A.O. Scott

The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination... The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment.

As the story limps and drags, the viewer also becomes accustomed to the images, and astonishment at the film’s innovative, painstaking technique begins to fade. But its charm never quite wears off, for reasons summed up in the title.

Perhaps the world doesn't need another picture on disaffected youth, but Pleasures is about more than alienation.

Suicide Squad is a so-so, off-peak superhero movie. It chases after the nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool” and the anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” but trips over its own feet.

Like many other recent documentaries about artists, it is more celebratory than analytical, a kind of slick, extended promotional video for its subject.

Mr. Malick presents these events as if he had drawn them not from his mind but from some repository of celestial memory. Which may be to say that Voyage of Time ultimately proves his point about the way the universe and human consciousness mirror each other. But it’s a point that might have been more powerful if he had left it unspoken.

Downsizing is an ambitious movie about the value of modesty, and its faults are proportionate to its insights. I sort of wish it felt like a bigger deal, but maybe that’s my problem.

It is possible to admire the craft and sensitivity of Louder Than Bombs without quite believing it. The characters are so carefully drawn that they can feel smaller than life, and the dramatic space they inhabit has a curiously abstract feeling.

The overall mood is of warm reassurance, and some of it is even pretty funny.

The director’s discipline is remarkable, and also a bit constricting.

The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection.

A woozy, disconnected piece of filmmaking about drugs, rock 'n' roll and the aftermath of sex.

If you have seen the earlier version, you can occupy yourself with point-by-point comparisons. If not, you may find yourself swerving between bafflement and mild astonishment, wondering how a movie that works so hard to generate intensity and surprise can feel so routine and bereft of genuine imagination.

The movie's tolerant, good-humored view of its characters drains it of some dramatic intensity, but Mr. Harris seems more interested in piquant, offhand moments than in big, straining confrontations.

Does a yeoman's job of recycling the day-old dough that passes for its story.

Shamelessly stirring, brandishing Mr. Gibson's anguished masculinity like a musket. It may be effective, but you leave the theater feeling used.

You may be taken by the director's enormous enthusiasm, but the picture doesn't quite work.

Even though, in retrospect, The Ardennes feels a little obvious and secondhand, it unfolds with enough speed and wit to hold your attention.

It's a much funnier movie than the trailer would lead you to believe; it would almost have to be. But it is just not as consistent as their previous trash wallows.

The Secret Life of Pets is adequate animated entertainment, amusing while it lasts but not especially memorable except as a catalog of compromises and missed opportunities.

Think of this movie as a greatest-hits package, with some good stuff to show but nothing very new to say.

The movie does have its own kind of blockheaded poetry.

The director Justin Lin, happily brandishing all the expensive digital tools at his disposal, makes “F9” feel scrappy and baroque at the same time. The identity of the brand rests on twin foundations of silliness and sincerity, both of which are honored here.

The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.

Mr. Gomes has a tendency to revel in his own cleverness and to indulge in self-conscious cinematic jokes. He also has a penchant for obscurantism, a habit of confusing ambiguity with depth.

There is a fine line between delving into the mysteries of life and engaging in mystification, and Mr. Gomes lands on the wrong side of it. There is something disingenuous in the way this movie disowns its own ambitions and scorns the possibility of clarity or coherence. Maybe its opacity is a matter of principle. Or maybe it’s just an excuse.

Notorious settles into a curious comfort zone; it's half pop fable, half naturalistic docudrama. Not a bad movie, but nowhere near as strong as its soundtrack.

It looks beautiful and moves swiftly but never quite takes full imaginative flight.

Cousin Jules is in many ways a wonder to see and hear, but there is less to it than meets the eye.

There is both too much story and not enough. The contours of this desolate future are lightly sketched rather than fully explained, which is always a good choice. But that minimalism serves as an excuse for an irritating lack of narrative clarity, so that much of what happens seems arbitrary rather than haunting.

Ms. Roth's radiance and understanding of Lucía's emotional life gives this film a touch of necessary psychological accessibility.

You may not quite trust Mother and Child -- its soft spots and fuzzy edges give it away -- but you can believe just about everyone in it.

A mild lark disguised as a wild bender, The Rum Diary is also a touching tribute to Thompson himself.

Nothing you see makes any sense at all, but the sensations are undeniable, and kind of fun in their vertiginous, supercaffeinated way.

The fun is contagious.

The high-mindedness of the movie, its showy conviction that its heart is in the right place, dulls some of its political insights. And its grandiosity undermines the ragged pleasures of the genre.

