For all its wit, its lively talk and deceptive lightness, this is arguably the writer-director’s most affecting work.

The intense chamber drama never disguises its stage roots but transcends them with the grace and compassion of the writing and the layers of pain and despair, love and dogged hope peeled back in the central performance. Fraser makes us see beyond the alarming appearance to the deeply affecting heart of this broken man.

The result is an expressive and moving portrait of a tempestuous marriage, one told with elan that feels rich in feeling even if its entire budget probably wouldn’t have covered the cost of croissants on an average film shoot in France.

Nothing in the film has a fraction of the dramatic impact of the emotional roller-coaster Colman’s performance embodies.

Nothing would work quite as well without the performance by Pugh. She commands the screen from her very first appearance, and we never have doubts that anyone who tries to interfere with her will be facing a formidable adversary.

As a cleverly packaged pandemic production with narrative echoes of that global anxiety, it’s at the very least something fresh. A gruesome portrait of another young woman hungering for a life greater than the fate she’s been handed, it makes an amusing companion piece to X.

The philosophical and sometimes faith-steeped bent of the women’s discussion might put off audiences not willing to go there. For those ready to take the leap, the thoughtful and beautifully lensed feature is a rewarding exploration that addresses not just the characters’ predicament but the existential questions that face any contemporary woman navigating patriarchal setups.

While the film’s emphatic style can become draining, and its attention to technique risks overshadowing the interpersonal drama, there’s an operatic grandeur here that won’t quit, giving the constantly escalating violence considerable power.

Guadagnino has made a kind of emo horror movie. He’s far less interested in the shock factor than the poignant isolation of his young principal characters and the life raft they come to represent to one another as they slowly let down their guard.

At once a vivid portrait of a place and its people, an unsentimental ode to the art and craft of tequila-making, a damning depiction of the results of globalizing economic policies, and an exquisite character study, with Teresa Sánchez delivering a performance of potent restraint.

Ava’s rebellion is against more than her parents’ mistrust; it’s about the cage of societal norms in Iran that stifles female creativity and self-expression.

Audiences’ staying power for this meandering existential exploration of personal, professional and national identity — as tragicomic as it is rueful — will vary, depending on their interest in the artist or their appetite for the film’s aesthetic beauty.

Tár marks yet another career peak for Blanchett — many are likely to argue her greatest — and a fervent reason to hope it’s not 16 more years before Field gives us another feature. It’s a work of genius.

There’s much to appreciate in Noah Baumbach’s alternately exhilarating and enervating attempt to tame Don DeLillo’s comedy of death, White Noise, not least the daredevil spirit and ambition with which the writer-director and his cast plunge into the tricky material. But little in this episodic freakout hits the target quite so well as the wild end credits sequence.

All elements of this arresting documentary work together to push an urgent thesis: What we are attuned to hearing, to seeing and to thinking about the U.S. and what the country can and cannot afford to do is by design. It’s better to realize that now before it’s too late.

There’s nary an amusing or unpredictable moment in the film.

Stallone provides just the right amount of world-weary gravitas and deadpan humor to put over the hokey material. And he still has the requisite imposing physicality to make the sight of his character beating up men a quarter of his age fairly convincing.

If Porcupine doesn’t cut as deeply as it could, it’s still an intriguing window into the lives of two characters who, thanks to Cahill’s precision, feel almost not like characters at all.

Katrina Babies is an assertion of presence, a proclamation that the devastating hurricane is not simply a past story, but a present one too.

If we take a step back, we can see the faint outlines of another, more urgent, narrative thread in Kaepernick & America — one that encourages an all too rare kind of integrity and commitment to creating a more just world.

Even if it takes itself a tad too seriously, it delivers enough nail-biting stress and terror to justify a trip to the multiplex for action-thriller fans.

Like the previous Kirikou movies, the combination of classic animation and straightforward storytelling provides a welcome antidote to the kind of overcaffeinated cartoons gracing today’s screens.

