Manohla Dargis

That this movie never matches the brilliance of Miller’s goes without saying, despite the heavy-metal clanging. That Alcock manages to rise above the fray with a performance that never feels like borrowed goods is at once a surprise and a gift.

It’s fine, pretty and amusing, but if no one’s heart seems in it, perhaps it’s time to make way for other toys.

This is that rare movie that could do with a longer running time, which would, perhaps, give it greater depth.

There are some promising themes in “Power Ballad” — the soulful joys of collaboration, the precarity of celebrity, the evils of the music industry — but the movie never develops them. Instead, the director John Carney, who wrote the script with Peter McDonald, keeps everything nice and insistently light, gesturing at complexities rather than delving into them.

Jones has turned a life into a hackneyed survivor’s story with cartoon villains, cardboard saints, pretty scenery, mewling piano notes and expedient, drama-goosing epiphanies.

The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.

Alas, Tereza, whose interior life remains largely obscured from start to finish, isn’t a compelling vessel for whatever Mascaro is trying to do in this movie. And, as it drifts from one place to another, one encounter to another, one sketchy idea to another, so may your attention.

Zendaya and Pattinson are both enjoyable to watch, but she’s given too little to do and he’s given too much.

Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.

It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages.

The results are, by turns, amusing and lightly scary, though never truly surprising.

The story and the actors make How to Make a Killing easy to drift along with, even if it never coheres tonally, logically or, really, any which way.

Robbie and Elordi hold your attention well enough, though they’re more persuasive apart than when they’re together.

The Moment lights on substantive subjects throughout, yet partly because it’s about one individual’s ostensible struggles rather than the larger system, its bite is toothless.

The fight sequences are models of spatial coherency and escalating tension, and they grab you wholly, turning a movie into a full-body workout. That feeling dissipates whenever the fighting stops, the story cranks back up and somebody calls someone else “bro,” which happens too often.

Djukic has a fine eye and is a talent to look out for, even if here, like Ana-Maria, she chose the wrong girl.

There’s nothing wrong (or incorrect!) about either Wright’s desire to please or the righteousness, and at times you can sense a bit of anger wafting off the screen, even if Wright and Powell mostly seem to be having a very good time.

Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.

There is, of course, enormous pleasure in watching Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of extraordinary sensitivity whose ability to convey a character’s interiority — the delicacy and the violence — can seem almost mystical. The problem is that as Anemone continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.

Greengrass knows how to shoot and cut, but The Lost Bus is at once too high-minded and too exploitative to work. However skilled the cinematography and editing, there is no saving a movie predicated on looming death with badly written characters and such a frustratingly narrow point of view.

For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise.

An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.

Before long, the fleetingly liberated child and the filmmakers’ imaginative playfulness are boxed up, and the whole thing turns into yet another superhero adventure.

Sex is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting.

Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably.

What is undeniable is that because Rust looks as good as it does, every time riders on horseback appear against a florid sky, it isn’t the characters you think about — it’s Halyna Hutchins.

The only sure thing is that Pugh deepens the material, investing Yelena with real feeling and a lightly detached ironic sensibility that’s reminiscent of Downey’s Stark. Pugh is the best thing to happen to Marvel in a while.

There’s an amusing, low-fi thriller here amid what prove to be too many twists and thickets of cinematic allusion.