Jake Coyle

It’s almost reassuring that in today’s often sanitized, assembly-line mainstream moviemaking that a film can be as crude, as off-brand and as bad as The Happytime Murders. Almost.

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 Meg is best when it acknowledges its derivativeness, just one more silly shark movie in an ocean full of them.

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.

There’s an upside to the film so eagerly jumping from anguish to slapstick, from social drama to buddy movie. Blindspotting is, like the Oakland it so dearly loves, always many things at once.

Eighth Grade is a revelation of both a remarkably natural young performer and a clever, sensitive young filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.”

While the movie isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is, the Zellners have a sweet, likable sense of humor tinged with tragedy. And they remain filmmakers to watch.

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.

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

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.

American Animals would be a legitimate cautionary tale if it wasn’t invalidated by its own existence.

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.

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.

It lives in the unglamorous and sleepless postpartum haze of breast pumps and swaddles. But like “Poppins,” Tully is a fantasy of parenthood — a homely fairy tale about a haggard mother who’s feeling her younger, former self slip away.

It’s really the simple pleasure of seeing so many good actors together that makes “Infinity War” — an “Ocean’s Eleven” in hyper drive — work.

While Super Troopers 2...may be just enough to satiate any remaining die-hards, it’s not likely to convert many new moviegoers to their syrup-swilling, “meow”-ing ways.

A hopelessly bland and bizarrely self-serious monster movie.

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.

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.

Ambiguous and damning at once, John Curran’s Chappaquiddick plunges us back into the summer of 1969: the season of Woodstock, the moon landing, the Manson murders and the lowest ebb of the Kennedy mythology.

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.

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.

The dog is, as ever, irresistibly winning.

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.

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

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.

Unlike many of its more hollow predecessors, Black Panther has real, honest-to-goodness stakes. As the most earnest and big-budget attempt yet of a black superhero film, Black Panther is assured of being an overdue cinematic landmark. But it's also simply ravishing, grand-scale filmmaking.

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.

To say that the many parts of In the Fade are held together by Kruger would be an understatement. As a cocktail of grief, fury and regret, she’s a remarkably original protagonist — a chain-smoking, tattooed mother who, in her trauma, is always a breath away from drowning.

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.