David Edelstein

Boundaries is earnest in way that partly makes up for the overbroad characters and stale setup.

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 is, much like its predecessor, delightful as an animated feature but really, really delightful as a superhero picture. It’s proof that someone (not anyone, mainly Bird) can make a Marvel-type movie that’s fleet and shapely, with action sequences rich in style rather than tumult.

McKay does no editorializing in En el Séptimo Día. He’s a simple, graceful storyteller — so graceful that we don’t notice all the technique he brings to the task of making us see the world through José’s eyes.

Nancy is a grim piece of work, but Choe’s empathy for her protagonist gives the film its distinctive texture — woebegone, with flickers of both hope and dread.

A wonderful breather from reality, from which you come back more conscious of — and dismayed by — the hate that more than ever runs the world.

The movie plays like a strenuous imitation of Steven Spielberg instead of the real deal.

Just as the “French Extreme” film Martyrs set a new standard for garish sadism, Hereditary raises the bar on emotional agony. If you want to see things you can never un-see and feel pain you can never un-feel, here’s the ultimate test.

The agreeable looseness edges into a less agreeable limpness.

The bigger problem is that stupidity just isn’t a very interesting subject.

It’s the 48- and 13-year-old Jenny sitting side by side, spent, against the wall of a women’s restroom, together in their helplessness, with little to show for their pain except this extraordinary movie.

First Reformed is rigorously austere (as befits the author of Transcendental Style in Film), but every frame suggests a longing for a world elsewhere. It could be argued that it gets away from Schrader, who probably had to wrest the script from his own hands to begin shooting.

Solo: A Star Wars Story hits all its marks except the one it needed to hit most: accounting for one of pop culture’s most cantankerous charismatics.

We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.

Revenge inverts the gutbucket revenge genre without transcending it. That said, why should men have all the fun? The movie is like Ladies’ Night at a sleaze-o bar.

What’s Terminal about? It’s about 90 minutes. That’s a cheap shot, but since the film doesn’t establish a baseline of reality, it’s hard to pick out a premise. It’s a series of playlets stitched together with the seams hanging out.

Both the film and the “notorious” figure at its center are the best imaginable retaliation to mansplaining.

Early in The Rachel Divide, a commentator describes Dolezal as a Rorschach blot, and the movie is one, too. Some people think it’s a hatchet job, others that it gives its subject’s commitment to social justice too much credence. I found it pretty much down the middle.

Despite a few scenes that are too on the nose, The Seagull... turns out to be very fine. Above all, it’s a platform for a handful of definitive performances.

Cold Water has the kind of emotional purity that puts it in a class by itself. Its blue fog envelops you.

Disobedience isn’t packed with surprises, but that’s not why you go to a movie like this. You go to watch humans with wayward emotions labor to make peace with (or opt to war against) a formal, ritualized way of life.

Flagrantly, bombastically extravagant, it plays its audience like a hundred million fiddles.

The title character in Tully, the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, doesn’t make her entrance until well into the film, after it’s established that the protagonist, Marlo (Charlize Theron), is moving from postpartum depression to postpartum desperation — and that’s when the movie enters uncharted territory and comes to life.

In Where Is Kyra?, Michelle Pfeiffer is stunning as a desperate, near-destitute woman whose life is shrouded in darkness.

Blockers, for all its high-velocity raunch and drug abuse, is fundamentally positive.

The movie suffers from having no obvious endgame, and it’s not as fun as the recent, less tony shut-the-hell-up horror movie Don’t Breathe. But it’s aggressively scary.

The (elderly) Burt Reynolds vehicle The Last Movie Star strikes a note of banality in its first sequence from which it rarely deviates.

The performances could hardly be better — with the exception of O’Dowd, who’s good but maybe needed to find just one redeeming moment. (The writers could have helped.) As for Andie McDowell, I haven’t changed my thinking about her amateurish work in almost everything but "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," but I also see that with the right material her inward demeanor can be powerful.

There’s not much wrong with the movie on its own terms. But there’s nothing great about it, either. It doesn’t have the breathless exuberance, the highs, of Spielberg’s best “escapist” work, maybe because everything is so filtered, so arm’s length.