Garrone has created a world of both rich and ugly textures — visual, narrative and imaginative — that transports, delights and imparts disturbing lessons.

Clever, amiable and eager to please, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is the comedy equivalent of the pop-rap star it satirizes, a bit of stupid-smart silliness that offers plenty of pleasure in the moment, even if its amusements last about as long as a snow cone in the sun.

What’s true in Pakistan turns out to be universal: Misconceptions can prove as dangerous as any disease and are even harder to eradicate.

Cartel Land reveals a culture that spans the border, full of death and dismaying behavior on both sides, but thriving all the same.

Riley doesn’t merely make a fine nonfiction film about the life and legacy of the late conflicted artist. He virtually resurrects him.

A deep core of emotion gives 3  1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets its ballast, but Silver, who also serves as cinematographer, infuses the production with simple, elegant sophistication.

Under Riklis’s direction, the film’s first act lulls the audience into a sense of familiarity, before plunging into a darker reality. The effect is shattering.

In Ozon’s confident hands, The New Girlfriend has moments that juxtapose gentle humor and surprising depth of feeling.

You’ll be glad that A Hard Day isn’t happening to you, but you won’t regret observing it all from a safe distance.

With its appealingly conflicted hero and generous sense of humor, Meet the Patels has the breezy touch of a scripted romantic comedy.

As small and specific as it is, Everybody Wants Some!! feels improbably expansive, even universal.

If “The Black Panthers” has been designed to leave viewers outraged and energized in equal measure, it succeeds with admirable style. It counts both as essential history and a primer in making sense of how we live now.

Peace Officer piles up evidence of outrageous excess, provoking what is likely to be a response, from its audience, that is far less measured than that of its main subject.

Truth would have been more compelling with less sanctimony and tougher self-examination.

It’s the characters, not the convoluted plot or digital magic, that make “Welcome to the Jungle” such fun. For a high-concept Hollywood special-effects movie, that’s quite a concept indeed.

Viewers who have nurtured a loving if complicated relationship with Barbie might feel seen by the end of the film. Whether they’ll feel satisfied is another question entirely — especially when it comes to the film’s letdown of an ending, which was no doubt perfect on the page but lands with a deflating, didactic thud. Then again, that gnawing sense of ambivalence was no doubt precisely what Gerwig’s “Barbie” was aiming for.

The camera is more athletic than anyone on-screen, muscling between bullets and smashing through walls. Heyvaert shoots action so well that you forgive how little physical action there actually is.

Rosenwald isn’t just a portrait of a great, selfless American and his powerful company, but an excavation of an ugly strain of our own history, and a reminder of what one person can do to uproot it.

Weaving together stories of death with observations on the post-9/11 culture of surveillance, Heart of a Dog hints that the very language on which Anderson has built her career as a performance artist is finally inadequate in the face of mortality.

As the quiet, compact vessel for roiling fears and ambivalence, Al-Hwietat’s Theeb winds up being a strikingly memorable character, whose deceptively simple tale possesses both haunting power and a whiff of prescient pessimism.

The movie has an unhurried pace, lulling the teens — and by extension the audience — into occasional complacency with the regular rhythms of each chugging train.

Moore’s latest movie is funny and touching, and it has a lot to say about what we settle for as Americans citizens, and how much better our lives might be if we raised some hell.

Whether or not Kaufman’s meticulously accumulated details add up to a grand unified conclusion, there’s no doubt he’s getting at something painfully familiar beneath his movie’s self-conscious artifice.

A documentary in which one of the most voyeuristic directors in American cinema delivers an engaging, if maddeningly unresolved, tutorial in film production and appreciation.

This is the rare military drama that conveys both the graphic physical effects of war and its lingering psychic cost.

Florence Foster Jenkins brims with love for its characters and forbearance for even their most blinkered self-deception.

It’s hard to say what is most difficult to digest about Prophet’s Prey.

As the film progresses, its visual resonance with the iconic photographs of Baker feels more organic and less forced. By the final act, it’s chilling how much Hawke has transformed into the late-career musician, looking aged well beyond his years.

Maggie’s Plan exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.

On one level, The Clan is an accomplished but not terribly original genre exercise — another story about amorality run amok, given an extra jolt from its real-life roots and heightened political context. What sets the film apart are the performances.

Wiseman’s voracious curiosity and evenhanded approach to his subject ensures that viewers will have a wide range of responses to the material he has collected.

Although Joplin’s brief life was eventful, its contradictions would stymie a tidy biopic.

This isn’t a paint-by-numbers revenge plot. When the payoff finally comes, it’s as satisfying as it is perplexing.

East Side Sushi includes a number of moments that are a little too on-the-nose in their eagerness to convey the obstacles.... But Lucero compensates for such missteps with subtly persuasive visual choices and narrative restraint.

