Whether we read about someone like Hasna or watch such a sad journey dramatized, it’s worth being reminded that stories like these always leave behind many who are forced to reckon with a society’s notion of what and whom they resemble.

It is a spare and yet unsparing film, and a bold artistic statement from an emerging filmmaker.

Too much of Dear Zoe, though, feels factory-designed to engineer emotion rather than aiming to earn it organically.

It would be one thing if the film was fully committed to its nastiness — a type of comedy we don’t see much of these days at all — but “The Estate” is too often hampered by its own self-awareness.

One of the most audacious American debuts of the year, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s Soft & Quiet shocks one’s system from its opening moments and doesn’t ever slow down to let you fully process it as it happens.

Ferragamo’s story is a complex intersection, touching on early-20th-century immigration, youthful ambition, the dawn of Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger, tenacity, foot fascination and wild innovation.

If you’re at all curious about “One Piece,” you might still enjoy One Piece Film Red, since it’s a better-than-average highlight reel for Oda’s ingratiating and vividly realized characters. Just don’t feel bad if you exit the theater feeling confused and a little unfulfilled; this new feature’s more of an oversized sampler platter than a full-sized meal.

What comes through loud and clear in “My Mind & Me” is Gomez using the film to declare her priorities, and her carefully controlled revelations are a chance to write her own story.

Tucked away in The Independent is a smaller family drama in which Elisha deals with her parents and the illness of her father. These scenes are far better than anything else in the film because Turner-Smith gets to play something realistic rather than over-the-top and plot-driven.

Please Baby Please may pay homage to queer aesthetics, but it fails to make any coherent points about gender or sexuality.

Bajestani is believably repellent as someone whose split lives as an obsessive loner and respected family man are disturbingly concordant. And Nadim Carlsen’s gritty camerawork pushes the film’s sense of grim social realism further still, providing a viscerally authentic horror. Abbasi doesn’t seem to realize, though, that he’s creating much of that horror himself.

It’s a bit of a mess, no doubt about that, but a fascinating one.

It’s attractively filmed and, mostly, solidly performed, taking some historical liberties but otherwise getting the gist of the tale out in the open for new generations to discover and appreciate.

It is an elegy wrapped around a true-crime story; an observational social-justice movie intertwined with an historical retelling that finds the universal in the specific. In braiding these strands together, Brown crafts a film that isn’t one thing or the other but instead dares to contain multitudes.

If you’ve ever watched a classic movie and wondered why no one else seems uncomfortable with its portrayal of female characters, you’ll want to see “Brainwashed” as soon as possible. And if you haven’t — well, that may be all the more reason to seek it out.

Most disappointing of all, Black Adam is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene.

It’s intense, creepy, often harrowing stuff, so you can see why del Toro has said in interviews that his Pinocchio isn’t a children’s film. But that doesn’t mean that brave children, and brave adults, won’t adore it.

Jones sets out to find out if sex work is empowering, but what she discovers, and what we are reminded of over the course of Sell/Buy/Date, is that vulnerability and sharing your story, in whatever form that takes, is the most empowering way to be in the world.

Even with its frequent clumsiness and failed ambitions, The Same Storm serves as an important time capsule of how we felt and behaved in the worst of times. As time elapses and memories get fuzzier, The Same Storm will prove to be not just a film but also an invaluable piece of history.

Things get a little overly explanatory, in general, as though the film assumes its audience is not familiar with these allegations or the bombshell nature of this story. But perhaps that is the issue that the film is addressing: that there are still huge swaths of indifference towards sexual harrassment and abuse thorughout the country.

The film eventually provides some memorable gore but the ultimate conclusion is unconvincing and perfunctory.

Battleground does serve as an excellent primer on the political and practical positions of both sides. But the biggest takeaway of this disconcerting documentary may come from pro-choice activist Sam Blakely, who insists that “we have to stop playing defense, and start playing offense.” Hope, it turns out, is no kind of strategy at all.

The Loneliest Boy in the World mostly bobs along without incident, never challenging viewers’ assumptions nor giving us much to sink our teeth into.

It’s neither successfully terrifying, nor shockingly grotesque, or even campy enough for one to revel in over-the-top derangement. And while it’s not entirely without its silly pleasures, indifference is the foremost sentiment it elicits.

For fans of Ivory’s films, A Cooler Climate reveals more about him than his memoir did, but on certain subjects he remains as tight-lipped as he needed to be in his youth.

