Jake Coyle

Mutant Mayhem...can’t entirely get over the feeling of trodding over well-covered turtle ground. But if we must go once more into the ooze, the film by director Jeff Rowe (co-director of “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” ) and co-written by co-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is probably the best of a not-so-stellar franchise.

It’s based on Adam Mars-Jones’ “Box Hill,” but Lighton’s film largely avoids the darker, abusive turns of the novel. Lighton is more keen to enjoy the unfolding dynamics of a relationship in the extreme, one that ultimately, like any other, is guided by needs and wants.

As a movie, Priscilla is the diametric opposite of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” Where Luhrmann’s film was lurid and careening, Coppola’s is muted and textured. Her film is a kind of fairy tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.

It’s less Haigh’s mournful view of American society — one that, for sure, rarely finds American movie screens — that makes the heartfelt Lean on Pete stay with you. It’s Plummer’s wounded, achingly alone Charley, humbly striving across a darkening land, holding on desperately.

Even as The Menu teeters unevenly in its third act and things get gruesomely less appetizing, its greasy last bites succeed in capturing one common aspect of molecular gastronomy: The Menu will leave you hungry.

Spaceship Earth, with a glowing score by Owen Pallett, doesn’t cast judgment on most of its subjects. It’s content to go along for the ride, marveling at all the surrealism. You’d say the story was out of this world if it wasn’t so much of it.

What absolutely, undoubtedly does work is Moore and Swinton together. If some of the more melodramatic or crime-movie flourishes feel forced, the central relationship of “The Room Next Door” is consistently provocative.

Brittany Runs a Marathon starts comically; its first moments, with Brittany working as an usher at an off-Broadway theater are its funniest. But it grows increasingly earnest. That’s part of the movie’s charm but also what leads it a little off track.

Nyad is balanced between Diana’s admirably insane ambition and Bonnie’s loyal (up to a point) support for her friend. In any case, it’s a reminder, like a pail of cold water, of just how good Foster can be.

Though there are elaborately choreographed long takes that smack of contemporary moviemaking, “Splitsville” belongs more to a screwball tradition stretching back to the 1930s.

A story about the victims of Sept. 11 maybe ought not to focus on a lawyer dispensing the cash. But Keaton — a truly great actor in his responsiveness to those around him — makes a compelling, initially tone-deaf listener to the stories that filter through Worth.

The jokes aren’t often Sandler’s best material but Hubie Halloween is as sweet and easily digestible as a Milky Way.

Pointed as the message of Plan B is, nothing supersedes just letting these two characters — traditionally bit players at best in high-school comedies — be themselves. They’re a pair of the most authentic 17-year-olds lately seen at the movies, something owed very definitely to two stars in the making in Verma and Moroles.

Onward makes the most of its strange assemblage to tell a sweet and moving story — enough so to leave you yet again shaking your head at Pixar’s magic act.

It’s a movie well engineered as a late-summer diversion — a big cat movie for the dog days of August — that Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (“Adrift,” “Everest”) insures stays well within the paths of man-against-nature films before it.

Nouvelle Vague, with a young Godard making things up off the cuff and on the fly, is a reminder how less can be so, so much more. And how it’s nice, as a young filmmaker with big ambitions, to have some company.

Blitz feels stuck between a conventional war drama and something more adventurous and probing. It doesn’t coalesce the way McQueen’s best work does, but the frictions that drive Blitz make it a singular and sporadically moving experience.

Antoine Fuqua’s Equalizer 3, a taut and textured sequel to Washington’s vigilante series, isn’t one of the actor’s best films. It wouldn’t crack his top 10. But it vividly encapsulates Washington’s formidable on-screen potency.

Okuno’s taut feature artfully reconstructs a Hitchcockian thriller around, yes, a blonde heroine in Monroe, but one with her own gaze and distinct anxieties.

The film, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, isn’t the farce you might expect. Rather, it’s one of the most textured and affectionate films about basketball that’s come along in a long time. Starring Sandler as a road-weary NBA scout and with several teams’ worth of all-stars in cameos, Hustle has a surprisingly good handle and feel for the game.

It’s an exploration that touches not just on policing and justice, but astronomy, politics, phrenology and race.

The antic chemistry between Mann, Cena and Barinholtz is stellar. Together, they capture the panic, embarrassment and sentimentality of young-adult parenthood as they scramble after their kids, none of whom need saving.

