It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

As regrettable as Hite's fate was, The Disappearance of Shere Hite goes a long way toward rectifying the wrongs done to her, whether in the name of erasure, ridicule, or willful misunderstanding.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

A satisfyingly suspenseful apocalyptic thriller with almost enough visual effects to give "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Deep Impact" a run for their money.

At times, the film feels less like an homage to a beloved legacy than a 1 1/2-hour piece of advertainment.

The shaggy but ultimately satisfying installment, set six decades before the four movies starring Jennifer Lawrence, carves out its own identity by leaning into its subtitle. If music is food for the soul, “Songbirds & Snakes” serves its tunes with a heaping side of venom.

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

Trolls Band Together is a glitter-encrusted variety pack of a movie. Packed with millennial boy-band humor, sibling love and snippets of pop songs, the third film in the Trolls franchise is an explosion of color tailored to a new generation of parents and their Gen Alpha kids.

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.

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.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.

This interpretation is overly reductive, I’ll admit. But once the thought had implanted itself in my brain, I could not shake it: These ladies are going to war over a couple of bangles (Kamala’s word, not mine). There’s a lot of fighting, and the fate of the world is said to hang in the balance. But when you look at the screen, all you see is a bunch of people trying to grab some shiny things from one another.

The film’s execution isn’t entirely convincing. It’s not the actors’ fault.

For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.

It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness.

Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, The Holdovers might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them.

Beyond Utopia contains background material on the history, culture and travails of North Korea that’s necessary but clunkily presented. The filmmakers also take an irksome turn toward the predictable during some of the travel sequences, adding conventional piano-and-strings movie music. But the rest of the movie is fresh and compelling.

The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

Like Sergio’s unusual modus operandi, Radical takes some time to click, its first half as unstructured as Sergio’s classroom. But at about the halfway point, when the kids discover the excitement of learning, it becomes as thrilling as any blockbuster.

Instead of prioritizing jump scares and game lore, as you might hope, the film leans into its gooey Hallmark center, focusing on underdeveloped relationships and predictable plot twists.

If it sometimes feels a bit contrived, and if its conclusion will leave some viewers unsatisfied, Triet has made a film that succeeds brilliantly — on terms that are as exacting, rigorous and precise as her unflappable heroine.

As it is, The Killer is less a diamond than a piece of good-looking but cheap quartz: all sparkling surface and not much value.

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.

The Persian Version is an ambitious effort to suture up the rift between past and present, parent and child. But like its heroine, it also suffers from a bit of split personality. It’s a tale with too much drama for the candy-colored comedy of its telling, and too much comedy for the drama to leave much of a mark.

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.

There just isn’t a whole lot to say about this deliberately lowbrow, gleefully low-budget expansion of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s half-hour stage play, originally performed by the duo in 2015 under the auspices of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy group.

There’s no doubt that Killers of the Flower Moon reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leeched of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating.

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy.

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

The state of uncertainty persists for the entire film, as you wait in vain for the director to tie the pieces together.

To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach.

Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being.

The ending of Foe is not the problem. It’s the beginning and the middle that feel phony: at once as calculated and as uncanny as ChatGPT.

If The Exorcist: Believer is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.

She Came to Me exists in between things: airy romance and psychological depth; operatic fantasy and gritty reality; farce and fatalism. Writer-director Rebecca Miller executes that balancing act with lighthearted audacity in a film that aspires, with fitful success, to resurrect the lost art of screwball comedy — with some literal opera thrown in for musical measure.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

Propelled by a funny, charismatic turn by Hewson (who infused such unpredictable energy in the terrific Apple TV Plus series “Bad Sisters”), Flora and Son is a feel-good movie that largely earns its sentimental uplift, one sick burn and soaring musical number at a time.

Overloaded with incidents, effects and explosions, “The Creator” fails to develop the personalities and relationships that would give its central characters an affecting humanity. The movie’s attempt to touch the heart comes off as, well, artificial.

The movie is unsurprising and not especially ambitious, but it’s agile enough to vault over most of its flaws.

Regan directs Scrapper with exceptional verve, interrupting the narrative with witty documentarylike asides whose framing evokes the poppy aesthetic of Wes Anderson.

By the end of Invisible Beauty, it’s obvious from all the accolades that [Hardison] made a difference in the lives of a new generation of Black models.

All this sporting entertainment turns out to be an unexpectedly mellow affair of the heart, with Bernal completely winning you over.

As a feel-good fact-based fable of financial comeuppance, Dumb Money is funny enough. But as its name suggests, it isn’t especially smart. Unlike its protagonists, it isn’t interested in making a quick buck, just an easy laugh.

Fremont has the demeanor of a kitchen-sink drama but is laced with deadpan absurdism.

A Haunting in Venice isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But that’s no doubt as intended by Branagh, who seems intent on rescuing Poirot from the reassuring, too-cute world of “cozy” mysteries and grounding him in the real-life loss and emotional dislocation of the postwar eras from which he sprang.

For all its faults, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 manages to just get by on pretty scenery and a meticulous inoffensiveness. What else is there to say but, “Opa!”

It’s all so confusing. But reason is an obstacle to appreciating The Nun II. What you need, like Irene and Debra, is faith — in this case, in the power of pure nonsense.

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 plot, in which Swank is given little more to do than guzzle Costco-size bottles of liquor and mope, proceeds in somewhat somnambulist fashion, generating surprisingly little suspense even when Paige confronts a suspect whose identity has been telegraphed throughout the film. This comes as a disappointment, at least for viewers who have watched a movie or two before.

Writer-director Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature, Bottoms, is a raunchy exploration of queer expression and online culture, bursting with humor.

