Bilge Ebiri

Whatever its occasional stumbles, Last Night in Soho is a mostly intoxicating affair.

You have to admire the effort — even as you survey, mouth agape, the calamitous results.

The Last Duel is full of incident and historical detail, and its universe is a complicated one — but it seems the script, by its very nature, has ingeniously done all the necessary underlining for us. Even as it pretends to add complexity and context, it simplifies and focuses.

Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland throws so much extreme weirdness and violence at us that we might overlook the fact that there’s method to its madness: Beneath the craziness and cacophony lies a tender, tragic tale of emotional paralysis and a civilization eating away at itself.

Amid the grit and the attempted emotional catharses and the sturm-und-drang, there is an actual Bond movie in there. No Time to Die is fun, but only when it dares to be.

It’s clever but not cute, savage but not depressing, and cartoonish but not asinine.

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.

Campion preserves the simplicity of Savage’s prose with the understated ease of her own storytelling, and she even finds a compelling way to navigate the novel’s somewhat outdated dime-store Freudian conceits.

Unfortunately, for every scene in which The Protégé seems to know exactly what it is, there’s one in which it seems to think it’s a lot smarter than it is. Given the level of talent involved, that has to count as a disappointment.

Director Filomarino is onto something here. The warm intimacy of the movie’s early scenes is replaced by such shocking brutality by the end that the violence feels like an emotional correlative, a blood ritual of sorts.

Like its star, Ryan Reynolds — and maybe thanks to its star, Ryan Reynolds — the picture occasionally seems aware of its limitations. At its best, it turns its cynicism into an asset.

Val is not a gloomy movie at all. Quite the opposite. It’s vibrant, quick, and alive, and Val Kilmer today makes for an entertaining guide, with his hammy facial gestures now doing double duty since he can’t talk.

With its incessant profanity, ridiculous body count, and trollish sense of humor, Gunn’s film often seems content to exist in a constant state of rug-pulling. Lots of fun but little forward momentum.

The clarity of its aspirations just makes the film’s downfall that much more pathetic, like a baseball player pointing to the home run he’s about to hit and then completely whiffing and landing on his ass.

The problem with Joe Bell isn’t that it’s telling Joe’s story; that’s an important (and tragic) tale that should be told. The problem is that it fails to also tell Jadin’s story — even after it makes the point that Jadin’s journey is inextricable from Joe’s.

If we absolutely must have G.I. Joe movies, surely they shouldn’t be this joyless.

Cinematically speaking, this is all low-hanging fruit. Maybe such unimaginative choices wouldn’t stand out so much if Huppert were herself not such an inventive and riveting performer. She is, and Mama Weed doesn’t really deserve her.

As it proceeds, it expands its vision and compassion, even as it de-escalates the tension. It’s not about the thing it’s about, except that it ultimately is totally about the thing it’s about.

Like most corporate cinematic endeavors, Space Jam: A New Legacy tries to have it both ways, proclaiming to be on the side of the angels while doing the work of the Devil. It criticizes shameless, money-grubbing attempts to synergize and update beloved classics (as LeBron himself puts it, “This idea is just straight-up bad”) … all the while shamelessly synergizing and updating beloved classics.

Saudi director Shahad Ameen’s mesmerizingly bleak fable Scales accomplishes something many films attempt but generally bungle: It tells a highly symbolic tale while conveying recognizable human emotions.

I suspect that, if nothing else, this astoundingly beautiful picture will stand the test of time.

So, it’s Edge of Tomorrow meets Interstellar meets Aliens meets Tenet meets Independence Day, with their brains removed. But it’s still tremendous fun, because this thing moves. Let’s face it: If it slowed down, the audience might start asking too many questions. The Tomorrow War is just as stupid as it needs to be.

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.

Ultimately, The Ice Road veers uneasily between immersive tension and a variety of you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me howlers on the level of both plot and dialogue.

Getting sucked into these people’s lives means experiencing the story in all its immediacy, sans judgment. Holler is too entertaining and well-made to be overly dour, too full of suspense and throwaway bits of cinematic elegance. It marks the arrival of a major new directorial talent.

Beyond the many jump scares involving aliens and the terrifically terrified-out-of-their-wits performances, what makes A Quiet Place Part II special is the sheer joy we get from feeling like we’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker.

The Dry is a beautiful thriller that leaves us not with explanations, but with overwhelming sadness.

If Profile has value, it’s not as a tale of terrorist recruitment or of amorous delusion, but of how power works in the extremely online world.