You can’t argue with the muscular marquee value of headlining Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot in a slick, fast-paced action thriller laced with playful comedy, even if it’s an empty-calorie entertainment like Red Notice.

Writer/director Mia Hansen-Love’s first feature, All is Forgiven, a keenly observed study in intimacy that has the rhythm and feel of real life, announces the arrival of an intriguing sensibility. Technically accomplished and finely acted without artifice by a talented ensemble cast, it’s an astutely written, mature work in its content, understated, naturalistic style and sensitive rendering of complex emotion.

There’s little that’s unpredictable in Miguel Sapochnik’s unabashedly sentimental sci-fi road movie, which could almost have been assembled in a robotics lab from the durable parts of countless movies past. But darned if I wasn’t misting up in the melancholy climactic scenes.

Moll crafts a seemingly simple plot that gets increasingly tangled as it jumps from one character to another, taking some rather surprising turns but managing to make sense of it all by the last scene.

Though it’s not without cinematic touches and affecting, sometimes harrowing moments, and even with a convincingly fragile and unmoored Amanda Seyfried at its center, the drama is often hampered by an instructive sensibility that gives it the air of a feature-length PSA.

The storytelling overall is less sophisticated, leaning a little too often on strained humor, but this is a slick, enjoyably playful entertainment.

The attention to character, group dynamics and emotional texture makes the film often feel more alive in its quieter moments than its fairly routine CG action clashes. But the depth of feeling helps counter the choppy storytelling in this new tangent in the MCU narrative

The drama around them too often lands rather neatly on the surface, saying exactly what it means, but through the unpredictability of its two leads, Keener especially, and in the knotty connection between their characters, the movie gets under the skin and goes beyond the bromide-laden playbook.

More uneven but ultimately more effective than filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi’s previous anti-war film.

The documentary goes out of its way to consider the situation from all angles, and what might look from the outside like a simple story spills over with complicated emotions once it’s been cracked open.

Cummings works the same muscles that attracted attention in the festival darling Thunder Road and its follow-up, The Wolf of Snow Hollow: Exploring the varieties of volatile awkwardness and desperation, he plays a well-known type (the showbiz ladder-climber who’s nothing but a smile) while making the character unlike any we’ve seen.

Wildhood combines the foundation of heartrending coming-of-age narratives with the feel-good elements of road trip flicks to create a delicate, not to mention visually appealing, sophomore film.

The performances make this worthwhile.

Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri’s fascinating, if diffuse, documentary fills in that considerable blank in his public profile while making clear the lingering emotional impact of Andrésen’s brush with fame.

On the surface, Drunken Birds is about Willy’s quest for love and his new life on the farm, but once he crosses paths with Julie and Léa, the film morphs into a fraught tale of white womanhood and its perceived innocence.

With a lesser actor, East of the Mountains could have come across as tedious or maudlin, or both. Instead, Skerritt delivers a performance of such understated eloquence and dignity that it emerges as a quiet gem.

Quickening does not end on a completely satisfactory note, and part of that has to do with the overall disjointed feel of this poetic project. Still, its narrative ambition and visual acuity make me excited to see what Waseem does next.

The film is steeped in beauty at least as much as it is in sorrow, the dance of Mediterranean light — Salomon would spend a good portion of her final fears in the South of France — a vibrant counterpoint to the creeping shadow of hatred and violence.

Lewin and co-screenwriter Allen Palmer don’t exactly raise the dramatic stakes very high. The formulaic storyline fails to sustain interest, not helped by the sluggish pacing and predictable gags and characterizations.

Now, more than a year and a half into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Matthew Heineman’s intensely intimate documentary arrives as a graphic and emotional reminder of the early days of the crisis, in all its confusion and horror. It’s also a breathtaking testament to the fight to live, the calling to heal, and the power of human connection.

The premise is rich with potential for aching romance and meaningful contemplation of the ways that time and technology can shape how we see our relationships. So it’s too bad that this version of it falls apart under closer examination, with a script that seems enamored of love more as a theoretical concept than a lived experience.

With its tight structure, adequate level of suspense and inventive plot, The Manor more than fulfills the requirements of a thrilling horror flick. But its clumsy and at times repetitive script, along with its beautiful but predictable cinematography, kept me from feeling fully immersed in Belgian writer-director Axelle Carolyn’s project.

There’s plenty of imagination on display in The Blazing World, but it’s buried amidst the narrative and stylistic self-indulgence that assumes we’ll be interested in going on this very strange and ultimately enervating journey.

As a window into the campaign process, Mayor Pete doesn’t match the perspective or dramatic payoff of Moss’ last film, Boys State, co-directed with McBaine. But it does have the benefit of showing a man who seems destined to remain a force in American politics, growing into the role in real time.

Naturalistic and a bit on-the-nose in spots, the film is also a moving tale of real-world strife — a sort of low-key, contemporary take on Visconti’s neorealist classic La Terra Trema, with EU officials and regulations undoing seafaring practices that have existed for generations.

Chronicling an ignominious chapter in queer history, Great Freedom is also a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration, and beyond that, an unconventional love story, tender but unsentimental.

The movie itself doesn’t always live up to its ambitions, playing like a loose assembly of sketches that are by turns hilarious and tedious, with a third act that fizzles out and an ending that doesn’t land smoothly.

There isn’t a false note in any of the film’s performances, and within its brief running time, writer-directors Mario Furloni and Kate McLean infuse this story of the changing culture and economics of pot production with an anguished depiction of generational displacement.