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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Block Party is a lightweight comedy that frustrates because there’s the potential for it to be great, to resonate beyond its blandly formulaic charms.

Leave No Trace tackles an urgent topic and relays essential truths.

We can, thanks to movies like this one, continue to bear witness. But we will never truly know the reality he tries so hard to unearth, and that remains our burden to hold.

Nearly 30 years later, Alma’s Rainbow makes the statement, perhaps even louder than ever, that film can and should reflect the lives and realities of Black women.

For all its telling — and showing — of sex, Bloom Up never really gets going until its final few minutes. And that late-stage twist occurs during the rare scene in which everyone is fully clothed.

There is an intimacy in the doc — as NTA’s drama continues to unfold, there is no indication that the activists will be triumphant, only that they will fight until the very end. The fact that Shaw and his team never turn off the cameras show their commitment to the people, rather than the outcome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Silent River feels intensely personal, but also impossibly closed off. But is that so bad? Ultimately, for all its awkwardness and attentiveness, its grab-bag of tones and problematic pacing, there’s a lot about “Silent River” that gives one faith in off-the-beaten-path cinema, from how much Lee cares about what his images and sounds convey, to how little he cares whether your narrative questions are satisfactorily answered.

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

The cars are the stars in Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, a pamphletized biopic that does the easy thing — beautifying Italy and vintage automobiles — but stalls with everything involving humans.

If you like unabashedly corny teen romances, there’s a fair chance that the sheer too-much-ness of The Quintessential Quintuplets Movie will appeal to you.

It is an often nasty film, with little regard for anyone on screen, far more content to grasp for false depth rather than logic. It’s a shame there’s nothing to root for other than its dwindling runtime.