For their reinvention of Father of the Bride, Alazraki and Lopez manage to make it feel so rooted in the Latino background of their characters that comparison to the older films doesn’t seem all that relevant. This one stands on its own.

The scattershot new media satire Vengeance might have been merely a toothless provocation replete with both-sides false equivalences were it not so well-scripted and well-directed on a scene-to-scene basis.

Rather than play like a significant departure from the “Toy Story” films that spawned it, Lightyear instead emerges as a disappointing runner-up, capturing but a fraction of the comedy, thrills and poignancy of its predecessors.

It feels derivative and only superficially invested in its big ideas about second chances and the conundrum of appropriating the bodies of individuals whom society has deemed irredeemable.

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

The ultimate meaning of Lopez’s life and career is still up in the air, a status suggested by the title Halftime. At one point here Lopez frankly discusses the various personas she has tried on, one of which she refers to as “Don’t write me off.” And we shouldn’t.

If the children feel like symbols — sweet and touching, but not quite real — the adults provide a profusion of reality.

It’s so talky and un-visual that despite it taking place in multiple locations, including the California coastline, it feels like a play barely opened up for the cameras.

Gianolli’s grand adaptation isn’t just a wicked send-up and a sensual period piece; it’s a poignant reminder that everyone who thinks they’ve cleverly sussed out the wickedness of mass media is hundreds of years behind the rest of the history class. Like the best stories told about earlier times, “Lost Illusions” feels remarkably contemporary.

The other generous read, although it’s damning with faint praise, is to call this the best “Jurassic” movie since the original in 1993, but that doesn’t mean this one’s not, much like its predecessors, a hot mess. It’s just a hot mess with some effectively scary bits, a cool car chase and Laura Dern.

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.

Malmberg’s documentary is quick to gloss over rough patches in both Mickey and Disney’s shared histories.

The act of writing has tended to be flagrantly non-cinematic, but with these last two films, Davies proves that the internal life of the mind can indeed be explored and portrayed in a visual medium. With every scene a stanza, Benediction is a lyrical triumph.

It’s a film about a bleak and cruel universe that is unkind to victims and eager to ignore reasonable pleas, a world that has a conscious and subconscious vendetta against women in general. It’s also a film that thinks it’s entirely possible to destroy that world, as terrifying as it is, and ultimately, it’s the movie’s principled strength that endures.

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.