Amy Nicholson

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

Presence is being sold as a ghost story, but it’s more like a family drama disguised under a sheet. The eye holes are the only thing separating it from a thousand other ordinary little films about the injuries people do to those they love. Otherwise, the story doesn’t have enough flesh on its bones to hold our interest.

The film’s most disorienting and wondrous realization, however, is that Shakespearean acting can exist even within “Grand Theft Auto’s” limits.

Lamont trusts his movie is personality-powered. He’s calibrated each performance to fit together like a 12-piece band, and he knows that some jokes are even funnier when whispered. But I’m in the mood to speak up: I’ve missed this type of satisfying junk food. Waiter, bring me another.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

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.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths invites you to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world. (If you personally know a worse one, my condolences.) That the unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about miserable jerks and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others.

Babygirl’s erotic scenes are hot. But really, Reijn is doing her damnedest to get a moral rise out of us. Romy and Samuel have safe words, yet our own national conversation about sexual ethics gets tongue-tied whenever it tries to define right and wrong. Instead, we have Reijn asking uncomfortable questions.

Even as the movie captures Williams’ recklessness, it’s also a convincing sketch of his artistic growth and commitment.

As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound.

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.

The Brutalist argues, and proves by its very existence, that the maddening thing about major works of art is that they demand invention and resources and cooperation.

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.

Red One is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids — especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun.

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

Corny, yes. But charming, too.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.

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.

Keaton’s an old pro at getting audiences to love a well-intentioned jerk, and the script gets good chuckles out of his inconsiderate attempts at generosity.

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.

It’s not hard to imagine “Transformers One” connecting with preteens whose pubescent bodies can be as unwieldy as Orion’s first, clumsy transformation, with wheels where he expects legs and arms where he expects wheels.

The film stirs the soul less by the magic of ghosts than by the power of human connection.

McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.

Speak No Evil is the rowdiest horror flick in ages, a hilarious and venomous little nasty that cattle-prods the audience to scream everything its lead characters choke down.

Sticking within the bounds of reality does make for a heck of a good slow-speed car chase. Those craving flashier, bullet-spraying butt-kickery will have to hope for a more gonzo sequel.

The usual possession beats are here — creepy crawling! smoking crucifixes! shivering violins! — and given their own quirky spins. (One key revelation takes place over coffees at McDonald’s.) Yet, Daniels carves space for the intimate moments that matter to him.

This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.

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

It’s a film prone to tonal whiplash. Yet the script has made some sharp trims, scrapping a subplot about Ellen DeGeneres and eliminating some of Ryle’s most outlandish behavior.

As much as the script quotes Shakespeare, it’s a lot closer to “The Shawshank Redemption,” a well-meaning reminder that the incarcerated are human beings, too.

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.

With the whole super-racket on the ropes, the cast of “Deadpool & Wolverine” seizes the opportunity to prove the power of their own charisma.

In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.

The film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work.

The French provocateur Catherine Breillat gets her kicks with unnerving tales of sexual coercion, but a clothed, close-up first kiss in “Last Summer” may be her most excruciating to date.

An earnest and frustrating documentary.

As Paltrow (Gwyneth’s brother), who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Shoval, makes his own case that history is built of small, individual actions that tend to be overlooked, he allows himself a bit of gallows humor.

A Quiet Place: Day One, the startlingly effective prequel to the 2018 blockbuster about noise-sensitive aliens that devour anyone who’s ever annoyed a librarian, hits Manhattan with a bang, a nasty body count and a fair amount of audience suspicion.

Baker’s delicate spellbinders more often leave their themes unspoken. Her characters grapple with longings and a need to prove their worth, but they rarely share their struggles out loud.

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.

Design-wise, the “Inside Out” characters are Pixar’s crudest work, with the blocky colors and stiff hair of a creature in a TV commercial for insecticide. Blown up to the big screen, they just look worse. Narratively, however, the film’s portrait of Joy is beautifully complex.

The perceptive dramedy I Used to Be Funny features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime.

The camera is more athletic than anyone on-screen, muscling between bullets and smashing through walls. Heyvaert shoots action so well that you forgive how little physical action there actually is.

The film is heavy on the dread, light on the narrative. It’s all about the tension in the gym where the adults are just as melodramatic as the girls.

The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

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 jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy.

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.

Are we looking for the human in the Sasquatch? Or for the Sasquatch in us? The movie works either way, but in its refusal to hew to a familiar plot trajectory, it holds up a mirror to our own narcissism.

It’s a simple, gentle tale that’s told beautifully but feels hollow — like a eulogy for an acquaintance.

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

It lacks the control of Guadagnino’s earlier work — or rather, I should say, it takes subtlety and restraint and thwacks them over the fence and into the bushes.

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

It’s hard to fault Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners” for being chaotic and miserable. That’s the mood he’s after — and he captures it with such assurance that the film is a tough watch.

It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

Música, Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will.

Between the hammering misanthropy, the herky-jerky editing and almost defiantly crummy sound mix, this exasperating film keeps you enjoyably off-balance.

This is a pressure-cooker film, an exercise in small-budget simplicity that leans on one set and one goal: Keep ’em watching.

“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.

Though the pair whisper the word “love” in bed and even seem to think they mean it, this is not a movie about two people healing each other. It’s about two broken souls mashing their jagged edges together, hurting each other and those around them. And it’s fun to watch the blood splatter.

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.

Problemista, which Torres wrote, directed and stars in, reveals a new willingness to tell a relatable story with a riveting sketch of an honest-to-goodness person.

This political context is vital to appreciate the rebellion underneath Sarnet’s romp; otherwise, it’s easy to dismiss it as merely a goofy riff on the Shaw Brothers Studios’ landmark Hong Kong hit “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” which likewise followed a novice’s hard-earned spiritual and gymnastic growth. Of course, it is that, too.

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.

With commendable wit and zero self-pity, Chinn sketches the daily surreality of her teenage analogue.

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.

To make good on his movie’s message, Jefferson is determined to give space to the moments of Monk’s life that don’t hinge on race at all.

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

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

Fennell has an ear for cadence, and her editor, Victoria Boydell, has impeccable shock-comic timing. The film is put together with precision.

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.

It’s human and messy — and it’s divine.

Diana wants our respect — and by the end of the movie, she’s earned it. While she’s one of the prickliest protagonists you’ll see this year, she’s so raw and earnest and apologetically herself that you adore her anyway — from the safe distance of the screen.

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.

In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.

This is a film that delights in unspoken terrors and audience misdirection.

This is Carney’s saltiest ode to creative expression — and, peculiarly, his most relatable.

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.