Watching large chunks of this film feels like being transported into a trance-like reverie, albeit a reverie that quite often has nightmarish contours.

With less pedestrian writing, there might have been some genuine uplift in the outcome of a family reinforcing its bonds while taking on future missions as a unified team. But Secret Headquarters is mostly just meh.

A rambunctious, strange and occasionally humorous action-thriller-comedy.

At times disarming, at others plain silly, it takes a few daring leaps without quite avoiding middle-of-the-road sitcom territory.

Easter Sunday earns points for its cultural bona fides, its loving portrait of the community it celebrates and its almost entirely Filipino and Asian-American casting. And Koy reveals himself to be a likable screen presence deserving of more starring roles. But it falls hopelessly flat in its comedic aspirations, more closely resembling the sort of bland network sitcom to which its main character aspires.

There’s enough carnage and violent action on display to satisfy Predator fans whose cinematic bloodlust knows no bounds, and the dramatic change in milieu provides some much-needed freshness. Featuring a cast composed almost entirely of Native and First Nations actors, Prey has clearly taken pains to be as authentic as possible.

This is compelling storytelling by any standard, its supple rhythms hypnotic, its atmosphere potent and its prevailing hushed tone and intimate camerawork affording us the closest possible access to three characters who in turn are constantly studying one another. The actors playing those three points of a complicated triangle could not be better.

Luck’s sweetness comes from the details of Sam’s story and subsequent adventure.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.

It’s an ambitious and auspicious debut, even though not all of its frayed edges seem to be intentional.

Free Chol Soo Lee vibrates with this broader understanding of incarceration.

A documentary that starts out odd and ends up oddly sweet.

Thankfully, there’s more than enough fascinating material — as well as choice archival footage and photographs — to build a robust narrative.

Too often, the film gives off the feeling that it was designed for the inevitable line of toys for the upcoming holiday season, with plenty of cuddly animals of disparate types soon to line the shelves of a store near you.

An eloquent meditation on loss, memory and how film can shape them.

There’s lots on the menu, and León de Aranoa brings it all together in a smooth manner. But the jokes tend to be too broad, and the themes too tritely handled.

It’s a restrained rendering of the events, a drama that plays, at times, like a documentary. But if Howard’s decision to spotlight the Thai characters in this harrowing narrative is a sound one, there’s an unfamiliar stiffness and self-consciousness in the director’s approach — an inability to marry the fast-paced, no-nonsense heroics that are his strong suit with more emotionally textured storytelling. The resulting awkwardness prevents the movie, for all the surreal tension and bravery it depicts, from feeling urgent or surprising.

Simply designed animation, modeled on the look of cool cartoons of the time such as Daria, adds an extra comic jauntiness. You could say, to use a popular slang term from the 90s, this puts the “mental” back in experimental, but in a good way.

Shepard’s reach might exceed her grasp, but there’s no question that she takes risks and is a filmmaker of notable promise.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Nope offers up a glutton’s feast for Peele disciples and fans of brainy sci-fi thrillers, ushering the director into an intriguing new phase of cinema that’s as rhapsodic as it is demanding.

It’s a clear-eyed, but by no means exhaustive, documentary that investigates this underreported crisis without losing sight of the people processing the depths of their loss.

For most of its 110-minute run time, Don’t Make Me Go is a solidly likable drama, anchored by lovely, lived-in chemistry between John Cho and Mia Isaac as a father-daughter duo. But a misguided third-act choice throws off its bittersweet vibe, leaving a distinctly sour aftertaste.

While the movie itself may prove nearly as unmemorable as its hero ostensibly wants to be, it’s anything but inconspicuous.

The screenplay, credited to the five original Blazing Saddles writers as well as Ed Stone and Nate Hopper, is relentlessly silly but only intermittently funny.

The film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

This is Manville’s film, a too-rare star vehicle in which one of England’s most invaluable actors carries us effortlessly on the wings of Mrs. Harris’ dream of egalitarian elegance.