The sense of loss post-1978 is pronounced, but there is also a sense of celebration and discovery in Is That Black Enough for You?!? that lets us see a whole world of lesser-known films just waiting to be viewed, re-viewed and appreciated in new ways.

While some talking points tend to be belabored and others don’t get unpacked at great enough length, Lynch/Oz still offers movie-lovers a variety of thoughtful and dynamic new ways of seeing Lynch’s work.

Timoner uses a stripped-down, totally straightforward method. She sets up a camera in her parent’s living room, where her father is resting in a hospital bed and her mother is silently worrying on the couch. And then she begins counting down the days.

Connolly has turned Tim Winton’s 1997 novella into his own environmental cri de coeur . . . and while the specifics can get a bit clunky, his passion drives our interest all the way to the end.

Given that Kalderon juggles as many tones as Erez has moods, it’s tough to imagine how he could possibly wrap them all up. And yet he brings his hero, and all of us now cheering him on from the stands, to the perfect conclusion. Unveiling one of the best finales of the year, he turns his ambivalent swimmer into a superstar.

It may not provide the rush of adrenaline that many people seek from their horror movies but Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is a smart and elegant piece of creepiness.

While not enough to sell Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Bardem’s mission to out-cartoon his animated scene partner (admittedly not difficult) still feels like a blow struck for old-school flesh-and-blood eccentricity in the age of blah digital cutes. May that battle continue.

Blue is the Warmest Color is subtitled “Adele: Chapters 1 and 2,” and by our last glimpse of this ordinary, extraordinary young woman walking down a street, we can’t help but long to know what she’s going to let herself in for next.

In Bruckner’s directorial hands and David Marks’ editing, more information is delivered than ever before, but no plot point is over-explained. Mysteries are allowed their ambiguity.

Baghdadi has harnessed something truly special. Like its fractious characters, Sirens is both humble and arresting, relatable and unique. It will stay with you long after the band has played their final chords.

Deadwyler doesn’t just evoke Mamie’s speech patterns (which are very specific to Black women in the city trying to shed vestiges of the rural South) or capture her mannerisms, which remain precise at all times; she embodies every single inch of Mamie, body and soul, bringing her to life and making her real in both our minds and our hearts. . . This magnificent performance elevates Deadwyler to the ranks of the great actors of our time.

Experimentalism isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the form, content, visuals, and motifs of There There aren’t inspired or interesting enough to warrant serious mental engagement.

Unlike its levitating heroine, it never really gets off the ground.

It is rare to find a film that reflects its subject so insightfully, in both an artistic and thematic sense.

My Imaginary Country is as much about the causes, participants and outcomes of a collective awakening in search of a more promising future as it is about an artist allowing himself to feel hope for a homeland that has forever been the focus of his artistic preoccupations.

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with the idea of setting an all-ages haunted house-style chase movie in a corny bulk retail store. The main thing holding back Spirit Halloween: The Movie is that its young stars never get to convincingly act their age.

Star and co-writer Billy Eichner spins a lot of plates here, crafting a hilarious and heartfelt film that also acknowledges the challenging and often hidden history of queer people in American society.

At too many points, the script from Kay Oyegun (adapting the novel by Angie Thomas) is uneven: Some story beats move too fast, while others pass too slowly, and there are narrative holes. Still, even with its flaws, On the Come Up — like 2018’s The Hate U Give — offers Black teen girls a voice in cinema that they have rarely had before. Lathan mines that gold, making her debut shine.

It’s based on historical facts and real-life characters, yet it feels timeless and allegorical. It’s indisputably Harron’s best, and she deftly locates stately classicism amid the crass and the banal, and vice versa.

This isn’t just a great horror story; it’s genuinely scary. You may be able to recognize familiar elements in its DNA, but it’s mutated into something distinct and unsettling. What a showcase of shocks. What a devilish debut.

The filmmaking craft on display and the control over the storytelling and suspense is exceptional.

Russell’s brand of Sturges-inspired madcappery has always been a high-wire act of energy and tone, but Amsterdam doesn’t even feel like an “I Heart Huckabees” or “Joy” misfire. It’s sloppy and disconnected, crammed with thinly drawn characters play-acting ‘30s screwball as Russell’s unmoored camera and jarring editing force the issue instead of capturing something genuine which, even with a game cast, clearly wasn’t there to begin with.

Zombie’s film, though clearly sweet and well-intentioned, seems only partially formed, a Frankenstein monster with only half the parts.

