Amy Nicholson

For all its careful evasions, I believe that the Michael this movie reveals is true and worth watching. But ultimately, it’s the music that breaks down our resistance, from the opening funk beats of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to the climax, which essentially cues a greatest hits tape right when we know the bad times are about to begin.

Despite this sequel’s thin and rote stretches, it once again closes strong with a few images that will stick in your head for at least a week or two. No spoilers, but it’s no coincidence that “Here I Come” finally gets more interesting once it tires of hide and seek. Finding a fresh plot twist is the only way it ekes out a draw.

Reminders of Him could use a little more swooning, a little less of the endless middle stretch of driving and talking, interrupted by wet sprints through thunderstorms.

The film is so committed to its rigors — the two-person cast, the glacial camera pivots, the moody lighting — that it teeters on the line of becoming monotonous.

The intended message is that B.J. must stop chasing the spotlight to let his son be the star. But his character can’t do it and neither can he. In fairness, the title is a clue that technically the focus was never Korean music. The story was always about Pops learning to be a dad.

Though Wuthering Heights is a phony tease, I’m grateful that Fennell wants to titillate audiences.

Honestly, Primate’s kills are great. The problem is the dead space between them when we realize we’re bored sick.

The result is a faintly comic curio that hurtles along without much impact.

Hamnet’s sweetest note is 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe playing the actual Hamnet. The script hangs on our immediate devotion to the boy and he stands up to the challenge.

There’s little urgency or outrage. Instead of a funhouse mirror of what could be, it’s merely a smudged reflection of what is.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.

He’s made a mystery with no curiosity, a cautionary tale with no good advice. It’s unclear if Guadagnino’s elites believe their moral arguments don’t apply to themselves or if they’re just stupid — or if the script makes them do stupid things to keep the audience off guard. Regardless, raise a glass of Pinot anytime someone says “This was a mistake.”

Having stripped away most of the documentary’s narration and sit-down interviews with Kerr’s family and friends, the film barely explores anyone’s psychology — and Blunt’s railroaded Dawn loses her chance to speak for herself.

I liked the plot better on a second watch when I knew not to expect Jamie Lee Curtis on all fours. The ending is great and the build up to it, though draggy, gives you space to think about the interdependence between our species.

The film is so stylishly done that I could accept it on those plain terms.

Like Kogonada, I believe that artifice is a useful tool to dig up honesty. But a script with this much contrivance only works if it’s delivered with snap and confidence. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is sticky sweet and sludgy and so cloyingly aesthetic that the roadkill bleeds ropes of twee entrails.

As sloppy as it is, there’s no denying that Honey Don’t! works as a noir with a pleasant, peppery flavor. Yet, there’s a snap missing in its rhythm, a sense that it doesn’t know when and how its gags should hit.

Freakier Friday won’t trade places with the original in audience’s hearts. But this disposable delight will at least allow fans who’ve grown up alongside Lohan to take their own offspring to the theater and bond about what the series means to them — to let their children picture them young — and then pinkie-swear, “Let’s never let that happen to us.”

Brooks can merely offer this flawed pair more kindness than they grant each other (or themselves). Which makes “Oh, Hi!” a pleasant if perilous date night film. Having spent an enjoyable evening with it myself, I have to admit: I like the movie fine, but I’m not in love.

This recycled trash is no treasure, but I’m betting the majority of this redo’s audience will be young enough to find ’90s-style schlock adorably quaint.

This isn’t quite the heart-soaring “Superman” I wanted. But these adventures wise him up enough that I’m curious to explore where the saga takes him next.

Thorne has made a resolute portrait of a woman who can’t break free of generational trauma.

But having stuck the landing once (and a few more times), DeBlois doesn’t leave himself much runway to do something new and improved. This “How to Train Your Dragon” is merely longer.

If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn’t be champing to find out what happens next. But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great.

The Oscar nominee gives her physical all to the movie and, as a thank you, Ballerina lets her stay mostly silent so its leaden lines don’t weigh down her performance. Fortunately, De Armas has expressive eyes.

Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see Final Reckoning on a large and loud screen.

It’s mostly Pugh’s tale, a smart move as she delivers one of the better performances I’ve seen in a super suit.

This go-round, everything’s louder and more banal.

The four leads are yanked not by their heart strings but by the machinations of a plot that steers them from one contrived scene to another, just so it can point to the skid marks and call them a sketch of the new American family.

So far I’ve yet to see any movie figure out how to integrate the dull activity of staring at a small black rectangle into something worthy of the screen. Landon’s approach looks a bit too much like a billboard or a meme, but I think he’s on the right track to be trying something expressionistic that circles back around to silent-movie aesthetics.

It’s rousing stuff and a bit glib.

This downbeat drama is as overwrought as Killian’s muscles — it’s a steroidal portrait of a man in distress.

A Working Man strikes an unsteady balance between solemn and ridiculous.

The new songs are forgettable and the animation is cluttered with every pixel competing to show off. There are too many leaves, too many petals and too many pores on the fully animated dwarfs, who bound into the movie with noses the size of pears.

The unwieldy action rom-com Novocaine makes a convincing argument that its lead, Jack Quaid, can do it all: woo the girl, shoot the goon and tickle the audience. The movie itself has a harder time, screwing its three genres together so awkwardly that it tends to limp.

It’s confounding that Johnson ignores the book’s brutal existentialism. But it’s equally fascinating that other parts of the story get their hooks in him. A novel — any piece of art, really — functions like a dream. You grab onto the bits that resonate. It’s why people can leave the same movie with totally different interpretations.

Riff Raff is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring.

A Valentine’s Day massacre in which PDA leads to public executions, it’s got decent gags, middling scares and a rationale sloppier than two dogs sharing a strand of spaghetti. As date night fare, it’ll do.

It has good style and a handful of fun ideas, but it’s ultimately as superficial as the puff pieces it’s attacking.

Only Anderson’s part with all its hazy contradictions — neither comic nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, neither subtle nor showy — seems, to transcend. More than the film around her, Anderson earns our respect.

This is a guaranteed blockbuster that nobody needed except studio accountants and parents. I’ll accept it on those terms because it’s a good thing when any kid-pleaser gets children in the habit of going to the movie theater.

I’ll give Schrader the benefit of the doubt that his dialogue is stilted by design, even though the female characters are particularly prone to clunkers. . . But it’s still irritating to sit through, and once we start questioning everything we see — would young Leonard really order a bran muffin at an ice cream parlor? — it gets harder to hand over our trust when the movie wants to get emotional.

Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.

Oppenheimer is after something that drives right at the heart of what a musical is. To harmonize means to agree. It’s a public display of solidarity — a pact to parrot the same delusions.

I wish Larraín had cut Callas down to size more. He’s too protective of his fellow artist to slosh around in the fury that fueled her art. Callas could sing three octaves, but the film is mostly one note.

Everyone involved knows exactly what movie they’re making — especially Craig Robinson as the hilarious town sheriff.

Don’t force a plot to emerge. Better to experience “Here” like open-eyed meditation, nodding at connections and ideas so fragile they’d disintegrate if said aloud.

Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films.

The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows.

If it weren’t for Moore and Qualley hurling themselves into the shared role, it’d be as flat as a scotch-taped pin-up. If it weren’t for Moore, I’m not even sure it would work.

You can see the jokes, but most of them don’t land. Still, there is some neat design work if you squint.

The bigger the scope and the more Cooper’s psychology is explained, the less taut the film feels.

This is sloppier and more personality-driven than [Moorhouse's] past work, but the performances are so shamelessly exuberant that, after a while, you simply throw up your hands at the flaws.

Kinds of Kindness runs nearly three hours in length and reveals nothing more than our eagerness to give him the benefit of the doubt. We’re here for the sick thrills. Instead, what we’re served feels more like dirty limericks delivered at an excruciating pace by a bore with bad breath.

Federer describes himself as an emotional guy, but with the international press and his management team nearly always on the sidelines, there’s little privacy to get personal.