May not be the most heartening portrait of our political system. But it’s a vital one and it provides reasons for optimism, too.

In more ways than one, Mann’s movie feels like a much-needed feature-length refuge from today’s anxiety-producing devices. Unlike many of Pixar’s moving metaphors of parenthood, this one is, affectingly, for the kids.

Time is the fundamental metric of prison life, which makes a documentary like “Daughters,” filmed over years, uniquely, maybe even monstrously capable of capturing its passing.

Flora and Son, like a B-side to Carney’s earlier hits, may sound a little like a tune you’ve heard before. But it’s sung with enough heart to have even the coldest cynic humming.

Rarely has a film conjured such a thick atmosphere of dread and wonder as “Annihilation,” a movie that unfolds, grippingly, as an existential mystery.

The whimsical, unpredictable artistry of “Kajillionaire” turns out to be no con, at all.

It’s the kind of comic, eminently British underdog story that Frears excels at. And with Sally Hawkins playing Langley as a woman undeterred by pompous academics and condescending naysayers, The Lost King makes for a charmingly droll tale of long-ago and not-so-long-ago reappraisal.

As The Mule ambles toward its conclusion, it draws closer to Stone, and maybe to Eastwood’s legacy, too.

The story is so sensational that you almost wish Cassandro was instead a feature-length documentary.

The movie, written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, is not the tale of manly valor that it first appears. The Last Duel is more like a medieval tale deconstructed, piece by piece, until its heavily armored male characters and the genre’s mythologized nobility are unmasked.

Mountainhead adheres to the tradition of the HBO movie; it’s lean, topical and a fine platform for its actors.

For some Marvel devotees, Ant-Man and The Wasp will be a clever enough diversion in between the more main-event releases. But it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want in a superhero movie: a funny cast, zippy action scenes and not an infinity stone in sight.

Though it may be a chaotic shamble, Chazelle’s film makes this one point brilliantly clear: Cinema will be tamed for only so long; the parade will go on.

Baltimorons is one of those little movies you might stumble across and be surprised that it hooks you. It does so despite — or more likely because — of its complete lack of flashiness or any self-evident attempt to “hook you.” Instead, it manages that simply with low-key charm and a warm, unpretentious humanity.

What it certainly is, though, is a very solid comic book movie. It’s a little surface over substance, and the time capsule feeling is pervasive. This is an earnest-enough superhero movie where even the angry mob protesting the superheroes turns quiet and pensive.

Where Haynes excels is in teasing out the personal and professional connections that mingle throughout.

Burton’s Dumbo, while inevitably lacking much of the magic of the original, has charms and melancholies of its own, starting, naturally, with the elephant in the room. Of all the CGI make-overs, this Dumbo is the most textured, sweetest and most soulful of creatures.

While Destroyer can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.

Unsane, a pulpy psychological thriller, is an exercise in both genre and technology. It’s a B-movie iMovie. And it’s 98 minutes of proof that the laborious apparatus of filmmaking can be not only light on its feet, but fit snuggly inside your pocket.

Good Boys mines that gulf between childhood and adolescence like few films have before.

Blinded by the Light isn’t a new tune, but it’s sung with an infectious passion and it captures something sincere about the globe-spanning, life-changing influence of great pop music.

For a long, sun-addled stretch, Lorcan Finnegan’s beach-set “The Surfer” simmers as a deliciously punishing nightmare, driving Nicolas Cage into his most natural state: a boil.

You Won’t Be Alone enchants in its novel perspective and in its sharp-shifting protagonist’s unquenchable curiosity. The witch, once so set in stereotype, has never felt so enthrallingly elastic.

Gloria Bell isn’t a dour midlife character study but a warmly affectionate one, in large part due to Moore’s radiant, lived-in performance as a woman committed to self-renewal.

Call Jane distinguishes itself as a stirring portrait of the birth of an unlikely abortion-rights activist.

The movie is unabashedly romantic about the Vandals but it’s equally dubious about the rugged masculinity they embody, too. “The Bikeriders” has its hands firmly on the throttle just it does the brakes.

Babygirl, which Reijn also wrote, is sometimes a bit much. (In one scene, Samuel feeds Romy saucers of milk while George Michael’s “Father Figure” blares.) But its two lead actors are never anything but completely magnetic.