Microbe and Gasoline doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it just might ride four of them into your heart.

Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.

Winter on Fire has all the immediacy and power of drama. If it lacks the dispassionate context of more balanced journalism, it makes up for it with a complex, contradictory emotional impact that is simultaneously demoralizing and hopeful.

The story can shift from uproarious to heartbreaking in the span of a scene, but Cheadle, in his feature directorial debut, controls the tone like a veteran.

Ixcanul is, among other things, a movie about the resilience and savvy of women who are continually disparaged by their cultures.

The movie, for all its uneventfulness, is intensely memorable.

As Alice, VanCamp is exceptional, eliciting our sympathy even when the character is making maddeningly self-destructive decisions.

For a filmmaker who believed in giving Africans their own voice, it seems appropriate to offer such an unvarnished portrait.

As this film’s engrossing character study makes clear, this woman of extraordinary tastes and appetites was ahead of her time, in more ways than one.

Despite its familiar, come-from-behind contours, the story brims with redemptive optimism that it comes by honestly, thanks to its extraordinary main character and the equally remarkable actor who plays him.

Snarky and sensitive in just the right measure, what initially looks like a glib exercise in adolescent mortification has the nerve to dig a little deeper. And it winds up mining a little bit of wisdom and compassion in the process.

Takes a turn for the dark side that will satisfy the franchise’s adult fans even more.

Like "After Tiller" a few years ago, Trapped is lucid and illuminating about the issue of abortion as a constitutional right. But in addition to being instructive, it brims with compassion, leaving viewers with haunting images of women we never even got to see in the first place.

The filmmaking, by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, is suitably claustrophobic and suspenseful, working up to a level of stress that may be unhealthy for anyone with a weak heart.

Goat doesn’t shy from showing us monstrous behavior, which might be more than some viewers can bear. This isn’t an easy film to watch. But it’s even harder to forget.

The Witness makes an encouraging case for the argument that society is not as apathetic as we fear. But it also reveals a troubling phenomenon: our willingness to accept all that we are told as truth.

Warm, ingratiating, with a beat you can dance to, Sing Street is a feel-good movie that never demands to be liked. Instead it asks, politely and irresistibly.

In the end, Marguerite isn’t a comedy so much as a love story. True love, it seems, isn’t just blind; it must be deaf, too.

This earthbound tale has a poignant political message — and not a subtle one.

Even when it dispenses with realism altogether, Hunt for the Wilderpeople conveys important truths about the will and sheer endurance it takes to make a family.

Amusing and even edifying, although it is also unlikely to make converts out of those who just don’t get Zappa’s pastiche of juvenile parody and sophisticated songwriting, derived from rock, jazz and 20th-century experimental music.

Thoughtful, searching and wonderfully moving in its wistful final moments, Lo and Behold may not be Herzog’s most artistically ambitious film, but it’s an intriguing, even important one nonetheless.

“Lovers” suggests that any film — even this one — can have the manipulative power of propaganda.

Like the warm summer day it chronicles, Southside With You possesses a mellow, languorous vibe, an infectious easygoing charm that insinuates itself gently, then seductively, as the couple at its center experiences the stirrings of what might be true love.

Suffused with wry humor, vulnerability and radiant warmth, Huppert’s performance captures that delicate period in life during which resignation morphs into graceful, even grateful, acceptance.

White Girl vividly charts what is at times a violent culture clash. But it is the young lovers’ desperate attempt to bridge the gap between their worlds that makes the film so deeply moving.

It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character.

Cernan is proud of what he accomplished, calling himself the luckiest man in the world for all that he got to see. But he also expresses regret at having done it at the expense of his family.

Mournful, enigmatic and compulsively engrossing, Fireworks Wednesday gives viewers a chance to watch a master at work — before he was acknowledged as a master.

Amalric is low-key and immensely likable, but what makes his Paul a worthwhile companion on a three-hour voyage is his utter sincerity, coupled with self-aware irony. He's not a phony, a user, a Romeo or a slut. His earnestness is his best quality; he tries so hard to do the right thing, sometimes only failing by a little. [10 Oct 1997, p.N48]

Lion is a complex movie, with its profound themes of home and identity, and its tonally disparate halves. A smartly understated approach to Brierley’s story holds it all together. Sometimes the truth alone is enough.

It’s a lovely tale, even if it’s not quite the Cinderella story you might expect. The documentary also brings up some interesting points about how the Internet — the land of vitriolic trolls — can draw two very different people together to create great art from odds and ends.

Robert Edwards, the writer and director, explores the layers of melancholy contained within these familiar but authentically drawn characters, and he cleverly doles out virtue and vice to each while weaving in acid humor borne from regret.

