Alonso Duralde

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.

There’s not much to Victoria & Abdul, but as a delivery system for Judi Dench, it serves its purpose. Otherwise, it’s just Buckingham Palace fetishism cranked up to peak mumsy.

While the film’s vertiginous set pieces are appropriately heart-clenching, it’s not nearly as successful at little details like plot and character.

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.

On the one hand, the story goes pretty much exactly where you think it will, but at the same time, Danny Collins generates its funniest and most dramatic moments precisely when the characters behave more like human beings and less like moving parts of what’s clearly intended to be a feel-good hit.

Those moments that land, whether funny or moving, occur when Ball isn’t getting in his own way and instead trusts in the characters he’s written and the actors who are performing them. Overall, the film works, but there are times during this road-trip saga where one wishes Ball would apply the brakes.

There’s a lot that’s frustrating about George Clooney’s new film The Midnight Sky, from its egregious borrowing from any number of better movies to its pacing issues, but thanks to a few grace notes, its shortcomings are mostly forgivable.

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.

The loss doesn’t hit, and the comedy doesn’t land, leaving Dean a wasted opportunity that offers a few talented artists the chance to do fine work in the service of an empty vessel.

For a film that’s so politically risky — Stone hasn’t named names and pointed fingers (at both sides of the aisle, incidentally) in a mainstream movie like this for years — it’s surprisingly safe aesthetically.

Moana 2 is always a joy to look at, from its shimmering blue waters to its stunning seacraft to the engaging character design of the human characters, the animals, and even the sentient coconut pirates. (Yes, they’re back, too.) But this remains firmly the kind of sequel aimed solely at people who want to watch the same movie again, only with a number in the title.

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

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

Whether you’ve read Flaubert or not, it’s a sharp comedy of manners anchored by two wickedly witty performances.

These performances are about more than just literal nudity, of course; both leads strip away the surface layers of the characters — her brisk efficiency, his good-time party vibes — to get at the vulnerability and the complex neuroses of each.

Any evolution should be appreciated, perhaps, as the story chugs its way to the finish line. Wicked fans can delight in one final visit to Oz, while those of us less enamored can hope that the yellow brick road ends here. For good.

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

The Laundromat flails about, with an excess of bad ideas that undercut the justifiable outrage over the events depicted.

Born in China” doesn’t flip the script in any significant way, but while the storytelling here has significant weaknesses, it’s hard to stay mad at any movie that offers so many close-ups of an insanely adorable baby panda.

The acting is universally excellent, particularly Fey, who’s shrewdly fulfilling our expectations while playing off them.

There’s enough gore, mayhem, and decay in Army of the Dead to make for a satisfying zombie-movie experience, and while it’s the best film Snyder has made since his last “of the Dead,” it’s also one that continually hints at the more satisfying work it might have been.

Southpaw is so simultaneously entertaining and unsurprising that it could go straight to ESPN Classic, but if these are the extremes it takes for certain people to notice that, hey, that guy from “Bubble Boy” has turned into a heck of an actor, then so be it.

This adventure should have been spooky and witty and exciting, but instead it’s just dreary and dull. Peculiarity has rarely been this tedious.

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.

For its first half or so, The Maze Runner tells a captivating tale of survival and weaves a potentially interesting mystery. Once its path become clear, however, you realize this is a puzzle you've worked out before.

McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons capture that sense that the children of immigrants often have of living with one foot in their adopted country and one in their parents’ homeland.

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.

While director Hans Petter Moland’s remake of his own film “In Order of Disappearance” (Frank Baldwin adapts the original screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson) may fall short of its goals, it’s hard not to admire the film’s ambitions — and certain scenes, performances and even one-liners — even as its flaws start piling up.

Apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before.

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.

This airless, laugh-less true story about 20-something wheeler-dealers who became arms salesmen during the Bush-Cheney invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has no point of view, nor anything to say about war or commerce or even 20-somethings who wheel and deal.

Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

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?

Collet-Serra’s fourth team-up with Neeson, The Commuter, represents neither man’s finest work, but at its best, it suggests the snap and fun they’ve brought us before.

This “based on a true story” underdog tale is infectiously determined to make you fall in love with it, like a mangy dog that plops its head in your lap and gazes adoringly at you until you scratch it behind the ears. Eventually, you give in and scratch. And then you wash your hands.

As slick and contrived as the plotting may be from time to time, the writers and director Jake Schreier (“Robot & Frank”) throw in enough charming character moments and literal forward motion (this is a road movie, after all) to avoid getting bogged down in whiny teen solipsism. You might not believe that any of these kids exist, but you’ll enjoy hanging out with them.

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.

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.

This new Man from U.N.C.L.E. would be an instant masterpiece if it were consistently as good as its best parts, but even as a hit-and-miss affair, it’s a bracing bit of late-summer fun for anyone who has given up the notion of a major studio offering anything truly revelatory until at least October.

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.

What’s most dispiriting about War Machine is that you can sense the satire it wants to be — and could have been — but never becomes.

You may never have thought you needed or even wanted a sequel to “The Croods,” but you may find it a pleasant surprise in a year where most of the surprises have been anything but.

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.

The aggressively unpleasant visuals certainly detract from the overall film, but Maleficent makes for a fascinating entry in an ongoing wave of projects that give “bad” women of literature a chance to present their side of the story.

