Especially in the first hour, it’s a richly satisfying tribute to an unimpeachable cinematic legend who, one could easily argue, has become even more beloved than the iconic directors he collaborated with or the movie stars whose legends his themes and cues helped burnish.

As a piece of filmmaking, Chasing Chasing Amy is effectively put together.

The Gutter’s humor rarely misses. The Lester brothers deploy jokes with precision, taking aim at everything and everyone.

Moland delivers a sharp-looking, well-paced movie with a moody score.

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.

For a movie covering such an expansive passage of American life, Here feels curiously weightless. It’s no fault of the actors, all of whom deliver solid work with characters that are scarcely more than outlines.

Hardy brings sufficient charm (and witty voice work) to his symbiote-inhabited character’s internal battle between id and superego to make each entry diverting enough, even if they leave little aftertaste. And so it goes with Venom: The Last Dance, which caps the trilogy by going gleefully out on its own.

Navigating a complex narrative line, Nabulsi doesn’t always achieve the nuance or the propulsive tension the material requires, but she has a sure grasp of emotional give-and-take and day-to-day realities.

It is Curtis’s first foray into animation and although the characters are digitally rendered, the story taps into the same authentic energies that made his earlier works so beloved.

It’s in transporting viewers into the heart of this jungle, where the moths calibrate the ecosystem, that Nocturnes most its most compelling case for protecting these exquisite creatures and our planet.

We all know a feel-good ending is coming eventually. But more patience, and fewer clichés, might have made its emotions feel more earned.

A haunting lead performance from Marco Pigossi, steeped in melancholy and raw pain but also in moments of openness, optimism and even joy, helps make High Tide an affecting portrait of untethered gay men seeking meaningful connections.

Wolff (Hereditary) impresses, deftly modulating his performance so we can’t land too easily in one emotional camp — excessive sympathy or complete ire.

The cumulative experience is affecting in its own minor-key way, an appealing throwback to old-fashioned family dramas of a more innocent era.

The movie functions mostly as personal testimony — a riveting, if too often searching, autobiography of a figure whose political transformation is haunted by narrative inconsistencies.

For a movie that aspires to antic comedy, it brings way too much casting firepower to a slim plot and even sketchier character development. Whether a streaming audience will even notice the mis-calibration is probably irrelevant, as long as they remember the mismatched brothers.

Smile 2 confirms Finn as a gifted visual stylist who has an assured hand with his actors. He perhaps just needs to back off a little from the misconception that more is more and maintain a greater focus on his story skills.

Neither dull enough to be painful nor fun enough to be engaging, it’s simply too bland to make much of an impression at all.

While there’s much to admire here . . . the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.

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.

The subject matter alone could be enough to trigger geysers of tears in viewers, but what makes Le Fanu’s direction especially impressive is its lack of sentimentality. Instead, she focuses on daily rituals — the little murmurs of gratitude and kindness, and the sense of exhaustion that stretches out for hours, days and weeks as one waits for someone to die.

Hardcore Ozon fans will have fun arguing about where exactly this falls in the ranking of his substantial body of work, but it’s surely somewhere in the top 10 or even the top five, a rock-solid demonstration of his control over storytelling, technique and ability to get the best from actors.

TWST is set up like a concert film, but instead it’s a combination of two nonfiction categories — the tone poem and the city symphony — that are used as fallback catch-all classifications for critics and scholars. Ujica blends them with archival rigor and effective whimsy to create a movie that’s dreamy and clear-eyed at once.

Forster’s steady direction keeps this thread of White Bird affecting even when it conforms to predictable narrative beats.

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.

Devara: Part 1 is ambitious, exhausting and so high-decibel that when it’s finished, after nearly three hours, you might need to pause and reorient to reality. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

This recap of a unique and deeply sincere bid to demystify utopian ideals for the conservative masses using the platform of popular television offers a fascinating glimpse into a very different period in this country’s past.

It provides some great background on Carville and certainly convinces us that he is one of the most colorful figures on the scene today — and still making noise.