If you haven’t sampled the works of Miike before now, here’s the perfect introduction. And yakuza action-comedy fans, you never forget your First Love.

Whatever its virtues, the film comes together more adroitly than satisfyingly. Think of Zeroville as an artifact, worth looking at as a piece of pre-history that cannot — at present — shed its baggage, and frankly didn’t need that off-screen baggage to be a bust.

Jeffrey Wright plays the world weary library director trying to keep the peace and hold on to some semblance of the institution’s core mission — a fact delivering, education supplementing bastion of learning, civic responsibility and civility. That’s one thing The Public absolutely nails.

“In moments of great upheaval,” Broadway wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda declares, hinting at the dark politics of bigotry and anti-semitism on the rise here and abroad, “‘Fiddler’ is going to seem relevant.”

It begins as a chatty, catty and not that amusing or harrowing hostage tale that falls well short of “thriller,” and devolves into something less.

Yes, we’ve filled the atmosphere with levels of carbon dioxide not seen in 66 million years of geologic time. But at least we get our own “epoch,” the Anthropocene, named after us. And there’s a smidgen of cautious hope underscoring much of what we see here.

Fazili has made an otherwise-unblinking cell-phone verite film of the crisis of our times, a first-person account of what people who cannot live where they are do to save themselves. Nobody watching “Midnight Traveler” can come away from it unimpressed, even if some are determined to look on this crisis and remain unmoved.

Just when you give up on the intended comedy ever coming together, it dives into something edgier. But that flip-flop is only a tease for a movie that never was, and probably never was going to be funnier than the one they ended up making, which is as charmless as it is laughless.

We few, we not-easily-bored few, can catch “The Goldfinch” in a theater and revel in unerringly modulated performances — everybody is so softspoken that the verbal explosions have alarming violence about them — and a world we might envy, or at least resent a little bit.

Tall Girl may miss, but it doesn’t miss by much.

She’s not unattractive, except when the movie goes out of its way to make her so. But Bell’s screen presence isn’t warm or engaging and the script’s jokes aren’t good enough to transform that.

Ad Astra (Latin for “To the Stars”) has dazzling eye candy and reasonable extrapolations of what near future space colonization might look like...But like too many imitation “Space Odysseys,” it flunks that most basic test applied to science fiction of this nature. It doesn’t make us care what happens, and I, for one, don’t care to see it again.

Actor turned writer-director Larry Fessenden (“Beneath,” “Wendigo”) seeks to distract us from the well-worn path by talking us to death. There are endless scenes of the doctor (David Call of “Tiny Furniture”) “teaching” the creation he names “Adam” (CLE-verrr) the fundamentals of life.

The first seventeen minutes of The Sound of Silence plays like the best short film in many a year. It’s compact, provocative and thanks to the serenity of its star, Peter Sarsgaard, and fraught exhaustion of the client (Rashida Jones), draws us in pretty much instantly. It leaves us with a sense of whimsy unexplained — mystery.

It’s those human touches that make 3 Days with Dad endurable. And if they don’t quite save it (the difference between character actors and leading actors is not skill, but charisma), they at least give it purpose, with the occasional break for levity.

It’s a meditative movie, as one underscored with Beethoven’s solo piano pieces “Moonlight Sonata” and “Für Elise” would have to be. Brodsky isn’t the first to get across what it feels like to experience the world without hearing it, so she doesn’t dwell on that, even if it is her central thesis.

Hustlers finds awkward laughs in female-on-male cruelty, loses its nerve in the late acts, but finds its heart in the finale. And it hits the “I don’t want to depend on anybody” empowerment message awfully hard.

The saving grace of “As It Was” is Gallagher’s saving grace as well, that John Lennon-meets-John Lydon voice, the songs he wrote or co-wrote that brought him back from the dead, the album that restored his place in British rock.

It’s stunning stuff. But lacking a story, per se, and with no narrative drive, Aquarela is almost sleep-inducing, like a loop playing on super-high-resolution video on the screen.

Much of that plays like politically correct lip service, and like much of this Downton Abbey, feels unnecessary. But that’s the thing about a cinematic feast for the eyes and the ears like this. You trim the fat, you run the risk of making the whole meal tasteless and dull.

Hedlund has the best lines and makes a great case for future employment in movies of this genre. Affleck is reliably reliable in such roles, Pascal (of TV’s “Narcos”) impresses and Isaac is more prepped for action here than he was in “Operation Finale” or the “Star Wars” movies. Hunnam has the flattest character to play, something that doesn’t help a guy who always comes off as a less interesting, less fun version of Hedlund, even in movies where they don’t co-star.

American Dreamer is riveting to sit through, but too pitiless to embrace.

Imprisoned never escapes its lack of drive, never takes on the urgency this scenario promises.

Scarborough asks us to get past the nudity, the sexual heat and blatant titillation and consider the dynamics and consequences of these situations.

There’s a laid back confidence to the jokes, a flippancy to his chats with corporate types, consultants and nutrition experts, and a down home connection to the interviews (a farmer cries, fast food workers decry their exploitation) with real people trapped in this onerus machine.

The picture feels cluttered, with the big set pieces outlined and diagrammed and arriving at precise moments in the 160 minutes of the movie.

For those of us who have longed for a “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” meets “Wedding Crashers” in French, Netflix is here to fill that void.

The whole affair is so rushed and half-assed — they have Duran Duran songs on the soundtrack, years before the band released its first LP.