It’s a self-conscious film, to be sure, driven by a combination of passion and guilt. It’s also a scattershot one that could have viewers wondering if it’s a film about the Walt Disney Company or a film about American capitalism.

Thavat’s harrowing, moving film doesn’t necessarily offer justice for Bunny, but instead regards the small pieces of justice that Bunny, as misguided as she may be, ekes out for herself and her loved ones within a system that is trying to keep her down.

There’s not a single frame in Stever’s film that takes the obvious compositional choice, placing the viewer in a perennial sense of disorientation that matches the film’s perturbing themes.

The early sections of Sidney are much stronger than what comes later, because it is Poitier himself telling the tale in interview footage and setting the expansive, very dramatic tone. He knew how to tell a story so that each nuance would make itself felt.

Ultimately, though, it all comes down to Duhamel. For a brief, heady moment, the real Galvan had all of Canada intrigued by his exploits. But the greatest coup of all is that his legacy will now forever be defined by Bandit.

Everything about this one is lovely and magical, but it’s also deeply heartfelt.

The juxtaposition of jubilance and misery is the film’s modus operandi, however jarring it may seem.

Recreated footage of the rovers flying to, landing on, and carefully exploring the red planet tend to be the most engrossing material in White’s scattershot documentary, which too often tries to humanize the rovers’ handlers by playing up their emotions instead of their accomplishments.

While Chevalier is by no means terrible, it seems like such a huge missed opportunity for an important historical figure to have finally gotten his due.

Polsky’s film digs into the rot in his characters’ psyches for a time but gradually climbs back out again, perhaps in an attempt to put their madness in a larger context social context. But mostly the final act of the film comes across like clunky, though well-earned, moralizing.

While Thomas and Eyre slip occasionally into feel-good vibes, they ultimately leave intact his narrative’s essential anger about the bureaucratic threat to community health care.

This is a war movie from the perspective of the losers, visually spectacular but by turns infuriating and heartbreaking. “All Quiet” is excessive, but it probably needs to be; the screenplay by Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell takes a dark story and makes it even darker.

The chief virtue of “Monica” is its restraint and its patience.

A treat for anyone with a taste for rock, for rock imagery and for the glories that can be found in that piece of cardboard wrapped around a record. Anton Corbijn knows those glories well, so his movie’s got a good beat and a good look.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.

In bold contrast to the flashier, more emotionally-charged documentaries of late, Riotsville, USA takes an approach more reminiscent of the PBS of old, or even C-SPAN, in the trust it places in the footage to tell the story.

It’s undoubted that the Gibbons twins were both original thinkers who were victimized by a system that did not recognize them as autonomous people, but it’s unfortunate that The Silent Twins is keen to do the same, reducing them to vehicles for aesthetic flexing and moral lecturing, rather than, as they themselves would have requested, simply letting them be.

It’s not just one film, or one election, or one win — it’s a movement, as the energized subjects keep repeating. “Justice is not a destination, it’s a journey,” is one of the many resonant quotes shared by one of Booker’s advisors and friends, and it’s a reminder that the fight is never-ending.

So much of the film’s brutality has been removed in favor of melodrama and CGI fake-outs that it doesn’t matter that the cast is bringing their A-game. The game has already been called due to lack of interest.

The film’s director and co-writer, Ol Parker, is so committed to light, feel-good escapism that he leaves out all of the requisite tension and twists — and, for that matter, the requisite jokes.

The early scenes are at times surprisingly awkward – and while things get better when Chickie gets to Vietnam and Russell Crowe shows up to (briefly) ground the movie with his quiet gravity, “Beer Run” still lurches from silliness to preachiness in a way that’s rarely satisfying.

If Panahi makes us understand Jafar, he also recognizes the rippling effect of his choices. Such is the dense and intricate layering of this deceptively simple film, which has a no-budget aesthetic and a novelistic sprawl.

An average scene in Confess, Fletch features several different kinds of humor, including callbacks, running jokes, physical comedy, and character-driven wordplay, all of which either flatter the individual actors or show off how well they work with their co-stars.

If The Good Nurse is about anything, it’s about dedication and stoic compassion, rather than a headstrong sense of morality, and the film, like its protagonist, is all the better for that.

The director hits no false notes. He knows firsthand the feelings each scene should convey, but he also has the skills to render them accurately.

