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

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

Hill evokes the great westerns of the past—in particular "Shane" and "My Darling Clementine"— but his approach is essentially postmodern. Though Hickok is a hero from another century, his plight is thoroughly contemporary.

Young Plato is a fascinating, sometimes funny and often touching film. It’s easy to see why the directors were drawn to McArevey and his school.

With the whole super-racket on the ropes, the cast of “Deadpool & Wolverine” seizes the opportunity to prove the power of their own charisma.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise, itself one of the more successful second go-rounds, commercially and artistically, of Hollywood’s modern corporate era. Yet the movie, like its three predecessors, is a fascinating case of content following form.

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.

Retrograde is a handsome film, ironically, conveying a sense of the country that is at stake, and its people. And Heineman is smart to frame the story around a single individual, as he did in his fact-based drama about war correspondent Marie Colvin, “A Private War.”

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

The discussions that take place on camera, in tastefully appointed suites, are frank and often offer fascinating insights into these dilemmas. But it is the sharply jarring — and dismayingly repetitive — footage of carnage that will stay with you long after the echoes of the film’s subjects’ words have faded from your mind.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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."

It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell.

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.

Earth Mama says a lot with very few words.

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.

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.

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.