Alonso Duralde

The fourth film of a franchise that probably should have packed it in at least two movies ago, this by-the-numbers sequel offers absolutely nothing unexpected, starting with its opening beaches-and-bikinis montage to the climactic standoff with the villain.

Young Woman is a biopic with all sharp edges removed, the kind of non-threatening, inspirational Disney movie that teachers screen for fidgety students on the last day of fourth grade.

It’s an earnest attempt at a warm embrace that squeezes the life and charm out of itself.

We’ve truly been down this road before, and none of Miller’s many talents can overcome the sense of familiarity that he’s already done all of this, and better.

For all its craft, though, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never finds the “aha” moment that justifies returning to the well for reasons more pressing than branding and global markets.

At 126 minutes, The Fall Guy overstays its welcome for a bit, but the stunts, the comedy, and the spark between the film’s dynamic leads make the movie a delectable kick-off to the popcorn pleasures of the summer-movie season.

Ministry works best when it chucks history out the window and leans into cinematic silliness.

It’s a collective simmer of sight, sound, sweat, and sensation about fascinating, complex people pushed through their paces on and off the court.

Civil War ultimately risks nothing and subsequently says nothing; it’s a thrilling war picture cosplaying as an examination of the zeitgeist.

What Patel has crafted delivers both kinetic action and real-world relevance, an exceedingly rare combination.

If Hollywood insists on continuing its own separate monsterverse, it could do worse than GxK, a film where giant beasts wallop the tar out of each other with thrilling efficacy.

The new Spenglers have the potential to be as memorable as the original cadre of Ghostbusters, but between the cameos by the 1984 cast (whom the film uses more as goodwill ambassadors than like the talented comic actors they still are) and the callbacks to Slimer and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, they tend to feel like afterthoughts.

Drive-Away Dolls is, at its core, a comedy about eccentric people contending with inept but still deadly criminals. But neither the eccentrics nor the criminals feel remotely like real people, and their hijinks never summon up much hilarity or suspense.

The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.

None of this would work without Johnson, whose gift for side-eye and deadpan line readings grounds what could be a very silly story into one with real human stakes (that do not, thankfully, involve the fate of the entire world).

Lisa Frankenstein is a deadly dull and stitched-together effort that doubtless worked better on paper than it does in execution

Director Matthew Vaughn, fresh off the success of his irritating Kingsman franchise, makes Argylle utterly weightless, both literally (the stuntwork all seems to be taking place in zero gravity) and figuratively (the barely-there characters never register).

The film doesn’t stop to give the six characters time for major exposition and backstory, which would only get in the way of the film’s B-movie sensibility, accentuating scalpel-edge thrills above all else.

Chirpy, as colorful as Skittles, and occasionally, appropriately, acrid, Mean Girls is a pleasantly bouncy reworking of the 2004 comedy of the same name.

Night Swim mostly delivers, veering from straightforward shocks to campy excess without ever hitting bottom.

The film commits a sin that is new to cinema: it’s a boring James Wan movie.

This new film resonates powerfully both as an emotional drama and as a welcome addition to the movie-musical canon.

If The Boy and the Heron does wind up being his farewell to cinema, Miyazaki will be leaving behind a beacon of encouragement, a guidepost to remind the world that even when all seems lost, courage and compassion can forge a new path.

Wonka stands as an effective reimagining of a beloved literary and cinematic character — so long as you don’t mind a little extra sweetness.

Even if the concert sequences don’t completely do justice to the thrill of seeing this show in person, this documentary offers an in-depth souvenir of both the show itself and of this particular chapter in the ongoing saga of one of popular culture’s most intriguing, unpredictable, and powerful creators.

Wish plays more like a collection of deleted tracks than greatest hits.

The film’s epic nature embraces not only size and scope but also the exquisite craftsmanship on display, from the detail work of Janty Yates and Dave Crossman’s costumes to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s ability to differentiate a successful battle from a disastrous one simply through his lighting choices.

It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here.

It’s an entertaining, if shambolic, 105 minutes, yet one can only imagine how much of a treat this film would have been if given permission to fully transcend business as usual.

