The movie is so flimsy that people might wonder how it could possibly have been made.

Amazing Grace can now be seen in all its aesthetic, spiritual and historical glory. And even more gratifyingly, it is as simple and unaffected as Aretha Franklin herself is in the film.

Marshall and screenwriter Andrew Cosby went overboard with their R-rating, introducing so much gore and profanity that it, quite frankly, gets dull. The flat performances and incoherent story do not help matters.

Bazawule’s simple, arrestingly composed frames accumulate into something transcendent and deeply affecting.

Even ardent Pattinson fandom won’t be enough to convert mainstream American audiences to the art-house director’s dark outlook and elliptical style.

The end result is a movie that feels oddly detached, especially considering the raw intimacy of Leigh’s previous films.

Yet despite the stirring performance at its heart, the movie is ultimately too restricted by its own dramatic conventions, and it only seldom comes to life.

The Best of Enemies is perhaps the first account of the United States’s traumatic racial history that could be adapted into a sitcom.

This is a small film with some big-ish names in it: Jeffrey Wright plays Stuart’s boss; Taylor Schilling is his love interest; and Gabrielle Union is a TV reporter. But it topples under the weight of its unwieldy themes.

In hewing so closely to life — in all its frailty and fellowship, its perseverance and mutual care — Jones has made something larger than life.

For all of its foodie appeal, however, Ramen Shop is a wispily sentimental enterprise, full of perfunctory transitions, maudlin plot twists and awkward time shifts between past and present.

Shazam! operates as a thrilling fantasy and a comedy about the learning curve of growing up. It’s also a stirring tale of the heroic potential that lies inside each of us, if only we’re put to the test.

“Ash” may not hit the dizzying heights of “Sin” but, compared with “Mountain,” it’s a far more consistent and satisfying ride.

Luckily, The Mustang overcomes its most predictable story beats thanks to de Clermont-Tonnerre’s intimate, unfussy style and a quietly captivating performance by Schoenaerts.

The new story is decidedly, deliciously dark, veined with thin layers of Burton’s trademark macabre sensibility, which adds texture and tartness to the inherent charm of the story (at heart, one about the parent-child bond and the possibility of the impossible).

Thank goodness, then, for The Brink, which is just the kind of lucid, observant, chillingly contradictory portrait Bannon deserves.

The callousness with which the terrorists operate is palpable and conveyed with a degree of verisimilitude that borders on sadism. Hotel Mumbai is a clockwork thriller, but man, is it hard to watch.

There’s a ripping good story buried somewhere in The Aftermath, an intriguing but ultimately disappointing story.

The way that conflict plays out is also surprisingly plodding.

Both simplistic and overcomplicated, Us depends on some of horror’s most hackneyed cliches and gaps in logic — by now, shouldn’t all movie characters know never to go back into the house and to always stay together? — as well as a few windy speeches explaining why bizarre things keep happening. The viewer begins to wish that Peele had given his script one more pass, either to pare it down or beef it up.

An excellent and entertainingly old-fashioned police procedural.

Dragged Across Concrete may not be the kind of movie you’d expect to emerge from such inspiration, yet the impassioned energy of those composers is echoed in Zahler’s feverish yet stubbornly patient approach to storytelling.

Full disclosure: I am so not the target demographic for Five Feet Apart, a mushy, three-hankie weeper that is aimed squarely between the eyes of every 15-year-old girl.

For the first half of this spellbinding — and unexpectedly gut-wrenching — little film, there’s barely any dialogue at all.

It’s all kiss-kiss, bang-bang and backstabbing, with a twist that, while effective, leads to a denouement of questionable — and not entirely satisfying — moral reckoning. In some ways, Yardie plays out like a film noir, but with a strangely sweet ending, and without that genre’s deliciously bitter aftertaste.

The comedy is far more subtle and elusive than laugh-out-loud. It’s a reflective, even occasionally tedious slice of daily life that relies on Moore to sell its dullest interludes — sequences that aren’t made any livelier by Lelio’s parched, washed-out visual design.

If the new biopic Mapplethorpe presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail — and it does — that’s only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian.

It’s a while before we learn anything, even a name, about the title character in The Wedding Guest. Played by Dev Patel, who delivers an unexpectedly stoic — yet predictably appealing — lead performance, he is a man of deep professionalism and equally deep mystery.