Alonso Duralde

Band Aid might sound gimmicky, but Lister-Jones keeps the emotions firmly rooted and the characters believably contextualized.

Unfriended commits to its idea and continually finds new ways to creatively exploit it, building the tension as each character reveals his or her own dark deeds, thus justifying the brutal vendettas visited upon them.

This is the kind of screenplay that offers juicy opportunities for actors, and Zendaya and Washington leave nothing on the floor.

The current results don’t necessarily redeem this troubled film, but seeing it again might remind audiences that it’s better than they remember. Certainly, this time out, it’s better than it’s ever been before.

Avengers: Endgame has almost nothing on its mind but crossing the Ts and dotting the Is of a far-flung superhero saga, but to anyone with even a minor emotional stake in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has all the fleeting satisfaction of a shot of whipped cream delivered directly from the spray can.

It’s not just the CG that’s visually impressive here; “War” boasts some extraordinary set pieces.

For audiences who want their 2021 return to the multiplex to deliver big, loud, exciting action, F9 makes the cars go fast, jump high, and generally do the impossible. It’s exhilaratingly ridiculous, yes, but it’s also ridiculously exhilarating.

The performances are strong across the board — all the scenes between Theron and Davis, in particular, overflow with empathy and understanding — and Cody’s writing has never been better.

At its best moments, Pride makes the chest flutter and the neck hairs stand up with the revolutionary adrenaline that comes from a potent protest song.

While it might not be as revolutionary as its subject, Julia celebrates not only the woman but also her joy and passion for the creation and consumption of delicious food. Just be warned: It’s not a film to watch on an empty stomach.

Neighbors 2 never lags, and the laughs keep coming, even though they’re coming from a fairly familiar place. If that’s all you want, that’s what you get. But, hey at least you get it, which is more than you can say for most sequels.

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.

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 not a lot in My Psychedelic Love Story that’s necessarily going to grab viewers who aren’t already interested in the era and in the notable figures in LSD history. But as a spotlight for a woman who knows how to spin a yarn – and as an inducement to pick up a copy of her memoir – this new documentary definitely finds its groove.

Moana does what it does so well that you wish its makers had imbued it with some X factor that separates the classics from the merely beloved.

It’s not the predictability that’s disappointing as much as the pat resolutions and emotional fixes provided to Anna. If you’re going to set up a young character who’s this complicated and in this much pain, you owe her a similarly complex catharsis.

There is wit and there are explosions, and while none of them represent a step above “Guardians of the Galaxy,” neither do they impugn the memory of one of the freshest and most fun of the Marvel movies.

There’s not much new in this tale of grim men staring, and then shooting, each other down, but this cast and crew know how to spin this yarn with efficacy and economy.

Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).

Roach and McNamara fall victim to the occasional phony biopic moment or straight-up moment of didacticism, but overall Trumbo is a lively history about the day-in-day-out drudgery of survival during oppressive times. Screenwriters are so rarely taken seriously by the film industry that it’s a nice switch to watch them be the heroes.

Ultimately, Sorry to Bother You does what every great first film should: it heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent and generates enthusiasm for what’s going to be in that second feature.

With so many potential crises underfoot, Saturday Night manages to pass the Apollo 13 sniff-test of historical dramas: we know everything’s going to come out all right, but the film nonetheless generates enough suspense to make us think that it might not.

Memorable acting, striking cinematography, and a provocative examination of the nexus between entertainment and media and politics — that’s part of what’s kept the legend of “Citizen Kane” alive for decades, and it’s enough to make Mank necessary, if not entirely fulfilling, viewing for film lovers.

The Hateful Eight may frustrate some of his more literally sanguine supporters, but it’s nonetheless an entertaining piece of dialogue-driven theater — with the occasional rifle-shot to the head.

It’s not impossible to give audiences both a puzzle-box narrative and an exploration of life choices and what it means to be human, but the balance just doesn’t play here.

Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).

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.

The rom-com veneer acts as the sugar that lets the film’s more serious medicine go down, and Schrader understands this territory well.

Maria is most truly involved with its subject when it abandons any impulse to scale her down, to reduce a titan to life-size, and opts instead to remember the singer as grandiose, allowing her memory — and Jolie’s perfectly suited performance of that memory — to fill the biggest screen.

If you can get through the excess of characters, and the requisite butt jokes, car chase and tween pop songs, the film does keep both the physical and the verbal comedy coming at a steady pace.

It’s lean and mean, focused and direct, and the jolts are both effective and well earned

If The Peanuts Movie never quite reaches the melancholy of earlier films like “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy Come Home,” it nonetheless respects the importance of failure and disappointment that Schulz always included in his storytelling.