Where Gran Turismo works best is on the track. Director Neill Blomkamp adds some formalist flourishes to the driving sequences, turning what could have been a monotonous series of races into entertaining and engaging fun.

The film does have its moments, mostly involving the relationship between Meir and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, nicely played by Liev Schreiber, whose character engages in delicate negotiations with her over a bowl of borscht, speaking in a seductive, diplomatic rumble.

Director Nimród Antal (“Predators”) does a serviceable job of keeping everything interesting and suspenseful, if not exactly fresh.

Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.

There are laughs to be had here, yes, but your mileage will vary depending on your tolerance for sophomoric bathroom humor and gratuitous vulgarity.

With the exception of a few choice words from Haddish, Landscape With Invisible Hand lacks the kind of steady humor and energy that would otherwise keep the story afloat.

Blue Beetle, the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.

Between Two Worlds is freshest when it emphasizes its documentary-like qualities, such as the brief inserts of everyday scenes and locales shot by Philippe Lagnier without any guidance from the director. Less effective are traditional movie elements like Mathieu Lamboley’s score, which flirts too openly with Philip Glass’s style.

In the end, Jules performs a magical if tiny bait-and-switch: It’s less a sci-fi parable — “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” for the AARP demographic — than a fairy tale reminding us that the tribulations of getting old are more natural than sad, and best done in the company of loved ones.

To reference yet another cultural touchstone, Aporia comes across like an expanded, indie-film version of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s never going to set the world on a new and unfamiliar course, but it does its job well enough.

Smart, sensuous and stylish, Passages is all about pleasure: the giving of it, the getting of it, the art and pursuit of it, and what it all can cost.

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.

A Compassionate Spy is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar.

If Shortcomings falls short in any way — hackneyed plot, halfhearted themes of assimilation and identity — it isn’t due to the two actors who carry the story across the finish line.

This is a story of family and of friendship, with enough humor to keep it from getting too sappy and enough restraint to keep it from getting too sophomoric.

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.

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

What should have been a light summer romp is rarely funny, never scary and a boring mess.

Earth Mama says a lot with very few words.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the premise of naive idiots attempting to get closer to death. (See: “Flatliners”). But it’s the ingenious combination of horror and human connection that makes Talk to Me, well, something to talk about.

The power of the story, such as it is, is not enhanced by the nonlinear narrative structure. In fact, it makes it needlessly confusing.

As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills, not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.

Lieberman and Gordon direct this almost family affair with a touch that is paradoxically light yet broad, from a screenplay expanded from their 2020 short by the same name.

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.

It’s a sterling cast, capably guided through the motions by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan — no relation to the author of this review, at least none that I know of — in this at times gently amusing and at other times modestly touching dramedy.

The good news isn’t just that Dead Reckoning lives up to its star’s notoriously high standards; it’s that it isn’t even over yet.

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.

Echoing Liam’s review of Sinclair’s work in progress, I’d call the first two acts of the film cleverly constructed, fresh and fascinating, yet marred by a climax and conclusion that are unworthy of what came before.

The otherwise sober-minded film relies heavily on music cues that are sometimes a little too on the nose, as when a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” plays under scenes of Weigel preparing to testify in front of legislators who see gender only as black and white.

It’s just charming enough, just exciting enough and just funny enough to not be a flop, but DreamWorks — the studio that has shown it can challenge Pixar when it comes to pushing the animation envelope — has chosen to play it safe here, rather than try to win the summer family film sweepstakes.

If The Dial of Destiny takes its cast somewhere far-fetched — and boy, does it ever — it makes sure to bring us all back to where we belong, just in time for the closing credits.

By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.

Maybe the whole endeavor is some kind of self-portrait of an artist who doesn’t know what he wants to say anymore, or how to even say, “I don’t know how to say what I want to say anymore.”

Cute, kind of clever and oh, so topical. But also problematic.

The framing may use the tropes of horror, but the film’s light tone — with jump scares more often used for comedic effect — defuses the tension required to make viewers feel on the verge of snapping.

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

Lynch/Oz possesses undeniable value, if only to remind viewers that cinema is worth dissecting, thinking about, arguing over, mulling around.

The disconnect between Barry’s mature and adolescent selves, a running gag, can be amusing. But coming on the heels of the parade of similar content that we’ve been subjected to for the past several years in the world of superhero films and shows, the device cloys.

Shot mostly in deeply shadowed interiors, the movie rarely makes effective use of its widescreen format. Indeed, it has a stagy quality and plays mostly as a series of theatrical exchanges between Gilles and Koch.

The title of the film “Mending the Line” refers to an adjustment to a fly-fishing line to counter the effects of water currents. But there’s a lot more than the placement of a filament that needs to be remedied in this well-meaning but inert PTSD melodrama.

Directed by Mary Harron from a screenplay by John Walsh, the thoroughly unengaging film is a remarkable achievement, but only considering the misspent potential of its juicy source material.

On the one hand, Beasts is a refreshing departure from the Michael Bay era: a sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes incoherent CGI fight fest structured around a story of family, found and otherwise, and starring a diverse cast. But it’s still, despite a few mildly grown-up jokes, a quintessential Transformers film in one inescapable way. It should come with a different sort of content advisory: No one over 21 admitted without their inner child.

Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge.

L’immensità lives up to its title: It’s a small but all-encompassing portrait of how life feels in a certain time and place — when the broken pieces of one’s true self are invisibly coming together, even when getting them to fit feels too overwhelming to contemplate.

It’s not especially new to see a story about a guy who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, even one this hyperbolic. One might say that Flamin’ Hot is just another serving of cinematic junk food: corn chips sprinkled liberally with the moviemaking equivalent of maltodextrin.

Although the performances are strong and committed — especially Qualley’s — the movie is little more than a conversation between two people who are constantly, maybe even constitutionally, full of it.