Bob Strauss

Smile is an immensely well-crafted horror movie.

Sometimes hilarious and pleasingly intense, “Day the Earth Blew Up” can also be kind of meh. But even when not as clever as its legacy demands, there’s enough of the old aesthetic and eclecticism to make us hope that this ain’t all, folks.

Come True should be an exhilarating discovery for anyone it doesn’t put to sleep. But even if you do find yourself nodding off a little during this deliberately paced, low-humming, sci-fi horror movie, that means it’s working, too.

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.

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.

Undergirding it all is a light but ever present tension between living up to the philosophy the men were taught as teenagers and making their way through the realities and compromises of American adulthood. Tran’s not preachy about that, but the filmmaker’s killer move is showing how his heroes’ souls can be as fragile as their aging bones, yet resilient when the situation demands.

By the time “Missing” reaches its truly terrible ending (which makes you wonder if the movie was all just a stealth Apple promotion), the feeling is one of programmed exhaustion rather than catharsis.

The documentary could have used a little more excitement, but “Coastal” leaves us with a lingering notion that we’ve seen something special.

While it’s not always as sharp as it could be, the energy in Jolt never falters, and there are definitely amusing bits.

The thing that may be most chilling about “Master” is how its three protagonists want and need to support one another but ultimately cannot due to internal as well as external forces.

Armstrong crams just about every strategy and justification late capitalism can produce into densely packed dialogue that the film’s core quartet of actors make sound remarkably organic.

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.

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

An unforgiving little thriller with a conscience and irony to burn (and boy, do they burn), Your Lucky Day is one of the last chances to see beloved Oakland native Angus Cloud onscreen.

The Man Who Sold His Skin may not be entirely believable, but its many great metaphors for multiple social ills create their own, withering truth. The film doesn’t ask us to turn our gaze away from the world’s ugly realities, but to see them in the very handsome images they inspired Ben Hania to make.

The director succeeds most at giving an inkling of the real Chase, now somewhat frail in his 80s. But she also makes a case that at past points, when the public consensus was “God, he’s being an ass again,” the truth may have been rather more poignant.

If you can buy the film’s unlikely core premise, you’ll be rewarded with persuasive speculative fiction in all its other aspects. Penna and company make it easy for audiences to do that, while putting four people whom they’ll come to really care about through all kinds of hell.

The Rip is another one — efficient for what it is, but if it’s remembered at all it will be for Damon and Affleck’s matching beards and effortless way of appearing at home together onscreen.

Despite some gruesome brutality, Totally Killer has a very light-on-its-feet quality. But as artificial entertainment goes, this one’s put together with ruthless care.

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

Free Guy is an ode to independence, creativity and the nicer aspects of anarchy.

Between the talking heads, Rothstein also uses kinetic imagery and spry cutting to keep the potentially eye-glazing subject matter as gripping as a true crime mystery, which it kind of was.

The film is worth watching thanks to a flawless central performance by “Glee” alum Dianna Agron, solid elder annoyance shtick from Candice Bergen and Dustin Hoffman, and Bialik’s “Big Bang Theory” co-star Simon Helberg locating his pain and relishing every minute of it.

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.

There are stretches when this true story can be a clunky inspirational piece about a young man who overcomes class and racial barriers to excel at science, business and helping his community. At regular intervals, though, it shifts to darker crime drama with dire themes of injustice and manipulation. The two moods don’t always transition smoothly, but each complements the other as they unfold.

What “The Grab” doesn’t do quite well is sell its argument or weave its many disparate, admirably reported discoveries into a graspable whole.

Saw X is “Saw 1.5” chronologically, taking place between the first and second films in this granddaddy of torture porn franchises. Quality-wise, though, it is closer to a 10 than a zero, which cannot be said about most of the other nine movies in this distressingly popular series.

Funnier, sunnier and even more violent than its predecessor, “Nobody 2” ups the ante in the cinematic action department as well.