Jake Coyle

There’s a mean potency to the borderland noir of both Sicario films, enough that it sometimes recalls another tale of explosions and drug enforcement agents on both sides of the border: Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” Day of the Soldado is too sober and grim for the sweaty heat of “Touch of Evil.” But it has taken to heart one of its best lines: “All border towns bring out the worst in a country.”

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.

Thankfully, someone has come to the not-hard-to-deduce realization that Clooney and Pitt are good together.

It’s a basic format that’s been trotted out for plenty of reboots before. But aside from its frequent stabs at self-referential comedy, “Scream” proceeds with a dull repetitiveness.

A dead-end wrong turn in the usually boundless Pixar universe. Buzz, himself, is a bit of a bore, too.

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

Motherless Brooklyn is done well enough that you wish it had struck out on its own path, rather than crib from Robert Towne and Roman Polanski. It’s hard to forget it, but that’s “Chinatown.”

It all fits together a little too well, too predictably and, well, too Disney. Pooh and company have always been a wonderfully neurotic bunch, but in Forster’s polished film, they’re a little suffocated, a little lifeless. Any semblance of authentic childlike glee remains purely theoretical.

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.

Goddard’s film looks terrific and has all of the — as Hamm’s character would say with exaggerated Southern flare — “accoutrements” of an intoxicating slow-burn thriller, but none of the payoff.

It’s Jones who dominates the film

Usually, it’s pleasingly aware of its own silliness. But there are blind spots.

It’s sluggish at times and too withdrawn for such a vibrant tale. But it stays nevertheless in tune with the spirit of Burnett’s book, and by the time it reaches its late crescendo, this “Secret Garden” blooms nevertheless.

Godzilla vs. Kong, the only creature feature to dare wide release in some time, is a rock ‘em-sock ’em monster-movie revival with all the requisite explosions, inane plot twists and skyscraper smashing to satisfy most lovers of gigantic amphibians. Vive le cinéma!

While No Hard Feelings finally gives Lawrence (also an executive producer) a platform for some of the slapstick humor she’s so good at, it also feels like she’s been inserted into the framework of a quite male coming-of-age rom-com/fantasy.

All sequels and no originals make us all dull boys.

A calculatedly combustible concoction, designed, like its chaos-creating character, to cause a stir. To provoke and distort. I wish it was as radical as it thinks it is.

For a movie about a detail obsessive, it’s curiously messy. But — and this might matter more — the film has a reasonably firm sense of just how serious and how knowingly silly a movie about an uber-talented accountant ought to be.

Taking each storyline at a time, all accompanied by flashbacks, gives each character some depth, even as the crowded film — at nearly three-hours long — verges on turning into a clown car. That sheer much-ness is in the spirit of King’s massive book. “Chapter Two” is, for better or worse, a horror carnival.

Much of F9 is kind of a slog. There are some not very dynamic car chases, a lot of flashbacks, ho-hum villains and an oddly prominent role for magnets. But when Taj and Roman reach zero gravity, the movie finally takes flight with goofy grandeur.

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

As the movie grows more abstract, it loses momentum. But an impassioned melodrama and a curiously sincere belief in the transformative power of pop music wrap “Mother Mary” in a gothic garb all its own.

Only a few times does the banter between Moana and Maui really remind you of the fun that characterized the original.

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.

Productions of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull almost always tip too far into farce or wade too deeply into tragedy, unable to sustain the play’s elusive balancing act. Michael Mayer’s lush and lively big-screen adaption is unfortunately no exception.

The real story of Ivan is more interesting even if it’s probably too dispiriting and shameful for a Disney movie. At the same time there’s some awkwardness in relating such an animal-rights tale with fart jokes and a celebrity voice ensemble.

All the momentum that “Wicked: For Good” does gather is owed significantly to its stars. To a large degree, these movies have been the Erivo-and-Grande show, a grand spectacle of female friendship that rises above all the petty biases and misjudgments to forge a vision of harmony in opposites. It’s a compelling vision, and Chu, as he did in the triumphant “Defying Gravity” culmination of part one, knows how to stick the landing.

Opening on the heels of raging wildfires, Elemental manages to be a movie about fire and water without even a passing reference to today’s climate realities. Missed opportunities abound.

The vaguest hints of real-world intrigue only cast a pale light on the movie’s mostly lackluster comic chops and uninspired action sequences.

The tonal swings, not to mention the gloss that covers the whole enterprise, make “The Gorge” an intriguing but empty genre mash-up and streaming-only exercise.

It’s not plot deviations from King’s novel that hamper Pet Sematary. It’s that, from early on, Kölsch and Widmyer, rely less on the detailed accumulation of atmosphere that King built his tale on, than jump cuts and music cues to build suspense. It puts Pet Sematary on a more familiar genre track.

The tonal extremes and multilayered theatricality of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie-mad movie are, by any measure, a lot. But I would argue such ambitious gambits are exactly the kind that a filmmaker in their sophomore outing ought to be taking. “The Bride!” feels constantly like an act of plate-spinning that’s about to collapse. That it doesn’t is a fever-dream feat, one that makes me eager to see what Gyllenhaal does next.

