Bill Goodykoontz

It’s too bad The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It isn’t a vampire story, because the filmmakers are bleeding this franchise dry.

When she’s playing Cruella, Stone is definitely in charge. It’s a bravura performance, filled with a crackling energy that never spills over into parody. That’s what saves it. Stone makes Cruella a believable character — if not relatable, then at least recognizable.

It’s squirmy good fun — agonizing in places, in exactly the ways you want it to be.

The authenticity that Collette brings to a woman desperate for some kind of change and the willingness to seek it is inspiring. She’s the real winner here.

I could see The Woman in the Window becoming a kind of channel-surfing cult classic. But not as long as Rear Window is out there somewhere, too.

Along the way there is some really gory violence and some really cliched cop-drama dialogue, with acting to match. But as long as Rock is on the screen, which is almost constantly, it at least keeps your interest.

Really, every actor is likable and, all by themselves, good here. It’s that each situation is more ridiculous than the last and none of it fits together, even when everything gets tossed into the narrative blender toward the end.

Whether Army of the Dead is any good isn’t really an issue. It’s more whether it sets out to do what Snyder intends for it to do. If he intended it to be an over-the-top exercise in zombie mayhem sprinkled with the occasional human emotion, he succeeded. The nice part is that this time he has actually managed to make it fun along the way.

Monster is a good movie that could have been a better one. Mandler needs to trust both his film and his audience more. Give him points for trying, but he’s just trying too hard.

Without Remorse is neither a classic nor a failure; it falls somewhere in-between. But like Kelly on a seemingly doomed mission, there’s Jordan, giving it all he’s got to save the day.

In fairness, you can say that Mortal Kombat is pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. It’s clearly meant as the first film in a renewed franchise. But for me, it’s game over.

It’s a matter of pacing and choices, what Penna chooses to focus on and what he ignores. He’s got all the elements of a good movie right in front of him. He just never puts all the pieces together.

It’s a sumptuous movie, with gorgeous cinematography (also by Dweck and Kershaw). It won’t necessarily make you want to rush out and pay a fortune for truffles to shave over your eggs. But it will make you appreciate people whose love for something has so fully informed their lives.

There are many things to enjoy — a cat named Small Frank is up there pretty high for me, as is Pfeiffer’s performance. But it snows you under with a small army of quirky characters and situations.

A decidedly dumb entry in the titan saga that’s still kind of fun.

It’s all insanely violent and gleefully silly. Stab wounds and bullet holes just don’t slow some people down the way you think they might. Through it all the best part of the film remains the dichotomy of a bland wimp (a character Odenkirk plays so well) who can flip the switch to becoming a remorseless killer — and seeing Odenkirk as the one flipping the switch.

It’s a movie as much about white privilege as it is anything else, an examination of the incredible advantages the wealthy have — advantages that don’t prevent them from cheating anyway.

If you’re looking for a brisk, compelling story, maybe not. It’s as if there is a third version of this film, something in between the two in terms of tone and fan service, that would be the best way to tell this story. That’s unlikely to happen, of course. How many “Justice League” movies do we really need, anyway?

The promising beginning shows that it could have been something more than dumb. Alas, it’s not.

The Father has occasional splashes of humor, but, by design, it’s tough to watch at times. Hopkins’ performance makes it impossible not to.

Ultimately Coming 2 America isn’t a sequel that ruins the original. But it doesn’t improve upon it, either.

There's a lot of promise here, all over the film, and not just with Takahashi and Paige. Fans of "Fresh Off the Boat" know that Huang can be funny (though he didn't like it). It's nice to see him stretch out into more dramatic territory, even if he's not quite on as sure footing there. Certainly "Boogie" makes you want to see what's next.

SpongeBob, in whatever form it takes, does one thing and does it really well: absurdist humor with a sweet center. I’m hesitant to ever say that this-and-such thing is “what we need right now,” so I won’t say that about the film. But I will say that SpongeBob is what we need all the time. The more the merrier.

It’s great that Moxie addresses so many issues, but this is a story that might have been told more effectively in a series. Ultimately though, it has powerful moments and it’s hard to complain too much about anything that introduces zines, Bikini Kill and the riot grrrl movement to another generation at a time it really needs it.

In Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, director R.J. Cutler’s film about the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, he allows the audience to come in its own time to what seems obvious by the end: For all of her talent, which is considerable, and her brilliance as a recording artist, Eilish is a teenager trying to figure out her place in the world.

Meanwhile, the Russos are ensuring that you never forget you’re watching a movie, and a stylized one at that. Note the names of the banks Holland’s character robs, for instance, or other little details. Granted, the person telling the story — Holland’s character — is an unreliable narrator for much of the film. But there’s a fine line between spicing things up and showing off.

It’s mostly a biography of Holiday — nothing wrong with that, certainly when you’ve got a performance as stunning as Andra Day’s in the title role.

Minari is as moving as it is entertaining, and it is a lot of both.