Saint Omer might be fiction, but Diop does not stray too far from her documentary roots. The film maintains a sense of naturalism even during its most tense moments. Diop’s directing style leans observational, as if she is watching and recording her screenplay’s effect on her performers.

Hamm makes plenty of sense in this role, but Mottola and Zev Borow’s screenplay doesn’t totally convince us the character is series-worthy.

Nyswaner and Grandage here let the lads get nude and sweaty, rolling around in a golden haze — lots of arched backs, hungry hands and eyes dilated in rapturous transport — that should at least set Styles fans’ hearts aflutter, albeit while remaining fairly decorous. But stodgy storytelling and clunky shifts between the drama’s two time periods dim the afterglow.

This is a vengeful dark comedy that probes percolating class anxieties (a popular theme in cinema lately). It indulges in opportunities to strip the emperor of his clothes, and while that doesn’t necessarily translate to the most revelatory social commentary, it does make for an amusing ride.

The real star of the show is Dunham, whose sharp dialogue and direction equips every actor with an acidic tongue and knowing gaze.

This picture offers more action, more delicious comeuppances, more daring design and a few genuinely surprising cameos just for good measure. Yet it doesn’t suffer from the usual “give ’em the same thing, but more of it” bloat common in sequels to surprise hits. Its ensemble is more varied than Knives‘, and its critique of the clueless rich more relevant to our age.

Energetic performances and technical precision come together to glorious effect in Prince-Bythewood’s rousing action film. It’s a lush, prime piece of entertainment in many respects.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed takes [the director's] work to new aesthetic heights and wrenching emotional depths.

Funny, sweet and occasionally pointed.

A Compassionate Spy borrows the look and feel of a historical espionage thriller and builds some momentum and moral complexity along the way, but it finds its real potency as a generational family drama.

Isolation, emotional distance and (mis)communication are all on display in Love Life, though these subjects are approached with a disorienting but welcome lightness, underlining the absurdity of family life.

There’s brutality but also an understated hint of poetry in the way Bratton tells his story from deep inside it, making beautiful use of Baltimore experimental pop group Animal Collective’s richly varied electronic score, which often plays in gentle counterpoint to the harshness of what’s unfolding.

Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is relentlessly silly, wholesome at heart and so stuffed with cameos it might give you the idea that a couple of generations of cool people love this guy.

There’s definitely some gas in its tank in the opening sections, which are somewhat promising, but then the story takes a predictable route that fails to deliver enough suspense or interest to go the full distance.

That the story of someone so off-putting climaxes in a moment as profound and moving as the penultimate scene of Return to Seoul speaks to the subtle power of writer-director Davy Chou’s storytelling and the portrayal by Park Ji-Min, a visual artist making a strong impression in her first screen role.

Wanting more is a criticism, but it’s a luxury criticism. This documentary builds a world you want to explore further.

The tragic dimension of a woman adored by the world, devoured by Hollywood and ultimately abandoned to her own despair in an ordinary little house in Brentwood resonates because we know Marilyn’s sad story. But it’s hard to ignore the queasy feeling that Dominik is getting off on the tawdry spectacle. De Armas holds nothing back in connecting with the character’s pain. She deserves better.

Although Hill certainly puts in a few sly tips of the hat to canonical and cult favorites and is clearly enjoying exploiting the audience’s expectations of the genre, Dead for a Dollar isn’t an empty nostalgia exercise. Nor is it a revisionist postmodern deconstruction. It’s somewhere between the two, built on a narrative architecture as classical in its vernacular as Doric columns on a bank, but with details that will surely remind audiences of the future that it was made in the 2020s.

This is Jackman’s movie. He makes Peter’s helplessness intensely moving as he keeps trying, against mounting odds and false breakthroughs, to communicate with a child who remains out of reach. Sadly, that goes for The Son, as much as the son.

Director-screenwriter Cregger displays an obvious perverse glee in guiding his audiences through his outlandish twists and turns.

Its chief merit is the rare opportunity it provides Saoirse Ronan to showcase her skills with bubbly comedy, making her the standout in a ridiculously overqualified ensemble. But despite the promise of that title, this wheezing romp slows to a limp.

In the end, it plays a little too often like an academic pastiche of horror tropes even though its emotional core rings with resonance.

The high-concept, low-satisfaction psychological thriller marks an ambitious upgrade in scope for Wilde from the character-driven coming-of-age comedy of Booksmart, and she handles the physical aspects of the project with assurance. It’s just a shame all the effort has gone into a script without much of that 2019 debut’s disarming freshness.

The balance between detail and momentum can at times be off, and the helmer doesn’t entirely avoid generic tropes of the legal drama. But he conveys the enormity of the undertaking at the film’s center — the first major war crimes trial since Nuremberg — and it’s felt in every moment of Darín’s compelling portrayal.

For all its wit, its lively talk and deceptive lightness, this is arguably the writer-director’s most affecting work.

The intense chamber drama never disguises its stage roots but transcends them with the grace and compassion of the writing and the layers of pain and despair, love and dogged hope peeled back in the central performance. Fraser makes us see beyond the alarming appearance to the deeply affecting heart of this broken man.

The result is an expressive and moving portrait of a tempestuous marriage, one told with elan that feels rich in feeling even if its entire budget probably wouldn’t have covered the cost of croissants on an average film shoot in France.