For a not small segment of the audience for Minions: Rise of Gru, only one thing really needs to be said. The Minions are in it. That’s enough.

Collet-Serra’s genre mechanics, stylized and sober, are efficient. His trains run on time, even if — especially in The Commuter — a rush-hour’s worth of implausibility eventually wrecks the thrill.

Hosoda grafted “Beauty and the Beast” into “Belle,” to sometimes awkward, sometimes illuminating effect. But in “Scarlet,” he struggles to bridge “Hamlet” to today. It’s a big swing, the kind filmmakers as talented as Hosoda should be taking, but it doesn’t pay off.

Migration is vividly animated with warm cartoon tones that would do Daffy proud. But it never quite spreads its wings.

Ibiza, scripted by Lauryn Kahn and directed by Alex Richanbach (both Funny Or Die veterans and disciples of Ibiza producer Adam McKay and Will Ferrell) has a loose, natural rhythm that easily surpasses its cliche framework.

With some notable exceptions, this is a traditional treatment of an extraordinary life, complete with deathbed scenes that bookend the film and frequent lines, in Jack Thorne’s screenplay, in which Curie single-mindedly speaks of scientific progress less like a person than a grade-school teaching tool.

Edgar Wright’s new big-screen adaptation is fittingly but awkwardly timed. Arriving in the year of King’s imagined dystopia, its near-future has little in it that isn’t already plausible today, making this “Running Man” — while fleet of foot in action — feel a step, or two, behind.

Once the film — based on the nonfiction book by Damien Lewis — settles into a seedy, sunny West African setting and the nighttime heist finale, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” proves a spirited, if grossly exaggerated diversion.

The craft and thick Gothic atmosphere of The Devil all the Time is impressive. The movie has such fine-wrought texture that it holds you in its cold grasp. But it’s also somewhat oppressive.

Ambulance pines for a visceral, breezily violent style of film that doesn’t slow down to ask too many questions. And while Bay’s film wouldn’t stand up to too much inquiry — this is a movie where a ruptured spleen is treated with a hairpin — it’s hard to deny its escapist panache.

It’s a preposterous and tasteless ode to the messy, nonsensical struggle and bliss of being human.

To both the movie’s benefit and detriment, the seas here are choppier than in the predictably (and sometimes boringly) smooth sailing of a Marvel movie. But the bright spots (Momoa, that octopus) can be difficult to really relish amid the oceans of exposition and a typically pulverizing, overelaborate screenplay.

The Prom works hard to be a good time, and I hope it is for many who could use one.

Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, so abundant with realistic simulations of the natural world, is curiously lifeless.

The Good Liar is a kind of film one wants to love. Such old-fashioned genre movies, let alone those starring actors in their 70s and 80s, are hard to find these days. But in trying to take a simple crime set-up and stretch it into a more sweeping tale of vengeance and victimhood, The Good Liar has to make some fairly preposterous moves to get there, and it doesn’t do a very good job of cloaking them.

As with all of Iñárritu’s films, “Bardo” isn’t just deeply felt but impassioned to the max, with grand designs to not just plunge into his own soul but that of Mexico, too. For a filmmaker always pushing for more — including those titles that stretch on and on — “Bardo” is his most ambitious and indulgent film yet.

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.

The film, set 183 years before the events of “The Hobbit,” is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists.

You end up questioning less why Smith and Lawrence are still making “Bad Boys” movies than wondering why such breezily watchable genre movie-star platforms more or less don’t exist any longer.

The tone is so farcical that the gruesomeness of some of Man-su’s acts come slyly.

Whether The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.

An almost sturdy, often gripping genre exercise that ultimately doesn’t find enough fresh material in the serial killer procedural to warrant its blast from a stylish and shlocky past.

With handsome period craft, “Munich — Edge of War” makes for a watchable, engrossing historical thriller with fictional characters situated like spies around political leaders at a profoundly tense, and ultimately woefully misjudged, moment in time.

It can be divertingly bonkers, but ends up a rather grim and slipshod “John Wick” ripoff.

For a movie predicated on satisfying fans, The Rise of Skywalker is a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion to what had been an imperfect but mostly good few films.

What makes Annabelle Comes Home rise above its well-trod narrative are the actresses and Dauberman’s sensitive attention to each of them.

Fuqua’s film is often harrowing and gripping but also less nuanced and too narrowly confined in genre conventions than its real-life protagonist deserves.

The dog is, as ever, irresistibly winning.

Renfield never lets Cage really sink his teeth into the movie, leaving us still hungry for more.

As cinematography, Malcolm & Marie (shot by Marcell Rév) is great. As cinema, not so much.

It’s an intriguing premise that “I.S.S.” can’t translate into a coherent thriller.

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

It’s not the quality of the acting that limits Eastwood’s film. It’s a threadbare script that fails to find much of a story to tell behind the headlines.

As it is, this “Death on the Nile,” for too long an affected and strained entertainment lacking any sense of place, floats well downstream from more bracingly constructed whodunits.

Jackson comfortably carries the film with a smooth panache, but his Priest — like the movie — doesn’t make much of an impression. Yet Superfly is also a generally entertaining movie, with good things in it.

