A.O. Scott

The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.

This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.

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.

With the director of photography (Annika Summerson) and the sound designer (Paul Davies), Tariq stitches domestic drama, satire and magical realism into a tissue of moods and meanings, held together by the shattering credibility of Ahmed’s performance.

Annette masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion.

The Green Knight is always interesting — and occasionally baffling — but at the end it rises to a swirling, feverish pitch of feeling and philosophical earnestness.

More a self-portrait than a profile, Val tells the story of a Hollywood career with a candor that stops short of revelation. The tone is personal but not quite intimate, producing in the viewer a warm, slightly wary feeling of companionship.

The list of charges against this watery café au lait of a crime caper is extensive — wearisome ethnic stereotypes, cop-movie clichés, awkward pacing, a labored plot — but the chief transgression is that it wastes the time and talent of one of the supreme screen actors of our time.

The Woman Who Ran is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.

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.

It’s about the sometimes risky discovery of pleasure, and it’s a pleasure to discover.

It’s a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams.

In a manner that is patient — and sometimes even playful — rather than polemical, “All Light, Everywhere” contributes to debates about crime, policing, racism and accountability.

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

The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.

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

The result is something that intermittently looks and sounds like a good movie without ever actually being one.

Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.

Each shot is a kind of sight gag, a visual and philosophical joke with absurdity in the setup and sorrow in the punchline. But this time, more of the jokes are one-liners, in which the premise and the payoff are one and the same.

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.

The rigorous honesty of Quo Vadis, Aida? is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.

A genial, mostly inoffensive, sometimes quite funny sequel.

A charming and slyly poignant documentary.

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

Nomadland is patient, compassionate and open, motivated by an impulse to wander and observe rather than to judge or explain.

Minari is modest, specific and thrifty, like the lives it surveys. There’s nothing small about it, though, because it operates at the true scale of life.

Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.

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.

It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.

The result is at once suspenseful, visually engrossing and intellectually bracing. It also raises urgent, sometimes uncomfortable questions about power, privacy and the ethical challenges of examining the past.

Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but One Night in Miami is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen.

It’s a small, delicate movie that doesn’t hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it.

David Fincher’s Mank is a worthy, eminently watchable entry in the annals of Hollywood self-obsession. That it is unreliable as history should go without saying.

A history lesson doesn’t have to be a lecture, and at its best, Mangrove, with its clear and painful implications for the present, conveys the sense of a world in motion, as the possibility of something new comes into being.

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

This Rebecca can’t really suffer in comparison to its predecessor. To suffer it would need nerves, a pulse, a conscience, or at least some idea of its reason for being.

It revels in the pleasure and struggle of creative work. This comes through in the rambunctiousness of Radha’s students, in her belated appreciation of her mother’s paintings, in shots of street murals and sonic scraps of freestyle rhyming — in pretty much every frame of a film that, like its heroine, is grumpy, tender, wistful, funny and combative. Also beautiful.

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.

Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, and propelled by the charisma of Janelle Monáe, it lines up moments of possible insight and impact and messes up just about all of them.

This is Kaufman’s most assured and daring work so far as a director.

The new movie, directed by Dean Parisot, is an amiable, sloppy attempt to reassert the value of friendliness and crack a few jokes along the way.

You might not learn everything there is to know about Tesla — that’s what the internet is for — but you will nonetheless feel illuminated by his presence.

Pickles can be comfort food. Not too filling, good for the digestion, noisy and a little sloppy rather than artful or exquisite or challenging. This one, as I’ve said, isn’t bad, and even allows a soupçon of profundity into its formula.

Pain is a necessary ingredient in any successful comedy. The trick, which Barbakow and Siara seem to have mastered on their very first try, is to find the misery of the right kind and intensity, to imply tears that match the laughter.

I’m not usually someone to hope for sequels, but I guess if you live long enough …

The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.

In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.

Moss, brazen and witty and seeming to push herself to the very edge of control, is a galvanizing presence, convincingly wild even as she’s trapped in a hothouse of sometimes dubious ideas.

Rae and Nanjiani do their best, but neither the dialogue nor the direction serves their talents adequately.

It’s a jaunt down memory lane and also a moving and generous elegy.

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.

First Cow is fundamentally a western: It takes up questions of civilization, solidarity and barbarism on the American frontier. And like many great westerns it critiques some of the genre’s foundational myths with bracing, beautiful rigor, including the myth of heroic individualism.

It is Porumboiu’s most elaborate feature and in some ways his least ambitious. Like a meringue or like a whistle, its substance is mostly air.

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.

The movie itself, which was lost until a few years ago, is relaxed, reflective and sweet, a romance shadowed by the complexities of history, race and politics that manages to be both modest and ambitious.

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.

Bellocchio’s approach to the story is at once coolly objective — the movie is part biopic, part courtroom procedural — and almost feverishly intense. He has a historian’s analytical detachment, a novelist’s compassion for his characters and a citizen’s outrage at the cruelty and corruption that have festered in his country for so long.

Just Mercy is saved from being an earnest, inert courtroom drama when it spends time on death row, where it is opened up and given depth by two strong, subtle performances, from Foxx and Rob Morgan.

Like any good novelist and every great filmmaker, Gerwig isn’t afraid to let her audience work a little. She trusts our intelligence and our curiosity, and also her own command of the medium.

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.

The shadows are what linger from this flawed, fascinating movie.

Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.

At the very least, it’s impossible to watch The Disappearance of My Mother without a measure of ambivalence. Gratitude for the chance to make Barzini’s acquaintance, and for Barrese’s sensitivity in making the introduction, is accompanied by ethical queasiness.

This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.

The actors draw out both the spiritual and the psychological dimensions of their characters. The interplay, a duet with sweet and eccentric harmonies, is fascinating to observe, even as it undermines the overall structure of the narrative.

The film fumbles some of its big gestures and over-italicizes a few statements. What lingers, though, are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend. This movie feels like something new, and also as if it’s been around forever, waiting for its moment.

It’s not only Mister Rogers’s kindness that hovers over “Beautiful Day,” but also his creative spirit. Paying tribute to his skills as a composer, performer and puppeteer, the movie affirms his status as a hero of the imagination.

It’s a perfect introduction and a lovely valediction.

It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.

Ford v Ferrari is no masterpiece, but it is — to invoke a currently simmering debate — real cinema, the kind of solid, satisfying, nonpandering movie that can seem endangered nowadays.

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.

It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.

It is a rousing and powerful drama, respectful of both the historical record and the cravings of modern audiences.

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.

There are a number of reasons to like Terminator: Dark Fate — Linda Hamilton’s scowl, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stubble, MacKenzie Davis’s athleticism — but my favorite thing about this late addition to a weary franchise is how little it cares about timeline continuity.

Its pulpy pop-cultural credibility is inseparable from its honest, brutal assessment of the state of the world. Its ideas about the nature and limits of heroism — about just how hard and terrifying the resistance to evil can be — are spelled out in vivid black and white.

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.

Zombieland: Double Tap sets the bar low and steps easily over it, which makes it better than a lot of recent big-screen comedies. It doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely brain-dead either.

The idea of confronting an unknown second self is full of rich, uncanny potential — there’s a literary tradition going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe — but Gemini Man squanders it, along with what might have been two interesting performances.

To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. Joker, an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that.

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.

A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid — and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.

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.

Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask. Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents.

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.

It looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It’s more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion.

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