Aster, who also wrote the film, fills his movie with foreshadowing clues that give the gruesome events to come a cruel note of inevitability. There’s a curse on this family, whether by ghost or DNA.

It’s an affecting window into what remains very possibly the most benevolent broadcast ever regularly beamed out on the small screen.

Wakanda Forever is overlong, a little unwieldy and somewhat mystifyingly steers toward a climax on a barge in the middle of the Atlantic. But Coogler’s fluid command of mixing intimacy with spectacle remains gripping.

To a remarkable degree, Happening is viscerally connected with its protagonist, closely detailing not just her navigation of social taboos and restrictions but capturing her unapologetic determination. It’s a movie about abortion, yes, but it’s also a coming-of-age tale about a woman’s resolve.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things nearly sustains something beautiful and sad that blends consciousness and time.

The most memorable images in Still are those of a present-day Fox in frame, speaking straight into the camera. The effects of Parkinson’s are visible but so is the jaunty, self-deprecating actor we’ve always known.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On could be considered a kids movie or an art-house indie (A24 is releasing). But its proper audience might be anyone who’s ever felt sanded down by life, and could use a roll in Marcel’s rover.

Here is a sweeping historical tapestry — no one does it better today than Scott — with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix — Scott’s spectacle and Phoenix’s the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance — makes Napoleon a rivetingly off-kilter experience.

The Old Guard, while in many ways typical, is wonderfully unconventional in all kinds of less obvious ways.

A slinky, slick caper that finds ways to distort expectations while unfolding a puzzle-box narrative.

Like its predecessor, “Dune: Part Two” thrums with an intoxicating big-screen expressionism of monoliths and mosquitos, fevered visions and messianic fervor — more dystopian dream, or nightmare, than a straightforward narrative.

Woman of the Hour will surely send many looking up this stranger-than-fiction story. But Kendrick’s achievement is in capturing, from a woman’s point of view, just how hard it can be to pick a serial killer out of an all-male line-up.

The documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, is vigilant in widening is lens to capture the broader problems at USA Gymnastics.

But for all its fast-paced zaniness, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, scripted by Rianda and his writing partner Jeff Rowe (also co-director), is basically a good old-fashioned family road trip movie, and the Mitchells slide in somewhere between the Griswolds and a more accident-prone Incredibles.

As played by Johansson, excellent here, every action for Natasha is tinged with acceptance and revulsion for her own nature. Black Widow becomes, kind of stirringly, a movie not about franchise extension but sisterhood, improvised families and traumatic pasts.

It takes a little while to get going...The “Borat” sequel will make you laugh and squirm as much as it will send shudders down your spine.

What distinguishes The Nun is its silky, sumptuous shadows. Directed by British filmmaker Corin Hardy (“The Hallows”) and shot by Maxime Alexander (who was also cinematographer on the “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle: Creation,” The Nun shrouds itself so much in darkness that it at times verges on becoming a nightmarish abstraction. You almost lose sense of what exactly is going on, as Sister Irene falls into a labyrinthine abyss.

While Green’s Halloween, which he penned with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film — the stoic killer, the gruesome executions, the suburban nightmares — what makes his Halloween such a thrill is how it deviates from its long-ago predecessor.

The Death of Stalin may be both Iannucci’s darkest and most timely satire yet. More than anything he’s done before, Iannucci has narrowed the distance between slapstick and savagery, prompting us to contemplate — even as we’re cackling — their uncomfortable proximity.

Vol. 3 is a messy, overstuffed finale. But you rarely question whether Gunn’s heart is in it. Sometimes it spoils some of that effect by trying too hard to juxtapose tonal extremes, and show off its brash juggling act. Yet whatever this sweet, surreal sci-fi shamble is that Gunn has created, everyone here seems to believe ardently in it.

Regardless of any incongruities, “Monkey Man” makes for a forceful directorial debut from Patel. More than anything else, he brings a compelling gravity to a film that is quite serious about getting seriously brutal.

In Us, Peele has produced a terrifying artifact: a sinister ballet of doppelgangers and inversions that makes flesh the unseen underbelly lurking beneath every sunny American dream and behind every contented nuclear family. It’s a scissor-sharp rebuke to anyone who’s ever held hands and sang “Kumbaya.”

