At a compact 79 minutes, “Bang My Box,” directed by Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam, packs in everything you need to know about Robin Byrd.

It is, in a word, lovely.

Lucky Strike isn’t a raw combat drama so much as a lone-wolf genre film, something that feels tidier and maybe safer. Lurie stages it with skill; it’s not like what happens is predictable. But it’s not enthralling either.

What binds and lifts all this foolery is the palpable love they have for what they do, and the other people doing it. You leave “Jackass: Best and Last” believing that they’ll actually miss all this, and that’s enough to make us miss it too.

Supergirl plods along, poised between sodden spectacle and snark.

Even as it ultimately bends to convention, the film is such a weird, willful popular entertainment for much of its (blessedly snappy) running time that it holds your goodwill: It’s almost bellissima but it’s fully, madly moviosa, and that’s more than the seventh entry in any animated franchise has a right to be.

The film is so astonishingly bad, it almost feels like the writer-director-producer is deliberately sabotaging his star Armie Hammer, whose intended comeback can only be harmed by this project.

He’s trying to stay true to his world (all the Irish chop-busting and piss-taking), but he hasn’t grown as a filmmaker. Then again, maybe that’s not so important. He doesn’t hit long drives, but by the end of Finnegan’s Foursome the ball is in the cup.

For all its otherwise precision-engineered sweetness, “Voicemails for Isabelle” doesn’t find its way there. Which is a shame, because Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson — two reliably likable actors, alike in age, genre credentials and button-cuteness — do everything in their power to make you believe.

Even at its most formally playful, the film is marked by an earnestness of tone that makes it feel like work, especially given a two-hour-plus runtime that exposes the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama.

Alive to both the soul connection and the bodily itch of these intimate, unwieldy, personally uncharted feelings, Kiyoko’s uncommonly lovely teen movie matches the dizzy, obsessive ecstasy of the song that inspired it.

It’s a sublime summing up, a movie that reflects the whole series in its magic mirror, and (just maybe) a perfect ending.

Mexico’s answer to “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” the Ambriz brothers’ beautifully idiosyncratic I Am Frankelda was obviously influenced by Del Toro’s darkly whimsical oeuvre; thus, it makes sense that the director of “Frankenstein” has been a supporter and mentor to these younger compatriots in their pursuit of stop-motion greatness. They are well on their way.

More than their civilian counterparts, viewers familiar with “Drag Race,” its superstars and its lore will likely get much out of watching the cast trade on or tweak the personae for which they’re known on stage. But notwithstanding its queer-friendly lexicon (much of which has infiltrated social media anyway), Shankman’s film is an easily accessible, unexpectedly ingratiating experience.

An astonishing bloodbath of brute hand-to-hand combat, highly resourceful weaponry and gnarly bodily contortions, “The Furious” is such a feat of mass physical coordination that such niceties as character and narrative can afford to be an afterthought. Here’s a film where you come for the fighting and stay for the fighting, and are unlikely to feel shortchanged.

The gauziness of the thesis here is matched by the generality of the characters and their lives.

Adam Carter Rehmeier‘s thriller, like many a good B-movie, adds up to more than the sum of its parts, with star power and star chemistry its major elevating, unquantifiable factors.

The Death of Robin Hood holds our attention for the sheer severity of its reinvention, the rooted, hessian-rough vividness of its ruined world, and its earnest, complex preoccupation with matters of the soul — a vanishingly rare virtue in the multiplex in general, let alone in the realm of endlessly repurposed IP.

The movie delivers subtext aplenty, overflowing in ways that help overcome its reserved exterior and make for an unobtrusive comedy-drama that, on occasion, comes close to working.

Disclosure Day turns out to be a lavishly intense chase thriller with a dollop of deep-think rumination and two characters at its center whose own close encounters have shaped their lives and destinies. Scene for scene, the movie is a vigorous and diverting ride. Yet coming after the mountains of real UAP footage we’ve seen, Disclosure Day never gives you the contact high of awe that “Close Encounters” did.

It’s the rare movie whose every artistic intention can be easily identified, but whose emotional effects are never discovered.

As a study of how the World Cup sausage is made, the film could go deeper and dirtier; as a crowdpleaser about the business of crowdpleasing, it’s more or less on point.

Performed with gusto by Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy, as a couple of Georgian grotesques sacrificing everything to host the aspirational dinner party of their dreams, it derives an odd poignancy from the smallness of its stakes, and the severity of its consequences.

In “Earth, Wind & Fire,” Questlove tells the band’s story, and Maurice White’s story, in a way that’s at once thrilling and haunting. He captures their rightful place in the pop cosmos.

It sinks into its star power as one would into a warm bath, and if the appealingly scrappy Goldstein doesn’t match that voltage, that’s largely the point.

It’s jammed with spoof-genre history, but that makes it feel more exhausting than exhilarating. It’s a top-heavy satirical party that’s become so meta it’s meh.

