More than it knows, this movie is an engaging, and sometimes enraging, exposé of chronic insularity.

Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

In Rewind & Play, Gomis does more than reveal the discussion that didn’t see the light of day in 1970; he reveals the cinematic methods by which the fabricated and tailored view of Monk’s life and work were crafted.

It’s a contemporary story that feels as if it has been worn away to a featureless, atemporal perfection of the sort that has been handed down, in the industry, through producers’ dictates and story conferences, and which filters into the world of independent filmmaking by way of film schools and handbooks, rounds of workshops and mentoring.

Creed III makes clear that Jordan, in directing and starring, has serious matters, personal and professional and societal, in mind. But the movie, produced as one briskly overpacked feature, doesn’t allow him enough time to explore them.

Finely framed by the cinematographer Kate McCullough, The Quiet Girl is an idyll, yet its placid surface is puckered by anxiety.

Cocaine Bear has a peculiar jostling quality, as the various characters shuffle onto center stage and then get elbowed aside to make way for the next contender.

As the title promises, Full Time is centered on work. It’s one of the best recent movies about work, and it approaches the subject with sharply analytical specificity.

The best thing about “Quantumania” is, surprisingly, its script (by Jeff Loveness), which is like saying that the best thing about a building is its blueprint.

With its straining yet deadened feel, this is the movie of a director who dreams of putting on one last show before going home.

One problem is that too much of Knock at the Cabin takes place in the cabin; at times, it has the smack of a well-made play, or, at any rate, a technical exercise in dread.

The strange thing is that, as the film unfolds, the beauty of the place grows ever more unforgiving. It resembles another planet, fresh from the act of creation, but it feels like a prison.

The film puts people and their surroundings, the moments of grand drama and the moments of contemplative solitude, in a state of spiritual equality.

The abruptness, the willfulness, the ferocity of Passages reflect, more than any other film by an American director that I’ve seen in a while, the influence of Pialat.

What Dhont understands, in short, is how kinetic the rites of passage are—how growing pains are expressed not in words, however therapeutic, but in rushes of activity.

This being an Eisenberg project—he also wrote the screenplay—the laughter comes with a wince attached as standard, and there is barely a scene, in a film constructed from social awkwardness, when your nails aren’t digging into your palms.

As impressive as the film is, the many thrillingly imaginative moments remain suspended and detached from each other, like scattered storyboard frames. The result is a film that’s accomplished but seemingly unfinished—indeed, hardly begun.

Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, Saint Omer... which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary.

There’s a different, far more substantial movie lurking within, yet the virtues of efficiency, clarity, surprise, and wit that enliven the one that’s actually onscreen leave its merely implied substance tantalizingly unformed.

The audience for Turn Every Page, I’d guess, will be a medley of Freudians, students of political muscle, and New Yorkers—each bearing a copy of “The Power Broker,” Caro’s 1974 book on Robert Moses, whittled down by Gottlieb to the size of a mere warehouse.

The exceptional, often overwhelming power of the script that Polley wrote, based on Miriam Toews’s novel, is, if not undercut, not amplified by the filming.

Emma Stone, in Chazelle’s “La La Land” (2016), was granted a beautiful lull in which to deliver her saddest song, but Margot Robbie has no such chance to breathe. Her performance isn’t over the top, but her character, as conceived and written, most definitely is, and she has no option but to follow suit. Such is Babylon. It goes nowhere, in a mad rush.

What Kreutzer aims to impress upon us is the effect of smothering and constraint—not only upon her heroine but also upon the female sex, at every social stratum, under Habsburg rule.

There’s palpable joy in the sheer ingenuity of the movie’s conception and in the realization of it. Panahi goes at his subjects with an irrepressible cinematic verve that extends from the story and the dialogue to the performances and the very presences of the actors.

The film is more than three hours long, some of it dangerously close to dawdling; not until the final third does Cameron apply the whip and remind us that, in the choreographing of action sequences, he remains unsurpassed.

So compelling are Nighy and Burke that I will watch them in anything, yet their spree, drenched in rich and hazy colors, doesn’t quite ring true.

The trouble with Mendes’s film is in the effort to combine the pieces in a way that feels natural, in an artifice that’s devised to be nearly invisible. It’s a synthetic that presents itself as organic. In the process, the film smothers its authentic parts, never lets its drama take root and grow, never lets its characters come to life.

It seems fitting, then, that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. Confidently led by Weir, they swarm the screen.