If Ultraman wants to conquer the world, he’ll have to try something livelier than a cartoon that looks like a kids movie but lurches about like a saccharine family drama.

This is a film that spells out its intentions for an audience still learning its ABCs, a film where Michael Giacchino’s misty violins never stop insisting how to feel, where Krasinski’s goofy dad literally wears a heart on his chest.

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

The cast does its best with the material, especially supporting player Perry Mattfeld, who makes a meal out of her small role as the mistress who broke up Solène and David’s marriage.

Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap.

A delirious, pulpy mishmash of knockoffs, The Scargiver isn’t good, but it sure is something.

“Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.

French Girl is a love triangle farce that’s mostly set in Quebec City but takes place on Planet Rom-com where bipedal characters act out in ways that rarely resemble human behavior.

While the high jinks are too haphazard to give him a credible — or heck, even coherent — character arc, Cena is here and there able to seize moments to show us the fissures in his layered personas, a fragile construction of confidence, ego, vulnerability and need.

The film, a debut feature from director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell, falls sway to the clickbait tropes it intends to send up: red herrings, a tone of suffocating gloom and a desperation to keep the audience on the hook.

If the movie succeeds at anything, it’s in capturing Marley’s lingering spell on fans.

Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama.

The script is as subtle as a bonk on the nose, and the editing repeats every beat twice-over in broad pantomime and meaningful looks.

The film has so much visual imagination that it tends to squander it.

Sweeney and Powell could do wonders with a better script, something that makes more use of the way they grin at each other like they ate knives for lunch. She’s skilled at layered insincerity; he specializes in smirky, put-on machismo, shooting the camera a horrifically funny tongue waggle.

It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity.

Oddly — and rather fascinatingly — this is a film about a spiritual revolution.

Our world so hauntingly echoes Collins’s fictions that the film, shot last summer, moves us to spend its gargantuan running time reflecting on contemporary headlines, mourning the generational tragedy of anger and fear begetting anger and fear.

The movie is constrained by its own conscience.

The result is a personal film that feels oddly impersonal. The tonal clutter overwhelms Keshavarz’s genuinely interesting story.

This all-star mercenary squadron composed of ’80s-to-aughts brutes is the cinematic equivalent to Slash’s Snakepit, a supergroup throwback to an era when men were meatheads and we in the audience merrily cheered them on.

The actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.

Where Jane feels thinly sketched in pastels, Corrine’s portrait has been detailed in bright permanent markers. A’zion roils with emotions and her character is funny, mercurial, reactive and real.

Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.

It’s clear why these films need Neeson: He commits to every line like his life actually does depend on it. But gravitas alone can’t salvage the frustrating plot contrivances and ridiculous dialogue that make the characters sound dumber and dumber the more they explain their motivations.

The rare moments in which an image pauses to catch its breath can be stunning, such as a shot of an endless expanse of flaming lanterns dangling over countless white ghosts — how the artist Yayoi Kusama might have designed the afterlife. There’s enough gags that a dozen land.

The misery unfurls in a straight timeline of dramatic scenes that leap over the lived-in moments that make up a relationship.

Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.

What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.

It’s disappointing, yet inevitable that the creation story of Lee gives way to the characters he helped create.

The plot is a bust. Five credited screenwriters and not one compelling stake.

The film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds.

Only after Emma’s circumstances get worse — the poor dear is knocked comatose — do things onscreen improve.

These well-meaning choices struggle to cohere into a satisfying picture.

This adaptation, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (“The Edge of Seventeen”), seems uneasy putting funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is.

Mr. McKay’s comedy is at its best when his tone is big, ridiculous and cheerfully subversive.

Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans.

After a decade in development, the project that made it to the screen is a noisy, pixelated smash-and-zap that does manage to capture the spirit of play.

Sandberg started his career in small horror films, and doesn’t seem to have much ambition to scale up. Most of the sequences are cut from medium shots strung together without much style — they may as well be a "Saturday Night Live” sketch.

It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.

It’s a mournful, stodgy, girl-meets-fish drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.

The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene.