Dan Bayer

If Toy Story 5 doesn’t quite represent peak Pixar, it does find the studio willing to tinker with its established formula in little ways that make a big difference.

Despite the well-written screenplay, it still takes great skill to navigate the tonal shifts of June and Lela’s relationship, and both women do superb work.

It feels good to have the Wayans brothers back where they belong, even if Scary Movie isn’t quite up to the level of the first film in the franchise. While it maintains that film’s strengths, the humor doesn’t feel as fresh as it once did. For all their willingness to offend, the Wayanses don’t have anything to say with their jokes, rendering them toothless.

Backrooms sees Parsons arrive on the cinematic scene as a fully formed filmmaker, with a strong visual style and a knack for creative, engaging storytelling.

Between the animation style and the decidedly adult content, the film’s ultimate sweetness is completely disarming. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, though, as it’s rooted in the same emotional honesty that marks all of the film’s dialogue.

While Øvredal’s direction and the lead performances carry the film through any rough patches, it can get quite rough. Burgess and Donohue have plenty of great ideas, but don’t seem to have edited any of them, resulting in a story that can be frustrating.

Is God Is has an infectious, rambunctious energy that wraps you up in the drama and sweeps you along with every wave of emotion. Thanks to the fun that Harris injects throughout, whether it’s a moment of sisterly bonding or a moment of visual flair, it’s a bold, brutal blast, and one of the best debuts of the year. At the very least, it announces Aleshea Harris as a major new voice in cinema.

This isn’t just some quirky look at an obscure American event and subculture or a love letter to the filmmaker’s home state; it’s a sly indictment of 21st-century America, wrapped up in what looks like a trashy thrill ride. It is pretty thrilling, to be sure, but much like how our intrepid hunters learn that the hunt is much more driving around in the dark than stalking and killing snakes, it’s not what you expect. For both the hunters and the audience, that’s for the best.

While The Devil Wears Prada 2 isn’t too sweet, it could certainly use more sour notes. The callbacks to the first film get the balance mostly right, but outside of those nicely judged moments, the film can sometimes feel like Miranda struggling with the new HR guidelines: Trying to be biting, but turning out toothless.

Two Pianos is at once a story about identity, aging musicians, memory (and the loss of it), the dangers of pragmatism, the treatment of young music prodigies and how it affects them as they age, overcoming addiction, and the lies we tell ourselves and others to justify our choices. All of these ideas are connected, but none of them rise to the top to become an overarching theme that unites them all.

Perhaps “Lorne” entertains more than it informs, but somehow, that feels exactly right.

Lowery, clearly fascinated by the plight of the modern pop star, has made “Mother Mary” with both the fervor of a fan and the insight of a fellow artist. The questions the film asks about the identity of pop stars as well as the ownership of their music, their image, and their very souls don’t all have answers, and Lowery doesn’t provide them. He does, however, provide plenty of food for thought as he asks these questions, interrogating the relationship between artists and their audience and what each owes the other.

You, Me & Tuscany has all the right ingredients; the recipe’s just a little off. Throw in a little more spice and add some depth to the central romance, and the next time Page and Bailey do this together, they might just make a classic.

You don’t watch a movie like this for character or dialogue, you watch it to see fierce, strong young women twirl, kick, and stab their way through a pack of mobsters to the sound of Tchaikovsky. On that front, Pretty Lethal delivers. Brava, ladies!

Given how well “Brian” works, it’s tempting to call it a miracle of a movie, simply because this humor shouldn’t play this well. But that’s not a miracle, that’s just everyone working on a film being perfectly aligned on how to tell the story they’re telling.

For the most part, Family Movie glides along on the geniality of its cast and Kevin Bacon’s light touch as a director. There’s not a whole lot of style to speak of, but the film looks good, and it moves along at a solid pace.

While it may be indebted to more modern storytelling methods than his previous features, Hokum still possesses enough of McCarthy’s dark magic that it will hold you in a vice grip all the way through. Considering how played-out many horror films feel nowadays, McCarthy’s mastery at scaring the audience is cause for celebration.

Instead of the sharp satire of modern-day relationships it starts out as, “Over Your Dead Body” becomes a gross-out comedy in its second half. While it’s very good in both of those modes, it can’t help but feel a bit disappointing that it takes such a sharp turn from something that’s both fun and perceptive to something that’s just fun.

The whole film has a surfeit of personality, thanks in large part to the multi-hyphenate Russo’s distinct voice permeating every aspect. In addition to writing and directing, Russo also edited and scored the film. That level of control may seem like a lot, especially for a first-time filmmaker, but when you have a vision as specific as Russo does here, it makes sense.

Boots Riley is a genuine original, and in I Love Boosters, he makes a statement as wildly entertaining as possible.

Yes, Reminders of Him is very much an ordeal, but not so much because it’s bad. It’s an ordeal because of all the emotional muck these characters have to drag themselves through to get to the other side.

The story, while unique enough in its presentation of Tourette’s, follows the same patterns as any number of other feel-good disability dramas, but all the actors are so believably in touch with their humanity, in all its messiness, that they make the material sing.

The film’s refusal to engage with its own material and its franchise’s legacy may not be the only problem with “Scream 7,“but it’s certainly the biggest. For every good element, there’s an equally bad one. The performances are either good (Campbell has always been great as Sidney, but this may be her best performance in the franchise to date) or barely functional (Courtney Cox looks and sounds like she’s sleepwalking through playing Gale Weathers despite getting an all-timer entrance).

All the ingredients for a good movie, or at the very least a fun one, are present in Cold Storge: A charismatic and talented ensemble, a clever story, and an overall sense of playfulness that extends from the effects work to the production design of the 24-hour self-storage facility built over the old government bunker used to contain the fungus. However, that sense of playfulness doesn’t extend to the overall tone, leaving the movie feeling like a wasted opportunity.

There’s certainly entertainment value in “Mercy,” especially in a late-film chase captured largely via dashcam, and in the film’s gamified version of criminal court, which has a video-game-like appeal. But with a concept so close to the real world, you need to engage with the ideas to connect with the audience beyond the surface, truly.

Holland conjures up some genuinely Kafkaesque images and dialogue exchanges that feel like exactly the biopic Kafka deserves, and in those moments, “Kafka” is quite thrilling. Unfortunately, though, Holland’s surfeit of ideas results in a film that simultaneously feels like too much and not enough; too much deviation from standard biopic formula and not enough connective tissue to make everything cohere.

Sure, the characters are paper-thin and do many things that defy all logic and common sense, but that’s part of the fun. Primate is bad in many of the ways you’d expect, but it’s better in many ways you won’t. It’s the best kind of January surprise.

While it’s impossible not to be moved by Holding Liat, Kramer also challenges his audience to consider the situation in Gaza carefully and really question what is best for the region going forward.