Bob Strauss

While Stearns’ style is detached and clinical, he finds tender humanity in unexpected places.

Despite any weaknesses, the movie still does what Morris does best. It digs deep into the details of how some terrible idea was mismanaged in execution.

These people seem real, even if their primary motivations are ideological. Perhaps more than they intended to, Goldhaber and the actors make the political personal. That’s a triumph of craft over appetites for destruction.

Smile is an immensely well-crafted horror movie.

Even with its floating hookah smokers, this movie feels far more grounded than most shows that grapple with the divine.

It’s a complicated situation despite how morally straightforward it appears. Scout’s Honor deserves some kind of merit badge for trying to untangle the knotty, awful mess.

Funny, heart-tugging, intermittently awesome and a loving if ambivalent homage to the heyday of martial arts cinema, writer-director Larry Yang’s film may not blend tones as seamlessly as Chan’s best work from the 1980s and ’90s did. But “Ride On” is moving and thrilling enough to be a worthy capper to the Chan canon.

While “Fresh” is intentionally not for every taste, it’s an uncompromising feminist horror/thriller with a fantastic lonely girl/victim/heroine for Edgar-Jones to play.

Whatever its weaknesses, contemporary parents who want a nontoxic Western to show their children could hardly find better than “Spirit Untamed.” It takes the idea at the end of genre master John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and virtually rides off in its own, counter-mythic direction with it.

The main effect this film’s commitment to emotional intelligence has is to show us what has been missing from the franchise all along. That, and to deliver a climax that will bring tears to your eyes — unless you’re some sort of beast.

It’s marked by a polished balance of humor, searing emotion, all the information about the toy business you’d ever want to know, and cautionary advice concerning investments in something silly like stuffed animals — or, by extension, NFTs.

Mixing in citizens’ harrowing cellphone footage and heartbreaking emergency call recordings, Walker’s teams immerse us in the flaming terror as few features have before.

This particular package has a lived-in quality that doesn’t just counterpoint the set piece mutilations but complements the franchise’s premise that death — or here, the never-seen personification Death — can come from anywhere, anytime.

This is at its core a story that understands misguided aspirations. Yes, they’re ridiculous, but without them there’d never be movies like the ’90s “Anaconda” — and we wouldn’t have this “Anaconda” to enjoy.

Rosi endlessly proves that he can turn the region’s agony into the finest art and proves that he hasn’t lost sight of the human factor in the process.

Snyder served as his own director of photography for the first time and, aided by terrific effects makeup and digital production design, he’s created a sprawling graveyard Vegas of detailed, decaying awesomeness.

Happily, Blue Beetle comes closest to cracking the code by grounding its slam-bang sci-fi shenanigans in familia. Based on the third incarnation of a comic book character who’s been in and out of circulation — published by several different companies — since 1939, this movie’s Latin flavor feels fresh, with welcome bits of political bite and funny takes on the genre’s over-familiar conventions.

Though each of the plotlines in “June Zero” stir up ethical questions, its primary approach is to look at people living their lives while an extraordinary event comes to its climax. That leaves the movie open to multiple, marvelous interpretations, as a decades-later coda suggests history will do anyway.

Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever goes a long way toward humanizing the Venmo multimillionaire best known for pumping his teenage son’s blood plasma into his own veins.

A touching combination of fact and fiction makes The Unknown Country one beautiful road trip.

Dialogue, quirky incidents and a general acceptance that this is the unfortunate way life is make this more than just a genre exercise, though hardly a breathtaking grabber of “Get Out” proportions.

It’s a more modest Traffic in several ways, adequate at what it tries to say about this dirty business but light on the wider scope of the suffering that it causes. Because there actually is a crisis, maybe it should be addressed with more of an emphasis on authentic details than on genre conventions.

Does its conclusion make up for the gluten overload that was most of “Rebel Moon”? Well, the series’ not-at-all-original theme is redemption, so that depends on whether you’re in a forgiving mood or sufficiently wowed.

Enola Holmes films are too concerned with chases, romance and flattering their target audience to even consider challenging anyone’s puzzle-solving abilities.

It presents a mostly sympathetic portrait of Mildred Gillars, the American actress who made propaganda radio broadcasts for the Nazis during World War II. Not an impossible task, but a tough one that the best efforts of producer-star Meadow Williams and director Michael Polish couldn’t make persuasive.

It’s Ice Road Truckers with a plot and concentrated, well-staged jeopardy. The film’s vibe is different from the History Channel series, but fans of that show will likely welcome the return of familiar thrills and predicaments.

Well-acted as far as superficial characterizations allow (Costner and Jon Baird share screenplay credit) and impressively mounted for a wide-open-spaces pageant that, quizzically, was not shot in widescreen, “Horizon” is most successful at filling its frames with ambition.

If you’re a millennial, odds are you’ll find “Y2K” amusing. But older and younger age groups will want to stick to their vinyl LPs and Tik Tok videos.