K. Austin Collins

The movie’s attentive sense of noticing makes its flaws, its leaps in logic, easier to notice. But this seems to matter less to the filmmakers than what the style has to offer the movie in terms of a message; on this front, Stillwater is tellingly consistent.

This being a Lowery tale, the monolithic, the overwhelming, are only more powerful for being rendered in intimate, miniaturized terms. The creepiness creeps just that much more; fear is heightened; fantasies, mysteries tingle with a sense of the unpredictable.

For Joe Bell to largely be a tale of one man’s inner journey rather than a dive into the unknowns of his son’s inner life and eventual tragedy is not out of turn. It is a worthwhile story to tell. The flaw is not in assigning gravity to Joe’s journey.

Old isn’t trying to be fashionable, low-fi, artisanal horror of the kind that seems to be setting the tone for the genre in the indie world. This is, instead, a credibly old-fashioned movie in some ways, a creature feature with something more diffuse than a “creature,” per se, a monster movie in which the monster is an unlucky pairing of longitude and latitude.

As a pure dilemma-fest, the movie basically works, resetting the clock scene by scene, making the joy of survival deliberately short-lived. The suspense works. Watching these people figure things out, just in the nick of time — except in the cases of the people who run out of time — doesn’t really get old, even if the movie somehow gets a little old.

An exercise anchored to a likable LeBron charmfest, melding multiple forms of animation, recycled cartoon jokes, and the basic plot of the original Space Jam, but with a twist that updates the original for our new, streaming content century.

It’s a good-looking, well-acted movie with a solid kicker. As for the odyssey of emotional nuance that its style and portent seem to promise, it digs beneath the surface, but to a shallower depth than it seems to think.

Credit is due to Pugh and Johansson, most of all, for proving, in the movie’s opening chunk, that their foes-then-friends dynamic could satisfyingly hold an entire movie.

It’s a thrill ride from a director who, recently prone to intriguing, one-off experiments, knows we didn’t exactly need reminding that he’s still got it, but reminds us anyway — flaunting what he has because, well, he can.

Bravo, abetted by a cast that couldn’t be more game, turns a classic case of “These white people will be the death of me” — a familiar idea among the rest of us, I think — into a dazzling, once-every-blue-moon experiment in how to tell an utterly modern, utterly mediated, confusing, offbeat story.

It becomes a lot of movies at once. Some fly, some don’t, but the sum effect is that it winds up spinning its wheels, its hyperkinetic delights (all I’ll say is: magnets) awash in too many strands of background drama.

It’s the product of a satirical ambition that lacks the wit to land any heady blows; the horror mastery to be even glancingly scary; the intellect to make those thrills invigoratingly existential; and the sense of humor to make it entertaining. What it is, is limp, dull, half-cocked — with a few good performances from good enough actors that hints at how a smarter movie might have worked.

François Ozon’s Summer of ‘85 — which adapts the YA novel Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers — is moving but contained affair, aflush with overwhelming feeling but also distant from that feeling, probing but not always revealing, sensuous and charismatic but not always easy to like.

An aspirational immigrant story that hits most every mark of the genre, but flows and overlaps and grows dense in unexpected ways.

Maybe the most notable thing about the movie is Wahlberg himself, who hypes up that hapless “Who, me? Aw, shucks” vibe that works so well for him in comedies but utterly fails him here.

The movie was directed by Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) who, in the case of The Devil Made Me Do It, reveals a finer hand with the melodrama of possession — the utter internal chaos of it, the feverish disorientation — than with jump scares. The jumps: not so jumpy. More or less predictable.

Cruella is never more galvanizing than its petty tit-for-tat and power wrangling.

The Dry is solid and appreciably sad but, for all the virtues of its rough symbolism and intriguing backstory, almost too jampacked with discovery for its own good.

Robert Machoian’s debut feature, The Killing of Two Lovers, has a tough psychological knot braided right through its center, one that it doesn’t quite satisfyingly untangle — not that it exactly means to.

I imagine that, for some, the movie’s structure will play unevenly, seem a little weird in its jumping and drifting. But the contours of this story, and the tinges of genuine melancholy thrown into our path along the way, are very much to the point. They make it all work, and make it worth it.

Army of the Dead is neither the best of Snyder nor the worst. In whipping a bit of both extremes into a dependably watchable piece of pop froth that hits the appropriate marks, the movie strives for the expected relevance, offers the right amount of nonsurprise surprises, and distinguishes itself from the given rules of the genre just so that it, more or less, breaks even.

Statham is always worth watching. But it’s in its closing scenes that this particular vehicle, Wrath of Man, earns its keep.

The movie certainly has heart; its purpose is unmistakable. But the spark — for which it has all the necessary ingredients — is somehow missing.

The movie’s not quite a fight-scene masterclass, though compared to much else on offer from studio action of the moment, it sometimes feels like one. It’s solid entertainment — refreshing, even, for finding ways to navigate the familiar pivots on its own terms.

The movie is a film-length argument against our usual, overly personified, cutesy depictions of animals. It is also, not incidentally, a plea to stop eating them.

Thunder Force is another of McCarthy’s collaborations with her partner, Ben Falcone (who has a small role), and bears all the effortless likability of a well-oiled machine, which cannot help but feel like a real limit on what McCarthy et. al. are capable of while also making a great case for how watchable these actors are when they lean in to being a little washed, a little lo-fi.

The film falls prey to its own smoke and mirrors. It is less subversive than it aspires to be, and more emotionally real than than the filmmakers seem to realize.

The plot of Godzilla vs. Kong matters far less than the basic fact that it’d be a much better movie if it stuck, firmly, to its title.