The Protege may not rise to the level of art, but like Anna herself, it does demonstrate a mastery of a certain set of skills, however limited.

Licorice Pizza is at its best — and is genuinely charming — when it’s simply focused on Gary and Alana — two mixed-up kids trying to make their way in a world that feels promising and perilous in equal measure.

Unexpectedly likeable, thanks to the high-spirited performances of stars James Belushi and Charles Grodin, under the relaxed direction by Arthur Hiller.

There are moments when Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris resembles the cinematic equivalent of nursery food: over-egged but soothing, and perhaps a much-needed respite from a world in danger of spinning off its axis.

As arresting and elaborate as the images are in The Northman, there are just as many sequences that revert strictly to pulpy, B-movie type.

It’s Southern-fried “The Blue Lagoon” meets “Murder, She Wrote” — and topped off with a sprinkling of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Actress Nana Mensah (“After Yang”) makes an impressive debut as a writer-director with “Queen of Glory,” a dry comedy of culture clashes, both ethnic and generational.

Whenever a sometimes-marginalized community gets the chance to tell its story on screen, expectations can be high. India Sweets and Spices, which looks at an Indian American family, takes that expectation and turns it on its head, giving us a more nuanced, complicated, and problematic look at the people it’s about.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm doesn’t end with catharsis, but even insects may have something to teach humanity: to endure the best way we can, however minuscule we may feel in the face of an incomprehensible world.

As a director, Penn knows how to create arresting tableaus that draw the eye and spark the viewer’s own sensory past. As an actor, no one is better at finding honesty in the moment. Like the antihero at its center, the essence of Flag Day remains tantalizingly elusive, potently evoked but never fully realized.

Audiard’s direction is engaging, especially his choice to portray one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world as a place defined by stark, concrete slabs of apartments and high-rises. But the film never quite lands on anything profound about how this generation lives.

It’s all entertaining enough, in a shaggy way. But if the director can’t stay focused on his own subject, how are we expected to do so?

Electric Dreams can be trusted to provide some idle amusement, particularly from "users" cautious enough to keep both their demands and levels of resistance set at low-to-modest -- probably the ideal setting for summer moviegoing in general, come to think of it.

The film’s title is apt: Gregory was one of a kind. But despite the film’s argument that its subject’s activism was part and parcel of his comedy, and not an afterthought, it’s the jokes that are given short shrift here. One wishes there might have been room for a few more of them.

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

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.

It's a lovely film, but a little inert. It reaches its high point with glorious close-ups of the children. From there, it's all downhill.

It manages to keep you going until the end and delivers the appropriate payoffs as a generic-brand thriller.

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.

Though the script is predictable, it's not too clumsy.

Though there’s no reinvention of the genre here, Louder’s mesmerizing mouse proves more than a match for the assembled tomcats — all exuding machismo — with whom she must deal.

Even a character as sincere and innocently wise as Marcel isn’t above fan service, even if it means taking a sweetly captivating idea an inch too far.

Sundown is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate. Roth is still a great and mesmerizing actor, even when he’s drifting, vacantly, through a hellscape.

Fortunately, Ahmed (an Oscar nominee for last year’s Sound of Metal and more recently seen in the niche Mogul Mowgli) delivers another one of his reliably watchable performances.

Although the pacing of the film — written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (“What Maisie Knew”), from a story co-written with David Spreter — can be as slow as the clouds over Big Sky Country, the flawed young characters grow on you, their troubles gradually becoming as mythic as the landscape that surrounds them.

What turns out to be the most moving and meaningful thing about the film isn’t the song at its center, but the work ethic of a man who might have disappeared from the public eye for years at a time but never stopped sweating every word.

Cousteau is a thorough if somewhat by-the-book profile of a pioneer in the field of marine ecology and an activist for better environmental stewardship.

Co-directed by siblings and faith-based filmmakers Andrew and John Erwin, this down-the-middle crowd pleaser ultimately makes for a rousing enough portrayal of against-the-odds fortitude, pad-crunching gridiron action and good old-fashioned Midwestern decency.