Amy Nicholson

Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.

The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé.

Instead of bothering much about dialogue, Fuze is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace.

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.

As a satire, it’s almost too implied — the filmmakers barely bother to develop their ideas, figuring correctly that people already agree the internet is, at best, a neutral-evil. I liked it and was impatient with it in equal measure, the way a teacher feels about a lazy, gifted child.

Out of magnanimity, I’ll liken this trifle to a Rothko. The more I think about The Christophers, the more I imagine it has interesting layers. But I won’t fault anyone who just sees a simple square.

Ultimately, The Drama is the movie equivalent of a half-glass of Champagne: a toast Borgli trusts us to decide whether its ideas are half-empty or half-full. I’ll raise my cup to full, but only because of how pleasurably it bubbles.

This is a rebellious, empathetic adventure story about a grandmother who catches on that her society needs to learn how to think freely.

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.

Project Hail Mary is wholesome science fiction that satisfies like a jumbo serving of apple pie and milk.

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.

Whatever Gyllenhaal wants to do, she does, which becomes its own act of captivation and reckless empowerment. It helps that Buckley and Bale are terrific, as is the ensemble at large. The full force of Lawrence Sher’s cinematography, Karen Murphy’s production design and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s orchestral score is fabulous, combining to make something seedy, moody and extravagant.

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.

From abandoned panic rooms to flubbed Ghostface executions, the characters make so many dumb choices that eventually we’re convinced that Williamson is frustrating us by design. Maybe in the boldest meta twist of all, the inventor of "Scream” wants to kill it off himself.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

While the promise of that gangbusters opening sequence goes a tad unfulfilled, “Killing” has two strong twists and plenty of reasons to enjoy the romp.

The screenplay gets so intricate and angry — and so shamelessly ambitious — you can’t believe someone in today’s Hollywood was willing to put up the money to get it made. Even helmed by proven hitmaker Verbinski of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, it’s a feat akin to convincing someone to fund a skyscraper-sized cuckoo clock that has a bird that pops out and heckles the crowd.

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

Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.

Filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s snaky, surprising fable starts with a sneeze and explodes into a saga about bureaucracy, modernization and moral corruption. It’s electrifying.

I’m hesitant to call Melania propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well. If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed.

Even if you don’t know her music, the film still works an acidic sketch of fame.

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

If we lived in a rational world, Fiennes’ bravura comic-manic performance would earn him an Oscar nomination.

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

Song Sung Blue couldn’t be less cool. But the Sardinas were completely sincere and Jackman and Hudson honor their innocence by playing them straight.

The movie’s moxie makes it impossible not to get caught up in Marty’s crusade. We’re giddy even when he’s miserable.

Cameron’s affection for the place is still a convincing reason to hang out in outer space until the popcorn visionary finally returns to our planet. But plot-wise, the story is the same as ever.

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It’s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres, down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone.

Rian Johnson’s darkest, funniest and best installment yet in his three-film detective series.

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.

Helander and editor Juho Virolainen pace the carnage like slapstick. They have a nimble rhythm for how many times a victim can dodge disaster before splattering. The violence is so big that it becomes comedy, even getting us laughing at a severed head, twice.

“For Good” is a worthwhile return to Oz. The extra scenes and rejiggered duets justify the running time (even if the 160-minute length of the first film remains unforgivable).

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

Sirāt is taut and riveting and nearly all mood. You feel the exhilaration of veering off the path, the self-exile of speeding toward nowhere, the dread that this caravan has veered too far for its own safety.

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.

Now that Linklater has ascended to the establishment, he’s encouraging cinema’s future by turning to its inspirational past with Nouvelle Vague, the lively story of how Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) directed Breathless with a tiny bit of cash and a ton of ego. It’s the origin story of Godard, and, in a way, of himself. Even more importantly, it’s a manual for what Linklater hopes will be a fresh wave of talent storming the shore any minute. (I’m counting on it.)

Bugonia is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life.

With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

This deservedly anticipated Frankenstein transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.

Earlier incarnations of this story had activism as the end goal, Valentin for his principles and Molina for his new friend. Condon is more focused on their humanity. Caring for each other makes this bleak world worth fighting for. Without joy, we’re already in chains.

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.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn’t it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight?

