Kokomo City, D. Smith’s impressive debut documentary about Black trans sex workers, arrives in time to be an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer.

Joy Ride is a heartwarming film about identity and friendship wrapped in a package of penis jokes. The directorial debut of Adele Lim, a co-writer of “Crazy Rich Asians,” applies “Bridesmaids” humor to a story that is surprisingly genuine and full of richly developed relationships.

Apparently, the answer is yes: Working from a well-judged script by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery and enlisting a superb cast of appealing ensemble players, Affleck has created something that Hollywood has seemed incapable of making in recent years: a smart, entertaining movie that, for all its foregone conclusions and familiar beats, unfolds with the offhand confidence of the most casually impressive layup.

Shayda could have been a horror story. Instead, it’s a survivor’s tale, and it’s suffused with gratitude and love.

Hey, I never said The Covenant wasn’t manipulative. It is — skillfully, entertainingly and at times almost overbearingly so. But oh, boy, does it work.

BlackBerry, a funny, insightful corporate biopic, tells the unlikely story of how a ragtag team of Canadian computer nerds invented the titular device — a combination “pager, cellphone and email machine” that would revolutionize modern communications until it became known as the thing you owned before you got an iPhone.

Richly observed and paced with relaxed, unforced ease, Afire doesn’t ignite as much as smolder. It’s a slow, steady burn.

Only the third feature from writer and co-director Ilker Catak, who won a student academy award in 2015 for his film school project “Fidelity,” “Teachers’ Lounge” is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias.

De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.

National Anthem is that rarity, a genuinely sensual American movie, and in that sensuality it connects its characters to the transcendence and union promised by Emerson, Whitman, Melville and all the rest of our country’s great literary dreamers.

Chile ’76 turns out to be a paranoid thriller altogether worthy of the era it captures with such cool, self-contained style.

The documentary could have been shapelier and better focused, but it packs lots of information and even more emotion.

Berra’s advice, of course, tends to be dizzyingly contradictory but deceptively simple. The same could be said of It Ain’t Over, which zips through Berra’s life without ever feeling rushed. When it comes to Mullin’s well-paced depiction of a misunderstood legend, Berra’s words put it best: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

Obliquely but evocatively, “Desperate Souls” ponders the many roles of the cowboy: gay icon, cinematic hero and symbol of American manifest destiny from the Rockies to the Mekong. Yet the documentary acknowledges that neither Schlesinger’s film nor its era could change everything.

The direction and performances in “How to Have Sex” are so spontaneous and naturalistic that the film often plays like a slice-of-life documentary; it’s not necessarily a fully realized story, but as one chapter, it’s extraordinarily vivid.

As Kiefer’s monumental art decays, “Anselm” can endure as his memorial.

Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.

Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma, and “The Taste of Things” provides the ideal showcase for those ineffable gifts.

The French provocateur Catherine Breillat gets her kicks with unnerving tales of sexual coercion, but a clothed, close-up first kiss in “Last Summer” may be her most excruciating to date.

If “Oak” brushes up against the fuzzy calculus of melodrama, Mari and Turner always wrestle it back to earth.

Scent is a captured memory, a living, breathing reverie rather than a narrative. It's also the birth of a great talent.

The documentary’s resulting mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting — although Sharp and Bwayo say they excluded the most horrific footage.

Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

Once The Iron Claw populates its first half with peppy needle drops, seaty training montages and brotherly bonding, the pivot toward death and heartache becomes all the more wrenching.

Roemer gives this tour of the chopped-liver circuit, with its bar mitzvahs and fashion shows and dog training classes, a bluesy, mordant spirit.

Despite its over-credulous willingness to go along on what through one lens amounts to a massive ego trip, Nyad manages to be a celebration of perseverance, self-belief and learning how to be loved.

As Paltrow (Gwyneth’s brother), who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Shoval, makes his own case that history is built of small, individual actions that tend to be overlooked, he allows himself a bit of gallows humor.

