Somehow, for all the work that went into the film, it comes across as something that may have worked better as an audiobook.

Reality isn’t just stranger than fiction: It’s subtler, sadder and exponentially more haunting.

This a sweet, mostly cute story about the importance of the people we’re related to, peppered with some fairly broad and not especially hilarious yuks.

Bailey nails the iconic moments (that head toss) and the high notes, but also her character’s combination of spunk and innocence. She delivers a lovely performance that’s all the more accomplished for being delivered amid crashing waves, sweeping vistas and the crushing expectations of generations of fans. As a new generation’s Ariel, she makes The Little Mermaid her own — with confidence, charisma and oceans of charm.

Kandahar is very much a box-ticking exercise, with Butler playing the same kind of hero — perhaps literally the same guy — he has built a career out of.

As a slice of life spiked with mordant, uncynical humor, it’s deliciously entertaining. In other words, it’s another Holofcener movie, which means it’s perilously close to perfect.

With its multiple intersecting narratives, writer-director Saim Sadiq’s debut feature takes an almost novelistic approach to its central theme: the repression of human individuality by a regimented traditional society.

There’s a certain kind of French movie that’s a quintessentially French movie: stylish, intellectually engaged, alert to adult emotions and problems. Other People’s Children is that kind of movie — it tells a small-canvas story that loses none of its poignancy for refusing to overreach or give into fatal self-seriousness.

Next to Momoa, the novelty of Fast X lies mostly in its cameos, which only a spoilsport would describe in more detail; suffice it to say that most work, and the most newsworthy come in the film’s final scenes, including the closing credits. Not surprisingly, Fast X brings new meaning to the term “cliffhanger.” There’s definitely more to come. There always is.

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.”

Monica is moody, slow-moving and stronger on style than characterization, yet Lysette and Clarkson endow it with feeling. This is a broken-family drama that culminates not with shouted recriminations or smashed crockery, but with baths, massages and gentle kisses.

As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, The Starling Girl plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s “Women Talking."

I wanted to buy this story. I really did. But its protagonist floats through the action — filled with jealousy, lust and violence — as though he were anesthetized.

R.M.N. is as gripping and scrupulously humane as Mungiu’s admirers have come to expect from an artist of supreme discipline and dramatic skill. It’s one thing to be a master of mise-en-scene; it’s all the more impressive when that talent for detail — pictorial and behavioral — results in an illumination of the world that’s both ruthless and surpassingly compassionate.

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.

[Fox] still has an immensely likable and funny on-camera persona, and now he is using that gift — along with a different one, this nakedly honest film memoir — to share hope, joy and perhaps a sense of acceptance with others.

Even amid the corny jokes, awkward segues, forced conflicts and predictable resolutions, Bergen and Giannini manage to develop a low-simmer chemistry between the insults.

Overwrought and overthought, this Carmen somehow winds up being underbaked, as Millepied throws various ideas at the screen, with precious few taking hold with any conviction.

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

Manzoor has created a world that feels at once very real — multicultural London, a blend of modernity and tradition — and very, very unreal. The story is a sci-fi and kung fu stew, with a mad-professor plotline that’s more than a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, the candy-colored sweetness of the sauce — a feminist story that is at heart about sibling love — makes all the hoo-hah go down a little easier.

A meticulously balanced if oddly inert film.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is decidedly and joyfully innocent. It’s refreshing to see a story about tween girls who are not depicted as children or shamed or sexualized.

On some level, Chevalier understands that the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was the bad old days. Yet it just can’t help but make them look really good.

In short, it’s a well-done studio horror movie stepping into the oversize shoes of its indie predecessors. It’s not a perfect fit, but by following in the footsteps of the earlier films, it gets the job done.

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.

The sad truth is that, for all his ambition, cinematic prowess and hyper-confessional candor, Aster doesn’t stick the landing. Instead, he’s made a movie about unresolved ambivalence that itself goes confoundingly unresolved.

The love language of the Russo family is shouting — one of several cliches deployed here — but Romano and his co-writer, Mark Stegemann, deftly deflate and dodge most other stereotypes, creating a funny and touching father-and-son tale about aspiration and finding your own path.

