At best, it’s a suitable companion piece to the novel; at worst, it’s a lackluster feature bolstered only briefly by flashes of real human emotion.

By the time “Old” is over, the strongest feeling it leaves us with is that it just got 108 minutes shorter.

The action scenes are so inexplicably painful — and the character work in “Snake Eyes” is so unexpectedly strong — that your heart sinks whenever the swords come out.

Who are these people? Why should we care about them? Not only does this inauspicious debut struggles to answer those basic questions, it never finds a believable way to ask them.

What could’ve been a fun chimera that someone Frankensteined together from two wildly different films instead becomes a low-flying slog that fails to sew its mismatched parts into a monster with a personality of its own.

While it might feel callous to belabor the rushed and scattershot editing of a documentary that pushed through so many difficulties to exist at all, the circumstances that compromise the film are also the same ones that conspire to make it such an affecting tribute to Nicks’ daughter, a fitting testimony to the perseverance of her entire generation, and a satisfying capstone to a project that has always stressed the need for people in a community to recognize each other’s pain.

The filmmaker has made a rather soulful look at what it means to grasp onto life in its waning moments, and invites his audience into the center of that dilemma.

As mercifully non-didactic as one would expect from any French movie about a constellation of hot people banging into each other as they rotate along their respective orbits Paris, 13th District is much less interested in judging these characters than it is in watching to see how they keep their balance.

Memoria is more meditation than movie, a transfixing deep-dive into the profound challenges of relating to people and places from the outside in.

Corsini keeps up the anxiety, jumping from scene to scene and person to person with a giddy, nervous energy that at least promises the film, as annoying as it might be, is never boring.

Justin Chon’s overcranked but achingly heartfelt “Blue Bayou” is a case-study in how issue-driven melodramas are a double-edged sword.

Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it’s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same.

While Jones (as is his right as an artist) seems determined to recast D-Man as an amorphous meditation on grief in many forms, the specificity of the piece is undeniable — and what makes it so enduring. D-Man speaks for itself, and it’s poetry in motion.

In not trying to reach too deeply into the well of profundity, Sarnoski has incidentally achieved a pretty profound movie.

Despite some of the counterproductive choices in “1666,” the way that “Fear Street” chooses to wrap up this mini-saga is a jolt of inspiration at the finish.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is as relentlessly odd as its predecessor, but its even giddier interest in corporate synergy turns it into a far more cynical outing. It will sell so many plush toys.

Red Rocket is so arresting because of how it keeps hope alive by rescuing devastation from the jaws of happiness.

Whatever you’re willing to take from it, there’s no denying that Titane is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa.

The film misses the core emotional charge of “A Separation” despite a similar eagerness to wade into the weeds of Iranian civil law, but what it lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the Socratic purity of its structure and the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one?

This first entry could stand to be a bit more satisfying on its own, but the sugar rush that accompanies “Gunpowder Milkshake” is more than sweet enough to prove its place in a fast-growing sub-genre, with a cherry on top.

The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold’s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture.

The result is an endearing and liberated explosion of Andersonian aesthetics that doesn’t always cohere into a satisfying package, but never slows down long enough to lose its engrossing appeal, and always retains its purpose.

Lingui can only exist in the face of great hardship, and Haroun’s surprisingly cathartic film honors the tradition by celebrating the fact that it still does.

At its best, Haynes’ film is neither a dry accounting of who the Velvets were nor a heady evocation of their work; it’s a movie about the fires these people set inside each other and how they spread to anyone else who was burning and gave them the same permission to push back against expectations.

Bergman Island is a heart-stoppingly poignant stunner all the same — one beating inside a body of work that has always been seasick with the bittersweet vertigo that comes from looking at the past through the smudged lens of memory and imagination.

The result is a low-key but lingeringly resonant tale about a strange chapter in the life of a grieving theater director — an intimate stage whisper of a film in which every scene feels like a secret.

If “Synonyms” was a howl, Ahed’s Knee is the spittle that was still left in Lapid’s mouth when it was over. It’s a smaller and less electrifying film — as contained and implosive as its title’s reference to Éric Rohmer would suggest — but also one that cuts to the heart of Lapid’s visceral genius and cauterizes the open wound at the center of his body of work.

The movie has few tricks on offer but above all, delivers a solid reminder of Penn’s filmmaking talent, and welcome evidence that it runs in the family.