Freddy’s is rarely frightening — a crowd-friendly PG-13 means fear and carnage are suggested but almost no blood is shown — and it doesn’t have much to say about its underlying subject matter besides, “Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if those musical pizza robots came to life and had sharp teeth?”

The Eras Tour spotlights Swift’s musicianship as well as her showmanship: the acoustic section, where she accompanies herself on guitar and piano, could have been the entire concert, if one could build a stadium tour out of such intimate moments, but the bigger-than-life stagecraft on display never overpowers the music.

Dowd and Burstyn’s performances will endure even as the rest of it fades into the memory hole of unnecessary sequels.

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.

On a pure craft level, The Creator delivers as a sweeping, big-screen science-fiction experience. What dazzles the eye, unfortunately, fails to connect with either the head or the heart.

The idea behind the series has always had potential — round up some beloved action stars of yesteryear and give them one more chance to ply their trade — but the expected fun has never materialized, with this latest entry lacking any sense of urgency, wit, or grace.

Rian Johnson may remain the unchallenged modern master of the whodunnit, but with A Haunting in Venice, Branagh shows more affinity for the genre than ever before. Not since Dead Again has the director so successfully applied his flair for showmanship to the requirements of the murder mystery.

This isn’t a story of rock music and stage theatrics; it’s about the woman who waited, in a home she was forbidden to leave, for the musician to come and deliver the love he promised. And it’s about the day she decided to stop waiting for it.

For all the inherent familiarity of the hit-man genre, Fincher and Walker have nonetheless crafted an absorbing tale; what it has to offer that’s any different from countless similar tales lies in the minutiae rather than the mayhem.

There are dazzling, funny, heartbreaking sequences throughout this examination of the music legend and his complicated personal life, but they are undercut by aspects that might have benefited from more attention or deeper thought.

As with Lanthimos’ previous films, Poor Things never allows viewers to get too comfortable or too acclimated to their surroundings; it’s a film that’s constantly throwing set pieces and absurdist humor and over-the-top outfits at the audience, but the effect is exhilarating rather than enervating.

An adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is as much about the director’s love of arch humor, fourth-wall shattering, and aggressive art direction as it a redemption saga about a rich man who finds purpose in his life.

Ferrari emerges as that rarest of films: the complex, complicated biopic. Like his subject, Mann appreciates beauty and power while never forgetting that beauty can wither and power can destroy; within that matrix of messy contradictions, he creates haunting drama.

It’s no easy thing to mine humor out of historical tragedy, but El Conde finds a zone that allows for rueful chuckles over humanity’s cruelty without ever being glib about Chile’s dark past.

Seligman and Sennott, reteaming after Shiva Baby, clearly know the beats and tropes of the teen comedy while taking every opportunity to subvert the formula. Bottoms always opts for the weirdest choices and least expected outcomes.

Blue Beetle is so singularly fresh and fun that Jaime Reyes and his family deserve to be front and center of whatever comes next.

Gran Turismo is a piece of salesmanship that never stops selling — the movie constantly reminds us how much the real races resemble the accurate simulation of the game, and even the Sony Walkman gets a fair amount of screen time — but the vroom-vroom of it all delivers enough adrenaline and character-building to make this a solidly entertaining piece of late-summer cinema.

Whether the eventual people-eating of the film’s final act merits enduring the turgid early portions of Meg 2: The Trench is, of course, a matter of opinion, but viewers might be well advised to wait until they can see the movie in a medium that involves a fast-forward button.

With all of its quick cuts and time-hopping, Oppenheimer behaves like a film that’s worried that it won’t have the space to fit everything it wants to say and do into three hours. Then it exhausts its welcome in the service of reiterating points. Then it delivers lectures in case you missed the earlier rounds. It knows how to blow up the world, but it doesn’t know when to quit.

Gerwig and Baumbach come out on the side of the power of the imagination but never discount the criticisms of this iconic American object. What the film does best, perhaps, is to understand and explain why people make up worlds, be they real systems of oppression or imaginary playsets.

