The conclusion of Great Freedom manages to finesse the flaws of the movie, and it winds up feeling genuinely tragic.

With Pattinson glowering beneath his cowl, Reeves creates a Batman whose psychology is at least as interesting as his crime-fighting activities, for the first time in a long time.

Whether playing off his returning company of co-stars or swapping barbs with fellow drag comic O’Carroll, Perry’s giving one of his best self-directed performances.

Sincere but uneven, professionally acted but amateurishly presented — there’s a lot to like about Family Squares, but there’s always something getting in the way of its intended impact.

It’s an utterly fascinating, mysterious, and often experimental character study of someone who is hard to understand because they fundamentally don’t understand themselves.

I’ll Find You is an ideal diversion for those who like their cinematic escapism with heavy doses of music and love.

The filmmaking itself is sound. Liu is spellbinding, and her supporting cast of character actors are game for the script’s insanity.

It’s remarkable how far McConnell’s film can coast on little more than novelty power, star power, and Doritos, but there’s no denying that “Studio 666” hits a wall after about an hour, and spends the next 50 minutes stumbling around in a daze.

To some, a film with undeveloped themes, thin characters, and superficial gore might seem like a bad thing. To connoisseurs of the slasher genre, it’s all part of a well-balanced breakfast. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s narrative efficiency and tight 81-minute running time make it an ideal delivery system for creative kills and memorable gore.

Strawberry Mansion dazzles most in its execution. In its own search for creativity and inspiration, the film leans into experimentation and whimsy.

The camera loves Channing Tatum, and that makes up for a lot in Dog, a corny road movie that mostly panders to fans of Tatum and/or dogs, as well as any moviegoer who still thinks that making a big show of supporting the troops (any troops) makes them more human than, uh, most everyone else.

A risky experiment with a striking payoff, Ted K is an impressionistic attempt to personalize the most unrelatable experience imaginable: life as a killer.

What The Outfit doesn’t generate much of is organic suspense. With an air of duplicitousness telegraphed early on, and a handful of scenes coming off like information dumps instead of natural exchanges, many of the story mechanics strain for believability.

Since making his debut with “Zombieland,” director Ruben Fleischer has developed an aptitude for cheerful proficiency (if not a ton of discernible personality) that he deploys to great effect in this brisk pastiche, especially with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg bickering their way through one set piece after another.

Reis, in her acting debut, is a captivating lead whose eyes speak volumes. And so does her body. There’s an openness in her presence that serves as a direct window into K.O.’s pain and her struggle.

It’s a snack of a movie, not so much a full meal, and that’s OK. There’s a lot of energy in this film; more than enough to get you through your afternoon.

As a film, Minamata is more than just a biopic, reflecting the important social impact of photography, although — as a slideshow of images from pollution disasters, oil spills, toxic waste poisoning and more are shown over the credits — one has to wonder what true change has been made.

The most serious problem in The Sky Is Everywhere is that Nelson’s screenplay has Lennie getting upset with people and generally freaking out in almost every scene, and this becomes irritating and monotonous because she is the central figure in the movie.

It’s better than nothing to mark the cheesy holiday, but the lack of effort shows.

Screenwriters Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (“Love, Simon”) are no strangers to the subversive rom-com, and capable directing and editing by Jason Orley (“Big Time Adolescence”) and Jonathan Schwartz (“Stuber”), respectively, set leads Jenny Slate and Charlie Day up for maximum hilarity. The film ultimately feels a bit underdeveloped, but this seems a small price to pay for a romantic comedy with zero misogyny and relatively realistic characters.

Blacklight is an unsurprisingly tepid action thriller which extends this odd phase of Neeson’s career, but the best thing that can probably be said about it is that it’s not materially worse than most of the others.

Branagh’s indulgences can grate, but you also sense how much he loves it all, which helps. It also helps that production designer Jim Clay’s elaborate recreations (of an age-specific steamer and Aswan’s Cataract Hotel) and Paco Delgado’s stylish period clothing make for steadily appealing visuals, and that the story is one of Christie’s more tantalizing, hot-tempered mysteries.

Writer/director/producer Beth Elise Hawk has approached her first documentary as an unabashed passion project. Her enthusiasm, and general sense of joy, shine through clearly from start to finish. Though she doesn’t dig deep enough to get us much past the elevator pitch, that pitch is pretty appealing.

