The knockabout humor just isn’t all that funny; its transgressive spirit too often feels forced.

Part Two is plagued by a nagging shallowness when it comes to portraying the Fremen, an indigenous people fighting for self-determination within the empire; the film has difficulty fully embracing the nuance of Herbert’s anti-imperial and ecologically dystopian text.

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.

Red Right Hand doesn’t add anything particularly new to the well-worn genre. But it features enough bloody action sequences and shootouts to satisfy fans, who will be more likely to catch it on VOD than at drive-ins.

Riddle of Fire tries to capture the extraordinary way kids experience the world, but the results border on twee.

Despite its moving conversations, Who We Are never transcends its lecture format.

Even if the film ultimately strays too far into virtuosic theatricality, betraying its origins, La Cocina is a gripping reflection on the dehumanizing grind of labor and the ways that its soul-crushing routines stifle hope. Even if he takes too long wrapping up an overwrought climactic crescendo, this is a compelling vision of the immigrant experience as a hellish limbo in which even the seeming ballast of community, brotherhood and love can be illusory.

Suspended Time does provide some of the pleasures frequently associated with Assayas’ work. . . Mostly, however, the project feels like the result of a writer-director killing time, sketching impressions of a life put on hold by outside circumstances, without figuring out what he wants to say with it all.

At its best, the movie is kind of like The Stepford Wives meets Rosemary’s Baby, with side orders of Cronenberg, J-Horror and Lynch.

It’s Crowe who’s the film’s MVP.

What it doesn’t provide, unfortunately, is a persuasive prescription for how we’re going to prevent our country from descending from democracy to theocracy.

It’s subtle but resonant, intimate but emotionally expansive and at every step crisply unsentimental.

The film is not good, but it is singular — and absolutely chaotic.

I had quibbles about the consistency of the documentary’s narrative approach — but not its bracing message about the challenges of political idealism and the wide-ranging consequences of democracy in peril.

It is an airless and stilted endeavor driven by a mechanical screenplay (written by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & Clarkson). Its lack of imagination would be astounding if it wasn’t so expected.

[Ben-Adir] wholly conjures Marley’s charisma while also teasing the musician’s sense of isolation, stemming from a childhood marked by abandonment. His compelling performance enlivens a film that otherwise feels like it’s perpetually struggling to take off.

Newton, Sprouse and the delightful Soberano are all more appealing than the sloppy package and undercooked characters deserve.

Bursting with passion, sly humor, satirical swipes and the inescapable heartbeat of insurgency — most of the film was shot in 1968 San Francisco — it’s the life-loving tale of a wise innocent abroad, and the not exactly warm reception he receives

Sure, it’s entirely possible that the film will find a constituency who will love its mirthless, shouty performances, its tortured random plot twists and its appallingly shonky-looking CGI. But there is also a distinct possibility audiences will turn up their noses at this like it’s a fresh litter box deposit.

It tries to stretch the bounds of the narrative form, to upend convention and encourage us to rethink our relationship to storytelling. It aims to do all this with style — Begert’s direction is slick and capable — and absorbing performances from most of the cast. But Little Death can’t fulfill the ambitions of its intellectual exercise, resulting in a bifurcated film that doesn’t find its footing until the end.

Talati’s film offers a sensitive and distinctive take on the fraught dynamics between mothers and daughters.

There’s a great deal of beauty in Porcelain War and there’s a potent artistry behind it, but I’ve never watched a documentary with so many running visual metaphors and so little faith that the audience will be able to grasp them. It’s a bit stunning and a bit insulting all at once.

Hilariously and movingly tapping into typical childhood anxieties, it’s infused with ample wit of both the visual and verbal variety for adults.

The powerhouse voice cast is another plus; besides the aforementioned, it includes Lucy Liu, Bowen Yang, comedian Jo Koy and Greta Lee (Past Lives), among others. Director Raman Hui, making his feature debut, keeps the proceedings moving at a suitably brisk pace, with the colorful CGI animation providing one diverting image after another.

Will & Harper charms as a portrayal of deep, sustaining and supportive friendship.

Sugarcane’s sensitivity to the ongoing pain of its subjects is one of the film’s principal achievements. NoiseCat and Kassie offer an affecting portrait of a community that endures in spite of colonial genocide.

All the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long.

It’s a documentary about the fight, one that takes the necessity of the fight as a given. That’s amply inspiring