The movie, directed by Michael Cuesta from a script by a team of blue-chip writers (Stephen Schiff and Michael Finch are credited, along with Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz), shows more skill than personality.

It is, overall, an amusing little picture, with some inspired moments and some sour notes, a handful of interesting performances and the hint, now and then, of an idea.

Like his (Abrams) previous features, "Mission: Impossible III" and "Star Trek," Super 8 is an enticing package without much inside.

The plot of Sleep Dealer is a bit thin, and the performances are earnest and dutiful. But there is sufficient ingenuity in the film’s main ideas to hold your attention, and the political implications of the allegorical story are at once obvious and subtle.

It is blunt, simple and sentimental, using time-tested methods to teach a clear and rousing lesson.

Chaotic, trifling, oddly likable film.

Like its hero, Disorder has plenty of technique but not enough purpose.

The entire picture is a third-generation Xerox copy, in part because adapting Mr. Harris's books for the screen seems to turn directors into rigid formalists.

Soderbergh and his top-notch cast (Sharon Stone shows up, as do Jeffrey Wright and Matthias Schoenaerts) keep things lively, playing out parables of betrayal and deception with pulpy, TV-movie flair.

Young Ahmed is suspenseful and economical, with a clear sense of what’s at stake, but something crucial — perhaps a deeper insight into the character or the contradictions that ensnare him — is missing.

This is a dumb movie pretending to be smart, even as it wants you to believe the opposite. Still, dumb can be fun.

Let It Snow is cheery, and it gets by on the energy of the actors, who may be as taken by the movie's guilelessness as audiences could be. The film's naïveté makes up for its rampant predictability.

“Sacred Deer” feels like a dark, opaque bit of folklore transplanted into an off-kilter modern setting.

The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant.

Churchill’s resolve, like the bravery of the soldiers, airmen and ordinary Britons in “Dunkirk,” is offered not as a rebuke to the current generation, but rather as a sop, an easy and complacent fantasy of Imperial gumption and national unity.

A genial, mostly inoffensive, sometimes quite funny sequel.

Mr. Spielberg, a digital enthusiast and an old-school cineaste, goes further than most filmmakers in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a form that is frequently dismissed and misunderstood.

I don’t think, on balance, that this is a very good movie. It’s talky and clumsy, alternating between self-importance and clowning. But it’s also not a movie that can be easily shaken off. Partly this is an accident of timing.

From the moment Cyrano enters the action, his charisma and intelligence are on splendid display, and Dinklage — jaunty, melancholy, sly — takes possession of the movie. But that means that the argument on which the drama depends is over before it has even begun.

Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed.

Comedy is in a weird place right now, and The Hustle deserves some credit for fulfilling its own modest, escapist ambitions. Unlike a lot of what we see these days, in movies and elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like a rip-off or a scam. It’s downright innocent.

The director, R. J. Cutler, whose previous work has mostly been in big- and small-screen documentaries, has a way of underplaying large feelings and amplifying subtle shifts of mood.

Thanks to Hancock’s craft and the discipline of the actors, it’s more than watchable, but you are unlikely to be haunted, disturbed or even surprised. You haven’t exactly seen this before. It just feels that way.

It is intermittently engrossing, though a little overextended for the deadpan approach that Mr. Bitomsky uses.

The trouble with movies like those in the "Friday" series is that their success can lead to a need to inflate their importance, inviting pretentious descriptions like "folkloric" when "Friday" is much closer to chitlin circuit comedy.

It is a reasonably skillful exercise in genre and style, a well-made vessel containing nothing in particular, though some of its features - European setting, slow pacing, full-frontal female nudity - are more evocative of the art house than of the multiplex.

Nightcrawler is a slick and shallow movie desperate, like Lou himself, to be something more.

Your last day - or, as it happens, the whole planet's last day - will be just like every other one. Mr. Ferrara makes this point with ingenuity and characteristic thrift by using found news footage to provide images of apocalypse.

Rage — shared by characters on both sides, even as they direct it at each other — is what “The Hunt” is all about. Anger is the source of its humor and its horror, both of which are fairly effective. The fights and shootouts are brisk and brutal. The dialogue pops with inventive profanity and familiar varieties of name-calling and woke-speak.

An often watchable, though goofy and lurid, blast of a costume drama set in the late 15th century.

On the Basis of Sex does a brisk, coherent job of articulating what Ginsburg accomplished and why it mattered, dramatizing both her personal stake in feminist legal activism and the intellectual discipline with which she approached it.