Absurd as it is, Moonfall represents yet another bold stroke of maximalist grandeur from a filmmaker who excels at making overwhelming chaos look beautiful.

As always, what’s so joyously, infectiously funny about “Jackass” is rarely the prank itself, but how funny they all find it to reduce each other to writhing heaps.

It’s a shame that Lessin and Pildes don’t tell us what these amazing women went on to do after the Collective ended. But they all remain, half a century later, passionate and eloquent and thoughtful and fierce.

A work of impressive investigative cinema. ... Their choice to focus so tightly on a micro-scenario here does strand us, occasionally, in the weeds of detail. But it’s tough to watch such a flatly incriminatory report without taking a macro view of society’s villains and heroes.

Davis’ story seems ripe for a sensational, multi-episode streaming event à la "Tiger King," but in Bahrani’s thorough and tactful hands, it yields a fascinating, infuriating but eventually touching piece of non-fiction storytelling.

Resurrection pushes about as far as it can possibly go, and the incredibly game cast supplies much of the pressure.

It’s a potent film that explores the roots of the brilliant but troubled Irish singer ... but it also turns her recent years into an afterthought, bypassing many of the highs and lows that led her here over the last two decades.

What makes "Lucy and Desi" so compelling is that we can feel, all the way through, that Poehler enjoys telling their story just as much as we enjoy watching it.

You Won’t Be Alone may not be a dumb or unimaginative exercise in style, but it also rarely encourages viewers to engage meaningfully with whatever’s on-screen.

Writer-director Mariama Diallo’s debut feature Master doesn’t just blur the lines between the horror genre and institutionalized racism; it convincingly argues that there’s no meaningful difference.

A strong ensemble cast, led by Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall, does a lot of emotional heavy lifting in the otherwise lightweight mockumentary Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

Much about God’s Country is provocative, raising critical questions about boundaries, environmental stewardship, community, inclusion, grief and more. It is, however, a slow burn, requiring patience and attention.

A warmhearted crowdpleaser undercut by moments of hesitation, Am I OK? has all the makings of an unqualified delight.

Ver Linden never goes the commercial route here with her high-concept idea. Like Palmer, she stays true to her goal but does give the audience several satisfying moments that call for applause.

It’s an intimately scaled film that still demands to be seen on the big screen; never once does it leave the impression that it would be best suited for a streaming platform. Hyde’s refined and attentive direction, Bryan Manson’s crystal clear cinematography, and Stephen Rennicks’ sparkling score have done wonders cultivating the sensual tone and texture.

At its richest and most riveting, when it’s seizing your breath or making you laugh or opening your eyes, Call Jane is about what it takes to come to that realization about true liberation, and what it means to see it through.

It feels like Dunham hasn’t progressed much after all this time.

Avoiding the sophomore slump, Raiff’s delightfully sigh-worthy Cha Char Real Smooth is the type of sincere enterprise that could easily be spoiled with hackneyed platitudes or simplistically rose-colored plot points, yet here it sings with a wondrous candor and an unforced dramatic rhythm that turns it mightily irresistible.

It’s a film that hits some narrative bumps along the way without diminishing its tougher observations about race, the police, and the treatment of veterans.

The control and confidence of its form, paired with an emotionality that is at once effortless and irresistibly powerful, makes the film feel to the audience the way those pointed and yet somehow ephemeral clips in Yang’s memory feel to Jake. In preying on a sensation that’s only indirectly remembered, the impact it makes becomes unforgettable.

Mimi Cave knows how to captivate and how to repulse, usually at the same time. She knows how to make us laugh and hate ourselves for laughing. “Fresh” is a breakneck emotional roller coaster, and like many roller coasters, it’ll also make your stomach churn.

Eisenberg emerges as a restrained filmmaker who has a clear idea of what he wants to communicate, and a clear, unfussy way of delivering it.

Walker-Silverman exhibits the sensibilities of a master storyteller, capable of making his splendid writing seem effortless in its construction and then molding it into warm magic via the cast’s remarkable talent. He’s an absolute revelation among emerging voices.

All in all, this electrifying and thought-provoking ride works as it chooses the searing over the subtle, a tough call when approaching a subject that warrants in-your-face urgency.

