela Anderson is a fairly smart, fairly funny and fairly boring — not in a critical way at all, just in a way that runs counter to expectations — woman who just wants love. She also — and this actually is a problem — has always been a fairly candid interview subject.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite ponders this paradox, and while somewhat vexingly it doesn’t fully explain why or to what extent Hite “disappeared” from public view in the decades before her death in 2020, it draws a vivid portrait of a complex, fascinating woman.

Even though the doc’s storytelling has an approach to twistiness that I’m finding increasingly irritating every time it’s used, the sheer volume of visceral responses produced by The Deepest Breath is hard to deny.

Take the plot of one of Richard Linklater’s Before movies, combine it with the eye-popping aesthetic of Wes Anderson, then set it within the ethnically diverse, highly photogenic South London enclave of Peckham, and you’ll wind up with Rye Lane.

Writer-director Christopher Zalla adheres to the subgenre’s conventions and doesn’t stint on sentimentality, but Radical more than earns its surging emotional payoff.

Scrapper is a sweet bit of fluff that’s trying too hard to be funny and offbeat and ends up being too often simply annoying.

It’s more like the kind of standard Sundance-bound dramedy we’ve seen lots of times before, albeit with a charming cast and some sharp bits of commentary on race, identity and gender that come courtesy of screenwriter Adrian Tomine, who adapted his 2007 graphic novel of the same title.

With the steadfast lack of melodrama we’ve come to expect from him, the writer-director packs more incident, life and unassuming complexity into 90 minutes than most filmmakers muster in twice that run time.

The emotional impact of A Little Prayer doesn’t so much detonate as unfold, a series of quiet epiphanies, well-observed and elegant in their awkward yearning.

Fancy Dance presents a broader narrative that emphasizes the connections that sustain families, communities and tribal nations, even when confronted with a legacy of disenfranchisement. Tremblay’s film validates the varied expressions of that experience with an affirming account of resilience and hope that sparkles with authentic performances, sensitive scripting and a genuine sense of place that resonate well after the final credits roll.

Its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.

An astonishing real-life geopolitical thriller with a very run-of-the-mill historical explainer grafted to it like a remora, Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia is so packed with high-stakes tension and nail-biting set-pieces that it’s fairly easy, and probably even ideal, to ignore its clunky structuring and expositional choices.

Where Going to Mars undoubtedly succeeds is in spotlighting the poet’s blazing personality, her unwavering confidence and her commitment to community without ever sacrificing herself.

This lively, likable, if somewhat on-the-nose work grabs viewer attention with fourth-wall-breaking monologues, jocular explanatory graphics, and tightly choreographed dance numbers to vintage American and Iranian pop songs.

This is the first feature for Gordon and Lieberman and there’s little evidence of a visual sense, even if the rough edges are part of the appeal. But perhaps due to the elements of improvisation, the comic timing is uneven and the material tends to be more often cute than uproarious.

It’s a quiet drama despite its characters’ many volatile arguments. Most of all, it’s a moving character portrait of a complicated woman who makes good and bad decisions but is motivated solely by the desire to create a better life for herself and the people she loves.

Despite the formidable star wattage and estimable talents on display, however, Maybe I Do fails to overcome its obvious stage origins, feeling all too schematic and talky. The plot feels like it could have been lifted from a French farce from the last century.

It all results in a documentary I found consistently interesting and never revelatory. I learned things, but given the opportunity allegedly presented to the production, not close to as much as I might have wanted to learn.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.

It’s an all-in performance for the ages, layered with as much vulnerability as anger, and it’s to Majors’ credit that our hearts ache for Killian even — or perhaps especially — when he’s out of control.

One of the smartest things about Parmet’s film is the way it portrays internalized misogyny in her female characters. The Starling Girl is a complex, often disturbing portrait of the way women have been pressured to shrink themselves and pass on that shame to their daughters.

If there’s a significant flaw to this confident and compelling debut feature, it’s that it’s sleazy enough to be fun beyond its serious-minded overturning of antiquated gender dynamics, but not quite trashy enough to be truly juicy.