It may well be that we’ll eventually stop looking at these Marvel films as discrete, individual experiences rather than chapters in an epic binge-watch, but even by those standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron feels like a solid but overstuffed episode, one more concerned with being connective tissue than anything else.

The writing leaves some unanswered questions, which viewers may interpret either as frustrating or as a reflection of the protagonist, who finds himself rudderless when he loses his hearing. Either way, Ahmed’s performance goes a long way in holding the film together.

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.

Hidden Figures is feel-good history, but it works, and it works on behalf of heroes from a cinematically under-served community. These smart accomplished women had the right stuff, and so does this movie.

There’s a lot to like about director Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeously fanciful tale.

So many movies play it safe and predictable that you have to give it up to Dope for making consistently bold moves — even if they don’t always pay off. This vibrant film is a bit of a mess, but it’s a beautiful one.

This sequel might lack the delightful jolts of its predecessor, but it nonetheless maintains a slow boil of terror that’s consistently unnerving.

Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell celebrates an influential musical legacy as well as a complicated life story, with a potent mix of sentiment and aesthetic appreciation.

Does Deadpool 2 pick up its predecessor’s baton and run off to new and exciting places? Not really. Is it as tasty as leftovers on the second day? Absolutely. Temper your expectations accordingly.

It’s a movie that both understands the basic desire to strike it rich and our deep understanding that one person’s wealth often comes at the expense of another person’s well-being. This isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s admirable for its ability to keep more than one thought in its head at a time.

While it’s an undeniably powerful film, it also seemingly feels the need to tread carefully.

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.

The movie is more successful as a thriller than as a thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.

Come for the city-flattening; stay for the political satire.

Even with the re-enactments, this is a pretty straightforward documentary. It’s nonetheless valuable for the way that it takes a complicated story and breaks it down into understandable pieces.

Reynolds has this drily ironic fourth-wall business down pat, and Savage makes for an entertaining foil.

Black Widow reminds us of the pleasure that can be offered by an MCU movie that isn’t having to do the legwork of setting up the next five chapters.

This is a film with an agenda in mind, granted, but it’s too witty and too heartfelt to be dismissed as a mere public service announcement. Audiences may get a message out of this message movie, but they’ll also get a movie.

Let Him Go is a tense genre piece that finds room to build out its characters, and their flaws, between bursts of action and suspense; it’s a tricky combination, but Bezucha manages the balance with real skill.

What some might find dramatically unsatisfying about the film’s climax directly comments on the inequities of the era and the limited options offered to women, and there’s no shortage of rich storytelling, acting, and visual potency leading up to it.

Director Dallas Jenkins comes from the world of faith-based media, and that world is not generally known for delicacy in its messaging, so it counts as a Christmas miracle that Best Christmas Pageant generally avoids heavy-handed sermonizing.

There’s a tipping point at which comedy goes from black to bilious, and that’s a balancing act that The Nice Guys doesn’t always nail. The laughs from this frequently entertaining action comedy get stuck in the throat, keeping this altogether good movie from being a great one.

The challenge is to balance the mayhem with the holly-jolly, to blow stuff up while also allowing troubled characters to find the nice in themselves and in each other, and Red One fulfills both of those wish-list items with a cheeky finesse.

There’s a lot to like here, from a rich palette of autumn colors to a potentially provocative subplot that will teach children that nations need to acknowledge and atone for their historical sins, but in the final tally, this is a sequel that exists not because there was more story to be told but because there was more money to be made.

Voyagers is a smart and effective little sci-fi thriller about the best-laid plans of scientists crumbling in the face of teenage hormones and human frailty.

"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.

Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.

The stakes are high and the danger is always imminent in this straightforward thriller; it never bends the rules of the genre, but it certainly delivers on what it promises.

Miscalculations aside, however, there’s a brutal wit and audacity to Ready or Not that makes it feel one-of-a-kind in an increasingly safe mainstream marketplace.

Purists may balk about revisiting this tale, but The Grinch earns its laughter and its sentiment, both of which are plentiful. It’s a full-throated Fah-Who-Foraze.

If you can overlook the three or four endings of Bridge of Spies, each more overdone than the last, there’s a lot to like here.

For audiences who like Marvel movies at their tongue-in-cheekiest, this sequel provides some breezy fun while we wait to find out just how permanent Thanos’ genocidal schemes really are.

Nosferatu offers all the atmospherics and the creeping dread that it should, but this version remains locked-in and static when it might have dared to explore new ground. Like its antagonist, it’s simultaneously living and dead.

Breeziness is a quality Queen and Country has plenty of, making for a lovely journey that never ends up anywhere particularly groundbreaking.