The press notes for Stop-Zemlia call Kateryna Gornostai’s coming-of-age story “radical, authentic, and sensitive.” The latter two descriptors are accurate. The movie’s power, however, comes not from any radicalism but from how authentically ordinary it feels.

The new New York Ninja often feels like a pre-fab midnight movie that was made with apparent love and care but without much urgency or creativity.

An aesthetically imaginative and affectingly breathtaking fairytale for our modern world, Belle envelops you first with its clever mechanics and youthful preoccupations. But as the reflective subtext comes to light, it extends an invitation to reconnect with others offline and to beware the comfort of these surrogate identities.

Arriving at a time when conversations once reserved for academics have filtered into popular culture, “Who We Are” never plays like the product of some Hollywood bandwagon effort. Instead, its existence speaks to the power of cinema to reflect the times by sparking conversations and changing minds.

This new Scream is a killer. Smartly scary and scary smart, consistent with the history of this series but unafraid to piss off fans if it’s for the good of the story. This satire of requels may very well be the first requel done right. It’s a scream, baby.

Gerbase shows talent here, but viewing The Pink Cloud requires nerves of steel that might not be available to even the strongest among us at this particular point in time.

While many of the jokes in Hotel Transylvania: Transformania probably won’t linger in your mind, they are still fairly well-executed.

The 355 is the kind of star-packed, glossy adventure that wants to be the launching pad for a franchise; instead, it’s going to be one of the films most mentioned in future discussions regarding January as a studio dumping-ground for misbegotten movies.

This is more than just a career-best for Collins — it’s a career-redefining performance. His talent for profundity was always there but previously untapped to this extent. Now the hope is that this won’t be a zenith for him, but instead a revitalizing rebirth.

If we absolutely must have another “Matrix” movie, if we can’t just let it be, then let it be this weird one. Let it be a film with an existential crisis. Let it be a film that’s half a nostalgia cash-in and half a biopic about a filmmaker who’s forced to make a nostalgia cash-in.

For implausibility, perversity, cluelessness, and sheer silliness, it’s hard to imagine another movie this year that will top Last Words.

There may be nothing new about America Underdog, but it’s still good enough, as far as non-perishable comfort food goes.

It’s surprising that this effort from Clooney is as flavorless and unrooted as it is, because his better directorial turns are the ones grounded in character more than style.

Certainly among the worst films of the year considering the reputable talent involved, this inspirational drama stains Washington’s directorial filmography.

What’s absolutely clear is Hadaway’s stunning eye and control of the camera. Her direction is not just steady but highly evocative, and the cinematography from Todd Martin, making his feature debut after shooting dozens of shorts and music videos, is just breathtaking. What a wonderful debut from them both.

Vaughn’s third installment in this series is ultimately a pretty lousy movie; again, better than the last one, but that isn’t much of a compliment.

The most superheroic feat on display might be the film’s ability to keep human-sized emotions and relationships front and center even as the very fabric of time and space twists itself into knots.

While director Reece has some 20 films to his credit in the last decade alone, it appears that he still doesn’t quite have a handle on either plot or pacing.

Shot in anamorphic, with long, silent scenes backed only by Amin Bouhafa’s haunting score, there is not a spare word or wasted image in the 92-minute running time. It should be said that this is not an easy watch, by any means. But it would be fair to call it a revelatory one.

Love and Fury itself feels like a commercial that can’t figure out what it is ultimately trying to sell.

It’s a story ripped from at least a few years of headlines, and a subject about which there has been much debate. It may or may not come as a surprise, then, that a single two-hour film fails to sufficiently capture its complexities, even working from a compelling premise with a gifted cast.

A film with all the right things to say about how government, the media, and corporations ignore the emerging disaster of climate change, but couched within a satire so lumbering that it’s enough to turn a tree hugger into a pro-fracker.

A Wikipedia entry fed into what can only be called The Sorkinator, but missing the wit module, Being the Ricardos is cultural-television-marital history flattened into a babbling stream of airless, horribly shot scenes that never come close to the glorious timing of a single comic exchange on “I Love Lucy.”

A movie about identity that doesn’t know its own identity, Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf starts in the wilderness, and pretty much stays there as it tries to tease sympathetic human drama out of the singularity known as species dysphoria, a condition in which people believe themselves to be not human, usually an animal.