All that’s missing, really, is a story. “The Bikeriders” is almost good enough to convince us we don’t need one.

Although the focus eventually returns to Chau’s disastrous undertaking, the asides gradually take over. The film expands into a debate on the ethics of missionary Christianity.

After years of dabbling, lyrically and literally, Taylor Swift has come for American cinema, and we can only wait for her next move.

Ultimately, Next Goal Wins isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — “Be happy” and “There’s more to life than soccer” — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.

Wicked Little Letters manages the paradoxical trick of being both broadly played and finely acted, the first due to a director intent on underlining every action with a heavy Sharpie and the second to a cast that colors in the outlines of their characters with finesse, depth and life.

At 85, Ian McKellen doesn’t have many performances left in him, so any movie that lets the actor carve ham with such exuberant relish as “The Critic” is worth his time and ours.

Under the supervision of animation director Carlos Léon Sancha, the film is a graceful, somewhat overbusy visual treat, a playful riot of colors anchored by a crisp sense of line.

This “Mean Girls” may be a sugarcoated object lesson about unhealthy, ingrained behaviors, but it’s no downer.

What’s extraordinary about To Kill a Tiger is Kiran and Ranjit’s determination, and the possible changes for good that may result from it.

Wiseman's approach is to drop you blindly into the middle of the Troisgros milieu and allow details to emerge scene by scene, frame by frame, as if you're watching a photograph come into clear, four-color focus over several hours.

While there are no salacious details or plot-moving drama about what makes Queen Bey tick — and there shouldn’t be — Renaissance reveals something else, showcasing the joy to be found in cultural touchstones like the tour and the community built around it.

The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.

It’s the kind of movie that some will deem important enough to merit end-of-year awards and others will find portentous enough to give them the giggles — again, not unpleasurably.

“Nosferatu” haunts as you watch it and vanishes when the lights come up, leaving a viewer shaken but not stirred. Still: Fangs for the memories.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

Lanthimos and his company still dare to find a bracing, disconsolate farce in our brief and helpless thrashing through life. For that, most people will never forgive them.

The film also suffers from erratic pacing and half-baked reveals, but at its best, it throbs with raw, human, horrific honesty.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning.

An existential black comedy delivered with flair and a steady gaze — and two remarkable performances at its center — it mucks about in themes of identity and exploitation, perception and personality, fate and foolishness.

Ryan Destiny’s performance as Shields is persuasive and commanding.

Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.

The Outrun is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology.

With wit, style and ruthlessness, Fargeat has made a movie that’s an example of the soulless pop-culture object she’s spoofing.

When the pair’s natural curiosity and humor seep into the film, their scrappy enthusiasm is infectious.

The trick is in the details — in letting the personal bring specificity to the universal while letting the universal illuminate the personal. It’s a balancing act, and writer/director/former teen disaster Sean Wang gets it mostly right in “Dìdi,” his fictionalized memory play of being a floundering Taiwanese American skate kid in 2008 Fremont, Calif.

At times a case study in How to Be an Ally, the film is accessible by intention. Yet it remains raw, vulnerable and joyful, even when things get messy, as it charts a road map to empathy and acceptance — the real destination that awaits at the end of their cross-country odyssey.

In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open.

An American teen encounters peculiar horrors at a remote German resort in Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo,” a kooky sci-fi genre hybrid that crackles with offbeat turns and creature scares as it unfolds against a backdrop of deceptively serene forests and cheeky Euro-kitsch.

Red One is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids — especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.

Karate Kid: Legends combines the best of all those sequels plus a 2010 remake — a simple underdog tale, appealing casts and crisply filmed action — to contribute a new and worthy chapter to the canon. It’s one whose ambitions meet, and occasionally exceed, our expectations.

An Oscar nominee for best international feature, Denmark’s harrowing, slow-boil thriller “The Girl With the Needle” has been described by some as a horror film. And from the hallucinatory opening montage of distorted, leering faces, this black-and-white drama promises to be the stuff of nightmares.

Emilia Pérez is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache.

