A.O. Scott

Like Mills’s emotional back story, the special effects seem to have been pulled out of a box of secondhand ideas. Nor is the execution all that impressive. There’s little in the way of awe, suspense or surprise.

Its rigor is impressive, but also something of a narrative trap. Once the futility of Cielo’s situation, and her persistence in the face of it, are definitively established, a feeling of paralysis sets in.

The cast is large and the costume and set designers have been kept busy with period details, but “Marlowe” neither dutifully copies nor cleverly updates detective-movie tropes. The dialogue is spiced with profanities and anachronisms, and the plot moves ponderously through a thicket of complications.

Hayek Pinault and Tatum have a tantalizing chemistry, but the script doesn’t always help them activate it.

For all its skill and cunning, Knock at the Cabin is an overwrought quasi-theological melodrama that also manages to be a half-baked thought experiment. It’s a thrill ride in a toy trolley.

I’m curious, and inclined — as I was in 2009 — to give this grand, muddled project the benefit of the doubt. Cameron’s ambitions are as sincere as they are self-contradictory. He wants to conquer the world in the name of the underdog, to celebrate nature by means of the most extravagant artifice, and to make everything new feel old again.

As an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, The Whale is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.

A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.

Magee and Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation emphasizes the romance of Lawrence’s book over the radicalism of his vision. This Lady Chatterley’s Lover is faithful to the novel, while also revealing how safe, how domesticated, it has become.

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.

Causeway is both thin and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of making it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, superb actors who do what they can to bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection to something that almost resembles life.

Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation.

For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.

Vengeance, while earnest, thoughtful and quite funny in spots, demonstrates just how difficult it can be to turn political polarization and culture-war hostility into a credible narrative. Its efforts shouldn’t be dismissed, even though it’s ultimately too clever for its own good, and maybe not quite as smart as it thinks it is.

Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.

How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.

In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.

Lightyear, directed by Angus MacLane from a script by Jason Headley, aims to please by pandering, to be good-enough entertainment. As such, it succeeds in a manner more in line with second-tier Disney animation than with top-shelf Pixar.

This is a very crowded movie — so many species of dinosaur, and I’m so bad at keeping track of them that my 8-year-old-self is no longer speaking to me. They are variously menacing, ravenous, bizarre and kind of cute, but the frenzied live-action and digital special effects rarely produce moments of Spielbergian awe.

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.

The movie, an uneasy amalgam of horror and allegory, full of creepy, gory effects and literary and mythological allusions, amounts to a sustained and specific indictment of the titular gender.

There isn’t much of a love story here. There isn’t much of anything, even as there’s too much of everything.

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.

Mothering Sunday never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency.

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

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.

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.

The nexus of racism, patriarchal power and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.

It’s not the kind of movie that will knock you out, but it won’t leave you with a headache and a dry mouth, either. It’s a generous pour and a mellow buzz.

While France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.

It’s funny and abrasive, but also coy and, in the end, a bit tedious.

For all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing.

Samuel makes the most of his formidable cast. If anything, he may be overgenerous. The narrative sometimes flags so that everyone can get in a few volleys of the salty, pungent dialogue on the way to the next round of gunplay or fisticuffs.

For all its reckless style and velocity, Titane doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.

The overall vibe — a look that is both opulent and generic; a tone that mixes brisk professionalism with maundering self-pity; an aggressive, exhausting fusion of grandiosity and fun — is more superhero saga than espionage caper.

The twists in the story are meant to raise the emotional stakes, but they have the opposite effect, undermining the credibility of the premise. The harder the movie leans into its own cleverness, the more it exposes itself as a diverting but ultimately unconvincing exercise.

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.

There is plenty of drama, and some hard feelings . . . but not a lot of intrigue or honest emotion. I guess if that’s what you’re after, it’s best to stick to Twitter.

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.

Despite Weitz’s sensitive direction and a superb cast — including Frankie R. Faison as Marian’s patient husband, DeWanda Wise as Matt’s patient love interest and Paul Reiser as his patient boss — Fatherhood can’t quite deliver.

The story is both overwrought and underdeveloped, with potentially important plot details insufficiently explained or left out altogether.

This revisionist supervillain origin story, directed by Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”), doesn’t offer much that is genuinely new, but it nonetheless feels fresher than most recent Disney live-action efforts

Rather than interweaving domestic drama, supernatural mumbo-jumbo and campus naughtiness, Pulcini and Berman lurch from one scene to the next, squandering scares and undermining the momentum of the story.

Imagine a Chekhov play without drama, an Oscar Wilde farce without humor, a Visconti film without desire, or a very long party at the home of a distant acquaintance, and you will have some idea of Malmkrog, Cristi Puiu’s latest film.

An action movie made with lavish grandiosity, zero pretension and not too much originality.

A genial, mostly inoffensive, sometimes quite funny sequel.

Like nearly everything else in this feverish, frustrating movie, the political themes are handled with maximal melodrama and minimal clarity.

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.

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.

The characters don’t quite come to life. They aren’t trapped by prescribed social roles so much as by the programmatic design of the narrative, which insists it is showing things as they really are. If it wasn’t so insistent, it might be more convincing.

Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.

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.

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.

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.

There are some jokey parts, some weepy bits, a sexy moment and a few fine displays of anger from Louis-Dreyfus, but they’re all just thrown together like salted nuts and cheap candies in a snack mix.

It almost works, but as persuasive as the performers can be, Tom and Joan seem less real the more time you spend with them.

Like other big-studio exercises in pseudo-subversion (very much including “Deadpool”), Birds of Prey is happy to play at provocation with swear words and violence while carefully declining to provoke anything like a thought.