It’s a nostalgia trip that never quite belongs to the present, and never rouses any real, cherished memory of the past.

Atonement comes to a place that, in a lesser film, might appear sentimental but in this one is bracingly real. You can feel the movie burning away the fog of war.

In telling this one family’s story and examining their connection to the land they were born into, Dosa makes an affecting documentary about a looming danger that many are ignoring.

A madcap ride that is diverting but never quite enjoyable, the film finds the silliest and grisliest extremes of the Jensen formula this time fighting each other more than they balance each other out.

Yeon returns to action-horror with “Colony” an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.

The governess is thoroughly ungoverned in “Victorian Psycho,” a grisly ostensible horror comedy from director Zachary Wigon that’s neither frightening nor funny enough to pass muster — and not quite outrageous enough to garner the kind of notoriety it’s aiming for, either.

The comedian’s 'Mr. Mom' update offers a few opportunities to chuckle, but the gags mostly fall flat.

As an atmospheric freakout, Backrooms is extraordinarily effective.

The film belongs to the ever-reliable Scott, who commendably doesn’t take the easily sympathetic route with the anxious, uptight Stagg, playing him with a suitably dour chill to match his grim forecast — but also a stern, stoic integrity that you’d trust with your life.

As satire, it’s more loosely irreverent than devastatingly pointed, but alongside the satisfying potshots at the far right, Nguyen and Athané’s script also takes welcome aim at body fascism and other forms of discrimination within the gay community.

The overlap of the two households, which offers an exciting narrative possibility, peters out with predictable cynicisms, while the climax is borderline comedic in its forced symbolism about family bonds.

In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality.

Soderbergh has done an ace job of illustrating “The Last Interview” by turning it into a dreamy archival collage, accompanying John’s words (and Yoko’s too) with hundreds of photographs I had never seen before. (He also uses a handful of fantasy images created by AI; if they’d been devised with older technology, no one would care, and no one should care now.)

“Samurai” is classical, if pared-back, in approach — at once a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits, a tricksy game of mental cat-and-mouse and a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership, in all its solitude and sacrifice.

It’s middle-drawer mishegas — though part of what’s sort of fun about it, and also interesting (even when it gets overdone), is that the director, in this case, is truly coming on like he has something to say.

Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic.

The Esiris cast a perceptive eye over the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center: loved by some, resented by others, admired by all — and totally alone.

Enjoyable but mostly surface-level as it recounts the highs or lows (it’s sometimes debatable which is which) of his career while maintaining a respectfully awed distance from his inner life, it’s a film for fans that could mint some new ones — given Cantona’s own still-irresistible presence as a talking head and storyteller.

The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.

Dhont has a tactile, compassionate sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men, and Coward, by turns breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual, thrives on that understanding, encouraging audiences to share in its pleasure.

With the sharply structured documentary Ask E. Jean, director Ivy Meeropol accomplishes the near-impossible, telling the story of Carroll in a manner as consistently enthralling and unapologetic as its subject.

Rather than stirring a debate, or even inspiring deeper cultural introspection, Sharrock and her collaborators deliver a trifle. For a satire about progress, “Ladies First” relies on far too many ideas from the past — cinematic even more than cultural.

The Black Ball does not come or go quietly, which is largely its point: If the film wants for subtlety and serenity, there is also something quite poignant about its narrative and stylistic maximalism, honoring any number of queer ancestors who never got to live out loud.

Though it can be genuinely wearying and not a little depressing to spend 148 minutes in the company of a man so deeply wrongheaded and in such maddening self-denial (even Paulette, complicit in her own way in her husband’s ambition will eventually insist that he stops calling her his little lady) it is certainly instructive and horribly relevant.

Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love is a stirringly offbeat drama, small and delicate and disarmingly precise, with a performance by Rami Malek that, if there’s any justice, should finally quiet down all the reviewers who’ve always been so snarky about him.

If Propeller One-Way Night Coach lets you know anything genuine, it’s that Travolta, at an early age, looked around at his life and thought it was magical. That, in its way, is a gift, one that in movie after movie he has reflected back to his fans.

Her Private Hell is a disaster, but even that’s part of its hipster factor. The film practically announces that it’s too cool to be coherent.

With all due apologies to any real-world sufferers of supernatural body-switching, who perhaps regard the film’s high-mindedness as a welcome corrective to the condition’s flippantly comedic treatment in pop culture more generally, the real unknown of The Unknown is the reason behind making a body-swap movie feel so wholly disembodied.

Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, Minotaur is very much up to the task.

There’s much horror here, and much beauty, but little meaningful tension between the two.

An elaborately nested reflection on creative license, story ownership and art imitating life imitating art, Bitter Christmas is so exhaustively Almodóvarian, the viewer occasionally has to fight their way into its circular hall of mirrors. For those who do, there’s much fun to be had here.

