The result, as directed by the promising Jeremiah Zagar (“We The Animals”), is an agreeable combination drill of humor, hurt, on-court action and redemptive uplift that’s closer to simply being a solidly inspiring sports movie than anything notably representative of the Sandler oeuvre.

For all its provocations, After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is rote and tedious. The body horror and gross-outs get repetitive, and none of it ever means much of anything.

For all of the film’s ideological richness, what Neptune Frost discusses is far from impenetrably abstract. The directors not only hack cinema, a medium historically dominated by white storytellers, to make a statement, but they also reposition its lens to center a fresh crop of artistic voices in a mesmerizing battle cry of a film set to the inextinguishable beat of the drums.

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko succeeds where so many other movies like it fail simply by making its characters seem real enough to be going through a series of familiar growing pains.

The Phantom of the Open tries so hard to be a winking commentary on British heartwarmers about lovable outsiders. And its efforts are, as often as not, entertaining. But after a while, it becomes clear that what it wants more than anything is to be embraced as a crowd-pleasing comedy itself.

The movie sometimes feels as aimless as moments in the lives of the characters it depicts, but that helps give it the intimacy of a story told from the inside, not the outside.

A tidy 73-minute romp through Lewis’ career that manages to fit in about a dozen staggering performances of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” but still leaves you wishing there was room for a couple more.

Showing Up is perhaps Reichardt’s most grounded and least impressionistic film, but it is still more than thoughtful and enjoyable and beautiful.

It’s a film full of boring conversations, daft sci-fi conceits, and confusing suspense, which add up to practically nothing. “Zero” indeed.

18 ½ attempts to be part cloak-and-dagger thriller, part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part mood piece, and its plotting is slapdash, to say the least.

Carpignano once again uses a tight, intimate character focus to take a wider look at larger political and cultural issues in this region. In the poetically, humanistically crafted A Chiara, he also manages to flip the Mafia movie on its head, and in doing so, challenges the mythology that keeps these shadowy systems in power.

A dense and bloody spy thriller with enough twists, turns, double agents, defectors and buried secrets to confuse even viewers who know the geopolitical players without a scorecard. For those of us who are struggling to figure out who’s who and where their sympathies lie on the fly, it can get downright impenetrable.

It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.

When chewing through some oddly phrased text, Qualley’s non-verbal tics offer twice the information with half the winces, making “Stars at Noon” sometimes feel like two films in one. There’s the paranoid thriller and the dreamlike dirge; a steamy drama and its feminist reappraisal; the work of a master with the promise of new kinks to iron out and maybe greater heights to which to soar.

There’s enough energy and flash, though, to overcome most nit-picking, and Butler throws himself into a performance that’s wildly physical but never cartoonish or disrespectful. (The movie respects Presley, who deserves it, but not Parker, who doesn’t.)

What sets The Eight Mountains apart is the degree to which co-directors van Groeningen and Vandermeersch strip away so much pretense and artifice, leaving nothing but a strong central question: What makes and prevents people from meaningfully connecting? The filmmakers then strike a refreshingly unsentimental tone when answering it.

Richly dramatic and at times confounding, it’s a gorgeous piece of work that has the ability to move you in one moment and leave you cold in the next.

Moonage Daydream is a bracing, gloriously messy (or, more likely, gloriously messy seeming) celebration and immersion in all things Bowie.

At his most memorable, Cronenberg creates viscerally unforgettable images that horrify, yes, but they also provoke with big, shocking ideas about our very selves – the monstrousness of disease, the perhaps inevitable hybrid of the corporeal and the mechanical, the determination of the self. With Crimes of the Future, we’re left with a remove from the material, where no matter what happens, it’s all just performance art.

Even with its raunchier aspects, the film’s devotion to plotting the course of true love would probably meet with Miss Austen’s approval.

It’s a tricky balance to build a world where characters are both absurd and believable — and on top of that, exist in a world where musical numbers can break out at any time (even the Wonder Wharf carnies get a song) — but Bouchard pulls it off.

With bleak serenity of a man who has peered into the abyss and responded with a smile, the filmmaker offers no answer or easy way out to the intractable, and perhaps foundational, human capacity for hate than with his own virtuosic talent.