Genius may be a bit stodgy and safe, but it tells a story of beauty — as it plays out in an improbably fruitful friendship, and as it’s discovered within vast expanses of raw language by a craftsman who was arguably an artist in his own right.

In truth, the story is practically beside the point with all the spectacular visuals. The steampunk aesthetic might be overdone, but there’s still a lot here worth marveling at.

Life has cool effects, real suspense and a sweet twist. It ain’t rocket science, but it does what it does well — even, one might say, with a kind of genius.

Horror works — or it doesn’t — in the flickering, moving images of the screen, not the page. Sandberg knows that. His artistry, for that’s what it is, is like that of the dollmaker Sam Mullins: to take inert material and create a living, breathing thing.

Standing Tall is indeed tough going, yet it’s illuminating and ultimately even a bit hopeful.

The documentary Hockney presents such an immersive portrait of its subject — artist David Hockney — that by the end of the film it feels like we are looking at the world through his eyes.

The lead actresses, like the story, work in subtle ways. There’s plenty of potency in small gestures, anecdotes and shared glances.

If it doesn’t rewrite the rules of horror, it calls attention to them, in a manner that is not just flamboyant, but also baroque.

The climate change documentary A Time to Choose takes what often seems like an oblique approach to the subject of global warming.

Hacksaw Ridge winds up being a rousing piece of entertainment that also happens to be an affecting portrait of spiritual faith and simple human decency.

Through the example of friendship and cooperation, The Innocents shines a glimmer of hope on a period of great doubt.

Right up to its somewhat perfunctory but sneakily satisfying conclusion, Aquarius makes a compelling case for looking up from our ubiquitous distractions to take in the world around us — the one that we live in and, whether we’re aware of it or not, lives in us.

I, Daniel Blake is about human value: disposable and abstract in one context; eternal, inviolable and sacred in another. They might underline the point a bit too thickly, but Loach and Laverty count on their audience to discern the difference, and to act accordingly.

The question that looms large here, lingering long after the closing credits, is whether, despite our human need for forgiveness, absolution is ever truly possible.

This is not a film about Neruda’s life or controversial death. This is a film for folks who are unfamiliar with the writing of Neruda, or maybe even skeptical about poetry in general. They may not cherish every word of the poet’s most heartbreaking lines, but they’ll understand the man who wrote them a little better those who already do.

If de Wit’s idea of story is sometimes gratingly simplistic and sentimental, there’s no denying its primal classicism, or the seductive pull of sound and image at their most pure and unfussy.

Tinged with madness and heartbreak, Endless Poetry is the unmistakable byproduct of, as the character of Alejandro puts it, “a heart capable of loving the entire world.”

Few will emerge from its story of intelligence tradecraft and egregious lapses in oversight without feeling seriously freaked out.

In the Chinese martial-arts film The Final Master, the fighting is more lucid than the plot. That may be characteristic of the genre, yet this smart, stylish movie diverges from the expected in many ways, most of them enjoyable.

It’s a tale bluntly told that arouses intense, evanescent emotion and then leaves you haunted, long afterward, by provocative but arguably answerable questions.

Gleason portrays great strength and great suffering in equal measure, lending vivid credence to tired platitudes about what it means to live life to the fullest.

“Strangers” offers an inspiring look at creative people from very different walks of life who nonetheless communicate beautifully with one another. They don’t need to speak a common language: Their dazzling music says it all.

The vérité style of filmmaking is slow and sometimes monotonous, making it all the more surprising that you will probably find yourself bawling your eyes out — without ever knowing how you got to that state — at the film’s profoundly, heartbreakingly somber conclusion.

Muted, measured and meditative, Arrival brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.

With its charming character animation and inventive art direction, The Grinch is a vast improvement over Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of the same story.

In the movie’s first hour, all the blood is medical. Then the director stages a big shootout, mostly in slo-mo, that’s more clunky than epic. Before that misstep, though, Three is singularly entertaining.

Although it boasts three crackerjack action sequences, Cold War 2 won’t wow Hong Kong cinema buffs who crave nonstop mayhem. This clever drama features more bureaucratic wrangling than criminal scuffles.

As with giallo, The Love Witch features deliberately wooden acting, and can be a little boring at times. But it’s a stunningly photographed, fascinating reinterpretation of classic melodrama.

At times, In Order of Disappearance is a bit too self-consciously clever. But what saves it, paradoxically — even, at times, delightfully — from skidding off course into cliche is the profound appeal of its middle-of-the-road, but never dull, protagonist.

Ralph and Vanellope’s growth in the first film was what brought them together. Here, it’s what might force them apart. In Ralph Breaks the Internet, they’re attempting to hold on to one another while also trying to let go, and the film treats that struggle with sensitivity and care (along with some flatulence jokes).