This tightly focused character study is a tiny film, with an emotional effect in inverse proportion to its size.

This sequel to 2016’s smash hit Oscar-winning animated film proves more than worth the lengthy wait, knocking it out of the park with its dazzling visuals, sophisticated humor and doses of genuine emotion.

There’s plenty of sadness here, but also lots of humor and female camaraderie.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is Nyoni’s respect for subtext. Her film doesn’t aim to be a guide, a balm or an ode to forgiveness. The director rejects the ease of over-explanation and allure of an exclusively reverential tone. She reaches for honesty, and what she uncovers is at once disquieting and deeply absorbing.

As Rasoulof intercuts real footage and fiction, we realize that what the family is going through is an extension of what the entire country has been facing.

Filled with beauty and fury, the film offers an immersive portrait of an endangered community.

Directed with razor-sharp, naturalistic precision and set over one sweltering Corsican summer, amid stunning Mediterranean vistas that provide a backdrop to all the bloody vendettas, The Kingdom marks the arrival of a bold new talent who’s able to spin a gripping crime thriller while channeling real emotion on screen.

In exploring how the ruptures of the past map themselves onto relationships in the present, [Quy] elegantly approaches a familiar theme: how war reverberates throughout generations, imposing on witnesses and their successors.

It would be easy, at quick glance, to dismiss their mischief as youthful self-absorption. It’s youthful self-absorption, to be sure, but something serious, vibrant and compelling courses through the levity.

There’s an achingly palpable, playful chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that leaps off the screen. But they also refuse to shy away from letting their characters’ less attractive qualities bleed through.

There’s swaggering confidence in the filmmaking to match that of the title character, along with adrenalized visuals, fine-grained production design and scrupulous attention to casting, down to the background players.

In Hamnet . . . the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable. But just as her William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two into the masterpiece that is Hamlet, Zhao harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.

Love, to quote that woozy old ballad, is indeed a many-splendored thing that takes many forms — a multiplicity that Love the film is quietly alive to.

Vengeance Most Fowl is a brisk and well-paced escapade, in which Gromit proves himself to still be one of our best screen actors and Wallace’s absentminded behavior still endears.

There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.

September 5 doesn’t skimp on any of the technological details — we also learn that Jennings reported events over a telephone, with the receiving end rigged to a studio mic — but Felhbaum steps back often enough to help viewers see the bigger picture at play.

In its mix of remarkable archival material, the film is both tender and galvanizing, summoning up what New York felt like in 1972 (yes, I would know) and offering a fresh slant on a country’s upheaval and a generation’s countercultural awakening.

The Order is the kind of tense reflection on American violence that Hollywood rarely puts on the big screen anymore.

I’m Still Here is a gripping, profoundly touching film with a deep well of pathos. It’s one of Salles’ best.

On Swift Horses is about the shapes love can take, the varied lives we live and the many different ways one can make a home. It’s beautiful, heartbreaking and demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible. Here’s hoping it brings the romantic epic back into fashion.

What makes Tropics so riveting is the way Costa constantly shifts between the epic and the intimate, the macro and the micro.

As much arthouse as grindhouse, it’s a blood-drenched mix tape that shouldn’t work. But it does, thanks to Coogler’s muscular direction, a terrific cast, enveloping IMAX visuals, body-quaking sound and music that stirs the soul while setting the pulse racing.

Flow is a joy to experience but also a deeply affecting story, the work of a unique talent who deserves to be ranked among the world’s great animation artists.

Tedeschi’s film is a declaration of love for the Beatles, but what distinguishes it is its curiosity about the America of that time, beyond the bubble of the four Scousers who can hardly believe they’re drinking cocktails in Miami.

The tyro director steps up to the plate beautifully, delivering an ingenious, fast-paced horror-thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat while also featuring generous doses of mordant humor.

Throughout Night Is Not Eternal, Wang models an urgent and necessary type of critical thinking. Her questions become one of the most striking elements of this project, which takes a surprising turn.

As courageous as the platoon members are, Warfare is not to be confused with a movie about heroism; it’s a movie about hell that leaves you shaken.

This superbly acted drama’s refusal to serve up tidy epiphanies might leave you wanting more. But the inchoate nature of the central characters’ self-reflection is partly the point in a smart movie with a lot on its mind.