Alonso Duralde

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.