It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but one that doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, given the linearity and literal nature of its approach to human anguish. At over two hours in length, its points are made with clarity before being repeated ad nauseam.

I found “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be fun in a slightly flat way. But because the movie has so little pretense, it’s basically an invitation to wallow in the lite “Star Wars” nostalgia that’s there in every frame.

Another Day tackles a tough topic with profound grace. This kind of cinematic workmanship, so finely effortless that it’s almost invisible, doesn’t come by often.

The two-and-a-half-hour result is riveting, acted with careworn nuance down the line by an excellent ensemble, yawing this way and that in terms of narrative and emotional momentum, even as we sense early on that no clear, cathartic resolution will ever be forthcoming.

It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional, careful, considered filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic set-up. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last.

Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it.

It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into. He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force — charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it — for a while we just feel like we’re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of.

The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.

Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.

Come for the arch, bitchy humor promised by the title and the director’s general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there’s more to Firstman than his online persona.

The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature, is the rarest type of film, not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be.

The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel in such a sodden way. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.

Ritchie goes relatively easy on the joy-of-killing stuff, at least until the climax, and there’s an engaging couple of minutes en route thanks to the simplest, cleanest action filmmaking the film has to offer: a chase involving motorcycles, police cars and some proficient editing.

A steamy stew of sex, death, VHS and junk food, as though workshopped by Eros, Thanatos, Colonel Sanders and the Jolly Rancher in the seediest recesses of a Blockbuster Video, Schoenbrun’s delirious third film is their most accomplished, most persuasive and most playful movie yet.

The unexpected formal execution draws the excitement out of what’s mostly a straightforward narrative.

An argument can be had about what will end up being the “best” animated feature released in 2026 — it’s early — but there’s little chance another film can dethrone Decorado as the most mind-bending.

It has the disposition of a vintage buddy movie and an underdog tale, one that celebrates human determination and the notion of advancement through science.

The result is a genuinely funny and ultimately heart-pounding production, with an execution that feels like a heist itself.

Balagov, however, remains the star attraction of “Butterfly Jam,” his fluent, adventurous command of sound and image keeping the film interesting even when not much is happening on screen, and tangibly atmospheric when the narrative pendulum swings too far in the other direction.

Fatherland is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet Fatherland, as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.

At 99 minutes, A Woman’s Life is brisk and concentrated, but it never feels glibly selective with regard to its protagonist, permitting us access to Gabrielle at her most impressive, her most unbearable and her most disarmingly ordinary.

Nagi Notes, however, happily sees the director returning to the form of his 2016 breakout Harmonium, with the precision of its characterization and the balance between heartfelt emotional candor and pensive silence in its finely worked script.

Like the novelty gift that causes all the trouble, Obsession initially seems simplistic, and even a bit silly, in its rehash of the age-old monkey’s paw trope. Like the consequences of that ill-considered wish, however, it proves eerily hard to shake.

It seemed like an entertainment that might have something for everyone. But The Electric Kiss is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its own conceits that I suspect it will end up satisfying virtually no one.

The movie often brushes past what might have been its most intriguing moments in favor of an unobtrusive hagiography. It approaches dramatic rigor and visual intrigue in only the briefest of scenes, often far too late into its runtime.

Both wildly entertaining and viciously upsetting, this remarkable debut boldly reaps what others have sown.

Even as it dabbles in toe-curling cringe comedy, The Travel Companion is ultimately too genial a work for such tonal extremes.

Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a concert film that doesn’t look and feel like other concert films. It’s a true experience, because of a combination of the show itself and the way that Cameron has filmed it.

Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story.

You don’t leave The Last One for the Road with the feeling that you have seen something life-affirmingly original. But there is still a sense of disarming comfort in the film’s down-to-earth demeanor, and Giulio’s rewarding if predictable arc.

In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.

On the story level, Swapped is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.

The series’ fourth season is still being rolled out through the summer, making “Azure Sea” play like a long-weekend getaway as opposed to a true feature-length fable. The fans are sure to clock in for its extra nuggets of lore, but there are few reasons for a non-Slimehead to take the plunge.

Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.

The film's chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it's hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent.

A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.

The melodrama begins at such a high pitch in Desplechin’s latest, you might think it has nowhere to go but down, yet this earnestly inflamed tale of art, grief, betrayal and all-consuming amour on steroids keeps finding new, hysterical ways to surprise.

The filmmakers have lightened and brightened their source material to a kid-friendly degree — even the English countryside, as glisteningly shot by George Steel, has never looked less overcast. Yet there’s wisdom amid the silliness, as the story gently makes a case for the necessity of grief, mindfulness and mortal awareness, even in a life otherwise unburdened by adult human responsibility.

Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.

Kormákur’s film doesn’t trade in surprises, but offers more than enough heart-in-mouth action spectacle to compensate.