It’s just too bad there’s not more of a personal stamp on the material to rescue it from its indie-film clichés. Flag Day is not a complete misfire, and if a no-name director had made it, the movie would probably get a pass. But considering the emotional stakes involved it’s neither terribly memorable nor moving.

Even if this deceptively artful debut feels a little muted and unpolished in places, it is plainly the work of a skilled filmmaker with ample future potential.

The preceding journey might have been smoother, but the doc is a reminder that we still know so little about the oceans and their inhabitants, and an illustration of how much hope we attach to them.

We may never know if Benedetta was sincere about her visions in the end, just as it’s impossible to judge how sincere Verhoeven is when he’s indulging in the erotic visions that have made him famous. The beauty of Benedetta is that it never provides a straightforward answer to all of our questions, making it mostly a matter of faith.

The distinctive British filmmaker is at the height of her powers in this semiautobiographical work.

This is a film of transporting grace and compassion, cerebral but never cold. It’s no small compliment to say that After Yang seems almost like an American sci-fi movie that Ozu or Kore-eda might have made.

Unfurling over a sluggish two hours plus, Stillwater is least convincing when McCarthy attempts to build suspense, with most of that work being done by Mychael Danna’s score. The late plot twists become almost risible, once Akim (Idir Azougli) enters the picture.

Dark, unnerving and thrilling, The Novice is poised to become a genre-breaking success. A film this raw made with such a steady, assured hand only comes along once in a while. We should take notice.

The characters are irritating, the look is cheap and the plot is reheated from other movies, but it has to be admitted that Dachra delivers its unsavory thrills.

Despite the sometimes tedious pacing and repetitive script, it’s a classic-feeling slasher that delights in gore — think Friday the 13th — and an affirming example of Janiak’s confidence behind the camera.

Carax’s trademark bonkers magic elevates many of these scenes, to be sure. But there’s also a nagging naiveté, even a silliness to the storytelling that kept bumping me out of the sluggish drama.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of The Legend of the Underground is that it doesn’t mistake hope for over-sentimentalizing.

While it probably won’t have you triple checking the locks on your door, it’s likely to keep you entertained enough to come back for more.

The intriguingly elliptical narrative and the use of highly aestheticized cinematography and music draw the viewer into a web of genocide and a series of shocking events

Though the movie is rife with too-convenient coincidences and relies on another iffy plot point or two to make its emotional arc work, the monster-killin’ functions well enough that few will complain.

A satisfying action pic that finally realizes the potential of its pulp-meets-sociopolitics conceit.

A throw-everything-against-the-wall collection of silly jokes that reimagines American history as a bro-tastic action flick, Matt Thompson’s animated film makes Drunk History look like a Ken Burns production.

Returning director James McGrath and screenwriter Michael McCullers had an opportunity to build on an entirely workable formula, but instead have settled for a frenetic sugar rush of a retread that rapidly wears out its welcome. Pint-sized viewers might be distracted by the noisy, chaotic result, but most others will be hard-pressed to find the proceedings cute and adorable.

Whether the narrative is in amped-up overdrive or idling, the director and her magnetic cast keep us fully invested in their cautious reconnection and their ability to survive a series of life-threatening encounters.

Unfortunately, this effort, clearly inspired by the French classic The Wages of Fear (and its terrific American remake, Sorcerer), isn’t even as entertaining as a typical episode of the History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers.

In short, there’s no predetermined narrative at play in this concise and elegantly crafted road trip. The terrain it travels is one of open-ended questions, and the spark it ignites has a contrapuntal power.

Fairrie doesn’t attempt to rewrite history and make a case for Collins as an underappreciated literary genius. But she paints a stirring picture of a gifted storyteller and a brilliant female entrepreneur, who shrugged off the cultural snobbery and the misogynistic backlash sparked by her “scandalous” work and laughed all the way to the bank.

It’s a chilling psychological inquiry that holds your attention for the duration.

As each new wrinkle comes to light, Soderbergh keeps the action wound tight, zigging and zagging like a well-oiled machine.

