Too often, the film gives off the feeling that it was designed for the inevitable line of toys for the upcoming holiday season, with plenty of cuddly animals of disparate types soon to line the shelves of a store near you.

An eloquent meditation on loss, memory and how film can shape them.

There’s lots on the menu, and León de Aranoa brings it all together in a smooth manner. But the jokes tend to be too broad, and the themes too tritely handled.

It’s a restrained rendering of the events, a drama that plays, at times, like a documentary. But if Howard’s decision to spotlight the Thai characters in this harrowing narrative is a sound one, there’s an unfamiliar stiffness and self-consciousness in the director’s approach — an inability to marry the fast-paced, no-nonsense heroics that are his strong suit with more emotionally textured storytelling. The resulting awkwardness prevents the movie, for all the surreal tension and bravery it depicts, from feeling urgent or surprising.

Simply designed animation, modeled on the look of cool cartoons of the time such as Daria, adds an extra comic jauntiness. You could say, to use a popular slang term from the 90s, this puts the “mental” back in experimental, but in a good way.

Shepard’s reach might exceed her grasp, but there’s no question that she takes risks and is a filmmaker of notable promise.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Nope offers up a glutton’s feast for Peele disciples and fans of brainy sci-fi thrillers, ushering the director into an intriguing new phase of cinema that’s as rhapsodic as it is demanding.

It’s a clear-eyed, but by no means exhaustive, documentary that investigates this underreported crisis without losing sight of the people processing the depths of their loss.

For most of its 110-minute run time, Don’t Make Me Go is a solidly likable drama, anchored by lovely, lived-in chemistry between John Cho and Mia Isaac as a father-daughter duo. But a misguided third-act choice throws off its bittersweet vibe, leaving a distinctly sour aftertaste.

While the movie itself may prove nearly as unmemorable as its hero ostensibly wants to be, it’s anything but inconspicuous.

The screenplay, credited to the five original Blazing Saddles writers as well as Ed Stone and Nate Hopper, is relentlessly silly but only intermittently funny.

The film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

This is Manville’s film, a too-rare star vehicle in which one of England’s most invaluable actors carries us effortlessly on the wings of Mrs. Harris’ dream of egalitarian elegance.

Persuasion is sufficiently bold and consistent with its flagrant liberties to get away with them. It also helps that the novel’s long-suffering protagonist, Anne Elliot, has been given irrepressible spirit and an irreverent sense of irony in Dakota Johnson’s incandescent performance.

Dipping less rewardingly from the same well in Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi pushes the wisecracking to tiresome extremes, snuffing out any excitement, mythic grandeur or sense of danger that the God of Thunder’s latest round of rote challenges might hope to generate. Chris Hemsworth continues to give great musclebound himbo, but the stakes never acquire much urgency in a movie too busy being jokey and juvenile to tell a gripping story.

Fourth of July turns out to be something we would have never expected from its director/co-writer — bland.

Throwing a woman in front of the camera and a few feminist quips into the script does not make these films any less conventional, or necessarily any more empowering.

Happily, the film is more than a greatest-hits rundown (and at nearly three hours, it had better be): In addition to nuts-and-bolts musicology, it offers real engagement with a complicated character, endearingly stubborn and self-effacing, whose inventiveness changed both his chosen field (“absolute” music) and the one, film scoring, he entered only reluctantly.

Minions: The Rise of Gru gives fans more of what they’ve come to expect, mainly Gru acting evilly, the Minions acting stupidly, and enough clever gags that will fly over its target audiences’ heads but keep their adult chaperones from dozing off.

What makes his story particularly compelling is that most of it is true.

In lieu of a throughline, Beauty offers beautiful, indulgent vignettes — aesthetically pleasing and immersive episodes lacking in ideas but full of vibes.

A tense, occasionally terrifying thriller that’s hard to look away from, though what it’s ultimately trying to accomplish with all that energy isn’t always so clear.

In its fine balance of emotional and intellectual curiosity, and its elegant assembly of a rich archive of home movies, photographs and interviews, this film unpacks those memories with beguiling candor

It’s frequently funny and occasionally savage in its commentary on the changed terrain. But in proving that Beavis and Butt-Head absolutely have a place in the contemporary world, it suggests that there’s a limit to how deeply we probably want to interrogate that place.

By focusing on the students’ stories, honoring their choices and leaving considerable room for their ambivalence, regret and uncertainty, the doc provides a sobering and emotional look at what, if any, options exist for those who aren’t white or wealthy in an unequal system.

Mild fish-out-of-water humor and an element of mystery may satisfy fans of Novak’s work on the again-popular The Office, but fall short of proving he has much potential as a big-screen auteur.

Civil often feels more like an infomercial than a documentary.

Predictable but sweet.