Paolo Sorrentino’s films can be overwrought, grotesque and uneven but they are rarely not alive. His latest, The Hand of God, is a catalog of wonders — of miracles both banal and eternal.

By breaking down some of the old mythology, Johnson has staked out new territory. For the first time in a long time, a “Star Wars” film feels forward-moving.

It doesn’t all fit together, and I Care a Lot has ultimately no way of resolving its fairly ludicrous plot. But it’s strong, gripping, unpredictable pulp, and Pike pulls something off that few else could as a protagonist. She’s quite detestable and completely compelling.

For an actress who’s hustled to get to this point, “One of Them” days is perfect platform for Palmer, scrappy and unstoppable.

In this forensic portrait of war, the only way to not get what’s happening on the ground is to be too far from it. François Truffaut famously said there’s no such thing as an anti-war film because movies inherently glamorize war. “Warfare,” though, is intent on challenging that old adage.

Dosa uses July’s narration to frame the Kraffts’ story with a playful sense of wonder and whimsy — a sometimes overly intrusive, too neatly packaged device in a film where what’s on screen is so overwhelmingly powerful that it might not need the extra layer.

Gunda ultimately falls somewhere between banal and profound. Maybe it’s both.

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a rollicking virtual-world geekfest flooded by ’80s ephemera, doesn’t just want to wade back into the past. It wants to race into it at full throttle. For those who get their fix through pop nostalgia, “Ready Player One” is — for better or worse — an indulgent, dizzying overdose.

On the whole, the Ross brothers’ observational, immersive filmmaking gets close to something bracingly real.

Tenet lacks the elegant mastery of “Dunkirk” or the cosmic soulfulness of “Interstellar,” but it has a darkly grand geometry.

When “F1” does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It’s not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it’s enough to glimpse another road “F1” might have taken.

The ambitions of Wonder Woman 1984 may be just outside its grasp, but it seldom feels predestined or predictable — a preciously rare commodity in the genre.

To call this a field of dreams would be pushing it. But it’s a lovely way to pass some time.

Not everything works in “Superman.” For those who like their Superman classically drawn, Gunn’s film will probably seem too irreverent and messy. But for anyone who found Zack Snyder’s previous administration painfully ponderous, this “Superman,” at least, has a pulse.

The film, as you would expect, walks us again through the tremendous upheavals in Turner’s life. But it’s ultimately about Turner telling her story — why she struggles having to tell it; why she needs to tell it, anyway; and why she wants to be done with it.

It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.

Locked Down is inevitably, and intentionally, of the moment. But I hope some of its off-the-cuff spirit lasts after the pandemic. So much Hollywood moviemaking is laboriously preordained.

Not all of it works. Heavy doses of melodrama and flashy surrealism sap some of the lurid spell of “Love Lies Bleeding.” But this feels tantalizingly close to the idealized version of a Kristen Stewart film.

That Crazy Rich Asians is a rom-com where the mothers are its most vital co-stars is one of the movie’s best attributes. Though some of the satirical edges of Kwan’s book have been smoothed down, it remains a love story more about immigrant identity and Chinese heritage than romance.

The movie’s earnestness carries it through these less smooth moments. So does the cast. Any opportunity to see Freeman or Harris, still at the top of their games, is a chance to be treasured.

The actors are uniformly good. And by fusing two types of films that have long been bedfellows — slashers and pornography — “X” makes for a gripping shotgun marriage of genres.

The film is shot by Florian Hoffmeister with a cool, almost documentary-like perspective. It’s in these chilly, highbrow environs that Lydia operates with exquisite intellect and ruthless cunning — and Blanchett gives a colossal tour-de-force performance that may be the finest of her career, a career as decorated as Lydia’s.

This “Saturday Night” may have a legacy of its own; a lot of this cast, I suspect, will be around for a long time. And, ultimately, when the show finally comes together, it’s galvanizing.

High Flying Bird is a heady movie, full of political thought about sport, entertainment, race and power. Rather than float on production value, it sustains itself on the tension of ideas, exchanged rapid-fire in gleaming office towers.

By its nature, “Exit 8” is sparse and repetitive. But in the not-especially-decorated annals of video game adaptations, it’s one of the most compelling and clever meldings of the two mediums — cinema and gaming — we’ve seen yet.