Writer-director Tyler Riggs’ feature debut has a ripe, palpable sense of place and a pair of magnetic leads in Nisalda Gonzalez and Matthew Leone as the young lovers. All that promise and potential make the film’s eventual surrender to narrative cliché and thematic overreach all the more frustrating.

Director Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Glazer and was a frequent Broad City collaborator, doesn’t quite sustain that bold stylistic stamp, even if the perturbing intimacy and insidious angles of the visuals go a long way toward masking the uneven tone.

In his interactions with his band, with Fine, with his family (eldest daughter Carnie Wilson appears in the film but isn’t interviewed), the documentary is a portrait of friendship and love as much as it’s about music. And beneath it all, the essential aloneness of the artist resounds

This documentary presents a persuasive argument for the aspirations of both MAAFA and IMAN without feeling like a commercial for either. It’s the approach, the compassion and the thoughtful mentorship that All These Sons advocates for. It’s hard to watch without feeling deeply and immediately invested.

The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.

This premise — of two people with divergent personalities potentially falling in love — is not new, but 7 Days satisfyingly freshens up a stale formula, thanks in large part to the lead performances.

The film might be conventionally structured, but the singular ebullience and warmth of its resilient subject make it highly entertaining.

Choppily told but thoughtful and illuminating, writer-director Buirski’s latest film completes a trilogy about the civil rights era, begun with The Loving Story and The Rape of Recy Taylor, that showcases lesser-known warriors for civil rights.

It’s not canonical Pixar, but it’s as sweet and satisfying as artisanal gelato on a summer afternoon.

It’s both an effective star vehicle and a tender tearjerker.

One in a Thousand’s lack of narrative focus and conflict results in a drawn-out, almost non-rhythm that at least mirrors the lazy summer days it depicts.

Director Rocha de Sousa here wants to ensure the audience stays on the side of the protagonists. But if you stack the deck too hard, the whole house of cards risks collapse.

The documentary isn’t as thorough or enlightening on border issues as something like Netflix’s Immigration Nation, but the young heroes make At the Ready a good vehicle through which many viewers will be able to process their own preconceptions and opinions.

With the risks to both the filmmaker and his subjects on full display, it’s an impressively exciting and strikingly novel approach in chronicling a humanitarian crisis that has yet to receive its due.

The acting from the central four actors is quite soulful, but we don’t get enough access to these characters’ inner conflicts. Too often, the narrative’s configuration feels like an intriguing second draft instead of a ready-to-shoot script, something that someone with an external eye might help finesse into something truly captivating.

I’m much more comfortable with Roadrunner as a portrait of an evolving, complicated, tragic TV personality, and as one of the best behind-the-scenes glimpses of a TV show (or shows) I’ve ever seen, than I am with it as an attempt to make sense of a man who, for whatever reason, no longer wanted to continue living.

A mature crime picture whose decades-hopping action makes the effects of generational poverty obvious without having to spell it out, it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness.

Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

Riegel seems to still be hung up on Winter’s Bone, making a slavishly imitative film with few flourishes that allow it to stand on its own.

While the team-up still fails to become more than the sum of its parts, at least we can appreciate Hayek’s enthusiasm for the over-the-top role.

The maturity of the directorial voice is evident in its clear-eyed, rigorously unsentimental assessment of a shattering situation.

Spirit Untamed is beautiful to look at and occasionally genuinely funny. The stunning and detailed animations saturate Lucky’s world with an impressive array of colors, from the crimson apples she feeds Spirit to the pistachio and emerald-green leaves on the swaying trees.

This one offers plenty of lurid fun and some genuine scares. But the grounding in dark spirituality that made the previous entries focused on the Warrens so compelling gets diluted, despite the reliably dignifying double-act of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson.

The true pleasure of The Outside Story doesn’t come from its heartwarming message about community or its nostalgic rendering of a mask-less, pre-pandemic New York City, but from Brian Tyree Henry’s exceptional performance in his first big-screen lead role.

They’re two out of millions of New Yorkers, but the more we get to know them, the more we see how these opposites — who exist on opposite sides of the law — are bound together by their mutual struggle to make it in the big city.

