Bilge Ebiri

As a director, he’s always been more about conjuring a mood than telling a story, about immersion rather than suspense. Filled with large, empty rooms, great blank stretches of barren landscape, and forlorn glimpses of the lonely vastness of space, The Midnight Sky is a movie you’re supposed to lose yourself in, at least a little bit. And on a small screen — even on a really big small screen — that’s practically impossible.

There’s something truly electric about the pure, visual storytelling of Monster Hunter.

It’s just escapist enough to fill our disaster-flick needs, but don’t be surprised if Ric Roman Waugh’s film sometimes feels like too much, especially in the middle of an ongoing real-life calamity. To put it a simpler way: Greenland is not just effective; sometimes it’s too effective.

Kids will be enchanted, adults will be enraptured. It’s somehow light as air yet overwhelming, both ineffable and unforgettable.

Let Them All Talk is a warm, enjoyable trifle, yet it has a personal edge that suggests an artist who continues to wrestle with the nature of his work.

More fun are the imaginative prehistoric beasts, from land-sharks to six-eyed spider-wolves to a tribe of “punch monkeys” that has developed a language that consists entirely of, well, punches and slaps. This was one of the strengths of the first picture, too: You sensed that the filmmakers had a blast inventing crazy new creatures for this primeval fantasy land.

The scene that kicks off The Climb is by far the best thing in the entire movie, but don’t hold that against the picture — the rest of it is pretty great, too.

There’s nothing wrong with subtle or contextual humor, of course, but here, frankly, it feels like a waste of a pretty great concept.

The patient, somber direction gives the characters — and the actors playing them — room to breathe. It lets them do the things they’re best at: Costner gets to be the sad dad. Diane Lane gets to be passionate. And Lesley Manville gets to eat up the screen. For all its surface simplicity, Let Him Go is a surprising emotional roller coaster, and it stays with you.

Horror is often cathartic, purifying — it puts you through the wringer but you emerge on the other side, somehow cleansed. You’ll find no such succor here. His House is beautifully made, and its scares are monstrously effective, but its images of real-world dread remain unresolved, its specters unvanquished. The film leaves you with wounds that won’t heal.

The cluttered story and the shifts in form might lose you from time to time, but the film conjures some genuinely powerful emotions.

Borat 2 may not hit quite as many shocking comic highs as the first Borat, but it probably coheres more as a film — ironic, given that it appears to have been written, produced, and edited in record time, during a global crisis — and it also manages to walk a fine line between offense and revelation.

The film is a masterpiece, so you should see it any way you can.

It’s a subdued, at times even intimate, old-guy action flick. And that streamlined, bare-bones quality serves the film well. Mostly.

The amiably bland family comedy The War With Grandpa genuinely surprises with how un-special it is. It’s the kind of film that seems to vanish from the mind even as you’re watching it.

Somehow, delivered via the bizarre antics of Adam Sandler, who was once one of our most wonderfully corrosive comic personas, it has a certain power.

The Antenna works first and foremost as a thriller that delivers its share of unsettling, upsetting images and scenarios — even if it doesn’t always seem to make a whole lot of sense or follow a clear narrative trajectory.

Save Yourselves! is a small movie about small people doing small things in the face of a (mostly unseen) big event. If it plays things a little too safe at times, that’s probably because it has to. And besides, it’s charming enough that you may not notice, or care.

What’s onscreen — choppy, lifeless, predictable action scenes jutting up against unbaked, middle-school-theater-production-level family drama — is quite damning in its own right.

Bonham-Carter is somehow both perfect for the part of Mother Holmes and, unfortunately, wasted. Perhaps we’re merely being set up for future adventures, in which these characters will presumably play greater parts.

The Devil All the Time is an antiseptic slog, too streamlined to make us care and too literal-minded to pull us in. We never really get to know any of these characters aside from their villainy and/or victimhood. They’re paper fish in a cardboard barrel.

Cuties is not a blunt screed or a finger-wagging cautionary tale in either direction — which is one reason why anyone watching the film looking for clear messages about right and wrong is bound to be disappointed, maybe even outraged.

The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.

Bizarre, bewitching film.

The new Russian horror film Sputnik whipsaws between suggested horror and schlock so furiously that it turns inconsistency into a virtue. It’s a creepy chamber drama that morphs regularly into an effects-laden ick-fest. But transformation is in the film’s DNA.

It’s intensely disturbing and hilarious in equal measure, as if somebody decided to let David Lynch remake Contagion.

Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.