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

The film documents how Dion has remained a pop culture fixture in the past decade, from appearances on late night shows to a music video with Deadpool.

It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.

Souleymane’s Story presents its hero’s life as an open-air prison. Scrupulously researched by Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut, it’s brutally frank about the predatory practices of some of Souleymane’s fellow West Africans.

So Clooney and Pitt’s first outing as scene partners since “Burn After Reading” 16 years ago turns out to be a pleasing, if largely predictable, lupine lark.

The film is heavy on the dread, light on the narrative. It’s all about the tension in the gym where the adults are just as melodramatic as the girls.

The film stirs the soul less by the magic of ghosts than by the power of human connection.

Candid, pitiless and deeply humanistic, Fleifel’s portrait feels simultaneously timeless and urgently new.

The movie serves as product placement for a brand of toys but also as a form of creative brick-olage, one that reflects a modern music producer’s ability to weave small units of musical noise into an epic canvas that gets the whole world up offa that thing.

Written and directed by “A Quiet Place” scribes Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, “Heretic” builds suspense through ideas and argument, allowing both sides to score points when it comes to organized religion.

Hollywoodgate is a fascinatingly — and sometimes frustratingly — oblique portrait of a country and its people in the tragic grip of extremism.

There’s no better time for a throwback than summer, and “F1 the Movie” is here to send audiences to a blissful era before constant cape slop, when the movies were loud, their stars were hot and the male main-character energy was flowing with exhilarating abandon.

The more interesting drama of Babygirl is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

A Complete Unknown just tells the story. But maybe that’s enough for a fresh generation to feel the joy of his apostasy at a moment when the world seems once more poised on a precipice of chicanery, treachery and disaster. If so, well, how does it feel?

It’s not hard to imagine “Transformers One” connecting with preteens whose pubescent bodies can be as unwieldy as Orion’s first, clumsy transformation, with wheels where he expects legs and arms where he expects wheels.

Whatever your familiarity with [Liza's] indelible performances, the amount of deep cuts and candid behind-the-scenes material is an archivist’s dream.

Once Perry brings his magnum opus to its many climactic conclusions, the bait-and-switchy gamesmanship and sheer swing of his conceit have become irresistibly contagious, and viewers can’t help but be moved.

Anderson is radiant playing this daffy optimist who rambles in breathy clips about past glories, as if the world around her hasn’t moved on since the days of Siegfried & Roy.

The Friend is a better dog movie than it is a people movie, but it’s such a wonderful dog movie that you may not mind that the people are merely fine.

The bones of this memory play are familiar, but Davidtz is a natural filmmaker, and the sense of a tattered but privileged world teetering on extinction is visualized with fresh and evocative details.

September 5 is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.

[Kurzel] delivers another warning in the form of a timely American crime story — one that, arriving in theaters a month after the U.S. election, many will deem too late.

Saturday Night is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia.

Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.

Screenwriter-director Peter Hastings — who also voices Dog Man’s barks, woofs, howls and assorted canine musings — has shoehorned a streaming season’s worth of plot into this sub-90-minute enterprise, and its caffeinated tempo makes “Moana 2” feel like a Terrence Malick joint.

As the tropes pile up faster than tears in a Nicholas Sparks novel, so do the bodies, dispatched in increasingly inventive and grisly ways.

Dragon imparts these pearls of wisdom with verve and delight, in a telling that is as visually impressive as it is emotionally stirring.

It’s a larky bunch of malarkey, laced with just enough moral complexity — washed down with car chases and capers — to set your own tush a-twitching.

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

Warfare is a process movie: It’s less interested in character development and “narrative” than in simply plunging viewers into an environment and giving us a sense of what life is like within it.

Scrupulously unpreachy, it resists all attempts to distill a moral or message, seeking truth in the honesty of its characters and their process of self-discovery.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

A remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same title...the new film is unnecessary as such, but it’s a determinedly openhearted crowd-pleaser with a handful of delicious performances, and it’s just about impossible to dislike.