It has elements of melodrama, of the soap opera even. But the film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures.

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

In this wildly uneven melodrama by writer-director Zach Braff, no member of the talented ensemble cast is entirely able to navigate its messy plot. That a few actors do manage to stay afloat for occasional breaths of air seems like a divine miracle.

With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.

If you are also an acolyte in the church of chopsocky, samurai swordplay and gunslinging gangsters, you could do a lot worse than John Wick: Chapter 4. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to do better.

Rodeo looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods dutifully doubles down on everything that made the first film both charming and instantly disposable. But the heart and meta-humor that were so refreshing the first time feel static and stale in returning director David F. Sandberg’s more-of-the-same sequel.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

Inside is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

The music energizes this often slow-moving film, even if it isn’t potent enough to bring its protagonist to life. Lucas’s bulky camera has, in its way, as much personality as its owner.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

The Quiet Girl is that rare thing: a work of storytelling that speaks most loudly when it is saying nothing.

Quotation forthcoming.

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

With Palm Trees and Power Lines, Dack has created a haunting portrait of how trust is manipulated and abused; the trust she builds up with her characters and audience, however, remains steadfast, resulting in a film of disarming candor and power.

For the most part, Creed III is a matter of clear, straightforward storytelling, with a well-balanced variety of action, feeling, character development and fan-pleasing callbacks. It’s a good movie.

"Luther” is not without its pleasures, assuming you have the stomach for the kind of theatrical crimes that exist only in filmdom.

During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), Cocaine Bear goes into snoring hibernation.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

Anton conveys a deep well of unrequited longing that is so powerful, it doesn’t really need storytelling gimmicks.

Less intriguingly convoluted than concussed into lifelessness, “Marlowe” is the cinematic equivalent of a word salad: It parrots all the right lines while striking all the right poses, without saying much of anything at all.

In “Quantumania,” sprightly pacing and lighthearted humor have succumbed to the turgid seriousness that plagues so much of the comic book canon.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a mostly flat, flavorless cocktail of a sequel that tries to replicate the fizz of the 2012 original by stirring together elements of a getting-her-groove-back love story with music-video-style production numbers, lessons in female empowerment delivered with all the subtlety of a TED Talk and the kind of let’s-put-on-a-show energy that went out of style in 1940, has — despite those flaws — its moments.

In the case of Sharper, we’re treated to puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each one delivered in sequential chapters — titled after the film’s main characters, Tom, Sandra, Max and Madeline — and unpacked, initially in reverse chronological order, with satisfying, if somewhat predictable, style and suspense. If you’re seeking substance, look elsewhere.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.