Bilge Ebiri

Everest may disappoint those looking for a more awe-inspiring film with big vistas and jaw-dropping stunts and acts of surreal heroism. Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.

Apostle is ultimately an absorbing, horrifying movie that’s maybe not as smart as it wants to be. But it is a lot stranger, and more disturbing, than you might expect.

Christopher Robin preaches a return to childhood exuberance and frivolity, but its quiet, focused restraint often feels like it’s coming from a very different impulse — an old-world professionalism and humility. It’s a grown-up sensibility applied to a child’s tale, which makes for an occasionally endearing mixture. In today’s world, I’ll take it.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

What comes through are Vaniček’s expert orchestration of suspense, and the cast’s ability to make their characters’ fears feel genuine.

Even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.

The way Dosunmu shoots her, she feels somehow both fragile and unchanging: It wouldn’t take much to turn Kyra herself into a blur, to erase her from the screen completely; but the broader sorrow that she represents will never go away. Where is Kyra? She’s in the midst of disappearing, but she’s also everywhere.

Playing Teddy Roosevelt in these films was nowhere near a highpoint for Williams, but it did speak to his fondness for these CGI-infused kids’ spectacles. His final farewell here is gentle, reflectively and almost unbearably moving. It lends the the film a retroactive grace.

Ouija is confident, meat-and-potatoes horror, and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.

This new film doesn’t have the emotional grounding of the original, and it probably dwells too long explaining things we never cared about. But it’s still a visceral, cathartic and — most important — gorgeous two hours of kinetic, poetic bloodshed.

Now, approaching twilight, Eastwood has stripped everything down to its essentials. The picture doesn’t always work, but it works when it has to. It’s a fragile enterprise — lovely to bask in, but liable to fall apart if you stare too hard.

One of the pleasures of a film like this is the knowledge that a new fold is always coming. Seen in that light, occasional narrative implausibilities (of both the psychological and physical kind) recede into the distance. The Outfit is imperfect, but it works perfectly.

Somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.

A surprisingly moving tale of friendship and family, dressed up as an adorably frivolous sci-fi comedy.

The way the narrative starts and stops and doubles back mirrors the characters’ own confusion. We try to make sense of the story along with them — who did what, said what, when, and what did it really mean.

That the actors are so good, and the imagery absorbing, also helps paper over some of the film’s weaker elements. Even as we dig into these men’s pasts, Dunham wants to maintain the slightly unreal, allegorical quality of his story.

The film’s most powerful achievement is perhaps also its most basic: the simple sight of two friends talking, openly and gently, about all the things on their minds.

Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.

You keep watching not just because she and Brad and the Mediterranean are beautiful, but also because small, surprising details start to take on great importance.

Wicked: For Good is shorter than the first film and, while it might be a step back in terms of spectacle, it’s a leap forward in (go ahead, laugh) subtlety and emotion. My audience was audibly sobbing by the end.

The Forever Purge jumps through a variety of styles and subgenres as it proceeds; some extended sequences will remind you of a Mad Max flick. The hodgepodge is weirdly appropriate.

As a filmmaker, Gibson understands that there is something fundamentally irreconcilable about Doss’ love of peace, his abject and visceral revulsion at battle and a war movie’s embrace of violence. Somehow, the director has made a film that can contain that contradiction — that remains irreducible. He breaks his own movie, and somehow the movie is better for it.

The good news is that within its own little cinematic fantasy realm, Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney’s The Grinch manages to be pleasantly moving in its treatment of Seuss’s classic solitary crank. As voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, the Grinch is a surly, sour, but ultimately wounded soul.

It is a terrifically scary movie that I wish were more haunting.

It’s not hard to enjoy Dumbo. Like the circus owners and carnival crackpots who try to exploit the flying elephant for all he’s worth, Tim Burton still knows how to give us what we want. He may think of himself as the tormented freak on display, but he’s also clearly the all-powerful showman, ready to exploit our sense of wonder.

It has plenty of gritty ’70s atmosphere (facial hair! Radio DJs!) and feels grounded in its time and place, but it also has a purposeful whiff of timeliness that tells us it’s as much about today as it is about 1977.

If Monday succeeds as a compelling drama — and, for all the clichés of its story, it does mostly succeed — it’s because Papadimitropoulos and his actors capture the intoxication of new love, as well as the slow-burn agony of the psychological combat that often ensues, with all the small skirmishes and victories and defeats that slowly pick away at a relationship.

If we judge these films primarily by the creativity and elaborate absurdity of their death scenes, this latest entry ably expands the palette without messing with the formula.