You have to forgive a lot from Bad Moms.... But the wonderfully unexpected cavalcade of hilarity — including one of the smartest and most unexpected celebrity cameos in recent memory — makes this summer sleeper a satisfying surprise.

While writer-director Warren Beatty’s movie about Hughes is crafted of the finest materials, it too remains mostly earthbound, defying gravity only in fits and starts.

Urban has never been funnier, and he makes Johnny’s character arc from cynical Hollywood burnout to a champion capable of self-sacrifice a believable one. Not that many people are buying to tickets to Mortal Kombat II for the character arcs, granted, but Urban’s performance is a delightfully unexpected pleasure in a movie that winds up being full of them.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will be, at best, a charming footnote in the Coens’ career, a project they enjoyed doing, and possibly even more enjoyed turning into a film so they can keep their résumé free of episodic television.

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.

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.

Zemljic spends most of the film front and center, and the movie wisely relies upon her to be our eyes and ears and insight into the story. It’s not a showy performance, by any means, but she earns our empathy.

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

Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.

As a retelling of a tragedy that had its moments of heroism among uniformed personnel and indefatigable civilians alike, it gets the job done.

It’s far more successful with holiday magic than it is with character-based comedy, but that’s not enough of a flaw to keep young audiences (and their parents) from potentially turning this feature into a cherished annual tradition.

Whether or not the “Wolverine” movies have a future — Jackman swears this is his last go-round — Logan is an exceedingly entertaining one.

Even if this material might have been better served as a 40-minute short than as a full-length movie, first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg has cast a trio of actors at the top of their game, and they elevate the material.

There’s nothing particularly world-shaking about Our Souls at Night, but it’s a nice movie about nice people finding love.

While director Andrews, most known for his stage work, doesn’t always know how to lift this story beyond banal biopic choices, he’s certainly tapped into something special with Stewart, who continues to reveal new layers with each film.

Audiences willing to just go with the movie’s outlandish lead character will find laughs and thrills along the way, as well as that rarest of studio properties: a tentpole that actually leaves you enthusiastic about the prospect of a sequel.

Life never reaches greatness, but it’s solidly good, from its earned scares to a spot-on ending. (Don’t let anyone ruin it for you.) The film’s tight spaces and layered audio will work best on the big screen; see it with someone whose wrist you can grab.

This Finale is basically one giant victory lap that takes the Crawley family and their employees into 1930 and beyond — as Cole Porter once wrote, “it’s fun/it’s fresh/it’s post-/depresh.”

Giving the film credit where it’s due, Wonder never cheats in its pursuit of emotion. It’s never mawkish or manipulative, and its characters are so well-established both in the writing and in the performances that the movie ultimately does the hard work of earning those damp Kleenexes.

Between Berry’s committed performance and the film’s brisk cocktail of dread and adrenaline, Kidnap makes for a rousing, if ridiculous, ride.

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

No one’s going to accuse Goodbye Christopher Robin of subtlety or of rewriting the biopic rules, but it does dare to go darker than most films like it.

The movie is not going to make anyone forget “Jaws,” but it delivers the kind of breathless tension that justifies its existence.

Whether he’s expounding upon his fear of wild animals or recounting how he sweated his way through his first experience trying to order something at Starbucks, Hart is a natural raconteur, alternately arrogant and self-deprecating, worldly and juvenile.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets might well represent the apotheosis of Besson’s singularly loony brand of filmmaking. It’s bonkers and gorgeous and confusing and thrilling and tiring and overflowing with ideas.

To bring up an issue that arose when Joaquin Phoenix flaked on Todd Haynes’ latest project — is this any way to spend two years of an artist’s prime period?

Demolition strikes a tricky balance; it’s a comedy of manners that never judges its hero’s bizarre behavior. Had it stuck to its emotional guns, it would stand much taller, but even its ultimate flaws can’t erode its sturdy foundation.

While the minions are certainly little, yellow and different, Minions has probably mined them for about as much comedy as they can provide as leading men.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo move their many playing pieces around with as much grace as possible, and they offer up jolts of pleasure throughout.

Ritchie’s reunion with leading man Jason Statham delivers the scheming, the shooting, and the swearing that the director’s fans have come to expect, by the bucketload.

Awash in bold colors, bright patterns and ebullient kids, director Ava DuVernay’s new take on A Wrinkle in Time dazzles its way across time and space even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Hardcore horror audiences won’t find much that’s frightening in Insidious: The Last Key — there’s not even that wonderfully unsettling shriek of violins under the title this time — but as a delivery system for more great work from Lin Shaye, it more than accomplishes its mission.