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.

It’s the kind of intimate tour of New York that usually gets called a love letter to the city, except the corners Aronofsky likes have so much grime and menace and humor that it’s more like an affectionate dirty limerick.

Roach has insightfully made this about people, not societal scapegoats. He and McNamara have changed up nearly everything in this disaster except its vibrations of dread.

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.

Lurker is a teeth-grittingly great dramedy that insists there’s more tension in the entourage of a mellow hipster than a king.

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.”

A former sketch comic, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters’ confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you’re listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world.

[Schaffer's] Naked Gun doesn’t want to regress; it wants to surprise and surpass while never punching down. The film is so committed to its PG-13 rating that it manages to pull off some truly filthy, bawdy slapstick without exposing a frame of skin.

Nothing about Together screams comedy, yet that’s precisely how it’s put together. Awkward humor is the skeleton under its prestige nightmare surface, even as it’s wonderfully, heartbreakingly tragic to watch our leads roil to melt together like mozzarella.

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 reboot’s boldest stride toward progress is that it values emotionally credible performances.

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.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

The pull of the film lies in how Davidtz allows Bobo to bob on the surface of things while we feel the dark undertow

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.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

It’s a magpie movie that’s happy to give audiences the tinselly things they want — i.e., two robots clobbering the Wi-Fi out of each other. But Johnstone creates openings for his own shaggy sense of humor. I’m excited to keep tabs on the promising New Zealander.

The pleasures of “F1” are engineered to bypass the brain. It’s muscular and thrilling and zippy, even though at over two-and-a-half hours long, it has a toy dump truck’s worth of plot.

Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.

It’s refreshing to see a romp this spry. Elio isn’t trying to reinvent the spaceship — it’s after the puppyish charm of sticking your head out the window as marvels whiz past.

Tilt “Materialists” at an angle and it’s the same film as “Past Lives,” only bolder and funnier. Really, Song wants to know whether a sensible girl can justify shackling herself to a broke creative.

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.

The script is lean enough that there really isn’t room for narrative flubs besides one breakdown that’s a bit too convenient. Hawkins lets herself get vulnerable, too, and the film never fakes a punch by pretending she’s anything more than a small, desperate and bedraggled woman with eyes that look like a bottomless well of need.

[Anderson's] managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.

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

Rudd and Robinson’s scenes together are great.

Every scene has a delight.

The grief in this film is relatable to anyone who’s realized how hard it is to go home again, whether that means a newly gentrified neighborhood or simply the security of what a middle-class wage used to afford.

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.

Sinners works more like a pop song than a grand statement, the kind of deceptively simple high-level craft that few people can pull off.

Warfare is strictly the facts, and those alone are terrible, brave, intense, random, tedious and captivating.

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.

Half the time, Black’s dialogue is just announcing what we’re looking at, from diamond swords to flying hot air balloons that look like goth squids. But it’s the gleam in his eyes, the gusto in his delivery, that makes every line zing.

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

I’d call “Wallis Island” a contender for the most quotable film of the year but there are so many good lines stacked on top of each other, and so much giggling on top of that, it’s impossible to keep up with Key’s wordplay.

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 a pleasure to enjoy something that’s both straight-faced and freewheeling, like a jazz pedagogue who also knows how to get a crowd dancing.

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.

As semi-inessential as Mickey 17 feels in Bong’s canon, I’m at peace that he keeps asking how to give everyone’s life value. He’ll keep repeating the question until we come up with an answer.

Maybe they don’t all deserve to escape punishment. But these otherwise overlooked lives deserve a spotlight.

Riff Raff is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring.

The tone is dry and spartan — and funny, too, if you don’t mind snorting at someone whose sons died in a marshmallow-eating competition, or giggling over the sobs of a worker weeping in a cubicle for reasons that go unexplained.

Love Hurts is an action-romance that fizzles like a science-class volcano made of baking soda and cheese. The individual ingredients are fine: two killers on the run from punishment and their personal feelings for each other, played by Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. But their chemistry is all wrong.

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.

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.

Green is a storyteller with such control that we don’t leave the theater feeling patronized or hectored. She’s thought everything out, and planned it so that every scene in The Royal Hotel is as gripping as it is pointed.

The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.

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.

Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt.

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.

Defa’s tight and tidy focus on communication — mostly verbal, sometimes role play (“Hug me like you haven’t seen me for three years,” Rachel instructs Eric) — adds a smart layer to this otherwise familiar tale of estrangement.

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.

First-time director Matthew López gets us rooting for the cheeky couple’s transition from rivals to romantic bedfellows, boosted by the cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who photographs the leads so adoringly that you half-expect them to turn to the camera and hawk a bottle of cologne. Thanks to their playful chemistry, we’re sold.

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

A stellar debut.

Hazanavicius has made a movie that tests our ideas of creative genius.

Clearly, the actors feel their characters in their bones.

I can say without hyperbole that there are conversations in this movie that I have never heard before (and refuse to spoil). Better, I can confirm that Brown — the straight man to Duplass’s comic relief — delivers his half with conviction.

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 staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness.

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

Satter, a veteran theater director, makes a smooth transition into her feature film debut, written with James Paul Dallas. She’s skilled at evoking tension from a minimal set.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.

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.

The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy.

This is a terrifically nasty thriller about seizing control, over others and over oneself. Wigon proves to have a great grasp on it, as well; his assuredness is half of the film’s success.

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

It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.

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.

For all its clichés, this furious and discomfiting film tugs on your conscience for days, making a powerful case to turn the American public’s attention back to a conflict it would rather forget.

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

Hallstrom wins the audience back with his sincere connection to af Klint, played in her bullheaded youth by his daughter, Tora Hallstrom, and in her muttering years by his wife, Lena Olin.

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.

Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint.

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.

The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.

Hooray! A romantic comedy that revives the screwball formula where two people talk themselves silly — and we only had to go to the end of the solar system to make it happen.

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.

No one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.

We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage.

It’s a shallow look at shallow people.

Missing captures the constant distractions of the modern age. Pop-up windows continually tug at June’s attention. However, the film’s more engaging moments tap into the older cyber nostalgia of text-based adventure games from the 1970s, where problems are solved by typing the right command.

Even viewers with a tolerance for this kind of saccharine cinema — oversaturated green grass, slow-motion sprinting, kindly biker gangs, and a fleeting bar squabble in which the nastiest insult is “Idiot!” — will likely say their favorite part is the end credits.

Dreams are incubators for dissatisfaction, Martins seems to sigh.

Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable.

For a film that takes this much glee in cruelty — Matilda is called “a brat,” “a bore,” “a lousy little worm” and “a nasty, little troublemaking goblin” in her first three minutes onscreen — it also includes scenes of genuine loveliness.

Only when Sarah and Toni meet for the first time, an hour in, does the film allow a genuine conversation — and, gratefully, a moment of recognition.

As an intellectual dismantling of white savior narratives, Devotion is smartly done; as an enjoyable heartwarmer to watch with your uncle, it’s stiff when it should soar.

The film is strongest when it falls silent, allowing the actors to communicate their thoughts with a look.

Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.

Adams doesn’t gain much by returning for Disenchanted, a cluttered and noisy sequel directed by Adam Shankman from a screenplay by Brigitte Hales. Neither does the original film’s fan base.

It’s one part doom cloud, one part squirting prank flower — an uneasy balance that’s united only by stunning visuals which sweep the audience along even when the gags stumble.

Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop.

In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.

Roberts and Clooney wear their stature like sweatpants, rousing themselves to do little more than spit insults like competitive siblings. They’re selling their own comfortable rapport, not their characters’ romantic tension.

The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.

Kunis’s alpha female appears at once ferocious and like a conspicuous sham. (Imagine Sheryl Sandberg as a “Scooby-Doo” villain.) Her performance carries the film — a fortunate break for the director Mike Barker, who has the near-impossible challenge of shepherding the tone from snark to painful sincerity.

Bros is hyper-conscious that it’s a landmark built on a fault line. No matter how many ideas it crams into its quick-paced plot, it’s doomed to fall short of representing an entire group of people — and it knows it shouldn’t have to. As such, Eichner’s challenge makes for a conflicted Cupid.

Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.

Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.

Do Revenge, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is a playful, sharp-fanged satire that feels like the ’90s teen comedy hammered into modern emojis: crown, knife, fire, winky face.

Boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.