Persuasion is sufficiently bold and consistent with its flagrant liberties to get away with them. It also helps that the novel’s long-suffering protagonist, Anne Elliot, has been given irrepressible spirit and an irreverent sense of irony in Dakota Johnson’s incandescent performance.

Dipping less rewardingly from the same well in Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi pushes the wisecracking to tiresome extremes, snuffing out any excitement, mythic grandeur or sense of danger that the God of Thunder’s latest round of rote challenges might hope to generate. Chris Hemsworth continues to give great musclebound himbo, but the stakes never acquire much urgency in a movie too busy being jokey and juvenile to tell a gripping story.

Fourth of July turns out to be something we would have never expected from its director/co-writer — bland.

Throwing a woman in front of the camera and a few feminist quips into the script does not make these films any less conventional, or necessarily any more empowering.

Happily, the film is more than a greatest-hits rundown (and at nearly three hours, it had better be): In addition to nuts-and-bolts musicology, it offers real engagement with a complicated character, endearingly stubborn and self-effacing, whose inventiveness changed both his chosen field (“absolute” music) and the one, film scoring, he entered only reluctantly.

Minions: The Rise of Gru gives fans more of what they’ve come to expect, mainly Gru acting evilly, the Minions acting stupidly, and enough clever gags that will fly over its target audiences’ heads but keep their adult chaperones from dozing off.

What makes his story particularly compelling is that most of it is true.

In lieu of a throughline, Beauty offers beautiful, indulgent vignettes — aesthetically pleasing and immersive episodes lacking in ideas but full of vibes.

A tense, occasionally terrifying thriller that’s hard to look away from, though what it’s ultimately trying to accomplish with all that energy isn’t always so clear.

In its fine balance of emotional and intellectual curiosity, and its elegant assembly of a rich archive of home movies, photographs and interviews, this film unpacks those memories with beguiling candor

It’s frequently funny and occasionally savage in its commentary on the changed terrain. But in proving that Beavis and Butt-Head absolutely have a place in the contemporary world, it suggests that there’s a limit to how deeply we probably want to interrogate that place.

By focusing on the students’ stories, honoring their choices and leaving considerable room for their ambivalence, regret and uncertainty, the doc provides a sobering and emotional look at what, if any, options exist for those who aren’t white or wealthy in an unequal system.

Mild fish-out-of-water humor and an element of mystery may satisfy fans of Novak’s work on the again-popular The Office, but fall short of proving he has much potential as a big-screen auteur.

Civil often feels more like an infomercial than a documentary.

Predictable but sweet.

The performances by Brealey, Earl and Hayward are terrifically sweet and sincere, in sync with the film’s unaffected attitude of silly but serious. The magic that Brian and Charles taps into is handwrought and underplayed, with Archer letting the weird details cast a low-key glow.

This utterly toothless, glorified Hallmark movie for Paramount+ proves the director is only as good as his material.

It’s a concert film wrapped in biography and an appreciation for a sacred and beguiling genre. The power of gospel music comes alive here, and the doc’s subjects, the practitioners of this fervent form, keep it engaging.

An uncompromising drama from one of Iran’s most outspoken directors.

Singh shows a confident hand as he works with the material on multiple levels of narrative and symbolism, keeping it interesting and in focus throughout. His greatest strength, however, is Randhawa’s powerful portrayal of the shepherdess, a role that could launch a career.

It’s a nightmare, and not one a mainstream audience would relish. But aficionados of this nearly extinct form of special effects will relish the chance to see a labor of love whose roots go back to circa 1987.

Rodeo is a combustible fusion of crime story, character study and existential mystery, a tale of celebration and lament, and it announces the arrival of a gifted and adventurous filmmaker.

This is a funny spinoff with suspense and heart, a captivatingly spirited toon take on splashy live-action retro popcorn entertainment. The title character is given splendid voice by Chris Evans, balancing heroism and human fallibility with infectious warmth.

