While the stakes are high, the spirit of Days Of The Whale is endearingly loose-limbed, in many ways recalling the similarly sun-kissed energy of Adam Leon’s “Gimme The Loot.”

Amulet is a horror movie which baits-and-switches cleverly—and angrily—about who is the horror’s innocent victim, and who’s its guilty cause. And as a haunted house film, its ornate mythology pulls the dingy rotting rug out several times from under our initial idea of who is the haunter and who the hauntee.

Yes, God, Yes is too comfortable with itself, too certain in its moral message, while leading Alice through a narrative that is never less than sure. It’s sex comedy as gospel, preaching a placid Sunday afternoon sermon to a congregation of the converted.

The Painted Bird is the kind of exploitative cinema that thinks drowning its viewers in increasingly drastic scenes of torture and brutality is inherently righteous. “Look at our terrible history!” “The Painted Bird” screams, but the film’s unrelenting onslaught of revolting ghastliness makes each chapter less impactful than the last.

We Are Little Zombies is much more about style than story. Nagahisa delivers a visual tour-de-force, careening wildly through an unimaginable array of arresting shots.

The disposability of the people who stand in the way of the mercenaries feels at odds with the film’s core ideas about the value of life. Perhaps this is a fitting encapsulation of “The Old Guard” itself. Situated at the crossroads of two different styles and ideologies, the film takes the less-trodden path – though not without a few detours into conventionality.

James often frames her characters in close-ups with still backgrounds and lingers there for far too long, creating a transfixing atmosphere of discomfort. Through all her aesthetic craft, the house transforms into a physical manifestation of dementia with forgotten rooms, claustrophobic spaces, and walls that slowly close in on each other.

Shocking without being exploitative, sad without veering off into depressing, and inspirational without a hint of the saccharine, David France’s documentary tells a difficult story well.

It’s a strange and odd, film, alternatively admirable and gripping, and also flat and one-dimensional.

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

The Audition is a harsh, and often cheap, picture that offers a fragmented view of a family diseased by the pursuit of perfection, who yet enable the behavior to continue at the ongoing cost of their happiness.

It’s McAdams’ believability, even tangibly intense commitment to this absurd role, that really sells Dobkins’ winning film and makes it sing sonorously, warts and all.

It’s easier to make pandering jokes about how liberals can’t break through to working-class white voters than actually put in the work to understand their full humanity. Without such effort, Stewart does not just repeat the mistakes of his characters. He magnifies them.

Spike Lee’s documentary on this formative period in Michael Jackson’s career derives its electric, enlivening energy from these fantastic clips. Alas, they’re not enough to alter the fact that this non-fiction effort . . . is merely a nostalgic promotional puff piece meant to look back fondly, and uncritically, at an artist transitioning from a youth-oriented pop fad to the biggest star in the world.

At its best, John Lewis: Good Trouble is a portrait in courage that pairs the past with the present.

Ultimately, Miss Juneteenth is a reminder that dreams don’t have to die.

In an era marked by omnipresent terror and universal doom, 7500 sparks fear and soothes anxiety in the same breath. Although the film utilizes violence as its foundation, 7500 promotes the idea that heroes exist everywhere, proving that, even amid turbulent opposition, survival, and endurance are sometimes the bravest acts people can ever accomplish.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn isn’t really about justice, per se, but about peeling back the layers on the man.

Holland’s focused effort doesn’t let us forget the respect we owe to the writers behind the headlines and stories we idly click through that often come to us through great personal and spiritual risk.

From top to bottom, The Last Days of American Crime is a lumbering referential malfunction. Nothing about it works; everything about it is offensive.

It may amount to less than a hill of beans, but Hill of Freedom is an amiable way to spend 66 minutes learning how even cultures that seem closely related to Western eyes, like those of Japan and Korea, can clash. And also how cultures like these, that seem so far from our own, can be trumped, by love, longing, friendship, sex and drunkenness, the same universal experiences we all share.

Though the visuals are a huge draw, having a variety of actors with palpable chemistry brings Sometimes Always Never to life.

While not perfect, nothing worthwhile ever is, Da 5 Bloods sees Lee exploring brotherhood, PTSD, greed, and how lost legacies and voices have led to present protests for a deceptively rousing war drama.

You Don’t Nomi cuts through the excessive nudity and stylized hyper sex of “Showgirls” to reveal the heart hidden behind the grime, relishing in the entrancing panache that has fascinated and charmed viewers for years.

But what’s especially dispiriting, this time around, is that the film promises more. It opens with a remarkable pre-title sequence of Davidson on the highway, driving with a stern face, and listening to the radio; we’re joining him in the middle of something, and we’re not sure what. And then he closes his eyes and steps on the gas, a move of suicidal recklessness that nearly gets him (and several other drivers) killed, after which he stammers, to no one in particular, several consecutive “I’m sorry’s.” It’s not clear why this opening exists, in the context of ‘Staten Island,’ because it’s not comedic, and it’s not feel-good.

Imperfections cannot steal away the ambitious underpinnings of Hersh’s intentions for “The Surrogate,” a down-to-earth analysis of the ever-precarious, self-serving human condition; an examination that speaks volumes despite its reserved demeanor.

Ultimately, Judy & Punch doesn’t hit squarely in the target, but hints at interesting conversations on prejudice, domestic abuse, and powerful individuals lacking integrity. As one watches, and ponders whether to laugh or gasp from one scene to the next, some of these inquiries do emerge strongly from its convoluted haze.

Adalsteins demonstrates a mastery of restraint, a rare ability to hold back emotions so that when they come, they pour forth like a broken dam.