Jake Coyle

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Hold Your Fire... burrows into the real roots of an oft-replayed movie scenario with insight and care.

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.

Pearce, sweaty and grungy, steadies Memory; it’s his film as much as Neeson’s.

The mythic simplicity is part of the point of The Northman, but the movie’s single-minded protagonist and its elemental conflicts verge closer to “Conan the Barbarian” territory than perhaps is ideal. Eggers’ film is only fitfully enchanting and squanders its mean momentum.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It could be that, if we’re talking about representing hard-to-tame adolescent urges in monster form, “Turning Red” — bold as it may be — can’t come close to matching the messy comic farce of “Big Mouth,” the far less family-friendly but much more true-to-life animated series that paired seventh graders with lascivious “hormone monsters.”

After Yang may not reach the heights it’s seeking, but it’s easy to respect it for trying to tackle profound questions and reach a register of high-minded reflection.

The Batman is darkly dour stuff — potent but erratic. It’s as though the filmmakers, working in the very long shadow of “The Dark Knight,” have opted not to rival the moody majesty of Christopher Nolan’s genre-redefining 2008 film but instead to simply go “harder” — blacker, more cynical, a total eclipse.

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

The buddy movie balance of “Uncharted” never clicks. Wahlberg, who was once attached to play Holland’s part, plays Sully like Nathan’s roguish, less tech-savvy elder. But they lack the needed chemistry and the script, by Rafe Lee Judkins, Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, doesn’t give them enough comic material to do much with.

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.

The “Jackass” gang make for a rollicking antidote to the beautiful, unblemished people who play superheroes that never so much as bleed.

Adapting Rosa Liksom’s novel of the same name, Kuosmanen has moved the book from the ’80s to the ’90s and lost some of the story’s political backdrop in favor of a more out-of-time love story.

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’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.

Anime master Mamoru Hosoda makes movies that, even at their most elaborate, can reach such staggeringly emotional heights that they seem to break free of anything you’re prepared for in an animated movie — or in most kinds of movies, for that matter.

A Hero, in which Farhadi returns to his native Iran after a trip to Spain for 2018′s Everybody Knows, is one of the most labyrinthine moral tales you’re likely to encounter.

But if defying one’s heteronormative programming and entering the Matrix was once a balletic finesse, in “Resurrections” the battle is blunter and the tone less exultant.