David Ehrlich

The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.

The film’s unflinchingly repetitive shape allows viewers to lose sight of their perspective at the same time as it invites them to draw their own conclusions, a vertigo which proves to be more involving than the didacticism that a traditional documentary might bring to the same topic.

A mouth-watering but utterly flavorless documentary about one of the most acclaimed sushi chefs in the world (and arguably the most famous), Matt Tyrnauer’s “Nobu” is such a fawning portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa that it feels like it should only be available to watch on a DVD sold at the gift shops in the restaurateur’s hotels.

While there’s nothing egregiously cynical about the film’s nature or design, its forensic tone belies the familiarity of its evidence, and its subject has already been too well-excavated for the sincerity of Monroe’s efforts to shake off that signature true-crime stink (the pungent stench of a once-proud medium that’s been left to rot on streaming).

28 Years Later effectively uses the tropes of its genre to insist that the line between a tragedy and a statistic is thinner than we think, and more permeable than we realize.

The action is hardly dull, but the sheer disconnect between the wowee zowee immediacy of the race footage and the mezzo mezzo excitement it inspires suggests that tuning out the noise isn’t as easy as Sonny Hayes might seem to think.

It’s a knowing smile of a drama that leaves you eager to follow Haugerud through his other two new films about the life of the mind, the last and best of which (“Dreams”) recently won top prize at the Berlinale.

Inside is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams’ debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene.

While every scene pulls Jerry apart at the seams, “Sovereign” is too vague and scattered to chart a legible path toward his breaking point.

There’s some fun to be had in watching Echo Valley shift into a battle of wits between Moore and Gleeson, as both actors mine devious nuance from the thin gruel of a paperback thriller.

An awesomely violent and artfully staged piece of animated pulp, Predator: Killer of Killers feels like a movie that was dreamed up by a couple of stoned teenage boys in a suburban basement one night during the summer of 1987, but this is the rare case where that feels like a good thing. A very good thing, even.

A bigger, more confident sequel might be just what this franchise needs to enjoy a peaceful transition of power — and to make good on the full potential of a Hollywood action movie that meaningfully tries to iterate on John Wick instead of just copying his moves.

My Father’s Shadow resolves as a movie less about a father than it is about the absence of one — a vibrant, deeply felt love letter to Lagos, written in blood.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative Yes is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis.

Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise.

Renoir — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season.

The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.

Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — Highest 2 Lowest modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.

Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.

With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.

The Phoenician Scheme is the busiest of Anderson’s films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding.

The Chronology of Water can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and yet Poots makes every moment of it ecstatic in its immediacy.

Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but Sound of Falling so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us.

“We make our own destiny,” someone intones during the film’s closing voiceover, and by the end of Ethan Hunt’s story, it’s hard not to take those words to heart. I only wish that Cruise and McQuarrie had managed to make a better one.

I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is . . . he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again.

Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one.

Even as the Shinkansen decouples some of its cars at full speed and performs death-defying track changes in order to avoid crashing into other trains, it never really feels like anything is meaningfully at risk, and Higuchi’s setpieces are seldom intense enough to offset the lack of danger that’s baked into this project from the start.

Sinners is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time.

An aggressively competent spy thriller that has less use for logic than its lead actor does for his smile, this globe-trotting Robert Littell adaptation would have us believe that no one is more dangerous than a math nerd who refuses to think of himself as a killer, and the film makes a compelling enough case to sustain itself across the entire television season’s worth of plot that it packs into two hours.

Even the worst capitulations to convention are short-lived, just as even its most eye-rolling moments can be seen as more of a feature than a bug toward the end of a fun sleepover movie that never forgets how hard it is to grow up without losing your head.

It’s a real credit to Black’s irrepressibly unique comic energy that “A Minecraft Movie” never feels quite as hypocritical as it should.

Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.

It’s always been clear that Ayer is a sensitive guy, and you can tell that he delights in forcing Statham to embrace his vulnerable side.

Even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.

Reworked from Yeon’s comic of the same name (co-written by Choi Gyu-seok), “Revelations” is the kind of layered yet messy adaptation that results from someone trying to find new ways of telling a story they’ve almost thought to death already.

It’s almost as if Frank can’t fathom why anyone today should care about the incredible true story of how some enterprising immigrants without a nickel to their names formed a multi-billion-dollar racket that shaped a huge part of 20th century America. The tragedy of “The Alto Knights” is that Levinson can’t either.