It’s a deeply personal documentary, candidly reflective and disinterested in flattery. It brings titans down to Earth.

Spielberg and Kushner clearly revere that history, but they’re also not intimidated by it; there are any number of instances where viewers can point to this song placement or that bit of character backstory as a new idea that the two have brought to the property, but this is a take on “West Side Story” that’s both reverent and exciting.

From a rain-soaked carnival midway to a glossy, Art Deco therapist’s office, everything in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley looks gorgeous. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot going on under the art direction.

“Welcome to Raccoon City” overstuffs itself with so many characters and plot points that nothing has room to develop. The pretty-good cast gets buried alive in a rushed and ill-conceived screenplay, and it doesn’t help that the film is murkily photographed and tonally dreary.

A tightly-drawn Bullock is fully in tune with Ruth’s pain, making her extreme introversion an evident side effect of trauma rather than personality. Because Ruth keeps so much inside, Fingscheidt uses every element to create a sensory connection between this difficult character and the audience.

This true-crime saga of the Gucci family losing control of their own fashion empire could have been a full-blown camp classic were it not so frequently dull and tentative.

India Sweets and Spices works so well in part because Ali gives her character the authenticity of someone trying to do the right thing while still figuring out how to handle her privilege and tradition.

The first two courses of this three-course meal were on the bland side. The third course is exciting, but by that point our appetite has waned, our interest in the company has dissipated, and we’re pretty much ready to go home.

[A] brash, bruising comedy.

Graham, Robinson, and Barantini’s thematic concerns about how restaurants work are strong enough ingredients. It’s too bad they’ve been subjected to the one-note flavoring of a single-take movie.

Vonnegut’s family members and biographers provide the most intriguing material in Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, but their interviews are too brief to enhance viewers’ appreciation of his work.

Indecipherable to a fault but in the end surprisingly hopeful, Zeros and Ones feels like diving into a murky river to search for a missing object, fully aware one might never find it but still willing to get wet in its slush for the sake of trying.

The film rides upon the shoulders of first-timers Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), and they’re both thoroughly engaging.

As a movie, this new installment feels closer to a lazily assembled playlist featuring all of the Top 40 songs that hit airwaves in the years since the original was released.

Enchant it does, in ebbs and flows, mostly when relatable human ache peaks through the razzle-dazzle.

It’s a valiant effort from Berry, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark, weighed down by a formulaic script, uneven fight direction, and little depth in exploring how a female fighter’s experience might change when a role written as a white, Irish woman is played by a Black actor.

Ali and Harris give Swan Song a powerful emotional honesty that’s consistently undermined by the film’s poorly developed intellectual conceits, but their combined talents are almost enough to justify this film’s existence alone.

In its swirl of ingenuity, purity, and achievement, Paper & Glue can’t help but feel self-serving for its traveling, ever-creative dynamo, even when the tale JR has to tell is unquestionably riveting and inspiring.

The movie is composed of three disparate shorts meant to explore a range of connections. Instead, all three feel as if they were designed inside an echo chamber thematically, and none displays a desire to push the envelope creatively.

On a level of sheer cinematic flourish, Miranda’s adaptation is a triumph; he really harnesses Larson’s songs for the screen and gives them tremendous life, whether or not you’d seen them before on stage.

Greene’s film explores not just the ability of art to repair emotional and sometimes physical injuries but also the resiliency of the human spirit and the solidarity of a group of individuals collaborating to provide comfort for themselves and each other through shared, unimaginable pain.

While Clifford is definitely cute, the script (screenplay and story are credited to five writers) lacks any depth, relying upon Whitehall to carry and deliver the comedy — so much so that Casey feels simultaneously exaggerated and two-dimensional.

Deer, a rare filmmaker of Mohawk descent, portrays in Beans the hope and love that help people thrive in the face of such hatred.

The movie is at its best when the filmmakers focus their ire on Hollywood itself — the hypocrisies, the empty promises, the rejections and belittlements that are built right into the system.

Red Notice plays like a parody of itself — a star-studded, globe-trotting heist caper replete with MacGuffins, twists, and double-crosses. And for much of its overstuffed two-hour runtime, it gets away with it.

All Is Forgiven is engrossing, yet it is only after it is over and there is time to think about it that the film starts to really seem dazzling, as an unfolding portrait of loss that leaves us with many questions.

Apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before.