In her narrative debut, Diop has found a way to mix her hard-hitting documentary style with fiction to raise a mirror to society. This new arena, with its wider reach, makes Diop an exciting filmmaker to watch.

The Woman King possesses broad appeal. It’s an oft-told tale, yes, but here imparted with a fresh angle and a meaningful moral. And it has something in store for those who prefer the action genre, too.

Johnson freely bounces around buzzwords like “disruptors” and “influencers” with dripping mockery, but he stops way short of satire. He never entices us to take an active interest in this new cast of characters, and there isn’t much suspense or high stakes to speak of even when things start to head south.

The 1990s framing device keeps pulling us out of the 1950s love story, sapping its power.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed remains, at heart, a simple and intimate profile of a woman who sees art and activism as one and the same.

It feels a little too light and even occasionally uncertain in the early going, but picks up steam, becomes deeper and more moving and absolutely nails the ending.

Catherine Called Birdy only shows that dropping Dunham’s sensibility down into the Middle Ages results in a viewpoint that is suffocatingly small and unenlightening.

It’s worth being reminded by James’s layered, grippingly told account of a principled betrayal that when it comes to the biggest threats facing the globe, sometimes one person in the right circumstance can make a difference.

The scale in which Fukada works — as both writer and director — is so deliberately intimate that immense experiences feel microcosmic, while tiny moments make a huge impact.

Medieval struggles as a work of historical fiction, but when the action mounts, it’s immersive and exciting.

Harry Wootliff’s True Things is a raw and passionate look at the type of love that can be both all-encompassing and destructive, passionate and dangerous.

Does it have moments of hilarity? Sure does. Does it run out of steam at times? Hell, yes. Is Appel a workmanlike director who mostly stays out of the way and lets his cast deliver the laughs? Yep, though he does try to get fancy a few times, with mixed results.

Neither the action scenes nor the musical numbers stand out though, and none of the characters or their performers transcend their expected roles.

If you set out to combine the worst parts of Hallmark holiday movies with the worst parts of frenetic ‘90s rom-coms, you’d probably wind up with something a lot like About Fate. The women are nuts, the men are clueless and the production is so cheap you could pass the time spotting every mistake no one bothered to fix.

Thankfully, Hold Me Tight, with Amalric’s alert, empathetic stewardship and Krieps’ gripping portrayal, sets aside the banality of grief’s burden for something more alive and elusive, but no less affecting.

Nothing about the interactions between Daniel and his former pen pal in the second half of the movie are even remotely believable, and so the rosy climax of Private Desert enters the dangerous realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, revealing that the makers of this film are as recklessly naïve and morally questionable as their protagonists.

Once more, the filmmaker’s level of formal control is exemplary and precise, and his lead actress game for whatever comes her way. Only one can’t shake the feeling that all of it runs against the film’s ostensible message, that is another case of Monroe’s agency taken from her.

Dead for a Dollar is a proud heir to a longstanding lineage of low-budget westerns. Consider that a feature and a bug.

Clerks III is serious to a minor fault and breezy to a minor fault. It’s got all the same laid-back, chill vibes cinema that Smith is well-known for, and the same immature approach to genuine maturity that he’s also known for, with a new sense of emotional severity that makes it harder to laugh than it probably should be.

Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz do make some attempt to dust off the concept, but the modernized moments further undermine their efforts. When they add empathy, the story loses its soul. And when they jam in easy updates, it just highlights how out of touch the rest of the script feels.

Where “The Father” was subtle and twisty, this drama is more agitated and restless, even melodramatic at times – but that’s a directorial decision that certainly fits the dark and troubling subject that the film explores but doesn’t exploit.

The most impressive thing about “Barbarian” is that Cregger keeps developing his twisty plot well after he sets everything up. Messing with viewers seems to be his guiding dramatic principal, from playful camerawork to unpredictable plot twists. Bless ‘im.

See How They Run lies as dead on the screen as the corpse of its murdered movie director.

After the youthful splendor of last year’s The Souvenir Part II, Hogg returns with a magnificent achievement of a more inconspicuous kind: a striking phantasm of affection, regrets, and remembered accounts that might be factually inaccurate but emotionally unfeigned.

Aftermath is the work of a stronger and more assured director. It drops mind-boggling revelations about the extent of Russian doping and the lengths to which Vladimir Putin’s administration will go to silence dissidents and whistleblowers, but it’s also a deeply touching portrait of a man whose life was shattered because he got tired of being part of a system that ran on lies.