Bill Goodykoontz

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is ultimately an OK entry in a legendary franchise. It’s fun enough, but why bother?

It unfolds in ways both comic and affecting.

Not every bit lands and the social commentary is not always exactly incisive. Sometimes it is, though. When a character says they should call the police and everyone breaks out into simultaneous guffaws, the point is made — fittingly, with laughter.

Emotionally engaging from the start, bolstered by brilliant performances and held together by Song’s understated direction that weaves timelines together flawlessly, it’s more than just good.

Logic devolves, cameos abound — there are two that are truly inspired, one of which involves legendary recasting — and lessons are learned.

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is a horror movie, no doubt. It’s also an intelligent one, with the courage to challenge its audience, to make it see the horrors not just in the monster, but in the societal inequities that ultimately created him. Thankfully, Story isn’t afraid to rework a classic.

What the movie needs is a more coherent story. While keeping an audience off-kilter and disoriented is a worthy goal, particularly in a horror film, it’s got to add up to something. In this case it’s more like meandering.

About My Father isn’t horrible. It’s not great. It just sort of exists as a passion project for Maniscalco, an OK gig for most of the rest of the cast and another curious line on De Niro’s resume.

It’s not a warts-and-all treatment because, at least in this telling, there are no warts. It’s more about securing Berra among a new generation of fans as one of the greatest players who ever lived. And on that front, it more than succeeds.

In many ways BlackBerry is the standard-fare cautionary tale of tech start-ups. Insert your Icarus metaphors here. But there is a kind of sweetness to the film that makes it more compelling than the typical rise, crash and burn movie.

All of this is interesting, in varying degrees. But watching and listening to Fox talk is magnetic.

It’s not a disaster, and it doesn’t lack for ambition. But it’s wildly uneven and kind of blah, if that can be said of a movie with nonstop, often incoherent action, self-aware needle drops and not nearly enough smart-aleck quips from a cast we’ve seen deliver plenty of them in the past.

Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret is a delightful film, just lovely.

The violence is gory enough to make the audience squirm, and just cartoonish enough to give it permission to laugh. Like the “John Wick” movies, it’s really one brutal set piece after another, though the choreography is not as poetic here.

Aster, who also directed the excellent “Hereditary” and the somewhat less excellent “Midsommar,” has the audience where he wants it — off-kilter, uncomfortable, bewildered. It’s his comfort zone, but not ours. Whether you enjoy this kind of manipulation will go a long way toward deciding how much you like the film.

Of its many brilliant aspects, the film does illuminate the numbing grind of real life when you’re trying to make art.

Using the horror genre to tell a faith-based story is an interesting idea, even if it doesn’t really work in the end. And then Beck shows up, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

The actors are having fun here and, for a while, so will the audience. But the payoff just isn’t there. It’s not-a-stake-through-the-heart disappointment, but the only eternal life Renfield will enjoy is in late-night channel surfing.

Paint is one of those good ideas that doesn’t quite make a good movie. Until it does.

Air isn’t a documentary, it's better — a brilliantly acted, fascinating true story.

It makes for an entertaining movie, one you can tell is glossing over some details and minutiae. That's probably a good thing overall, but that, and an inability to nail down a consistent tone, leaves it feeling a little incomplete.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is not a great piece of cinema, exactly, but it delivers on what it promises, time and again.

Moving On, a dark comedy written and directed by Paul Weitz, isn’t a great movie by any means, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s also a relief to see Fonda and Tomlin play women whose age is not discounted, but is also not disqualifying.

Without an actor like Dafoe at its center (and margins and everywhere else), it would be unwatchable torture. With him, it’s more like watchable torture, easier to admire than enjoy.

Scream VI is a decent film with a transitional feel, a signal that you can take the show on the road and it still works. But it doesn’t leave you screaming for more.

Creed III is definitely a people movie. And Jordan has trained his lens on the right subjects. He’s once again convincing as a man trying to fight his way through internal conflict, not just opponents in the ring.

Director Jamie Payne keeps things moving, certainly, and the action is appropriately gruesome. But you can see where a little more time to tell the story would have helped.

It’s stupid by design, but it’s not stupid enough. … It plays like an idea in search of a film. Desperately in search of, and never quite finding it.