Ultimately, Corsage is a deeply sympathetic portrait of Elisabeth, enhanced by Krieps’ delightful performance.

As overflowing as it is with subplots and stylistic quirks, perhaps “Brother and Sister” should simply have concentrated on the brother and sister. That would have been more than enough.

That a director can summon such emotional maturity paired with grand narrative originality in her first outing, particularly working from a deeply personal standpoint, astounds. Wells, a forward-thinking artist, invites into a vortex of feelings and sensations that fully exploits the language of cinema for its gorgeously humanistic pursuit.

Like a weaver on a loom, Hansen-Løve loops these moments together, threading small moments of thought-provoking social commentary throughout, revealing the larger picture only once the process is done, offering a snapshot of a moment in time, a profound and captivating portrait of love, lost, found, and ever-remaining.

Although the film takes place in a dystopian near future, the story rarely reveals any meaningful information about how society functions after an environmental collapse, or indeed portrays hardly any scene as though it could take place only within the confines of Mondocane.

It’s a bold and stylish work that slips in and out of fantasy and isn’t afraid to use music and sound design as a weapon, but it can also get relentlessly dreary and oppressive, albeit by design.

An indispensable watch, Banua-Simon’s first feature focuses on the island of Kauaʻi and the history of its exploitation as a colony, which endures under the guise of statehood.

It’s an acerbic, tough look back, which makes it a rarity in a genre that often (and sometimes effectively) dons rose-colored glasses.

Final Cut is silly and excessive and completely over-the-top, but it also brings out the lightness and deftness of Hazanavicus’ touch with comedy; the director somehow manages to fling body parts and bodily excretions at the audience for almost two hours, and yet you leave feeling as if you’ve seen a feel-good movie.

The central relationship of “The Valet” is the weakest part of the film, and much of the comedy is a bit tiresome, though a few bits do pop.

Monstrous offers a strong premise and some fresh twists, particularly in a genre where gimmicky filmmaking has prevailed.

Montana Story remains a worthwhile exercise, largely because it puts two stellar actors through a monumental emotional gauntlet, and they pass with flying colors.

The new Firestarter is a lot like the old Firestarter, if the old Firestarter was duller, cheaper, and devoid of almost all meaning.

Il Buco is riveting and bewitching, a wholly immersive film, led soulfully by Frammartino’s confidence in saying less.

Vogt, with his second feature, has crafted a disturbing and original heart-pounder all his own, uncommonly attuned to the perspective of unsocialized prepubescents: how their feelings work, what their minds process, and why their worst moments may bring catharsis to them, but can look terrifyingly wrong to us.

In the end, Top Gun: Maverick counts as a worthy sequel in that it succeeds and fails in many of the same ways as the original. It’s another cornball male weepie and military recruitment ad that feels like every WWII movie got fed into an algorithm, and the flying sequences are breathtaking enough to make you forget that these guys and gals are engaging in the kind of combat scenarios that start wars.

Garland’s active engagement with his themes, moods, and show-stopping ick is still something to be reckoned with in today’s climate of fear in the film industry regarding original stories.

The result is one of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness.

Ultimately, The Takedown is a goofy retro buddy cop movie with decent action scenes at best. At its worst, it’s as awkward as the diversity and inclusion publicist following Ousmane around, desperate for a relevant quote.

To call it a difficult watch would be an understatement; it often feels, in its stark honesty, like a horror film.

It’s a history lesson you can dance to, and at times it’s an unexpectedly mournful and moving portrait of a city that has an intimate relationship with death and damage.

The follow-up to 2016’s “Doctor Strange” hits the ooh-and-aah marks we expect from a well-crafted Marvel adventure, but even with Sam Raimi at the helm, this entry goes heavy on the spectacle but light on the humanity.

Ultimately, FLINT is real-life American horror at its most devastating and disappointing, as it provides no indication that either hope or human decency can prevail.

While it may have started as a spellbinding evening of theater, what Raim’s unfussy, handsomely mounted documentary reinforces is that film is its own spiritually transporting medium, with its own risks and rewards, and its own ability to turn the enjoyment of art into — what else? — tradition!

“Pompo” reveals itself to be a film about why not every single thing you do as an artist is special, and how admitting that can lead to stronger, more efficient storytelling.