The Day the Earth Blew Up isn’t arguing for the past at the expense of the future, it’s simply trying to put a modern spin on a classic formula in a way that makes you wonder why we ever left it behind.

The Threesome doesn’t always feel like what you might think of when you imagine a “modern” rom-com, but that’s what makes this one of the rare movies that actually fits the bill.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

Cuttingly funny at times, The Actor isn’t much interested in answering any of those questions, but this semi-inert death trip of a film teases a certain pull from its cosmic uncertainty.

Truth be told, there isn’t a single laugh — or even a knowing smile — to be found in this relentlessly stale ordeal, which does for sci-fi adventure comedies what “The Gray Man” did for action thrillers: absolutely nothing.

The same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.

Last Breath is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions. That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed.

The strength this film exists to celebrate is directly contradicted by the weaknesses of its storytelling.

Everything in the characteristically hyper-literate Kontinental ’25 is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.

This isn’t just another great Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he hates capitalism (though it definitely is that too), it’s the first Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he loves people.

Plot is often the cruelest fate that could ever befall a cool premise, and so it goes with Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a high-concept genre exercise whose shallow depths are all too eager to come to the surface.

It’s fitting enough that “Brave New World” is a film about (and malformed by) the pressures of restoring a diminished brand. It’s even more fitting that it’s also a film about the futility of trying to embody an ideal that the world has outgrown. Sam Wilson might find a way to step out of Steve Rogers’ shadow, but there’s still no indication that the MCU ever will.

Most of us could never hope to be as smart as Ricciardi was, but the movie he’s left behind does everything in its power to ensure that we’re not as dumb as he was either.

Frustrating as it can be to watch such an intriguing movie get so high on its own supply . . . Chainey’s aggressive refusal to engage with the specifics of Darcy’s inner “rot” or to unpack Daphne’s artistic insecurities allows this delirious three-hander to remain appealingly immune to the “everything is trauma” approach that has made so much of modern horror feel like a form of collective psychotherapy.

A collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.

A documentary whose strengths and weaknesses all too perfectly reflect the nature of the crisis at its core — a crisis that stems from a vast confluence of geopolitical issues, but expresses itself through the siloed misery of loneliness and longing.

Gates only pokes fun at how America casts itself until she gets distracted by a cinematic fantasy of her own.

Rebuilding accrues a lasting power from all of the impermanence that it collects along the way. Even the film’s most schematic moments make it feel as though Walker-Silverman is simply unearthing something that was already there.

Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, Zodiac Killer Project sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage.

Split into three parts that reflect an infinite pattern of crime, punishment, and cultural recidivism, Predators fixates on our shared complicity in continuing that cycle with every click.

For a story that takes place in such a tactile and cohesive fantasy world, it’s frustrating that the archness of its telling keeps the viewer at a distance rather than pulling them closer to the heart of the matter.

Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground laws by examining their effects through the lens of a single case — one that harrowingly illustrates the defects of castle doctrines (among other policy failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of white America’s inability to parse between fear and anger.

Twinless mines a steady drumbeat of solid laughs from the mismatched energy of its co-leads, and the Pinter-like precision of Sweeney’s dialogue is especially well-suited to the scenes where Dennis and Roman are talking at each other on completely different wavelengths.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You vibrates with a primordial love and respect for its heroine, one that self-evidently stems from Bronstein’s own experiences as a mother, but the film refuses to wink at its audience or often even the slightest hint of memeable solidarity.

A semi-feral drama about parental fears that isn’t remotely scary enough to catalyze those concerns into the action it puts on screen, Wolf Man runs away from its potential with its tail between its legs. “There is nothing here worth dying for,” reads the “no trespassing” sign on the childhood home where Blake inexplicably returns with his wife and daughter. There’s nothing here worth watching for either.

By the time this hard-nosed genre exercise arrives at its ambivalent final scene, whether or not the criminals get away with stealing a few million Krone feels all but irrelevant to a world in which real fulfillment is so hard to keep.

Yakusho never misses a beat; fittingly enough, even this movie’s greatest weaknesses are an opportunity for him to prove his strength.

While Yen makes sure to acknowledge that he isn’t as young as he used to be, such admissions prove needlessly self-effacing.