It’s a thriller at times, but also a wickedly funny dark comedy. And it features a nostalgia-inducing yacht rock soundtrack that slyly comments on the action.

Neptune Frost is an intimidating film, both in scope and pure cinematic power.

With its stellar performances, dramatic orchestral score and rich costume and set design, Illusions Perdues is a worthwhile, sweeping narrative of love, lust and literary ambition.

Halftime includes moments of disarming sincerity, when it seems like the doc and its subject, despite their cautiousness, are genuinely reaching for the truth.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

Even if Being BeBe doesn’t often go deep, the candor and infectious humor of Ngwa make it a satisfying watch — particularly for fans who have made RuPaul’s Drag Race its own vibrant chapter in contemporary queer pop-culture history.

The movie’s wry hijinks and spirited affection for its characters prove gratifying.

There’s a depth of feeling and a disarming sincerity to the movie that keeps you watching. Even the inevitable triumph seems refreshingly understated.

This is a highly original work that goes beyond its theological aspects to explore more universal questions of mankind and our evanescent place in the world.

It’s a slow-burning film, one that pulls you in with its steady observations of the minor triumphs and major pitfalls [of its two protagonists].

Paris Memories is a mystery movie, with Mia, like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, following various leads and fractured memories to get to the truth. It’s also a story of emotional renewal, chronicling the phases of recovery that follow in the wake of a major catastrophe, with all the ups and downs that entails.

The evocative sense of a place frozen in time and the raw feelings behind the family dynamic ultimately carry the film

If it weren’t directed by Coen ... Trouble would merit a debut at a less showy festival than Cannes, where reviews would boil down to “damn, they sure dug up a lotta great clips!”

A fresh and uncompromising feature debut ... Kline has a true gift for portraiture, and it’s what makes this sad and scrappy portrait of the artist as a young cartoonist feel new and yet strangely familiar.

The sly pleasure of Sick of Myself is that Signe’s narcissism differs from the rest of ours more in degree than kind. Her impulses are as uproarious as they are repulsive not because they’re so hard to understand, but because on some level, we can understand them all too well.

Silence is Atef’s strength. The director impressively uses quiet moments to great effect.

Mysius loses control of the tone, and the wayward direction of the last half hour, which unfolds mostly at a gypsy wedding and goes on 15 minutes too long, suggests difficulty finding resolution, a common problem with first films.

Mysius goes all out here, but her film overshoots its target by a few miles, even if the mise-en-scène is inspired and lead Adèle Exarchopoulos excellent as always.

This beautifully acted, expertly modulated film is a work of such enveloping gentleness that even the worst crises are simply absorbed into the fabric of life and work. While the ending might have been corny in a less subtle director’s hands, here it’s quietly restorative. We don’t deserve Kelly Reichardt.

Quite watchable, even sort of plot-driven — for a Serra film.

Léonor Serraille’s film Mother and Son contains moving strokes, but struggles to make a lasting emotional dent.

Dhont and his team know just how to turn up the emotional dials with stunning magic-hour lensing that gives golden-haired Dambrine a halo of backlit suffering as he stands in fields of nodding dahlias, that most gloriously domestic and benevolent flower.

Much of this might have been formulaic in less artful hands, but Kore-eda has an unfaltering lightness of touch, a way of injecting emotional veracity and spontaneity into every moment.

Tautly shot and edited by a top-flight technical crew and notably scored by Peyman Yazdanian, Just 6.5 is more than a thrilling watch. It is a sobering reflection on the inability of the law to stem the tide of drug addiction through round-ups, arrests and executions. Or perhaps it’s society that needs adjusting?

What this twisty espionage thriller ... doesn’t have enough of is character depth or storytelling coherence.

It’s a sweet but oddly circumspect film, ruled by a friction between warring demands: the allure of wistful memories and the rigor of complex appraisal.

With a formidable cast, assured direction and skillful camerawork, Nostalgia proves to be a surprisingly absorbing film.