Anyone familiar with Poonpiriya’s “Bad Genius” won’t be surprised to find that the director’s follow-up fizzes with the same pop sensibility that made his high-school heist thriller the most internationally successful Thai film ever, and afforded him this chance to make something more personal. To his credit, it does feel personal, even (or perhaps especially) as it speeds over a few potholes of forced schmaltz. For all of the feeling in this broadly enjoyable journey, “One for the Road” is most effective for its simple pleasures — smooth needle drops, nostalgia-saturated cinematography, and tear-jerking reveals engineered with the precision of a luxury sedan — but it often stalls out when it tries to switch gears and steer through rougher emotional terrain....

Christopher Nolan’s 12th feature film, the star-studded period piece “Oppenheimer,” debuted its teaser trailer complete with a live countdown to the July 21, 2023. The “world forever changes” thanks to the scientific invention of the atom bomb, “fathered” by Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy. Known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer was head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and helmed the “Manhattan Project,” which first developed nuclear weapons for World War II....

Updated February 9: Denis Villeneuve’s sweeping “Dune” (Warner Bros.) leads the way as the frontrunner in the VFX race. The other nominees include “No Time to Die” (MGM/UA), “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (Marvel/Disney), “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (Marvel/Disney), and the surprising “Free Guy” (20th Century/Disney). DNEG created imaginative VFX for the otherworldly “Dune” (overseen by two-time Oscar-winning production VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and Oscar-winning SFX supervisor Gerd Nefzer)....

The first episode of the season, titled “Echoes,” raises the stakes for all of “Outlander’s” characters and reckons with Season 5’s brutal finale. Claire (Caitríona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) have built a life for themselves in Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina, but Claire is still processing the trauma of her sexual assault. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War is on the horizon, and Brianna (Sophie Skelton) and Roger (Richard Rankin) wonder how they’ll weather the coming conflict....

“I think people will be surprised by the series for two reasons,” Jackson said. “One, it’ll be far more intimate than they imagined it to be, because everyone is used to seeing music documentaries being a bit kind of MTV-ish, sort of together in a poppy kind of way and it’s just the music, music, music, you know? The music isn’t at the forefront of this film: weirdly, it’s what goes on behind the music at the forefront....

Despite its title, however, Wandel’s focus is not the unbridled joy and freedom of childhood, though there are some rare instances of it here. Instead, she paints a harrowing picture of the memories many of us have tried to forget, where school is a warzone rife with violence and bullying, one that children are forced to largely maneuver alone. Wandel is interested in the life-cycle of bullying, and the violence we’re taught to use as a defense mechanism at a young age....

Some movies don’t seem inevitable until they’re made. The most absurd thing about Sion Sono’s “Prisoners of the Ghostland” — a sukiyaki psych-Western that casts Nicolas Cage as a criminal on a mission to rescue a runaway girl from a post-apocalyptic wasteland before the bombs attached to his balls explode — is that it didn’t already exist. This is the first film that Sono shot (predominately) in English, and the first film that Cage shot with a (predominately) Japanese crew, but “Prisoners of the Ghostland” leaves no doubt that these two wildmen speak the same language....