Johnny Oleksinski

Freddie Mercury may have had the better voice, but it’s Elton John who gets the better movie. Rocketman, director Dexter Fletcher’s trippy new biopic about the flamboyant rocker is braver, deeper and more enlightening than last year’s slobbering piece of Queen propaganda “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which he also partly directed).

If the title makes you wince, know the movie is a lot better than it deserves to be. You’ll actually care about what happens to the prickly blue dude, even if you never cared about getting to zone seven.

This comedy soars squarely on small moments and big jokes.

The film is empty-headed good fun that’s blessedly under two hours and has just enough character development to make you kind of care when someone gets bitten.

Most of DC Comics’ dreadful movies deserve to be violently squished, but not Blue Beetle, a refreshingly spry new film featuring the lesser-loved, bug-shaped superhero who’s been crawling around in some form since 1939.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, the sequel to the 2006 comedy that’s not at all about Anna Wintour, is a good time, even if the high-pressure world of Vogue, er, Runway magazine is no longer the epitome of New York luxury and glamour it was back in the aughts.

The gory-as-hell movie is as campy and fun as any chapter in producer Sam Raimi’s four-decade-old horror series. But trapping kids in an apartment — as opposed to college-age friends in a cabin — raises the stakes and brings on legitimate scares. And some hearty laughs, too.

Dunham has made a really attractive and cohesive film, merging her modern, punky sensibilities with the dirt-and-stone drear of the time period.

It’s the most touching dramedy about young women battling over a sash since “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Unlike Zack Snyder’s Justice League, there is nothing serious about The Suicide Squad. That’s a good thing.

Lane and Costner are swell, but the film jolts to life the second we walk into Blanche’s dimly lit kitchen, occupied by even dimmer men. The villainous Manville acts like a rooster, clucking, crowing and, worst of all, pecking. A sickening scene in a motel won’t have you taking the kids to South Dakota anytime soon.

While the movie could be a notch scarier, the unsettling imagery and slow build to chaos make me want another movie by this director stat.

This dramedy, which began filming in 1970, is more than just a museum exhibit for film geeks. It’s a solid, entertaining, complex story packed with eccentric performances.

The action film is as unpretentious as Charlie Sheen eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut at Six Flags. In short: blissfully dumb entertainment.

Boy Erased is the second gay conversion therapy movie of the year, after “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” Both are worthwhile. Where “Cameron” was an intimate charmer focused on the importance of camaraderie to get through hard times, the more dramatic Boy Erased is about accepting our family for who they are, in whatever condition they arrive in.

A terribly funny sendup of the show that famously gave us “Waterloo” by ABBA in 1974, and now gives us a year’s supply of crazy. The Netflix film is the most enjoyable music industry parody since Christopher Guest’s folk satire “A Mighty Wind.”

The beefcake Swayze role, Dalton, is taken over by an intense Jake Gyllenhaal in this entertaining and, for better or worse, less mockable update of the cult classic.

The film is an often ugly character study of a hard life that only got worse the more famous Martin got.

A funny-but-tortured femme-fatale performance from Florence Pugh as Russian assassin Yelena Belova, brutal and tactile fights and a merciful lack of confusing backstory makes for the most enjoyable MCU entry in a while.

The John Wick action series doesn’t get bogged down in such silly trivialities as character development, plot, dialogue, morals or any of the usual rubrics most films follow. Instead, these fun flicks are just loosely connected, extremely violent fight scenes starring Neo from “The Matrix.” And why the hell not?

What I love about Green’s style is he has both a sense of the grand — he gives Michael’s mask the cinematic weight of Moses’ Ten Commandments slabs — and the goofy.

But like he seems to do with every project these days, Grant runs away with the movie.

As the horror genre has, in recent years, grown more sophisticated and clever, you heave a sigh of relief to be handed a thriller that’s so dumb.

Many modern teen issues are touched upon — depression, anxiety, eating disorders — and because of the honest performances from Smith and Fanning, you ache for them.

Keeping logical track of all the comings and goings is like trying to focus on a single bird in a flock. The details, names and faces blur a little more every time a character rounds a corner, just as they would for the ailing Anthony. With its narrative boldness, however, The Father never stirs or fully satiates.

Emancipation, which is an otherwise well-tread period drama about the horrors of slavery, features more of Smith’s rich emotionality and laser-focused intensity that he’s uncovered late in his career and that won him the Oscar for last year’s “King Richard.”

We hold Pixar to a higher standard because of the true art it has achieved over the past – gulp – 30 years. If “Inside Out 2” doesn’t quite reach those heights, it is still a promising step on the studio’s difficult quest to rediscover its own sense of self.

Although “Ben” can get a little sentimental at times, Roberts and Hedges are a team to root for.