If the dizzying crescendo of intricately choreographed fight scenes is the main attraction in Ballerina, it’s those occasional moments of dry humor that make it a welcome extension of the John Wick universe.

It’s all tremendously silly but somehow it works, thanks to combat choreography that would make Jackie Chan proud and the introduction of America’s premiere new comedy team, Awkwafina and John Cena.

Some of its mockery and many of its nerd-friendly celebrity talking heads — Seth Green! Kevin Smith! Paul Scheer! — are predictable, but when it isn’t poking fun at moments of iconic trash, it offers an insightful exploration of the production and context of the special.

It’s a declarative project, which oscillates between didacticism and experimentalism. What viewers take away from the doc will depend on their familiarity with Woolf novel. Preciado’s film comes most alive when it plays with its source material.

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.

It’s still beautiful to look at, but I most enjoyed Wild Life as a complicated procedural about land use (don’t expect to see that blurbed on a poster any time soon).

The film is a little wispy, too often slapping another song on another dreamy sequence rather than giving us more intimate access to the main characters — let alone the secondary figures who make up the tight-knit queer family, most of whom don’t even get names. But the authenticity and distinctiveness of the milieu keep it involving.

While not a typical teen comedy, Mustache approaches the genre from a perspective that’s gently humorous and refreshingly clever, even if it’s quite a bit tamer than mainstream fare.

Ultimately, the film’s divided attention between its snapshot of a place stuck in time and its examination of the unsolved case that came to redefine it stops Last Stop Larrimah from being a first-rate true-crime doc. But there’s nonetheless a lot of flavorful material here.

Swank makes it work with a canny performance that conveys her character’s inner turbulence, much of it derived from her troubled relationship with her estranged grown son.

Pugh delivers a superb starring performance that serves to accentuate her growing artistic stature and co-star Morgan Freeman turns in his best work in years after appearing in far too many sub-par vehicles. Their efforts lift A Good Person, which otherwise too often feels familiar in its themes and self-conscious in its melodramatic plot contrivances.

The End requires complete submission to the off-kilter rules that govern this family and to Oppenheimer’s ambitions to radicalize the musical genre. It’s an admirable if uneven endeavor.

For anyone interested in the origins of what we now call video art, not to mention mass media and the internet, it’s essential viewing. Paik was a true visionary who foresaw the virtual world we now live in, and Kim’s film chronicles how he channeled that vision through madcap sculptures and installations that took technology to places it was never meant to go.

While the disparate thematic elements don’t mesh together seamlessly in Crater, the film offers enough fun and thrills to swell the ranks of aspiring astronauts.

Laslo Benedek’s expert megging keeps the action taut and suspenseful, drawing top performances from a capable cast.

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

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.

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 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.

A visually rich doc with much more than scenic vistas on its mind.

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 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 director’s customary delicacy, compassion and sensitivity ripple through the drama, though its affecting moments of illumination are more intermittent than cumulative.

The director is poking around in territory that’s familiar to him — self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach.

With Banel & Adama, Ramata-Toulaye Sy has conjured a stunning world in need of a sharper story.

Arnow’s film won’t be for everyone — there’s a specificity and an insider energy to some of the jokes, which don’t always land — but there’s enough to fuel curiosity about what Arnow is trying to do. Even the title, with its sense of drifting and silent ellipses, makes you think.

Even when its storytelling occasionally falters, the visual power of Thornton’s gorgeous compositions — in the monastery’s chiaroscuro interiors as well as the sprawling landscapes in the northern part of South Australia, near the former mining town, Burra — remains transfixing.

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.