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.