With the risks to both the filmmaker and his subjects on full display, it’s an impressively exciting and strikingly novel approach in chronicling a humanitarian crisis that has yet to receive its due.

The acting from the central four actors is quite soulful, but we don’t get enough access to these characters’ inner conflicts. Too often, the narrative’s configuration feels like an intriguing second draft instead of a ready-to-shoot script, something that someone with an external eye might help finesse into something truly captivating.

I’m much more comfortable with Roadrunner as a portrait of an evolving, complicated, tragic TV personality, and as one of the best behind-the-scenes glimpses of a TV show (or shows) I’ve ever seen, than I am with it as an attempt to make sense of a man who, for whatever reason, no longer wanted to continue living.

A mature crime picture whose decades-hopping action makes the effects of generational poverty obvious without having to spell it out, it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness.

Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

Riegel seems to still be hung up on Winter’s Bone, making a slavishly imitative film with few flourishes that allow it to stand on its own.

While the team-up still fails to become more than the sum of its parts, at least we can appreciate Hayek’s enthusiasm for the over-the-top role.

The maturity of the directorial voice is evident in its clear-eyed, rigorously unsentimental assessment of a shattering situation.

Spirit Untamed is beautiful to look at and occasionally genuinely funny. The stunning and detailed animations saturate Lucky’s world with an impressive array of colors, from the crimson apples she feeds Spirit to the pistachio and emerald-green leaves on the swaying trees.

This one offers plenty of lurid fun and some genuine scares. But the grounding in dark spirituality that made the previous entries focused on the Warrens so compelling gets diluted, despite the reliably dignifying double-act of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson.

The true pleasure of The Outside Story doesn’t come from its heartwarming message about community or its nostalgic rendering of a mask-less, pre-pandemic New York City, but from Brian Tyree Henry’s exceptional performance in his first big-screen lead role.

They’re two out of millions of New Yorkers, but the more we get to know them, the more we see how these opposites — who exist on opposite sides of the law — are bound together by their mutual struggle to make it in the big city.

First-time director Jen Rainin’s portrait of Stevens, Curve‘s achievements and blindspots, lesbian progress during the Clinton era and the uneasiness with the “lesbian” label among many queer women today is accomplished, resonant and deeply moving.

This cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.

What Cruella lacks in script, however, it makes up for in sheer visual punch, with costume designer Jenny Beavan’s exquisitely detailed gowns especially enriching the angsty, sinister universe the film conjures.

An engrossing, unfailingly lucid account of a momentous political breakthrough that interrupted a decades-long impasse. Few will be unmoved by its sorrowful timeliness.

The very personal nature of Taylor’s involvement with these magnificent creatures makes this quite an affecting account of their threatened survival.

This is a stirring valentine to a neighborhood and its people that, as the film tells it, stared gentrification in the eye and stood their ground, staying true to their cultural identity.

It’s endearing — a love letter to the fans who’ve watched the musician grow up, and to her children, who might not remember all the details about their badass mother.

At a time when the fate of Black men and their bodies has risen to the level of a national emergency, what happens to the characters in Two Gods takes on added weight.

The fact that Lindon doesn’t judge the situation as much as she simply shows it is a sign of her intelligence as a promising young filmmaker — one who has both dared to expose herself onscreen and then dared to let the audience judge for themselves.

Sequin in a Blue Room feels very much of the moment, but it’s upholstered by an impressive command of good old-fashioned craft.

It’s another breathless chamber piece, expertly crafted to pack dread into every nerve-rattling sound.

In F9’s would-be showstoppers, the thrills are mostly AWOL or the feats are simply too idiotic to embrace, even guiltily.

Effectively moody but offering frustratingly skin-deep chills, The Woman in the Window underestimates its hero in more than ways than one.

The well-crafted film’s principal arcs may be largely predictable, but it’s an emotionally satisfying and gripping watch.

Spiral delivers when it comes to gore, if that’s your thing, and appropriately dour aesthetics — but not much else. That’s a shame, because the story’s themes, from the unreformable nature of the police department to the cost of integrity in a space that values power above all else, could not be more relevant.

It packs everything but the kitchen sink (though it does bring the entire Swedish government) into a two-hour-plus survival story that mostly keeps you on the edge of your seat, especially once the bravura action scenes kick in and you start wondering how the heck the filmmakers pulled them off.