A throwback to an era when “summer movies” represented something distinct from what studios produced for the other nine months of the year, Dead Reckoning offers 163 minutes’ worth of adrenaline and excitement that never overstays its welcome.

For all its potential, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken remains stuck in the shallow end.

If contemporary American cinema insists on having its cake and eating it when it comes to mixing the sour and the sweet, at least a film like No Hard Feelings spotlights the ability of an actor like Lawrence to deliver both with complete sincerity.

One of the film’s best features is that it does a minimum of seeding the ground for the next five MCU sequels; one of its worst is that it generates little enthusiasm for ever seeing these characters again.

The wisecracks could be wiser, admittedly, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with this airy, utterly innocuous, still charming Mother’s Day treat.

What we’re left with is an unromantic romance that’s as generic and forgettable as its title.

If you’re still on board for what these movies have to offer — and the global box office indicates that quite a few people are — Fast X deliriously overdelivers its delights.

While it’s still an exercise in re-branding and revenue, the results at least provide some dazzle, some romance, and a handful of pretty good new songs with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Across the Spider-Verse is a breathtaking whirligig of a superhero saga, spanning multiple realities without ever losing its emotional tether.

If The Flash proves anything, it’s that the fans won, and that’s a loss for everyone else.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts defibrillates a moribund franchise; the patient may not quite be up and running, but it’s standing more solidly than it did before.

Visual delights, a sweet love story, and that potent Pixar sentimentality carry this animated feature past a periodic table's worth of script flaws.

Cocaine Bear is a thrilling binge of adrenaline that you won’t regret in the morning.

The writer-director is aided immeasurably by lead actor Emma Mackey (“Death on the Nile”), whose wide eyes and expressive features convey a torment and vivacity being held in constant check by a repressive society.

There are few surprises or misdirects or red herrings involved with this all-too-solvable mystery, let alone subtext or commentary. With Marlowe, a very talented cast of actors and a legendary filmmaker have assembled to make a Philip Marlowe movie you can fold laundry to.

"Quantumania” may not swing for the fences as ambitiously as recent entries like “Wakanda Forever” or “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but it does take the wildly disparate tones and plot threads that are seemingly endemic to this series and turn them into an entertainingly cohesive whole. To be continued, obviously.

Formally speaking, Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over isn’t nearly as much of a groundbreaker as its subject, but that subject has lived such a rich life — and recorded so many unforgettable songs — that the film is, ultimately, as pleasurable as hearing a vintage Warwick hit on the radio.

It’s a hyped-up cocaine conversation of a movie, throwing out lots of ideas and images and mammoth set pieces without ever amounting to anything.

Much like the UCLA interviews that inspired it, Framing Agnes is a vital part of the historical record, addressing trans life as we know it right now and providing deeper understanding for current and future viewers.

Violent Night is one of the Yuletide season’s most delightful surprises, not just for what it gets right but also for the many ways the whole production could have gone very, very wrong.

While it spends perhaps too much of its running time either recreating or directly quoting moments from its 1983 predecessor, it still manages to land some new and original gags of its own.

The teaming of Will Ferrell (making his return to Christmas movies nearly two decades after “Elf”) and Ryan Reynolds delivers the banter you’d expect and the singing and dancing you might not, and their energetic interplay goes a long way to making Spirited a movie that might become a holiday go-to in certain households.

There’s a great deal to enjoy here, and fans of “Black Panther” won’t necessarily leave feeling disappointed, but there’s a sense of strong elements not quite coming together.

Most disappointing of all, Black Adam is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene.

Star and co-writer Billy Eichner spins a lot of plates here, crafting a hilarious and heartfelt film that also acknowledges the challenging and often hidden history of queer people in American society.

So much of the film’s brutality has been removed in favor of melodrama and CGI fake-outs that it doesn’t matter that the cast is bringing their A-game. The game has already been called due to lack of interest.

All Bullet Train had to be was high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense, but instead it gives high-gloss, all-star, late-summer nonsense a bad name.

While not as anarchic or outrageously hilarious as “Teen Titans GO! to the Movies,” this latest all-ages animated adventure from DC Comics and Warner Bros. nonetheless has — and offers — lots of fun with the four-legged counterparts of a Justice League that’s more “Super Friends” than Snyder Cut.

