Tornatore’s tendency toward information overload is balanced by a clear affection for his subject — the film treats Morricone with the tenderness of a close friend, insisting that we see him for more than the melodies that made him famous.

Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale that packs a more poignant punch than most entries in the superpowered canon.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

As much as Guy Ritchie’s uber-violent, stakes-free, World War II action comedy caper “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” milks its “based on a true story” bona fides, it’s more akin to the last decade’s glut of slick, cool-guy popcorn pictures (including his own) than any meaningful retelling of real heroism.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

It’s hard to fault Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners” for being chaotic and miserable. That’s the mood he’s after — and he captures it with such assurance that the film is a tough watch.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

The film “The Beast” is a Russian nesting doll of genres: a belle epoque romance set inside a contemporary serial-killer thriller set inside a dystopian sci-fi drama.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

Monkey Man seems hellbent on establishing itself as the latest wrinkle in post-Wickian cinema: nonstop mayhem featuring an actor previously thought of as a sweetie pie.

Wicked Little Letters manages the paradoxical trick of being both broadly played and finely acted, the first due to a director intent on underlining every action with a heavy Sharpie and the second to a cast that colors in the outlines of their characters with finesse, depth and life.

Wingard’s not a sentimentalist, and “Godzilla x Kong” stumbles whenever he tries to slap phony emotions onto the film to make it more like a generic crowd-pleaser.

It’s the right kind of bonkers for the right kind of audience, a gaga genre hodgepodge that, not for nothing, taps Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as its showstopping anthem and reminds us of a truism, of both cinema and life: Adding a dog or two — or 60 — can make just about anything better.

If "Road House” were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor. But it doesn’t aspire to much more than mining the intellectual property catalogue for a quick-and-dirty cash grab.

Regina King gives a lively, convincing portrayal of pioneering U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in “Shirley,” an earnest, curiously listless biopic of a woman whose legacy suffuses modern life, even as it goes unacknowledged.

The new film is professionally made, well-acted, entertaining enough, and possessed of no earthly reason to exist aside from the care and feeding of intellectual property.

A modern Gothic slow burn that simmers in pedestrian frights until it finally boils over into bursts of delicious, gory violence. When it does, anchored by an impressive performance by Sydney Sweeney, the bloodshed isn’t just welcome but cathartic, a gonzo takedown of religious patriarchy with one hell of a memorable finale that reconfirms the good news: Nunsploitation is back, baby.

The lightweight nature of the plot is, arguably, appropriate to the film’s gentle comedy, which elicits chuckles here and there, but rarely stings or draws blood.

Four Daughters is film as family therapy and family therapy as film.

The story is a familiar one — a young immigrant fetches up in New York to seek his fortune, only to be buffeted by a bumptious city and cut to the quick by its competitive edge — but Torres reshapes it into something simultaneously more fantastical and far more real.

Despite the radio reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and some very “Just Say No”-era drug busts, this is a mythic 1980s and a mythic USA, peopled by venal desperados pulled from the mildewed pages of a 1950s Jim Thompson novel.

There are no gambles in this crossbreed of sports movie and doggy drama that dutifully — and lazily — stays on course from beginning to end. Heartstrings are tugged, dogs are adored and it’s all inoffensively inspirational.

There’s the potential for some real emotion here, as well as a touch of real-world commentary about a woman with 21st-century sensibilities trapped in a 19th-century world that feels, at times, medieval. But we can only catch glimpses of it beneath all the flickering layers of paint.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

Under the supervision of animation director Carlos Léon Sancha, the film is a graceful, somewhat overbusy visual treat, a playful riot of colors anchored by a crisp sense of line.

Shayda could have been a horror story. Instead, it’s a survivor’s tale, and it’s suffused with gratitude and love.

The humor is often over-caffeinated and anarchic — a style that suits the production — but when the film dares to slow down, it has a gift for reworking classic gags, like a wordless shot of animals stampeding through a china shop.

It’s all meticulously conceived and impressively staged, but becomes repetitive and monotonous, devolving for anyone not completely steeped in the “Dune” universe into a hazy orange-and-ocher soup of dust, smoke, flames and sand.