It is subversive, stomach-churning and visionary, a body-horror film that doubles as a fable of femininity gone wrong.

Unfortunately, the second half of Firebird is far less involving than the first.

Bourgeois-Tacquet’s script is loaded with witty bon mots and carefully-constructed insights.

Zax’s gentle, fly-on-the-wall perspective keeps us primarily in the present, reminding us that all we need is right there inside the shop.

The awkward transitions and clichéd merrymaking that define Lisa’s story will likewise be either more feature than bug for genre fans or just one more thing that makes Azuelos and Fierro’s narrative seem lazy and confused.

Memory often feels more like a direct-to-video threequel than an actual movie.

It’s particularly sad that viewers can’t spend more time in Casey’s world, since newcomer Cobb is this film’s greatest asset.

It was disingenuous of the filmmakers to use the phrase “A New Era”, because the film relies wholly on its viewers’ affection for characters and situations they have seen many times before.

Panahi and cinematographer Amin Jafari take familiar tropes of contemporary Iranian cinema and rework them with refreshing twists.

Given how much of the new material on Monroe is audio-based, one is left wondering why a project like this wouldn’t work better as a podcast. There is little that’s visually compelling about Cooper’s work, the type of investigation perhaps best listened to in the background of another activity.

Too many heartwarming comedies, especially those with mature leads, eventually expose themselves as cynical contrivances. The same could be said for some of the based-in-truth dramas that have started to feel inexorably churned out. In its affable sincerity, The Duke is both their opposite and their antidote, a feel-good entertainment for feel-bad times.

Charlotte may not take the utmost advantage of its material, but what it dares to tackle, it does so successfully, sadly, and memorably.

Marvelous and the Black Hole proves to be a small marvel of an indie gem and an assured debut for Tsang.

This sleepy and visually murky black-and-white drama belabors the same banal truisms about memory and role-playing during wartime –basically, it’s impossible to maintain your autonomy when you’re only a pawn in a complicated game — and tends to be more interesting to think about than to watch.

Ultimately the movie asks a lot of us, while simultaneously withholding too much. The concept remains compelling, but the execution both figuratively and literally falls flat.

Soberly shifting from war thriller to apocalyptic drama to oddly sentimental buddy film, “Onoda” bears the weight of its many filmic forefathers. But as it pulls off such moves with such quiet force, it also represents a different kind of emergence.

Anyone who’s sat through enough of those Christian films and watched them with a critical eye (and not for the mere indoctrination) can easily tell that the basic craftsmanship of Father Stu is on a different level. That doesn’t necessarily make this an admirable production, but at least it’s a proficient one.

The Northman is gory, muddy, hallucinatory — and intensely entertaining. An examination of the way that violence begets violence, and a study of how a life devoted to single-minded hatred and vengeance can lead to uncomfortable truths, this is a movie that lives up to every saga comic books and metal bands ever spun about the brutal conquerors of yore.

For the diehards and the curious, it should hold some intrigue, because in its exploration of pop longevity and band dynamics, it’s more a cousin of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster . . . than the typically image-conscious, preserve-the-legacy music doc.

As They Made Us is a very forgiving film about seemingly unforgivable pain, which is to say that it has been made with a lot of unconditional love.

It feels as though [Loznitsa] has wrangled an entire uprising’s personality into bite-sized pieces.

Although some of its components spark with cleverness, it lacks overall narrative sophistication as a work of storytelling art, even if considering the vintage-cinema tone it seeks to replicate.

Why, given all its potential, wasn’t the bar set higher? That, alas, remains the most noteworthy mystery of all.

It fills up the uncharted territory between parody and pure fan service with a guileless weirdness that the biopic genre never knew it could accommodate but, in a post–“Walk Hard” world, could stand to emulate.

It’s a bit of an irony for ¡Viva Maestro! that Braun’s having to fit unexpected events and thorny issues of arts and politics, into what was surely intended to be a straightforwardly image-burnishing biodoc, has ultimately created a better in-the-moment movie.

While many of the subplots of “Secrets” fall flat or go nowhere (usually both), there are globetrotting sequences of political intrigue that sometimes make Yates’ latest foray play out like an exciting, fantastical espionage thriller.

