Bob Strauss

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.

The action ramps up so much toward the end that there’s really no time to care whether it makes visual or logistical sense. It’s sustained, exciting and increasingly gory fun that’s a pleasure to get to after some of the film’s earlier, dour stretches. It’s sustained, exciting and increasingly gory fun that’s a pleasure to get to after some of the film’s earlier, dour stretches.

There’s crafty playfulness to Wohl’s approach, though; dialog can be as killer as Jo’s darkest impulses, and some scenes are drop-dead funny even if they’re about wanting to drop-kick Baby out of your life.

While pacing and believability issues in The Pale Blue Eye cannot be overlooked, this finely made period mystery’s virtues should still be savored.

The film simply wouldn’t be much, however, without Cooke’s quick-witted performance. She’s formidable and disarming at the same time, all the time. The character’s always got a line and, usually, a good move for any situation.

Though Butcher’s Crossing has its share of conflicts and drama, it can move as slowly as the glaciers that cut its imposing scenery.

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.

Oslo ultimately acknowledges that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is anything but resolved, and shows why even this first, limited step toward settling it was so immensely difficult. Whether we’re in the mood to find it entertaining right now remains in dispute.

There’s nothing here to match the ingenious audacity of, say, the hospital-shootout-with-infant sequence in 1982’s “Hard Boiled,” but once Silent Night finally unwraps its gratuitous gifts, the faithful Woo fans should find them worth the wait.

Neither too “oy vey” nor “Weekend at Bernie’s” but steeped in the best aspects of both Jewish and black comedy, Bad Shabbos is a treat any night of the week.

This sometimes clever, outrageously gory and slickly violent horror comedy is more “John Wick” than Tod Browning, and that’s just the tip of its tonal confusion.

There is a great deal of movie-backlot sleight of hand that looks fine while you’re watching, but when you think about it comes off as mostly façade. In that way, at least, Rodriguez successfully links form to content.

Overacting and silly lines sometimes distract, and the latter sound sillier in Branagh’s forced French accent (“Ah love, it is not safe”). Still, Branagh’s direction and screenwriter Michael Green, who also scripted “Orient,” add diversity and convincing emotions to the mystery mechanics.

First Date is a very ambitious independent film with a charming, casual attitude.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance may not be as dirty a delight as the male stripper series’ first two movies. It has other pleasures, though, especially for fans of screwball comedy, musicals and — yikes — serious dance.

This Statham exercise, like most, is mainly about body count. While that seems to be what his faithful fans want, it just gets kind of tedious for the rest of us.

The Drop can feel like being stuck with someone who has their good qualities, in serious ways, but that you can’t stand.

Grading on the Tyler Perry curve, though, “The Six Triple Eight” respects its noteworthy topic — and its audience — as much as it possibly could.

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.

Sokolov has cited notable filmmakers like Sergio Leone, Park Chan-wook and Quentin Tarantino as influences, and their inspiration can be seen in the film’s tense standoffs, corridor fights and flashing swordplay, respectively. For all that and some original flourishes, though, this mainly feels like a Radio Silence rehash.

Standard issue and sluggish as it sometimes is, “Elevation” maintains engagement.

Amid all the mayhem, a fairly lucid portrait of disturbed child psychology emerges. Although derivative, Chris Thomas Devlin’s script has enough sick, witty ideas to make the fearsome goings-on seem fresh and immediate. At the very least, after watching Cobweb, you’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.

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.

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.

Knowing what Powell is capable of, it’s not unreasonable to go into this expecting a bigger payoff.

As a director, Schweighöfer deftly plays around with a few genre conventions, handles action scenes capably if not distinctively, and stages a decent enough Point Break tribute.

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.

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.