Alissa Wilkinson

Like many documentaries of this sort, “Merchant Ivory” opts to be a survey without a thesis — informative, even engaging, but lacking an argument that might drive the documentary itself forward.

Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.

There’s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven’t felt in his previous work. The stakes, presumably, couldn’t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie, I don’t understand why I was meant to care. As an intellectual exercise, Tenet is very interesting, if not entirely successful. As a movie, I’m not so sure.

While there’s no reason to crack a lot of jokes to lighten the mood, it can start to feel like the movie relies too heavily on despair, to the point of capitalizing on its characters’ suffering — and, given the realism of Sheridan’s films, the suffering of people like them.

It does just what it sets out to do: Give us a bit of fantasy, and then let us remember the joy of reality.

Rae and Nanjiani are terrific comedians whose wisecracks and antics are thoroughly entertaining, so even if you know what the ending of The Lovebirds will be, it’s great fun watching them get there.

It’s absolutely exploding with energy because Elton John is its pulse. It stumbles a few times — as has its subject — but on the whole, it’s a consistently good performance from start to finish, a movie rooted in a real story that nonetheless doesn’t keep itself too tethered to the ground.

There is something off about You’re Cordially Invited, some sense that the whole thing never clicks into place.

Mortal Engines is visually spectacular, if a bit derivative. It’s a social allegory that goes for broke. And while it’s hardly a groundbreaking movie, it’s still pretty fun.

If you’re an aficionado of ’70s cinema, there’s probably not much new here. The films covered are certainly a murderer’s row of masterpieces, but they’re familiar to cinephiles. Yet despite its lack of depth, there’s value to Breakdown: 1975 as an introduction to an era, particularly for younger people or newer movie lovers who might relish learning about the films of the time and the ways they weave into history.

It’s not that American Made doesn’t have anything to say; it’s just that whatever it has to say has been said better somewhere else. It’s not bad; it’s not good, either. It’s just shallow.

Ella McCay is a bizarre movie that would have worked better if it went all-in as an homage to another era. Since we won’t get to see that version, you’ll just have to buckle up and enjoy the very strange ride.

The big difference between this kind of video game movie and an actual video game is that you’re not playing it — you’re just passively consuming it, and you know how it will end before it gets going. So any surprise or intrigue comes from just seeing how our mighty protagonist will get himself out of this scrape. That’s just enough for a couple hours of fairly mindless entertainment.

On a number of occasions, the film veers close to succeeding. At times it’s evocative and touching. But it’s also heaped high with ideas about the magic of stories and the importance of recapturing your sense of wonder, which don’t really add up to much in the end.

The Falling Star offers little in the way of dramatic tension or intrigue, and its comedy, mildly clever at first, starts to feel repetitive. The word “tedious” popped into my mind a few times, perhaps because the world of the film is so small that it starts to feel airless and lacking in surprise.

As a film, it’s at best serviceable, stronger in its world-building than in its climactic exorcism and nowhere near as unnerving as the original. Yet Believer is a fascinating artifact of 2023. It highlights in myriad ways how much the world has changed since the original’s release. Hollywood isn’t the same, and neither is American religious culture.

Cody gets a little subversive with it all — Lisa’s stepsister, Taffy, for instance, is not at all what this kind of movie usually serves up, and that feels refreshing. But the rest is pretty predictable from the start, and so it starts to wear a little thin after a while, a title in search of a story.

For as much as DuVernay’s film is a lovely and good-hearted movie that delivers lots of eye-popping, imaginative awe, its status as an adaptation necessarily raises the question: Was A Wrinkle in Time the right source material through which to tell this story?

There’s enough in Eleanor the Great to still make it watchable, especially the genuinely moving intergenerational connection between two women who need each other to move past their particular grief. If only the world around them had been developed more carefully, too.

It knows what year it’s coming out — on July 4, no less — and it’s slamming on every hot button it can find. That might be cathartic. It might also be turning pain into entertainment. With The First Purge, your mileage may vary.

I left All the Money in the World wondering why this was a movie at all. It’s a series of events that happened, to be sure. And Getty is an important and interesting figure from the middle of the 20th century. But those facts don’t make for a good movie.

It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting one.

The result is a bland heist movie in space that does nothing unexpected and never justifies its existence.

It’s focused on pleasing fans of the original without taking any risks. It’s a pleasant, diverting, modestly ambitious film, fun for the whole family. But it leaves much to be desired, too.

It’s both a blindingly predictable pastiche of an action movie — absolutely nothing happens here that you haven’t seen in a movie before, with the possible exception of some crass sign-language humor from a giant gorilla — and weirdly charming.

Even when he’s in a mediocre movie (and he often is), LaBeouf is a magnetic onscreen presence. There’s a naturalism and complexity to his McEnroe that keeps him from being turned into a caricature. It’s hard not to want more of him.

Dumbo isn’t entirely unpleasant to watch — on the whole, it’s probably Burton’s best since Big Fish, whatever that’s worth — and while the scenes in which the elephant takes flight around the circus tent aren’t exactly magical, they’re pretty fun.

There’s an interesting film dancing around the edges of The Greatest Hits, but there’s both too much sentimentality and not enough thought, and that’s too bad.