The schematic for No Sudden Move remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.

The art is lacking, but the material is remarkable enough to make up for pedestrian filmmaking.

The Way, Way Back has the charm of timelessness but also more than a touch of triteness. Its situations and feelings seem drawn more from available, sentimental ideas about adolescence than from the perceptions of any particular adolescent.

Probably the worst thing you can say about Hollywood Ending is that it has one: it turns out that Mr. Allen wasn't being ironic after all, he just made a comedy that feels ironclad.

The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.

This is ultimately a tale of affirmation, self-acceptance and second chances, and its lessons, while not unwelcome, are a bit too forced and neatly packaged to make it fully satisfying.

This isn’t a bad movie. The problem is that it’s too nice a movie, too careful and compromised, as if its makers didn’t trust the audience to handle the real news of the world.

There are so many red herrings and plot twists, such a dense barrage of flashbacks and quick cuts, that you may find yourself as rattled and breathless as Ig himself. And a bit let down at the end, when all the noise, color and energy resolve into a basic whodunit decked out in weak special effects and spiritual swamp gas.

Though you may hear otherwise, Top Gun: Maverick is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie. But it is also, and perhaps more significantly, an earnest statement of the thesis that movies can and should be great.

Lacks more than subtext: it barely has text. At times, the picture seems to have been edited with a blowtorch. But it gets the job done efficiently and swiftly.

Dog is unabashedly sentimental. A movie about a dog and a soldier could hardly be otherwise. Luckily, Tatum’s self-deprecating charm and Carolin’s script keep the story on the tolerable side of maudlin.

So campy it reflexively sends an elbow to its own ribs.

The storytelling and the visual style are rarely more than workmanlike, and the big scenes arrive punctually and are played with minimal nuance.

Silent Waters is several different movies, and most of them feel negligible and meandering, until the film finally packs a wallop.

Except for the access the director, David Teboul, had to Mr. Saint Laurent's inner circle, "Times" wouldn't be out of place on A&E.

So beautifully realized as a mood piece that it takes a while for a slight disappointment to register.

When it clicks, the picture should shock you into laughter -- enough to make you wish it were better and applaud its efforts anyway.

After a while the humorless solemnity of The Rocket stifles any interesting sense of Maurice Richard as a character. The hockey sequences are nicely done, though, and give a reasonably good sense of what a great player he was.

There are several reasons that Katy Perry: Part of Me is more interesting than similar movies about Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. Most simply, she just has more talent than any of them, and her songs have a wider emotional range.

A singularly unpleasant movie: full of obnoxious characters in scenes that seem overwritten and under-rehearsed, oblivious to the most basic standards of tonal consistency, narrative coherence or visual decorum. But it is also sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant.

There is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. White Noise is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.

"Author” is most interesting — and least self-aware — as a study in the gullibility and narcissism of the celebrity class.

What makes the movie interesting — and disturbing on a few different levels — is how its sentimental, inspirational elements do battle with darker impulses.

Thankfully, Mr. Grimaldi and the screenwriters have no great lessons to impart or messages to deliver, and the film, while uneven -- sometimes too on the nose, sometimes anecdotal and diffuse -- is generally absorbing, thanks mostly to the quality of the acting.

Bay’s virtuosic flouting of the laws of physics, probability and narrative coherence is meant to catapult you into a zone of sublimity where melodramatic emotion and adrenalized excitement fuse into a whole new kind of sensation.

A modest, intermittently engaging film.

An action movie, a basic training movie, a swaggering sea adventure, a home front melodrama and an inspiring tough-love heroic teacher fable. If the aggregate of all these movies is exhausting and occasionally overwrought, some of the parts are stirring and effective, though not exactly fresh.

As the film moves through his world of blood and sex and curdled machismo, The Devil's Double inhales some of his toxic, shallow energy. At times you feel as if you were stuck in "Grand Theft Auto: Baghdad City," which, while entertaining enough, can also become a bit wearying.

An energetic, unpretentious B movie — the kind best seen at a drive-in like the one in an early scene — it is devoted, above all, to the delivery of visceral, kinetic excitement.

Yet there is so little characterization that when the sub goes down, you may find yourself confused as to which of the supporting cast members lived through the torpedo blast.

Even as Mr. Gilliam assails the tedium and pointlessness of Qohen’s existence, The Zero Theorem succumbs to those forces, spinning its wheels and repeating its jokes in a manic frenzy that is never as funny or as mind-blowing as it wants to be.