More contained than “Strawberry Mansion” but with similarly expansive ideas, “Obex” feels opportune for the modern era.

The film is most enlightening and affecting when it settles into a perceptive, finely detailed examination of everyday domesticity lived under the weight of rushing mortality.

Filmmaker Kim A. Snyder’s illuminating documentary — premiering at the Sundance Film Festival — offers a rattling look at coordinated efforts to ban books. More importantly, it introduces viewers to the everyday and increasingly vital heroes pushing back: the librarians who sound the alarm to both legislative and grassroots attempts to pull books from school and public libraries.

Caught Stealing might feel like a break from the “Pi” director’s intensely subjective character portraits, which range from “The Wrestler” to “The Whale,” but in fact, Aronofsky brings us as close to Hank as he has to any of his characters.

While Ride and O’ Shaughnessy never wed. Her candor here marries a spectacular professional saga with the personal love story convincingly.

Clever, unpredictable and fun, Final Destination Bloodlines offers the series a transfusion of creativity that virtually guarantees that it will live to kill again.

Despite its episodic, and at times, vaguely-defined motivation, picture on whole is a poignant and dramatic portraiture of a typical Cinderella girl’s love story. Several good comedy sequences interline the footage, deftly written and directed.

Sweet, silly and sincere, director Prarthana Mohan’s spin has a clear understanding of what makes its source material revelatory and resonant.

Like a backstage pass for Broadway buffs, it’s one hell of a show for those in the know, and a sparkling introduction for the uninitiated.

The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.

What’s remarkable is that even if one fails at grasping in full the plot and its many conflicts, Ne Zha 2 has the power to flood the senses and convince anyone who watches it that they have just witnessed an animated production that holds absolutely nothing back.

The “Neon Bull” director has always had an incredible visual sense, though his plots tend to lack focus. Not this one.

I’d never spent a minute thinking about how these two put their act together, but the evolution of their career, which took shape with not much more calculation than the comedy bits they often improvised, turns out to be a story at once fascinating and enchanting.

Berri’s sympathetic work with his small cast, and his subservience to Pagnol’s story and dialog are key factors in the film’s robust dramatic appeal.

This day in the life of a young man attempting to earn cash for his family back home gathers impact by the reel.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is nothing if not an homage to the lasting impact that junk culture can have on impressionable minds.

Superbly catching the warmth and feeling of Jan Struther’s characters in her best-selling book of sketches, “Mrs. Miniver,” Metro has created out of it a poignant story of the joys and sorrows, the humor and pathos of middle-class family life in wartime England.

Good Boy reflects the powerful connection between people and their pets as few films have, ultimately devastating us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.

Annapurna Sriram manages to succeed in delivering a singular vision in all aspects of filmmaking, though not without its influences.

Happy Gilmore 2 is a happy orgy of raucously well-executed Adam Sandler fan service. It’s a pointed exercise in nostalgia, but with a present-tense edge. It’s not some fake update of the clever/dumb brand of slob comedy that made Sandler a superstar in the ’90s. It’s the genuine article, a true revival of Sandler’s Jerry Lewis-meets-rock ‘n’ roll rage. A sequel to his fabled 1996 golf comedy, it extends that movie’s anarchy-on-the-putting-green spirit as blithely as if the original had been made yesterday.

It’s a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now, and about how connected that is (or not) to the way we’ve always lived. And there’s a dark side to it. It’s “Sex and the City” filtered through a sobering reality check.

Some things you simply can’t fake. Take talent: There’s no room for anything shy of genius in The Christophers.

Harvey, Mary Chase's Pulitzer Prize play, loses little of its whimsical comedy charm in the screen translation.

[Aster] wants to show us the really big picture, and while “Eddington” isn’t a horror movie, it puts its finger on a kind of madness you’ll recognize with a tremor.

In the end, it’s the through-the-roof chemistry between the two leads that makes the film worthy of repeat viewing.

Regardless of how you feel about the ending (and many will happily embrace the movie’s darkly comic finale), Cregger has achieved something remarkable here, crafting a cruel and twisted bedtime story of the sort the Brothers Grimm might have spun.

In the end, “Badlands” is about the value of teamwork and learning that “alpha” and “apex” don’t mean the same thing where Predators are concerned.

There’s no defiling of peaches or precocious sexual experimentation between the roughly decade-apart duo, though the ambiguous subtext proves infinitely more fascinating, leaving everyone who sees it with a different interpretation.