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

Cheesy, strident, ridiculous and sometimes disarmingly, stupidly funny, Renfield doesn’t go for the jugular as much as give it a playful and quickly forgotten love bite.

In her latest film, Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt, the director of 2019’s “First Cow” and virtuosa of slow cinema, turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.

The result is competent and informative, but lacks swagger and elegance. Sweetwater is no three-pointer.

As a thriller channeling the deepest anxieties of its era, however, How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels urgently, unmistakably of its time.

It’s all played for laughs, which fail to materialize in a story that milks easy cliches and stereotypes about Italians, pasta and sexual double-entendres, with icky dialogue about “spicy sausage” and the like.

Wild Life is at its best when it focuses on Kris’s path toward renewed purpose after an unspeakable loss. By committing that journey to film, Vasarhelyi and Chin show off an invaluable skill: knowing when a story is worthy of preservation.

The artistry is enough to keep children and adults watching. It may help that Mario gains power by eating mushrooms — a good message about healthy eating, on the one hand, yet one with an obvious psychedelic resonance at the same time.

Wilson’s portrayal of Nargle/Ross isn’t so much a performance as an impersonation. It’s a thin coat of paint, in other words, covering up some serious cracks in the storytelling.

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.

It’s a fever dream in which the past and present are confused, along with plant and animal, the living and the dead, and, ultimately, the meaning of this troubled vision.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves bottles the spirit of the game in the flask of a fantasy adventure even if it fails to reinvent the wheel.

It has elements of melodrama, of the soap opera even. But the film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures.

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

In this wildly uneven melodrama by writer-director Zach Braff, no member of the talented ensemble cast is entirely able to navigate its messy plot. That a few actors do manage to stay afloat for occasional breaths of air seems like a divine miracle.

With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.

If you are also an acolyte in the church of chopsocky, samurai swordplay and gunslinging gangsters, you could do a lot worse than John Wick: Chapter 4. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to do better.

Rodeo looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods dutifully doubles down on everything that made the first film both charming and instantly disposable. But the heart and meta-humor that were so refreshing the first time feel static and stale in returning director David F. Sandberg’s more-of-the-same sequel.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

Inside is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

The music energizes this often slow-moving film, even if it isn’t potent enough to bring its protagonist to life. Lucas’s bulky camera has, in its way, as much personality as its owner.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

The Quiet Girl is that rare thing: a work of storytelling that speaks most loudly when it is saying nothing.

Quotation forthcoming.

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

With Palm Trees and Power Lines, Dack has created a haunting portrait of how trust is manipulated and abused; the trust she builds up with her characters and audience, however, remains steadfast, resulting in a film of disarming candor and power.

For the most part, Creed III is a matter of clear, straightforward storytelling, with a well-balanced variety of action, feeling, character development and fan-pleasing callbacks. It’s a good movie.

"Luther” is not without its pleasures, assuming you have the stomach for the kind of theatrical crimes that exist only in filmdom.

During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), Cocaine Bear goes into snoring hibernation.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

Anton conveys a deep well of unrequited longing that is so powerful, it doesn’t really need storytelling gimmicks.

Less intriguingly convoluted than concussed into lifelessness, “Marlowe” is the cinematic equivalent of a word salad: It parrots all the right lines while striking all the right poses, without saying much of anything at all.

In “Quantumania,” sprightly pacing and lighthearted humor have succumbed to the turgid seriousness that plagues so much of the comic book canon.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a mostly flat, flavorless cocktail of a sequel that tries to replicate the fizz of the 2012 original by stirring together elements of a getting-her-groove-back love story with music-video-style production numbers, lessons in female empowerment delivered with all the subtlety of a TED Talk and the kind of let’s-put-on-a-show energy that went out of style in 1940, has — despite those flaws — its moments.

In the case of Sharper, we’re treated to puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each one delivered in sequential chapters — titled after the film’s main characters, Tom, Sandra, Max and Madeline — and unpacked, initially in reverse chronological order, with satisfying, if somewhat predictable, style and suspense. If you’re seeking substance, look elsewhere.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.