It’s difficult to convey the multilayered beauty of Past Lives beyond just urging people to see it and lose themselves in its transfixing spell.

In poetic fashion, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt asks for interpretation, making ordinary explanations unnecessary.

Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama is a melancholic story transformed into a precious portrait by the director’s generous and nurturing eye. She digs into the familiar landscape of a Black mother facing an oppressive legal system and pulls from it the most unexpected and humanizing details. She observes them with a loving curiosity, and then asks viewers to do the same.

Hewson takes a flawed but good-hearted mess of a character and makes her sympathetic, likable and fully human.

Rippling with sly humor and a bold command of the tropes of classic Hitchcockian suspense, this is a twisty and beguiling original, led by contrasting but expertly synced performances from Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway.

Alice Englert expertly finds the line between satire and sincerity, mocking the slipperiness of the spiritual-enlightenment industry while acknowledging the serious intentions of the people — in this case very well-heeled customers — who think it’s at least worth a try.

Even when the ambitious film overshoots, you can’t wait to see what happens next.

There’s a modesty about You Hurt My Feelings that makes it seem in some ways as simple and straightforward as its title. But Holofcener is such a gifted writer that it becomes a mosaic of mildly absurd minutiae, mixed in with legitimate feelings.

For all the movie’s quite credible conjecture about technology rendering nature obsolete and procreation becoming the privilege of the wealthy, The Pod Generation never fully hatches.

Sometimes I Think About Dying, then, is a graceful treatise on how challenging — but liberating — it can be to make connections.

Many cinephiles are nostalgics at heart, and the story of how Kim’s Video was founded, lost and eventually found again seems to reflect a greater story about how the cinema, whether consisting of Palme d’Or winners or Z-grade slashers, has been pushed to the margins of popular culture — to be fondly remembered in documentaries like this.

Justice regurgitates information that was largely already in the public sphere, so its main purpose will likely be as a for-the-record summation, albeit a workmanlike one puffed up here and there with generically ominous music to suggest murky machinations at the highest levels of government.

What comes through most vividly, other than the human tragedy on display, is the vital importance of war correspondents and the courage and ingenuity they must possess in order to work under such life-threatening conditions.

A hair-raising third act adds an unusual coda — one that I, after only one viewing, am still processing. The relief, however, is in the filmmakers’ approach to these tense scenes: Fogel and Ashford loosen their grip, at last trusting us to sit in our discomfort, draw our own conclusions and sharpen our tools for the discourse.

Guggenheim’s particular approach here leaves lots of room for the next documentarian who wants to celebrate Fox’s life, but with its tight focus and distinctive style, it delivers an essence of Fox’s energy and generation-spanning appeal.

A generally compelling story with obvious contemporary and global resonances gets an unfortunately dry and surface-level retelling in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.

Seasoned documentarian Roger Ross Williams, who profiled Armendáriz in 2016 for the Amazon series The New Yorker Presents, makes an assured transition into narrative features with this entertaining biopic, which doubles as a gorgeous depiction of mother-son love and an exhilarating exploration of fearless queer identity in a macho environment.

This movie’s dazzle is all about the chemistry of its powerhouse quartet and the potential for comic sparks, and on that front, the starry huddle of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Sally Field delivers.

It comes on like gangbusters and keeps generating belly laughs well past the halfway point, slowing down then to take a GPS-directed turn into familiar romance territory.

Shotgun Wedding amounts to an action romantic comedy in which the action is uninspired, the romance tepid and the comedy flat — such that not even rom-com queen Jennifer Lopez can elevate it above aggressive mediocrity.

Missing succeeds at maintaining a propulsive, nail-biting atmosphere and overcoming the boredom of its conventional narrative beats by treating each tool — Gmail accounts, iPhone photos and company websites — as a deeply layered puzzle, one that gathers and offers more information than most people realize.

Lead actors Cole and Latimore are competent enough, but they don’t come close to approximating the original film’s stars’ charisma or likability, with the result that their characters’ ill-advised activities leave a sour taste. This is one party you can’t wait to be over.