The Rise of Skywalker — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.

This screen adaptation feels like a clumsy hybrid. It’s a little too long and winding to work as a feature film, especially in the horror genre, and might have worked better as a limited series, with a little more room for the many characters who populate its grimly imagined American landscape.

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.

Huppert’s uncanny mixture of self-possession and wildness is never not interesting to watch, but when Frankie is off screen she takes the film’s life force with her.

The humor is so audacious and the psychological insight at times so startling that it’s hard not to be dismayed when an easy and familiar dose of comfort is supplied at the end. This “Rabbit” is maybe just a little too cute, and a little too friendly.

It has a loose, friendly, house-party vibe, and it’s impossible not to have a good time watching the actors have a good time with one another. If there’s a problem, it’s that the good humor has the effect of lowering the film’s dramatic stakes, and risks turning its cultural reference points into cartoons.

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.

In some ways Berlusconi, a media mogul and cruise-ship crooner in earlier phases of his career, a creature of appetite and excess, is Sorrentino’s ideal subject. But the overlap in their sensibilities turns Loro into a blurry, distracted, sentimental portrait.

The spirit of Hustlers is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.

This 2-hour-49-minute movie drags more than it jumps, wearing out its premise and possibly also your patience as it lumbers toward the final showdown. Along the way there is some fun — some scares, some warm feelings, some inventive ickiness — to be found.

The songs don’t have the pop or the splendor. The terror and wonder of the intra-pride battles are muted. There is a lot of professionalism but not much heart. It may be that the realism of the animals makes it hard to connect with them as characters, undermining the inspired anthropomorphism that has been the most enduring source of Disney magic.

The one halfway-interesting part of this movie is Nivola’s performance, which operates at both a deeper register of seriousness and a higher pitch of comedy than anything else.

Yesterday is more of a novelty earworm than a classic. It’s appealing and accessible in a way that the Beatles never really were. If it took itself — and them — a bit more seriously, it would be a lot more fun. But it wasn’t made to last.

This is an end-of-the-world party with an appealing guest list and inviting, eccentric décor.

You occasionally sense the presence of an interesting movie struggling to get out of this hyperactive action comedy — or even just a better Tim Story action comedy, something like “Ride Along” or “Ride Along 2.”

The movie ties itself up in knots as it tries to be provocative without giving offense, and offering more complacency and comfort than terror.

The gore and the scares work pretty well.

The movie itself, while not entirely terrible — a lot of craft has been purchased, and even a little art — is pointless in a particularly aggressive way.

The story and its trappings feel a little generic, the dialogue studiously bland and the characters and their problems curiously weightless, in spite of gestures in the direction of real-world issues.

It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.

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.

More silly than scary. This doesn’t seem to be entirely intentional, and it isn’t altogether unwelcome.

The sweet smarts of Mitchell’s first movie, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (treated to a bit of auto-allusion in “Silver Lake”) aren’t much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of “It Follows,” his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller.

Little is overly protective of its characters and its audience; it’s soothing rather than sharp. That’s most likely because of an anxious concern for grown-up sensitivities. Smart 13-year-olds are likely to roll their eyes as well as laugh.

Rather than illuminating the politics of the present by examining the struggles of the past, Bissell lurches from folksy comedy to clattering melodrama, producing the opposite of enlightenment. To quote an old protest song: When will we ever learn?

This isn’t an especially good movie — it’s too long, too drenched in Thomas Newman’s cloyingly eclectic score, too full of speechifying and self-regard — but it is a coherent one, with the courage of its vengeful, murderous, politically terrifying convictions.

What Perry lacks in filmmaking rigor — like its predecessors, “Family Funeral” is a bit of a mess, formally and technically — he makes up for in generosity. The movie is the usual plateful of low humor and high melodrama, in no particular hurry to make its way through a busy plot.

Even though the techniques are immersive — plunging you into a disorienting reality that mirrors the drug-fueled frenzy you are witnessing — the effect is also curiously distancing.

The point, and the fun, is the wild mischief of Huppert’s performance, which grows lighter and more joyful as Greta’s behavior slides from menacing to murderous.

The movie is fun to look at without quite being exciting to watch. This is mostly because the story never fully lives up to the ideas, and the ideas themselves are fuzzy and scattered.

I can’t deny that the glum, resentful, not-giving-a-damn masculine vibe of Cold Pursuit has its appeal, as does Moland’s blunt knack for efficient screen violence.

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.

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

Vice offers more than Yuletide rage-bait for liberal moviegoers, who already have plenty to be mad about. Revulsion and admiration lie as close together as the red and white stripes on the American flag, and if this is in some respects a real-life monster movie, it’s one that takes a lively and at times surprisingly sympathetic interest in its chosen demon.

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

There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative. And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances.

Reitman uses Altmanesque sound design and serpentine camera movements to convey the chaos and kineticism of a process in constant, frantic motion. But after a while, once we’ve met the principal players, the speechmaking starts and a potential comedy of political manners turns into a pious, tendentious morality play.

It is hard not to be touched by the testing of paternal love, or by Nic’s fragility. But Beautiful Boy, rather than plumbing the hard emotional depths of its subject, skates on a surface of sentiment and gauzy visual beauty.

The plot zigs and zags and sometimes accelerates in the direction of genuine hilarity...only to downshift into sloppy, easy jokes and gags.

What holds this patchwork of naughtiness together is some pretty threadbare cloth.

Mr. Peretz and the screenwriters (Evgenia Peretz, the director’s sister, is credited along with Tamara Jenkins and Jim Taylor) find an amiable farcical groove, and the actors embrace the ridiculousness of the circumstances without overdoing it.