Its plot turns can be rash or implausible, and the movie increasingly feels like ideas and set pieces strung tenuously together.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is often dazzling, occasionally wondrous and always atmospheric. But is also a bit of a mess. Even magic bags can be overweight.

Six films in and with more on the way, too much of a good thing is becoming more of a pressing question in “Despicable Me 4,” a silly and breezy installment from Illumination Entertainment that passes by with about as much to remember it as a Saturday morning cartoon.

The combination works well enough, though it’d be fairer to deem “You’re Cordially Invited” a funnier-than-average wedding movie than it would be a top-grade Ferrell comedy.

It’s counting on your amnesia to the past, on screen and off, and it will readily supply you with two hours of mindless escape. It does the job better than most, thanks largely to its hulking hero.

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.

A Man Called Otto is less after realism than it is a modern-day fable, with shades of Scrooge and the Grinch. As a tale of a solitary man, Hanks has made it a poignant work of family.

Hunnam’s presence, alone, keeps the movie grounded. But the movie time and time again exalts the gallantry of its gentlemen heroes at the expense of those unlike them. It gives this glass of Gritchie’s English Lore a bitter taste.

Yet the slapdash vibe of “Day Shift” has its charms. It’s built almost perfectly to be the kind of thing you might, after some scrolling, absentmindedly click to watch on Netflix and end of watching for its sheer watchability.

21 Bridges is well crafted enough to pass the time, but anything more than that is a bridge too far.

It’s a goof, and there’s something to be said for watching Grohl and the gang having so much fun.

Ball’s command of the camera and his ability to hurtle his character through science-fiction realms has visibly grown through the three movies. For too long The Death Cure stays in one place; it’s best when on the move. And now, it’s probably time for Ball to move on, too.

Last Christmas is about as buoyant as leftover eggnog. Clarke’s natural charm comes through — she looks ecstatic to be out of Westeros and playing a less upright character — but such a fleabag-screwup role feels better suited to a more comedic performer.

This Hillbilly Elegy has stripped away the most sermonizing, debatable parts of the book, but it’s also denuded it of any deeper purpose, leaving us with a cosplay shell of A-list actors chewing rural scenery.

Presumably one of the reasons to bring actors into remakes of animated classics would be to add a warm-blooded pulse to these characters. Zegler manages that, but everyone else in “Snow White” — mortal or CGI — is as stiff as could be.

Ticket to Paradise goes down as a footnote to the many superior rom-coms Roberts has sparkled in before. And if I wanted to watch Clooney in a tropical locale, I’d choose Alexander Payne’s lovely “The Descendants.”

If any narrative thread holds the movie together, it’s each character dealing with their own version of anxiety, fear and stage fright as performers. While a laudable message for a kids movie, it’s drowned out by the movie’s commercialized blare.

The only time Bohemian Rhapsody works is when it finally retreats from not just the standard biopic narrative but from storytelling altogether.

It’s no train wreck. Leitch’s film is colorful, cartoonish and well-choreographed. But the more-is-more manic energy of “Bullet Train” eventually peters out, since that’s all the movie was ever running on. Well, that and Pitt. His charm alone does wonders for the movie, raising it at least to the level of watchable.

The pacing is sluggish when it should be quickening, and nothing in how Little turns out will surprise anyone. Yet the trio of Hall, Rae and Martin makes Little a consistently pleasant experience.

The deft tonal balance of “Hit Man,” let alone of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” is missing in How to Make a Killing, a disappointingly flat almost-remake that has neither the biting farce nor the chilling darkness to match its black comedy ambitions.

In mixing up the Beanie Baby timeline to play out each storyline simultaneously, The Beanie Bubble needlessly complicates itself. But it also makes a compelling reflection of history repeating itself.

Though Liman knows how to mix action and comedy as well as anyone, “The Instigators” is better whenever there’s less going on.

The elements never quite cohere in “Freud’s Last Session.” The rhythm of conversation feels choppy and lacks the probing give and take that can electrify a two-hander.

There is little here, amid the high-tech photorealistic animations, that would satisfy London’s concept of “wild.”

Don’t Worry Darling is ultimately neither worthy of all the off-screen fuss nor quite the on-screen disappointment it’s been made out to be.

The Secrets of Dumbledore, lacking in much magic, is a bit of a bore.

It’s a empty chamber for movie spectacle and nothing else, where the only option is to pile elements on top of each other until you have, you know, a giant evil ape swinging a vertebrae like a lasso while riding a kaiju controlled by a crystal.

None of this is likely to be enough for anyone to exclaim “Oh, yeah!” while hopping up and down and doffing their cap. But it is an hour and a half’s worth of superlative marketing that will whet your appetite for more Mario back home on the couch.

A work of fierce interiority has been turned into a hollow exercise in exteriority.

Arteta (The Good Girl, Cedar Rapids) has an underrated ability at crafting comic, humanistic movies out of commercial concepts. But Yes Day slides too often into contrived, loudly scored montages of “fun” that don’t transfer to those of us watching. And while Garner and Ramirez are both very fine actors, neither of them is funny.