The best parts of Relay harness the details of Ash’s brokerage. Mackenzie’s direction is never tighter than when he’s focused on message relays, burner phones and the bureaucracy of the post office.

Director/co-screenwriter Uberto Pasolini (Still Life, Nowhere Special) strips the tale to its bare essentials, resulting in a stark, solemnly paced experience that viewers will find either enervating or thrilling.

At its best, The Assessment smartly taps into and maintains its focus on the near universal anxiety about parenting in a world made increasingly uninhabitable by overconsumption and climate change. But the film loses its way when it widens its scope and tries to incorporate eleventh-hour world-building.

This is a sizable step up for the Boukherma brothers from the smaller-canvas genre films they have done up to now and they bring a satisfying cinematic sweep to the material that feels more Hollywood than French — for better or worse. Their sensitive direction of the intimate exchanges is sharp, even if scenes veer at times from melodrama into soap.

As a mood piece, the Samir Oliveros-directed The Luckiest Man in America is plenty evocative, full of retro flair tinged with dread or dreaminess. But as a character study or a narrative, it’s too rooted in its particular place to extend its impact beyond it.

On an intellectual and reporting level, Separated is sturdy and persuasive. Morris is angry, and if you’re watching this movie, chances are good that after 90ish minutes, you’ll be angry, too. What Separated needs, though, is a little touch of the old Errol Morris.

In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject.

The creatives’ obvious affinity for the genre comes through in every frame of the film, and to their credit Heart Eyes includes many clever touches.

The live-action Lilo & Stitch is faithful enough to the original to please traditionalists and tweaked enough to feel somewhat fresh.

It should hardly come as a revelation that Black’s hardworking comedic efforts are the film’s saving grace.

How to Train Your Dragon honors the charm of the original. I’s not an essential remake, but at least it’s not an offensive one.

Once the principal heroes and villains have been established and the perfunctory narrative throat-clearing is out of the way, G20 finds its groove as a solid popcorn action flick.

I got bogged down frequently in the familiarity and intentional messiness of the story that Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger chose to tell, while at the same time wondering what sense a wholly unaware viewer would be able to make of this woman and the long shadow she still casts.

Though an array of family and lovers are interviewed, the most interesting comments come from European critics and directors.

For the most part though, O’Connor’s direction is disciplined. He wrings humor from nearly every moment by staging action scenes as blunt as Christian’s commentary and employing transitions as precise as the accountant’s aim.

The strengths of Love, Brooklyn make the weaknesses harder to shake. For every scene bursting with energy and texture, there are oddly vague moments that destabilize its hold on us.

Magic Farm features a stupendous cast fully in sync with Ulman’s deadpan absurdity. The actors effortlessly entwine the droll and the ingenuous, but as Ulman juggles more characters and more plot angles than in her first movie, there isn’t necessarily more payoff.

Despite its occasionally stale elements, the film succeeds movingly thanks to the inherent power of its narrative and the terrific performances by Boosher and the four young actresses (Amber Afzali, Nina Hosseinzadeh, Sara Malal Rowe, and Mariam Saraj) as the team members.

The drama does eventually come full circle, but it’s gone so far off the rails by that point that it’s hard to bring us back.

Ricky struggles with underbaked narrative threads and breathless direction that can verge on unfocused.

Bunnylovr‘s strengths are in its engaging character study of a languid young woman who came of age online. It’s not a novel portrait, but Zhu makes it wholly her own.

In reviving one of the more toxic friendships in recent movie history, Feig reunites two stars whose chemistry makes this twisty, often very ridiculous and sometimes trying movie more compelling.

The documentary is generally engaging, and putting Spiegelman in a spotlight will always be worthwhile. But Disaster Is My Muse is in the shadow of Crumb, in the shadow of Maus and just a little bit behind the times, in various disappointing ways.

The film, which bows on Max on March 13, is low on genuine scares, but it does boast an appealing cast, whose comic chops elevate the flick slightly above the standard streamer slush.

Vartolomei is a compelling actress and the camera truly loves her, but there’s only so much she can do with a script that doesn’t have much of a second or third act.

It’s a complicated meta-commentary delivered loosely in the guise of a ghoulish conspiracy thriller, presented in rushed form to an audience that would happily devour many more hours of the actual ghoulish conspiracy thriller that this is not.

It all plays as artificially as it sounds, but as tautly directed by David Yarovesky (Brightburn), Locked manages to maintain its silly but arresting premise throughout its fortunately brief running time.

Director Sean Byrne doesn’t lean hard enough into the trashy pleasures for maximum fun, unlike some of the more preposterous recent shark movies. (Give me The Shallows, Under Paris, The Meg.) But he dishes up plenty of lurid chum and puts a kickass heroine in peril.