Bob Strauss

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.

If Quentin Tarantino ever made a family film, it might look like “Riff Raff.”

Fundamentally, though, “My Dead Friend Zoe” is a tricky story told exceedingly well. It earns our attention — and a few salutes.

It’s just not very fun or engaging.

Well, there’s one way for a biopic about a self-loathing, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying and self-involved music star seem different: Make him an ape.

The suffering artist story is as old as time. Yet “The Brutalist” tells it with such specificity and visceral conviction, it feels entirely fresh. Modern, even.

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.

Backed by a feral, driving score from Ukrainian folkloric quartet DakhaBrakha, “Porcelain War” makes the case for art as another protective weapon against imperialism. Like Ukraine, the film concludes, the delicate but resilient sculptures may break easily — but are very hard to destroy.

Pitt’s all-in performance and an impressive supporting cast supply enough roughhouse wit and Brooklyn grit to hold up scenes that might have otherwise gone down for the count.

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

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.

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.

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

Naturally, laws protecting LGBTQ+ rights are quite different in the United States, especially in California and the Bay Area. Nonetheless, “All Shall Be Well,” in addition to being a skillful, absorbing story, serves as a gentle reminder. After dabbing your tears as the credits roll, your next move should be to send an email to the family lawyer.

Sanders likes to mention Monet’s colorful influence, but the realistic, primeval wilderness of “The Wild Robot” is what stirs the soul.

It’s tougher than it looks to sidestep revenge movie shortcuts and formulaic payoffs while keeping matters engaging. But Saulnier does it. Off-kilter and fresh, Rebel Ridge may frustrate crude expectations, but its satisfactions are many.

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.

Sadly, fun is a rare element on Pandora, as “Borderlands” trudges through its treasure hunt scenario and endless ripoffs of better franchises from “Lethal Weapon” to “Star Wars.” It makes you want to go home and blow up your Playstation.

In the end, though, “Kneecap” is a dramatically well-structured tale of cultural and personal reclamation – done in the cheekiest, craic-talking way imaginable. It’s as if “The Commitments” had a bastard child with “The Crying Game,” and it mutated into its own, magnificently defiant thing.

Longlegs is a conjuring of dark, poetic cinema where the devil is definitely in the details.

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.

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.

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

The Watchers just doesn’t connect on anything deeper than a surface level. Given material that isn’t about looking at the same boring thing over and over, Shyamalan might have been able to really make something.

Like “Chinatown” with no stakes or “The Big Lebowski” minus the laughs, Poolman is a neo-noir comedy that shares just one quality with its superior influences: a palpable love for Los Angeles in all its corrupt, cruddy glory.

The suburban world Owen and Maddy feel so out of sync with, seen mostly at night, flickers with blue, magenta and sickly green light. It’s unnerving, yet mesmerizing, like a small-screen nightmare that won’t let your psyche go.

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.

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.