First-time director Jen Rainin’s portrait of Stevens, Curve‘s achievements and blindspots, lesbian progress during the Clinton era and the uneasiness with the “lesbian” label among many queer women today is accomplished, resonant and deeply moving.

This cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.

What Cruella lacks in script, however, it makes up for in sheer visual punch, with costume designer Jenny Beavan’s exquisitely detailed gowns especially enriching the angsty, sinister universe the film conjures.

An engrossing, unfailingly lucid account of a momentous political breakthrough that interrupted a decades-long impasse. Few will be unmoved by its sorrowful timeliness.

The very personal nature of Taylor’s involvement with these magnificent creatures makes this quite an affecting account of their threatened survival.

This is a stirring valentine to a neighborhood and its people that, as the film tells it, stared gentrification in the eye and stood their ground, staying true to their cultural identity.

It’s endearing — a love letter to the fans who’ve watched the musician grow up, and to her children, who might not remember all the details about their badass mother.

At a time when the fate of Black men and their bodies has risen to the level of a national emergency, what happens to the characters in Two Gods takes on added weight.

The fact that Lindon doesn’t judge the situation as much as she simply shows it is a sign of her intelligence as a promising young filmmaker — one who has both dared to expose herself onscreen and then dared to let the audience judge for themselves.

Sequin in a Blue Room feels very much of the moment, but it’s upholstered by an impressive command of good old-fashioned craft.

It’s another breathless chamber piece, expertly crafted to pack dread into every nerve-rattling sound.

In F9’s would-be showstoppers, the thrills are mostly AWOL or the feats are simply too idiotic to embrace, even guiltily.

Effectively moody but offering frustratingly skin-deep chills, The Woman in the Window underestimates its hero in more than ways than one.

The well-crafted film’s principal arcs may be largely predictable, but it’s an emotionally satisfying and gripping watch.

Spiral delivers when it comes to gore, if that’s your thing, and appropriately dour aesthetics — but not much else. That’s a shame, because the story’s themes, from the unreformable nature of the police department to the cost of integrity in a space that values power above all else, could not be more relevant.

It packs everything but the kitchen sink (though it does bring the entire Swedish government) into a two-hour-plus survival story that mostly keeps you on the edge of your seat, especially once the bravura action scenes kick in and you start wondering how the heck the filmmakers pulled them off.

There’s no shortage of excitement, suspense, jokey camaraderie, sorrowful losses, satisfying comeuppances, twists and turns to fill the generous running time, with plenty of variation in the bloody encounters.

Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.

Buried somewhere deep inside this phony, flashy movie there are thoughtful questions of racial identity, ingrained social perceptions, environmental conditioning and codes of masculinity. . . . But any thematic coherence is sacrificed to stylistic showboating that keeps taking us out of the story.

While offering some of the expected musical material and concert footage, the film is much more interested in the singer’s emotional health, especially as it pertains to political unrest in his native Colombia. Though these themes might open the film up to interest outside Balvin’s fan base, neither is explored with enough depth to really accomplish that; in practice, Boy is for pretty devoted fans only.

One unfortunate effect of the jumbling is that it cools off Statham’s slow-boil performance, and prompts us to question the logic behind H’s plan.

Here Today doesn’t fully succeed in any department. But it does provide some alternately amusing and touching moments, thanks largely to the heartfelt performances by Crystal and his co-star Tiffany Haddish.

There's enough here to keep you engrossed, particularly once the camera pulls back in a majestic reveal of the environment surrounding the pod. The visual effects are slick, but the most indispensable effect is the human element of Laurent's performance — by turns distraught, desperate, tough, determined and resourceful.

Although some might argue that not mentioning anyone's difference is a kind of erasure in itself, it's hard not to get swept up in the cast and crew's joyful insouciance. Plus, the cheeky showtunes, co-written by onscreen villain MuMu and executive producer Peter Halby, are a hoot.