Green operates in a smarter mode of storytelling, giving the audience the benefit of the doubt that they'll notice the details, and he's clearly whispered Pacino into giving a nuanced and human-sized turn.

For all the targets that director and co-writer Edgar Wright hits with the story’s political and media satire, he allows the pacing to go slack, turning what should feel like an escalating set of stakes into an episodic series of vignettes.

This is a rare misstep for Russell, who in the past has sold us on all kinds of stories, whether they’re as indescribable as “I Heart Huckabee’s” or as traditional as “The Fighter.” Unlike his indefatigable heroine, however, Russell just can’t seem to close the deal on Joy.

There’s a lot more sex in this Wuthering Heights, but the characters are flatter, the story is duller, and by the film’s climax, any dramatic momentum has been swept away by the winds on the moors.

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

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.

If you love Christmas movies for all the reasons that make them Christmas movies, Almost Christmas is a Christmas movie for you.

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase is clearly made by people who have thought through the material and tried to make it enjoyable and palatable, but the set-up at the end for further sequels feels a little too hopeful.

A little more deviating from the playbook would make Hellion stand out more amidst an ever-growing pack of similar films.

It delivers the kind of sentimental sledgehammering I found myself willing to forgive — the presence of Helen Mirren goes a long way in that regard — but once the story goes off on a pointless tangent, the whole soufflé collapses.

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.

A cover version is pretty much what this do-over of The Gambler represents, with the rougher edges mixed out and sweetened. It's no mystery why actors and directors want to relive the magic of American studio movies from the fabled 1970s, but if you're not going to take the risks that the originals did, or illuminate as much about the characters, why redo them at all?

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

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.

Combines the barely-there characterization and irritating cutesiness of “The Smurfs” with the hideous character design and awful pop covers of “Strange Magic.”

It's not even that the film shifts wildly in tone as much as the fact that none of those tones work at all: the horror parts aren't scary and, surprisingly for Smith, the comedy bits aren't funny.

It’s always apparent what Assassination Nation is going for, and it more often than not fulfills its ambitions, and the hits more than make up for the misses.

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.

With The Conjuring: Last Rites, this venerable franchise finally (one hopes) gives up the ghost, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Zack Snyder superhero movies are the black licorice of cinema: Those who like the taste can’t understand why everyone doesn’t, and those who don’t like the taste grimace at the thought. And now the streaming wars and online clamor have brought us Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It’s four hours of black licorice.

It works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn't do is answer the question, “Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of ‘Behind the Music'?”

It’s fine to forfeit elements like stakes or suspense for a character piece, but when the characters are this vague, there’s nothing on which to hang your hat (or headband, for that matter).

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 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.

When Ramírez and Cruz, or Moura and de Armas, are on screen together, addressing the human cost involved in spycraft, Wasp Network becomes much more interesting. When it veers away from them, the film seems mostly comprised of conversations in restaurants, where new characters and organizations are constantly being introduced.

As cinema, it’s an avalanche of feel-good clichés, but as an audience-pleasing machine, it relentlessly pursues its goal and will probably win over viewers who surrender to it.

While this sassy cyborg with the deadpan baby voice remains a brilliant comic creation, the movie’s messaging is muddled. For all of the laughs and thrills, we’re left with a satire about technology that still wants to play nice with AI.

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.

For a comedy set around one epic catastrophe of a rotten day, this wisp of a farce feels strangely chaos-deficient.

Lister-Jones is clearly focused on character, and less so on genre conventions, so “The Craft: Legacy” could turn off some of the first movie’s fan base while simultaneously bringing new fans into the fold. As far as franchise revivals go, this one’s got the right elements.

Camp X-Ray never makes the bond between this particular woman and this particular prisoner feel genuine or organic. Their relationship (platonic, obviously) smacks more of screenwriter contrivance than of two put-upon souls finding each other under duress.

It’s only in assuming that we care more about Boogie’s athletic journey than his interpersonal relationships that the film falls short.

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

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.

Overall, The Little Things — which is how Deke refers to the details that lead to killers being caught — isn’t much of anything.

The film’s intentions are unquestionably noble, but the execution falls wildly short, even with so many talented artists involved.

Hotel Transylvania 3 always goes for the joke and rarely misses.

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.

While the film far outshines most of Cage’s recent efforts (he was direct-to-VOD when direct-to-VOD wasn’t cool) in terms of art direction and fearlessly madcap storytelling, the results are nonetheless muddled and messy.

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.

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

Abrams certainly knows how to manipulate, but when he does it, you can see the strings. How much or little you enjoy The Rise of Skywalker will rely almost entirely on whether or not you mind that every laugh and tear and jolt feels like it’s coming right off a spreadsheet.

Perhaps the biggest issue for The Mauritanian is that the screenplay by M.B Traven and Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani tries to accommodate too many protagonists.

This remake doesn’t desecrate the memory of that modern classic, but neither does it ever transcend it.

If you have waited your entire life to see this world brought to life, and to watch humans and Pokémon occupy the same space, then Detective Pikachu may well be everything you ever wanted. But for those of us who don’t know a Jigglypuff from a Charizard, this film scores low on wit, coherence and engagement.