That From Ground Zero exists is both a tragedy and a miracle in unequal measure, a fact that proves impossible to forget over the course of a film whose every frame has been rescued from the rubble of an ongoing genocide.

There’s no denying that Los Frikis were punk as hell, and errant traces of that anti-establishment attitude can be found in Nilson and Schwartz’s refusal to judge their characters for injecting themselves with HIV as a “fuck you” to a government that hadn’t left them any other choice, but the declawed safety of their storytelling undercuts that energy at every turn.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

Alas, the special effects in “Kraven the Hunter” are bad enough to completely undercut the only decent setpiece — a chase through the streets and rivers of London — in an action movie that doesn’t take advantage of its R rating until the final shootout, as the CGI devolves from “adorably cartoonish” to “done as cheaply as possible by a studio trying to cut its losses” so fast that it comes dangerously close to “Scorpion King” territory by the end (which doesn’t stop Chandor from burdening the effects with selling his story’s most pivotal moments).

Like “I’m Not There” before it, “A Complete Unknown” would rather celebrate Dylan’s mystery than attempt to explain it (each of their titles emphasizes his elusiveness as a defining factor), but where Haynes’ solution was to make Dylan infinite, Mangold’s is to make him as small as possible.

At least it aspires to mine a fresh experience from the all too familiar tedium of watching Hollywood pick a franchise dry, even if it ultimately falls well short of that goal.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

A Photographic Memory is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search.

Neither the deficiencies of Thorne’s script nor the made-for-TV feeling of Taylor’s direction ever fully obscure the enduringly relevant principle they exist to serve: Science will always keep inching forward, but it’s society’s job to ensure that bringing life into this world is a happiness worth the heartache of living in it.

The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.

“Life Comes in Flashes” doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the more salacious details of Bogart’s story, but it’s also not as bowdlerized as some viewers might expect from an estate-approved doc.

Ghost Cat Anzu may be much sillier and less substantial than “Spirited Away,” but this warm little weirdo of a charmer eventually builds into something that squeezes your ribs like a hug, as it blazes a scattered and unhurried path towards its own acceptance of the fact that life is for the living.

Meanwhile on Earth is a film that feels more compelled by its premise than it is by its story, but Clapin is able to suffuse it with the same ethereal hauntedness that brought “I Lost My Body” to life.

The moments when 100 Yards lands its blows are exhilarating in a way that makes the movie feel miles removed from most of its competition.

What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.

On its own, Paddington in Peru is a fun if forgettable matinee for the whole family to enjoy, but — like its hero and its villain alike — the movie belongs to a tradition that it implores us to cherish like an heirloom, and it would be a direct contradiction of its story to orphan it from the greater context of its creation.

“How does he do it?,” someone asks. Music by John Williams doesn’t have the slightest idea. This long and indulgent doc is content to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking that same question for centuries to come.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense.

Despite the film’s best efforts to melt its characters into the vast sludge of superhero cinema, the union between Eddie and Venom is simply too pure to be diluted down to nothing. Thanks to Hardy, even the least of the movies in this franchise is definitely something, and it’s something that its genre may not be able to survive without.

The film is determined to prove that people can meaningfully interact with the world in any number of ways, now more than ever, and it accomplishes that goal with real clarity and rare emotional force (the last shot is the kind of gut-punch that hurts so good).

Nothing about it feels the least bit real, but nothing about it feels dishonest either.

A potent but emotionally diffuse coming-of-age drama in which everything — even faith, even love — has the potential to be as exploitative as the deforestation that continues to eat away at the soul of the Amazon.

Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

There’s good fun to be had in watching so many limbs get hacked off for the better part of two hours, but Director Kim can only dismember so many body parts before he starts to lose track of his movie’s spine.

This lilting tale’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity proves inseparable from the lasting power of its punch-to-the-gut impact.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

Notice to Quit is redeemed by the simple fact of its nature: This isn’t a film that lives in the lows and highs of its defining moments so much as it’s a film that’s sustained by the strength it takes to put one foot in front of the other, and by the rush of rushing through New York City in lockstep with someone you care about.

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

It’s easy to imagine how a version of this film might have descended into vaguely connected sketches (and still would have been one of the funniest pure comedies in forever despite its shapelessness), but there’s a clear and rewarding intentionality to DeYoung’s plotting, and it pays off with a finale that — better than almost any scene before it — perfectly threads the needle between all of the movie’s competing energies.