The film isn’t always subtle, and like much of the director’s work it sometimes teeters on melodrama . . . But it’s also undoubtedly moving.

Franco-Belgian actor Worthalter, who’s perhaps best known for his role in Lukas Dhont’s Girl, is riveting every time his character takes the stand. He convinces us of Goldman’s innocence, not to mention his commitment to political causes, far before the trial is over, and we’re only hoping that the jury will wind up agreeing with us.

Rarely does Ben Hania’s film feel exploitative or manipulative. In fact, more than anything, Four Daughters is radical in its honesty and courage.

The threat posed by women who think for themselves to the absolute power of men is a central theme in this starch-free tale of Tudor intrigue, its protofeminist perspective seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric without a hint of the didactic.

Like other live-action remakes, The Little Mermaid is a neatly packaged story ribboned with representational awareness. There’s enough in it to fill an evening, but it doesn’t inspire much more than a passing sense of déjà vu.

A visually rich doc with much more than scenic vistas on its mind.

By the end, Black Flies leaves the viewer battered, bruised and bleeding out on the sidewalk, but never fully captivated

With Banel & Adama, Ramata-Toulaye Sy has conjured a stunning world in need of a sharper story.

Anatomy of a Fall is, above all, about the essential unknowability of a person, of a relationship, and the perilous impossibility of trying to understand — whether it’s a child puzzling over his parents or a courtroom straining to make sense of an inscrutable suspect. In other words, it’s a film concerned with storytelling — the stories we tell others about ourselves and those we, as individuals and a society, tell ourselves about others.

The movie goes downhill into predictable territory, finally landing in a soggy quagmire of talkiness and would-be profundity expressed in voiceover at the end. But at least the visuals are nice, with Ceylan’s signature use of snow-capped landscape and wide-angled lensing to the fore.

The director is poking around in territory that’s familiar to him — self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach.

Its perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.

The three-and-a-half-hour running time is fully justified in an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip — a sordid illustration of historical erasure with echoes in today’s bitterly divisive political gamesmanship.

At this point it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Jonathan Glazer is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original.

The director’s customary delicacy, compassion and sensitivity ripple through the drama, though its affecting moments of illumination are more intermittent than cumulative.

Harlow makes a surprisingly strong impression in his film acting debut, signaling that more big screen roles are in his future, while Walls provides the requisite simmering intensity and formidable physicality as the anger-prone Kamal.

This is a big, bombastic movie that goes through the motions but never finds much joy in the process, despite John Williams’ hard-working score continuously pushing our nostalgia buttons and trying to convince us we’re on a wild ride.

Twice in the film, giant lumbering objects ricochet through crowded city streets wreaking absolute havoc in their wake. They’re perfect visual metaphors for the movies themselves, so stuffed with over-the-top mayhem and testosterone-packed macho aggressiveness that they’ve become utterly ridiculous. What saves Fast X is that it’s so aware of its own absurdity that it becomes an entertaining parody of itself.

With all the recent controversy surrounding Depp, not to mention Maïwenn herself, the result of their collaboration is a handsome period piece that feels both flat and shallow, and certainly far from any scandale.

You Don’t Know Me aims to cut past the mythology to reveal the flesh-and-blood woman underneath, and in doing so assembles a mostly sympathetic, mostly compelling portrait of an all-American tragedy. But when even a movie aimed at capturing the “true” Anna Nicole Smith seems unsure exactly who that might be, it’s hard not to wonder who any of this is really for.

While the disparate thematic elements don’t mesh together seamlessly in Crater, the film offers enough fun and thrills to swell the ranks of aspiring astronauts.

I’ll take this JLo as “nobody fucks with me or my daughter” killing machine, discovering her long-hidden maternal instincts, over those grimly generic rom-coms she cranks out once a year, which might as well be direct-to-inflight movies.

It’s watchable enough, but ultimately has the counterfeit feel of a filmmaker dabbling in a genre that’s not a natural fit and finding little joy in it.

Harka darts between genre conventions: One minute it feels like a thriller, the next a heart-wrenching drama, another a psychological study. When the risky mix-and-match works — and sometimes it doesn’t — the results are emotionally potent. Nathan is fascinated by desperation, the kind that roots itself in the mind and soul. What lengths will a desperate person go to in order to survive? That is the essential, thrilling question coursing through Harka.

Signed, sealed and delivered, Book Club: The Next Chapter is an unabashed love letter to four great movie stars. As a vehicle for their talents, it’s less of a sure thing.

Carried by impressively fluid, determinedly naturalistic filmmaking, with performances that never hit a false note, 20,000 Species of Bees (20.000 especies de abejas) marks an assured debut, slowly but surely hitting an emotional crescendo during its final minutes

What Frybread Face and Me lacks in drama, it makes up for in a boundless affection for its characters and an appreciation for the everyday details of their lives.

The footage-forward/talking head-free approach is a tough one to get exactly right, and Adolphus doesn’t always nail it.