It's an odd match of a screenplay (adapted by Berman and Pulcini) that's too obvious, telegraphing rather than teasing out its twists, and direction that's overly timid; one gets the sense that the filmmakers are checking off genre tropes and tricks from a list instead of finding ways to invest them with fresh chills or shivers.

The result is a solid entry in the Clancy screen canon — gritty, briskly paced, laced with vigorously choreographed fight scenes, explosive weapons action and twisty political intrigue that seems prescient as it taps into the most strained period in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War.

A student-teacher romance that’s so slow-burn it almost never flares up, Wet Season marks a skillfully observant if somewhat tepid and overwrought sophomore effort from Singaporean director Anthony Chen.

A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

A B-movie that would benefit immensely from some wit in the script and charisma in the cast, it’s not as aggressively hacky as P.W.S.A.’s oeuvre, but it runs into problems he didn’t face in 1995: Namely, the bar has been raised quite a bit for movies in which teams of superpowered young people have fights to save the universe.

The strength of the ensemble helps give the proceedings further dramatic resonance, with the performers providing subtle emotional depths that keep us firmly invested in the characters' plight.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

Duty Free is warm, personal, beautifully structured and socially relevant as it creates a vivid portrait of its real-life heroine and the ageism she encounters. Smoothly edited into a swift 71 minutes, the film rarely goes beneath the surface of its issues, but that surface is smart and, taking its cues from Rebecca, refreshingly unsentimental.

A heavy-handed reimagining.

The doc pads out its assertions of malfeasance with personal scenes that fall flat, never giving much insight into its subject's personality or deepening the sympathy we may have started off with for the children she left behind.

The brisk pacing and capable cast still can't quite mask a certain routine feel in a movie without much heart.

Gallo displays none of the screenwriting elan he's exhibited in such previous efforts as Midnight Run and the Bad Boys films, although here it's hard to separate the ponderous dialogue from the way it's delivered.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

Cannily exploiting #MeToo themes and the opportunities for cinematic mayhem provided by technology-driven smart homes, Held proves an uncommonly thoughtful and provocative suspenser.

The conflicts feel just a tad too routine and the characters too thinly drawn to get the blood flowing.

Filmmaker Harry Michell doesn't quite stick the landing in his sophomore feature, aiming for a complex mixture of comic irreverence and sensitive character study. But he does earn points for creative ambition, and Say Your Prayers, benefiting from a terrific ensemble, has enough entertainingly startling moments to mark its filmmaker as capable of bigger and better things.

Night in Paradise contains a lot of good plotting, several amusing characters and a decent array of exciting action scenes and bloodshed. But it is indulgently long.

Some will say that Nina Wu is a courageous work for exposing the abuse powerless young actresses face when trying to break into an acting career, while others will no doubt feel that, by what it shows, the movie remains part of the problem. As unevenly presented here, it’s a wobbly tightrope.

After an intriguing setup that takes its time building atmosphere and characters, declining to rush the first death, the film becomes progressively more overwrought and hokey. It also loads up on derivative tropes that worked better everywhere from Ringu through The Conjuring Universe.

A likably low-rent, low-ambition entry into a genre whose standard-bearer, Meatballs, doesn't set the bar very high, Mike Stasko's Boys Vs. Girls goes to summer camp for its promised battle of the sexes.

Despite an undernourished thread connecting key characters by their experience of loss, seldom have the human figures and their interplay been as peripheral to the headline action in a popcorn blockbuster. The good news is that even if the convoluted kaiju mythology tends to trip over itself in a plot that only barely makes sense, the Monsterverse face-off delivers plenty of visceral excitement.

Admirers of old-fashioned British war drama should find this passably entertaining, and the dazzling green Welsh countryside and seafront locations that stand in for England's Southeast coast are certainly pleasing to the eye. But handsome production values can't disguise shaky storytelling that relies almost entirely on composer Marc Streitenfeld's agitated orchestral score to stoke suspense.

The documentary is just as notable for the cultural and social analysis that it lacks as it is for its contents.

It's never remotely involving, and you can feel the lead performers straining to handle their acting chores. The exception is Haddish, who is so convincingly scary and menacing here that you wish her character were in a better, dramatic movie.