Brian Lowry

The title, however, feels particularly apt in describing a series that burned quite brightly when it first arose, and despite the light and heat cast by its charismatic lead, gradually fizzled, faded and flamed out.

Director Elizabeth Banks conjures bursts of absurdist energy and humor without delivering anything approaching a sustained rush.

Ant-Man is a somewhat ironic choice for a very, very big job: Kicking off the next phase of Marvel movies. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania works on one key level, establishing Kang the Conqueror as a truly formidable and worthy villain. Yet with its plunge into inner space, “Ant-Man” comes up short in almost every other way that matters.

Your Place or Mine will probably do just fine for Netflix, standing out from a pack of Valentine’s Day-timed rom-coms because Witherspoon is her, and Kutcher is him. But those awkward red-carpet photos weren’t the only part of this exercise that didn’t quite work, whatever place one happens to watch it.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is less a coda to the franchise than a muted riff on it, an encore without much of a purpose. What drew director Steven Soderbergh back to material this thin is anybody’s guess, but if strippers like to talk about making it rain, this third and (for now) final entry creatively speaking yields more of a drizzle than a downpour.

The result is a humanizing look at a woman often reduced to cartoon caricature, while occasionally feeling too conspicuously like a licensed product.

The main challenge is that there’s simply not enough heft in the story to fill out this wild-and-crazy weekend, which requires a level of embellishment that alternates between cute and absurd.

As for “JUNG_E,” the film turns out to be visually striking and narratively muddled, with a story that starts somewhere in the middle, throws around lots of provocative science-fiction concepts and comes to a rather abrupt end.

Economically told and cleverly calibrated to maximize its claustrophobic setting, it’s among the most effective films the director has delivered since his mid-career slump, making this a door well worth opening.

You People relies on cringe-inducing moments as the crux of its comedy, as a Jewish guy and a Black Muslim woman (neither of them particularly observant) get engaged, then endure the push and pull of their respective families. A topnotch cast – down to the tiny cameos – can’t fully redeem material that gets lost somewhere between satire and sitcom as assembled by star Jonah Hill and director Kenya Barris.

Even for an action comedy, this Lopez-produced effort is inordinately skewed toward putting everything that might entice someone to watch in the trailer, beginning with the shot of Coolidge hoisting an automatic weapon to defend the wedding party. As hot as she is off “The White Lotus,” she can’t redeem the tiresome execution.

These two Paramount+ projects ultimately feel pretty toothless.

Missing doesn’t try to reinvent the concept so much as recycle it, and the more the audience is willing to just roll with that, the more they’ll enjoy it. Yet even making that allowance, it should be taken as a cautionary note to any plans for future sequels (or reboots) that this sleuthing-by-computer thriller is already beginning to run in low-power mode.

Granted, the overall exercise feels more efficient than inspired, but there’s something to be said for that sort of workmanlike ethic in an old-fashioned “B” movie fashion. Those attributes don’t necessarily merit rushing out to buy a ticket, but wherever and whenever one ends up boarding this flight, taken on its terms, it’s not a bad trip.

Director Gerard Johnstone builds up nicely toward those moments, smartly taking its time before the casualties and coincidences start piling up. The film is also a savvy rumination on the perils of letting technology serve as the ultimate babysitter, with Cady becoming a bit of a little monster herself when deprived of M3GAN’s company.

Pretty easy to tune out.

While the ranks of musicals brought to the screen probably does merit some family planning, “Matilda the Musical” offers a sprightly demonstration that there’s always room for another good one.

Despite a stellar cast and showy moments (given who’s involved how could there not be?), the writer-director’s sprawling, messy, three-hour-plus endurance test isn’t ready for its closeup.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish brings a playful quality to the animated feline as well as a deeper message. When it comes to long-delayed sequels it’s wise to be careful what you wish for, but overall the film manages to nimbly land on its feet.

James Cameron has done it again with Avatar: The Way of Water, a state-of-the-art exercise that rekindles that sense of wonder and demands to be seen by anyone with lingering interest in watching movies in theaters.

Despite its beauty, several of those narrative touches don’t fully work, leaving behind a movie that’s aesthetically lovely but narratively uneven.

While the haunting aspect of the photograph grounds “Emancipation” in reality, there’s a pronounced Hollywood-ized feel to the finished product, one that doesn’t compare favorably with other projects that have covered similar territory, among recent examples the biographical “Harriet” and Amazon’s fictionalized miniseries “The Underground Railroad.”

The love showered on Brendan Fraser out of film festivals inflates expectations for “The Whale” wildly out of proportion, in a movie based on a play that occurs almost entirely within a lone apartment. Weighted down not by its morbidly obese protagonist but rather its stick-thin supporting players, Fraser deserves praise for his buried-under-makeup performance, but that’s not enough to keep the movie afloat.

At the end of Sr., a documentary so personal the word “intimate” almost doesn’t do it justice, Robert Downey Jr. ponders what his 90-minute ode to his father was really all about. The simple answer, stripped of celebrity, is the painful process of saying goodbye to an aging, increasingly infirm parent, filtered through the careers of these two entertainers.

The idea of a nasty Christmas movie is nothing new, but Violent Night still manages to deliver the goods, mixing “Die Hard” and “Rambo”-style action with a fair amount of hokey ho-ho-hokum. David Harbour makes a particularly good cranky, butt-kicking Santa, in a movie that offers the sort of shared experience that should bring theaters some much-needed cheer.

Writer-director Rian Johnson again assembles a solid cast behind Daniel Craig, but it’s his use of language – where nary a word is wasted – that finally gives the sequel its edge.

Amy Adams nimbly steps back into the role of an animated princess trying to adapt to the live-action world, in an epilogue to “Enchanted” that has moments of magic without completely delivering on the premise.

It’s a strange and intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying stew.