Mostly gentle but occasionally turbulent comic drama, which is primarily about the ways people fail their families, friends and themselves.

To anyone who feels, at times, so overwhelmed by the drumbeat of climate disaster, economic collapse, crime, mass shooting and terrorism, deadly viruses, and political polarization that it feels as the apocalypse is upon us, Knock at the Cabin will resonate powerfully.

Baby Ruby makes a valuable contribution to the emerging cinematic literature on the unspoken realities of women’s lived experience — with style, disarming honesty, and a steady and intelligent hand.

Dhont tells a familiar story in what feels like a fresh and urgently new way, with sensitivity, sadness and promising glimmers of hope.

A serviceable mash-up of sitcom and sports flick, 80 for Brady should please fans of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field and/or Tom Brady. Everybody else might want to call a timeout.

Hansen-Love’s semi-autobiographical script provides heart-wrenching glimpses of the empathetic academic within.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

You People sounds preachy, doesn’t it? Trust me, it’s not. What it really is is a master class on wedge issues and our shared humanity, delivered by comedians who know that laughter can be at once a bitter pill and the best medicine.

Rather than a self-indulgent portrait of two amazing men and their amazing careers, “Turn Every Page” bristles with ego and good-humored tension.

Mawkish, obvious and manipulative, “The Son” is, quite simply, a disappointment, from its pat setup to its equally false — and, quite frankly, cruel — resolution.

While “Missing” is just a cheap thriller, one can’t help but wonder whether, in the hands of more inventive filmmakers, the screen time that has come to define personal interaction might find a richer dramatic purpose.

After Love, the feature-length debut from British writer-director Aleem Khan, is a quietly compelling exploration of identity, grief and the secrets loved ones take to the grave.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

Plane is a shot of adrenaline and fast-paced, brain-free fun.

Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s follow-up to “Shoplifters,” his Oscar-nominated 2018 film about a family of liars, cheats and thieves, is, like that unexpectedly heartwarming drama, a story whose darker themes of social dysfunction and fissure are sublimated into a fable of surprising sweetness.

With skill and sensitivity, Polley turns an on-the-nose political debate into a bracing declaration of independence.

Working together for the first time since 2004’s “Finding Neverland,” director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Magee have reimagined Holm’s vision by scaling back the cynicism, softening the central character’s tragic backstory and dulling the black comedy. Yet it’s Hanks’s performance that sets this Hollywood remake apart from the original.

Living mostly avoids sappiness. And it shows an actor at the peak of his powers.

Still, for all its attractively appointed torpor, Corsage offers a provocative retort to the fetishistic depictions of Elisabeth that have become commodified in Austria over the past 125 years. It tears open the candy box to reveal something poisonous at its center.

Where The Pale Blue Eye succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar — yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember — got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.

Despite clocking in at nearly 2½ hours, “I Wanna Dance” barely scratches the surface of its celestial subject and the figures in her orbit.

Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play is a murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

Like so many recent films — “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Belfast,” “The Fabelmans,” “Empire of Light” — Babylon wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn.

Matilda...explodes with an exhilarating pleasure in filmic transformation, in harnessing the strength of one medium and regenerating it freshly in another.

For fans of wildlife documentaries, Wildcat is at least as good as, say, a rerun of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” (Google it). That is to say: It’s enjoyable while it lasts but fades from the mind soon after, all except for that little piece of a viewer’s heart that holds out hope that little Keanu — and the people who raised him — will one day find the lives they deserve.

The bar isn’t terribly high here, but Puss and company clear it comfortably, landing — but of course — on their feet.

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger.

Through a donkey’s large and expressive eyes, Eo shows us the beauty of the world and the cruelty of humanity.

Olivia Colman delivers an alternately delicate and ferocious performance as a cinema manager in Empire of Light, a tender, tear-soaked valentine to the ineffable joys of moviegoing.

Ultimately, the movie tells a story about two lives: complicated, filled with both love and pain, but well and fully lived.