Back to Black is, like its heroine, flawed and fallible but frequently very affecting.

What’s fascinating about Martin Brown’s keenly observed and amusing debut is the twist it offers on the famous Big Apple adage that, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Writer-director Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za pocetnici) is a fizzy, huggable portrait of a self-made, roughly blended queer family.

While the events in the first Omen seemed to be taking place in a real world that just happened to include demonic figures, this film seems more like a fever dream, its outlandish storyline taking a back seat to a nightmarish vision that’s more about mood than narrative coherence.

By the time the mainstream world came to embrace MoviePass, we all already knew it was doomed, and I wish the documentary had illustrated what the alternative might have been.

The result is a film that takes the idea of beauty seriously and works, with deceptive ease, to show us the tiny pleasures that make up life in Cabrini-Green.

Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.

Amusing, uplifting and about as sugary and teeth-sabotaging as caramelized popcorn, The Beautiful Game celebrates the healing power of team sports for those who might feel more pushed to society’s margins by misfortune or choice.

Crowe himself, as usual, is the best thing in the film, once again upgrading less than optimal material with his indelible screen presence.

Director Adam Wingard (reuniting with Stevens after the terrific 2014 thriller The Guest) orchestrates the monster madness with impressive visual flair even if he relies on an excessive number of ‘80s-era pop song needle drops to make things seem more exciting than they actually are.

While filming Transition, Bryon was on assignment, working on a feature film in the final stages of post-production. Even when the documentary doesn’t fulfill its ambitions or potential, it does preview the exciting work coming from its director.

Tragically, The Truth vs. Alex Jones doesn’t deliver any closure. What it does provide is a disturbing reminder that the fight against evil will likely be never-ending.

Terrestrial Verses is a marvel of potent understatement.

The Contestant is a missed opportunity. It’s a documentary about voyeurism that, in the absence of freshly delivered insight, just reintroduces and rehashes the voyeuristic impulse it’s largely condemning.

I Don’t Understand You is a lot fresher and more enjoyable than its generic title might suggest. That’s largely because Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells make such an effortlessly funny and convincing couple that they smooth over the rough transitional patches.

Nonetheless, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire tries hard, very hard, to satisfy the series’ fans with plenty of nostalgic throwbacks and mainly succeeds.

It’s an intriguing premise. ... But The Greatest Hits is the kind of film that should sweep you away with its charm and emotion. Instead, it’s too transparently button-pushing to go beyond the stale tropes of the weepy drama.

The Idea of You functions best as a carefree treat — a feel-good romantic comedy that delivers some laughs and bursts with the magnetism of its lead. That it manages to wiggle in some lessons about self-discovery is merely a bonus.

Sora has made a work of magnificent minimalism. Its vision of immortality might be most stirring in the moments when Sakamoto’s elegant hands hover above the keyboard at the end of a piece. It’s as though he’s coaxing the final chords to resonate just a bit longer before they fade into something like silence but now, after his conjuring, much richer.

Part of the problem of Jacqueline (Argentine) is that it wants to be a film of many layers but Britto doesn’t have the know-how to keep each layer legible separately, with the final result feeling messy and impenetrable rather than admirably complex and, well, layered

Despite its high-concept premise and lengthy spells of laboratory work, Britto’s movie is fundamentally an intimately humanistic exploration of death and acceptance.

The vigilance of the character building doesn’t translate to the narrative. The story at the center of My Dead Friend Zoe — a young woman suffering from PTSD and tasked with caring for her aging grandfather — is oddly unyielding, never relaxing enough to fully engage or move us.

Despite a juicy hook built on heated emotions and drastic actions, Magpie proves too cold and ultimately too timid to spark much of a reaction.

The film gets across the weird weight of lockdown, a time of tension and anxiety but also an opportunity for creative growth none of us saw coming.

Desert Road will surely invite repeat viewings to discern its hints and untangle its logic. More than that, within its very specific subgenre, this unlikely intersection of Memento and It’s a Wonderful Life just might prove an enduring classic.

Together, Leguizamo and Ferreira share a chemistry as warm and lively as the campfire their characters share over one meteor-filled night.

It may be conventional but it’s never uninteresting, thanks to King and a strong ensemble in the key roles. And no one could argue with its value in bringing Chisholm’s achievements to the attention of younger generations perhaps unfamiliar with her legacy.

Silence is both the film’s main asset and its principal limitation, creating moments of suspense but also leaving us in the dark, to the point that it feels more like a gimmick than anything substantial.