The resulting film offers a unique and revealing — but fundamentally incomplete — perspective on the ongoing war in Gaza.

Dracula is one of the most confounding, and worst, movies I’ve seen in a long time.

This month’s Statham movie is titled “Shelter.” And as these things go, “Shelter” is more Shake Shack than it is McDonald’s. It resembles his other genre movies in the basic form and idea, but it’s a much more high-end and satisfying version.

The sheer earnestness of director Ugo Bienvenu’s elegiac, even mournful tale feels as appealingly anachronistic as its lush 2D animation.

McAdams again proves she has real comedic chops that this island, and Raimi’s direction, have only sharpened.

At 160 minutes, “Magellan” is one of the shortest and most accessible of Diaz’s films, which for the past decade have tended to fall between four and eight hours...But the scale of the film remains resolutely epic, in part because Diaz is patient and in part because he’s insistent on telling this story of conquest and domination on his terms.

It’s a mark of creative achievement that Zlotowski’s film manages to dwell in uncertainty — about what’s really going on, where Lilian’s marbles have gone and, for that matter, why her ex is so game to chase them around with her. Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny, low-key unsettling but far from provocative, and elbow-deep in dreams and memory but without much discernible revelation.

Almost every narrative choice is ludicrous. And yet, “Mercy” is also a hoot and a half.

At minimum, “All That’s Left of You” is a thoughtful exploration of how trauma can both fracture and bond a family. But for those who need it, the film serves as an urgent reminder of how ignorance and passivity undermine what it means to be human.

If you go for this kind of fare, you’ll have a good time. If you don’t, you’ll probably find it off-putting.

Fiennes anchors the film with his remarkably layered performance, relishing Kelson’s eccentricities while conveying the underlying anguish of a man losing his grip on what his life once was.

In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” we are given the rare chance to watch an exploration of a religion born instead of female pain.

Riveting and darkly comedic, the film nimbly conveys the tragedies of buying into the American Dream.

The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.

Here, [Park] takes a 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax,” and applies it to his home country with malice aforethought. The result is an entertainment that draws blood.

This “Anaconda” never stops winking. Its juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

In some ways, this dramedy, directed by Bradley Cooper, is a familiar story about midlife crises and marital dissatisfaction, but it quickly swerves in a fresh direction, resulting in a movie that’s both resonant and hilarious.

Listening to “Sweet Caroline” feels like a hug — warm and fuzzy to some, smothering to others. Watching Song Sung Blue has a similar effect.

The Plague does an exceptional job of making viewers share in Ben’s growing sense of dread.

None of this would work were it not for the swaggering, high-wire performance of Chalamet.

From its opening shakedown to its final takedown, “The Secret Agent” wanders a world consumed by corruption.

The plot simply doesn’t have enough juice.

Brooks, whose storied career includes insightful gems such as “Terms of Endearment” and “Broadcast News,” turns in a halfhearted mess of a movie that spends its entire two-hour running time trying to figure out what it wants to be.

Goodbye June is a sweet but bland Christmas film that relies too heavily on its talented cast to make up for its narrative shortcomings — a surprising choice for actress Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, until you take note of who wrote the screenplay.

In “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou has made a love letter to nonconformists, and to the freedom one can feel when you simply stop caring about who the world wants you to be.

What a pleasure it is to witness a masterful storyteller at work, and to see Craig lead a franchise he so thoroughly enjoys.

Eternity might start out strong, but its plot eventually runs out of steam.

As a meditative study on what’s often left outside the frame, the film is a literal revelation. It’s also a beautifully crafted punch to the gut.

There’s a lot to like about “Jay Kelly,” the unexpectedly sweet new film from director Noah Baumbach. It’s beautifully shot, bustles with strong performances by a roundly endearing cast and indulges in an old-Hollywood elegance well-suited to its story: the late-life crisis of its titular megastar, played — embodied, really — by George Clooney.

In the end, “Rental Family” is a movie that gives viewers a lot to ponder — about loneliness and family, about the importance of truth and the comfort of white lies — even if the delivery mechanism proves imperfect.

The film is steeped in melancholy, a world populated by people who understand they are not exactly all right but don’t quite understand why.

Despite its packed agenda, the film can also feel meandering and directionless.

The film honors Hujar not by impersonating him, but by doing exactly what he did in a different medium: demanding we look long and hard at the world.

Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” — an uncanny homage to French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and, specifically, the making of his 1960 breakthrough, “Breathless” — balances its fervor with a stunning cinematic undertaking. Put simply, lovers of “Breathless” will be left so.

The movie is more than an admonition for the living; it’s also an achingly bittersweet love story about caregiving.

The Brit who brought us such violent delights as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver” has just the right mixture of empathy and impishness to turn King’s cautionary tale into a would-be blockbuster with integrity.

Although Fleischer pulls a few clever tricks, such as when his camera angles work to deceive viewers alongside the handful of French policemen chasing the Horsemen through Thaddeus’s eccentrically designed mansion, most of the film is underwhelming.

Christy, a biopic that plays by the rules, doesn’t do justice to an athlete who gloriously broke so many of them.

