The Painted Bird spirals between fairy tale and history lesson as if it were trying to fly with a clipped wing. Several passages create a stomach-churning sense of inertia, but only during the very last shot does the whole thing manage to get high enough off the ground to offer a valuable perspective.

If the film never aspires to be any heavier than one of FLS’ unscripted comedy shows, it would be wrong to write it off as a fans-only proposition — not when Fried so palpably captures the universal thrill of going out into the world and finding the people who give rhyme to your reason, and reason to your rhyme.

It spreads itself too wide and too shallow, and leaves us wishing that we might have seen more of the journey that has come to define Jones’ adult life: The path to starting a family of her own.

While The Tobacconist is always watchable, its inability to find meaning in a mess of uncooked symbolism prevents the movie from being worthy of Freud, and from doing justice to his parting words.

The film is a wild ride and a loving portrait, providing a vital record of this outsized figure who was so ahead of his time it seemed as though he transcended the laws of the universe.

Relic exists firmly in the realm of allegory, and if you’re looking for answers to the film’s spooky ambiguities and uncanny set pieces, you won’t find them. James is more concerned with creating an atmospheric rumination on intergenerational trauma, death, and dying that also happens to be a striking horror movie.

As this unclassifiable wildfire burns itself out, all you can say for sure is that these little zombies are alive in ways that most adults have lost the ability to imagine. Whatever demented game its characters are playing, Nagahisa’s live-action Twitch-fest is delightful for how it lets us watch along.

A terse and streamlined dad movie that’s shorter than a Sunday afternoon nap and just as exciting, Greyhound bobs across the screen like a nuanced character study that’s been entombed in a 2,000-ton iron casket and set adrift over the Atlantic.

Despite the familiarity, The Old Guard manages to be both very grounded and very entertaining, a marriage of expectations and twists unlike little else the genre has inspired even during its most fruitful times.

Comedy has to be more than just cheap, gross gags that illicit a response steeped in revulsion. It’s got to have a heart.

Charlène Favier’s Slalom is a familiar story of sexual abuse, but one told with such bracing intensity that it snaps across your face like a blast of cold mountain air.

Another guns and glory war movie about young American soldiers having to shoot their way out of some rats nest they should never have been sent to in the first place, Rod Lurie’s The Outpost is a familiar but uncommonly visceral reminder of what it really means to “support the troops.”

An entertaining and informative new documentary, Denise Ho: Becoming the Song, reveals the singer’s motivation and personal sacrifices while also offering a vital survey of Hong Kong history and the fight for independence.

Before its messy climax, Skyman works well as a tragicomic look at the nature of extraterrestrial obsessives. After a random expert opens the movie by explaining that such true believers are “looking for something science can’t prove,” Myrick digs into the psychological factors driving that desire with enthralling results.

The most intense look at a social media-obsessed loner since “Eighth Grade,” Swedish director Von Horn’s Polish-language feature finds its character wrestling with the nature of her popularity, until she’s forced to confront the disconnect between her public and personal existence in vivid detail.

The filmmakers excel at crafting delightful musical montages to capture the sense of escapism Yuri finds in his newfound support system, but it’s clear that these circumstances provide only a temporary fix.

While Mouret can’t resist the desire to tie it up into a neat little bundle, just like some of its less inventive genre peers, Love Affairs still manages to end in an unexpected way that feels just right — unwilling to settle on a tidy outcome, and open to the possibilities of what could happen next.

A dense collection of inquisitive, unpredictable and often life-affirming responses to the pandemic from some of the most astute directors working today, Homemade is pure filmmaking talent in bite-sized pieces that doubles as a lively, scattershot collage of the world in 2020.

This is Hamilton as you always wanted to see it, and it always will be.

While even the movie’s best moments are derivative enough to deserve that kind of mix-and-match categorization, Welsh shoots the whole thing with such a knowing sense of time and place that its age-old story of revolt can feel like it’s happening for the very first time — like it’s now or never, and there’ll be no going back once the sun comes up.

The well-intentioned and wincingly naive work of a white filmmaker who recognizes the need for change but fails to comprehend the full extent of the problem, “Women in Blue” is most valuable as yet another reminder that defunding the police isn’t a radical position so much as it’s the only feasible way forward; it’s the difference between moving deck chairs around the Titanic and building a safer boat.

If the intimate storytelling doesn’t hit viewers where it hurts, the film’s timely exploration of topics seemingly ripped from the headlines are destined to sting on their own.

Each portion of the story — the formation of the 9to5 group, its ambitious jump into union organizing, and its current aims today — could easily engender its own feature, but it’s the early acts of the film that are most successful on their own.

Even Bautista and a genuinely cute kid co-star can’t enliven this predictable and humorless entry into a micro-genre long due for a refresher.

Sensitive and lived-in and strong in ways that a more forceful version of this story could never have been, Bora’s debut sketches a portrait of a girl coming into her own strength, and learning to see the blank page of her life as an opportunity rather than a death sentence.

This modest recollection is a quiet act of defiance and course correction. “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” may not be worth anyone’s time, but The Ghost of Peter Sellers is another story — and a much better one.

Despite a bumpy screenplay and some odd tonal choices, Garcia excels as a monosyllabic Bigfoot who casts a big shadow and uses it hide from the world.

One way or the other, the biggest issue with “The Story of Fire Saga” is that most of it is just too limp and anodyne to register.