Though the first act of The Contractor is its lengthiest, the lazy pace does nothing to enrich the lives of the characters who we know are at stake. The action that follows is quick and cramped; sequences that should feel heart-pounding are, instead, dark and erratic.

Diverting as it may be, The Bad Guys is the sort of movie that’s missing a big heart and, at times, feels like they’re having more fun in the ADR booth than we are watching it on screen.

We can confirm that Morbius is, really and truly, a movie. Granted, it’s not much of a movie, but it’s a movie nonetheless.

The screenplay reflects actual effort, and Jim Carrey gets to be unfettered in his performance, leading a surprisingly satisfying follow-up.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is more than what Ang Lee calls a “breath of fresh air”; it’s an affirmation that all films, however humble their origin, can matter and be counted.

Even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this shoulda-been auto-pocalypse from being in any way pleasurable.

The first hour or so of Mothering Sunday can be very enjoyable because Husson (“Girls of the Sun”) does not take what little narrative there is too seriously and instead dedicates herself to making O’Connor into the most attractive possible love object for her camera.

The movie’s secret sauce is humanity through action, what Watts’ Pam in all her heart, knowledge, grit, solitude, caring, irritation, and worry shows us when she’s in her element: what losing and finding looks like in real time.

With striking scares, moody atmosphere, and impressive performances, You Are Not My Mother gradually reveals itself to be a wicked, wicked work of horror, with perhaps only a few unanswered questions holding it back from true greatness.

True to its title, Baena’s latest takes us through more than a few tonal twists and plot turns, even if they don’t always land smoothly or humorously, in its exploration of how fooling oneself into believing a fantastical fiction can provide dangerous respite from a bland, ordinary reality.

It’s a difficult world out there, so once in a while it sure is nice to just sit down with the family to watch a wholesome movie about a wholesome man, his wholesome dog, and their tireless, never-ending hunt for human corpses.

Jane by Charlotte is a sensitive, pretty, reflective and artful piece that attains intriguing levels of intimacy and emotion alongside moments of banality.

The most frightening part of Umma is not the ghostly apparition of Amanda’s mother, but Amanda herself. Under Shim’s direction, Oh’s Amanda is haunted and taut, an unpredictable force of nature.

A joyless exercise in IP mining, Cheaper by the Dozen is all the more depressing for its glimpses of unfulfilled potential.

Deep Water offers so many tawdry delights along the way that its flaws aren’t dealbreakers. Affleck and de Armas might not have lasted as a couple off-camera, but as co-stars, they’re a potent combo.

“Until the Wheels Fall Off” works better as a humanistic exploration than it does as a biography, making its Hawk focus occasionally feel like a weakness.

Part unlikely friendship tale and part potpourri of genre tropes orchestrated as a parade of red herrings, this debut feature takes on modern culture’s blatant disdain of aging and veneration of youth. ... Greatly entertaining.

Full-hearted, albeit conventional ... That long first act feels, at times, punishing. ... The drama that plays out in the film’s second half is much more engaging, the script gaining momentum alongside Leslie.

Unlike the “memberberries” school of nostalgia that can reduce itself to “I had that lunch box!” Linklater gets granular and specific (and thus universal) about his memories and his perceptions of the world at that time.

"Massive Talent” goes full fan service–y, tapping into the cult of personality shrouding its lead actor. But the actual finished product feels too inside-baseball; it takes a true Cage aficionado to be in on all the jokes.

Like the anime series, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 sometimes feels too much like a Cliffs Notes adaptation, despite also featuring more interaction between the supporting characters and the lead protagonist than the original manga.

After the quick-witted and action-packed first act, the film switches gears into full romance-novel mode. Unfortunately, The Lost City never manages to sustain or recover once Pitt’s rousing cameo is over. It’s still pleasant, though it’s unlikely to satisfy those thirsting for action and adventure.

The Daniels are unusually present ringmasters here, eschewing the flippancy that marred their splashy quirk-quake “Swiss Army Man” for a more big-feeling anarchic escapism. In their nifty code-switching, we-all-contain-multitudes metaphor, they’ve concocted something that feels genuinely attuned to our modern anxieties, but also embracing of our coping mechanisms.

Song for Cesar manifests as the scrappy but meaningful results of people coming together to document a chapter of America’s recent past still not as visible as it should be.