This ultimately feels like four very promising movies mashed together, with spectacular highlights bumping into each other in a way that’s ultimately lacking, even as they all demonstrate the prowess and bravado of the filmmaker.

If this latest one was aiming to mix it up by giving equal weight to the masks of comedy and tragedy, it’s an effort that falls short.

Rather than play like a significant departure from the “Toy Story” films that spawned it, Lightyear instead emerges as a disappointing runner-up, capturing but a fraction of the comedy, thrills and poignancy of its predecessors.

The other generous read, although it’s damning with faint praise, is to call this the best “Jurassic” movie since the original in 1993, but that doesn’t mean this one’s not, much like its predecessors, a hot mess. It’s just a hot mess with some effectively scary bits, a cool car chase and Laura Dern.

The act of writing has tended to be flagrantly non-cinematic, but with these last two films, Davies proves that the internal life of the mind can indeed be explored and portrayed in a visual medium. With every scene a stanza, Benediction is a lyrical triumph.

At his most memorable, Cronenberg creates viscerally unforgettable images that horrify, yes, but they also provoke with big, shocking ideas about our very selves – the monstrousness of disease, the perhaps inevitable hybrid of the corporeal and the mechanical, the determination of the self. With Crimes of the Future, we’re left with a remove from the material, where no matter what happens, it’s all just performance art.

Even with its raunchier aspects, the film’s devotion to plotting the course of true love would probably meet with Miss Austen’s approval.

It’s a tricky balance to build a world where characters are both absurd and believable — and on top of that, exist in a world where musical numbers can break out at any time (even the Wonder Wharf carnies get a song) — but Bouchard pulls it off.

In the end, Top Gun: Maverick counts as a worthy sequel in that it succeeds and fails in many of the same ways as the original. It’s another cornball male weepie and military recruitment ad that feels like every WWII movie got fed into an algorithm, and the flying sequences are breathtaking enough to make you forget that these guys and gals are engaging in the kind of combat scenarios that start wars.

The follow-up to 2016’s “Doctor Strange” hits the ooh-and-aah marks we expect from a well-crafted Marvel adventure, but even with Sam Raimi at the helm, this entry goes heavy on the spectacle but light on the humanity.

Memory often feels more like a direct-to-video threequel than an actual movie.

The Northman is gory, muddy, hallucinatory — and intensely entertaining. An examination of the way that violence begets violence, and a study of how a life devoted to single-minded hatred and vengeance can lead to uncomfortable truths, this is a movie that lives up to every saga comic books and metal bands ever spun about the brutal conquerors of yore.

It fills up the uncharted territory between parody and pure fan service with a guileless weirdness that the biopic genre never knew it could accommodate but, in a post–“Walk Hard” world, could stand to emulate.

We can confirm that Morbius is, really and truly, a movie. Granted, it’s not much of a movie, but it’s a movie nonetheless.

Deep Water offers so many tawdry delights along the way that its flaws aren’t dealbreakers. Affleck and de Armas might not have lasted as a couple off-camera, but as co-stars, they’re a potent combo.

Unlike the “memberberries” school of nostalgia that can reduce itself to “I had that lunch box!” Linklater gets granular and specific (and thus universal) about his memories and his perceptions of the world at that time.

It’s a film as cuddly as Meimei’s panda form, but it’s also a perceptive examination of how one person’s coming-of-age has a ripple effect on those closest to them.

Whether playing off his returning company of co-stars or swapping barbs with fellow drag comic O’Carroll, Perry’s giving one of his best self-directed performances.

It’s a film that hits some narrative bumps along the way without diminishing its tougher observations about race, the police, and the treatment of veterans.

The 355 is the kind of star-packed, glossy adventure that wants to be the launching pad for a franchise; instead, it’s going to be one of the films most mentioned in future discussions regarding January as a studio dumping-ground for misbegotten movies.

The most superheroic feat on display might be the film’s ability to keep human-sized emotions and relationships front and center even as the very fabric of time and space twists itself into knots.