Fortunately for moviegoers, the veteran Scottish actor is an engaging, charismatic presence, and Plane is the sort of breathlessly paced suspenser that barely leaves a moment for audiences to stop suspending their disbelief.

Directed by Brian Vincent, the documentary situates its subject within the context of more familiar characters and tries to understand why Brzezinski, a charmingly aloof painter, is not readily considered among this cohort. The answer to this question is less interesting than the shocking journey it takes Vincent on.

Mars One revels in the lives of its characters, taking a leisurely and scenic route to understanding their dreams and realities.

M3GAN might be too frequently funny to be terrifying, but it’s never too silly to deliver tension and vicious thrills. It seems a safe bet that the killer doll will return, not to mention become an in-demand costume next Halloween.

Although A Man Called Otto never fully rises above its obvious plot machinations, director Forster thankfully applies a fairly restrained, subtle approach. The result is a film to which you ultimately find yourself succumbing even though you never stop being aware that your heartstrings are being shamelessly pulled.

This third collaboration between writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale (following Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) is far stronger on gothic atmosphere than suspense. It’s capably acted and visually effective, with lots of mist-shrouded woodlands and chiaroscuro interiors, but the storytelling is stilted and uninvolving.

Critics will sniff, as they invariably do, about the familiar conventions of the music biopic. But the spirit of I Wanna Dance With Somebody transcends those conventions far more often than it gets weighed down by them. Anyone who loves Whitney Houston and her music will leave the film with that love reinforced — especially anyone who sees it in a theater with a wall-shaking sound system.

Propelled by Justin Hurwitz’s unrelenting wall-of-sound score, it’s often electrifying, to be sure, and certainly impressive in terms of sheer scale. How often do we get to see hundreds of non-digital extras in anything these days? But even when Chazelle takes a breather from the debauchery and gets his principals on a studio backlot or tries accessing them in more intimate moments, it all seems like one big, noisy, grotesque nostalgia cartoon.

The pieces don’t always fit together neatly and Alexandra Pelosi struggles with a subject whose façade is proudly impenetrable, but there are points at which Pelosi in the House is engaging and enlightening enough to make up for it being simultaneously choppy and rushed.

In terms of narrative sophistication and even more so dialogue, this $350 million sequel is almost as basic as its predecessor, even feeble at times. But the expanded, bio-diverse world-building pulls you in, the visual spectacle keeps you mesmerized, the passion for environmental awareness is stirring and the warfare is as visceral and exciting as any multiplex audience could desire.

With a refreshingly diverse cast and a compelling premise, there’s a lot to appreciate about Darby and the Dead — even with its muddied execution.

A timely reminder of the legacy of voting rights in the U.S. and an inspiring testament to the power of community organizing.

A sense of admiration and responsibility courses through the doc, an orientation that eventually curdles the narrative.

The drama feels flimsy when it strays from the swamps, rendering the politics of the time as almost secondary to the visual spectacle of a harrowing escape.

For those who prefer their gingerbread soaked in booze and their tinsel splattered with gore, Violent Night might be exactly what the season calls for.

Tantura finally attempts to get the record on that incident straight, but as a movie, it serves an even greater purpose by bringing it to a wider public than ever before.

Where the drama is headed is never in doubt, and the steps it takes to get there are often familiar. Yet by this time we are sufficiently invested in the couple to care deeply. If anything, the intrusion of mortality makes the relationship more believable as both Parsons and Aldridge (Epix’s Pennyworth) imbue their scenes with warmth and heart, regret and exquisite sadness.

The People We Hate at the Wedding doesn’t stray too far from the formula of our streaming-dominated visual landscape, but a witty screenplay from the Molyneux sisters and strong performances from Janney, Platt and Bell make it reliably diverting.

Darker in tone but still extremely funny, the film, like so many of its animated brethren, falters when resorting to the frenetic action sequences seemingly designed for tykes’ short attention spans.

It’s all a bit much, really, and the constant tonal shifts from a sort of demonic Fantasia to bouncy musical numbers proves more than a bit jarring. It doesn’t help that none of the songs are particularly memorable.