An astonishing lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence keeps Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” from falling apart — which is ironic, given that the new film depicts her ripping at the seams.

This movie would have done better two-thirds as long but focused more tightly, or four times longer and airing on Netflix as a limited series. Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.

This meditation on life is a 102-minute respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is. Perhaps that’s reductive. But, perhaps, that’s the point.

There is a ritualistic, even tribal, quality to DaCosta’s telling that suggests a truth to the story untethered to time or place: Any woman confined like Hedda is will strive to escape, one way or another.

It Was Just an Accident ends twice. Both times, its brilliance can take your breath away. That is, what breath you have left by the third and fourth acts of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s latest relentless road trip, wherein the destination isn’t a place or a thing, but a masterful commentary on power.

It’s a viciously smart and disturbingly funny abduction tale, primarily confined to a grubby basement but with a purview that extends from the inner sanctums of the memory to the outer reaches of the galaxy.

The movie does not demystify a rarefied world, or paint an emotionally accessible portrait of the artist, but rather assembles a somewhat stuffy compendium of literary references and insider-y bons mots aimed at tickling theater aficionados.

It’s a bold, claustrophobic movie that wouldn’t work without Byrne.

Ultimately, as is made overwhelmingly clear, this is a film about forgiveness. So allow us to extend the same grace to some clunky writing.

All the world is a farce, Ansari seems to say, while suggesting that it can still be saved. But like a breezy sitcom episode, his big-screen creation doesn’t feel the need to offer solutions.

The kind of statement that makes you feel like you’re watching a movie not about real people but about how eight years after #MeToo, we still haven’t figured out how to talk about it at all.

You’re astonished to see how fully actualized Candy was as a performer in his short time, but you’re also left with the heartbreak of all that was left unrealized by his untimely passing.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

This internal struggle transforms “Roofman” from what could have been a run-of-the-mill heist movie into an intriguing character study, even if it falls just short of success.

J-Lo is essentially an elaborate distraction, which is just fine as the story goes, but not exactly a kinetic position for a star.

This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

Johansson capitalizes on her cast’s innate chemistry. An accomplished performer herself, she is unsurprisingly an actor’s director. She guides the story with tenderness — perhaps to a fault, because even the most capable directing of a talented cast can’t save this movie from its central premise.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

One Battle After Another isn’t really a political film, but neither is it not a political film. It just carries its concerns within the framework of a hellacious action movie, a sidesplitting character comedy, a riveting suspense thriller and various other genres the director makes up as he goes along, replete with a hapless hero, a warrior princess and the damnedest villain the movies have seen in a very long time.

The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

That existential paradox — are we all in this thing called life together, or is it every man for himself? — gives the film and its protagonists something meaty to chew on as it, and they, progress. But “The Long Walk” doesn’t dig into it in any deeply satisfying way.

The story manages to put a smile on your face from time to time, despite the gloom of its humor. It avoids happily-ever-after almost as strenuously as it works to remind us: You’re not in Hollywood, hon, but Hampden.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Writer-director Russell, a producer and co-writer of TV’s “The Bear” and “Beef,” knows his Hollywood existentialism — the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody, the easy California vibe that hides gnawing insecurity, the understanding that a friend today can and certainly would cut your throat tomorrow.

Directed and co-written by the Samoan filmmaker Miki Magasiva, the movie features a unique central character, a powerhouse star performance and some truly uplifting choral singing. Those are the good parts. The less good part is a script that pummels audiences with melodrama, manipulation and sentimental clichés until we all cry uncle.

The grand subject of “Splitsville” is the virtues and pitfalls of unconventional relationship structures, and it’s never more inspired than when it’s finding surreal ways to convey the insecurities such arrangements may awaken.

James Sweeney seems intent on leading us all merrily to hell.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

All of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

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.

The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.

I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.

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.

Beecroft’s screenplay — which the actor turned filmmaker wrote after moving in with Tabatha and Porshia, off and on, for three years — is not as strong as her visual storytelling. Some of her dialogue trips over its own bootlaces.

Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.

Making memories it ain’t. But making 89 minutes of your life disappear almost painlessly has its place, too.

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

A sneaky tale of savagery in the dehumanizing digital age, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud” is as bleak a warning as you’ll find in theaters this year, cautioning against the corrosive combination of late capitalism, the internet and human nature.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go.

Architects who are already working to make architecture more sustainable and humane will roll their eyes at the last few minutes of commentary. But they won’t regret having seen “Architecton,” which is a raw, beautiful and demanding essay on the fate of our collective home.

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.

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

Rather than aim for the flagstick, “Happy Gilmore 2” seems all too content to lay up in search of one gimme putt after another.

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A suspense comedy as breezy and noncommittal as its title, this sophomore feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks is a deceptively low-fi affair, but it keeps a cheeky premise going for longer than it has any right to.

Buoyant, bracing and, most shocking of all, brief, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” represents a quantum leap of ship-righting.

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

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.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

Smurfs may be all over the multiverse, but it doesn’t land anywhere worth writing home about.

The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.

Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.

To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on “Superman,” banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favor of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humor.