Mark Feeney

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

Last year’s biggest animated feature was Pixar’s Soul. The best thing about it was a rare feeling for music, an ability to express jazz visually and rhythmically. At times, Vivo does the same even better for Latin music.

Maybe the most inexplicable thing among the movie’s many inexplicabilities is the near-complete waste it makes of an actress as gifted as Cotillard.

With Johnson’s arrival, “Jungle Cruise” enters “Raiders of the Lost Ark” territory. It’s not just the cascading action adventure in an exotic setting. It’s also James Howard Newton’s score sounding so much like John Williams that Williams should get royalties.

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

The quality of the acting makes it easy to overlook how increasingly leaden Stillwater becomes — but not easy enough.

The movie’s heart is completely in the right place, which, frankly, can make it a bit of a chore to watch. Moral righteousness makes the world a better place, but filmic it’s not.

The best thing in the movie is Pratt. Firmly established in not one but two franchises — Guardians of the Galaxy and the Jurassic Park reboot — he’s come a long way from Parks and Recreation. He alternates here between charming wise guy and sensitive family man: Peter Quill domesticated.

A predictable, semi-shameless, yet not-unsatisfying action drama.

Usually loud and almost always ridiculous, F9 is action-packed enough to make your carburetors seize up.

The most remarkable thing about Brendan J. Byrne’s documentary — for anyone who’s followed Bill Bulger’s career it’s shocking, really — is the degree of cooperation Byrne got from the Bulger family for this joint portrayal of the two brothers. It started out as a profile of Bill, Byrne says, but he quickly realized he couldn’t tell the story of the younger brother without also telling the story of the older.

The humor is crass when it isn’t forced. The violence, which barely pauses for reloading, feels even more mechanical than it does mindless, and it’s very mindless. How can a movie so full of action feel so tired?

[Krasinski's] direction is so efficient and assured that the three or four rather ridiculous plot elements go unnoticed until well after the movie’s over. That’s how absorbing Part II can be.

Kohl-eyed and in command, she vamps, she camps, she stamps — and not just her foot. If Stone put any more spin on her line readings, she could audition to play a gyroscope.

The Woman in the Window is a thriller, as you’ve no doubt figured out, but also has a throwback, Bette Davis vibe — Adams gets to do a lot of emoting — with a touch of horror movie thrown in.

There’s some scary bad-guy stuff in the movie, but nothing to compare for fearfulness with its climactic forest fire.

Profile is one big gimmick, but the gimmickiness, you might say, is that in a very real sense it’s shot entirely on location. Is it a great movie? No, but it’s something rare in any medium, film or otherwise: a work in which form really is content.

Assured and well made (Dominic Cooke directed), The Courier offers bits of tradecraft — Penkovsky photographing documents with a miniature camera, a special tie clip used as identity-establishing bona fide — and a high-stakes extraction plan gets put in motion. But it’s less about what gets done than the persons doing it.

Rodney Ascher directed Glitch. He’s best known for Room 237 (2012), an inspired look at several bizarre theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Glitch ups the ante on that documentary and then some. It looks at a bizarre theory about everything. The result is lively, playful, and busy — in a very good way.

It’s not hard to see the script’s appeal for the actors, John David Washington and Zendaya. Playing the only characters in the movie, they get a very serious workout and give seriously good performances.

Wiseman has made something so mundane as to be absorbingly exotic, a civics-lesson procedural. As with any procedural, the people involved in the process are just as important to the story as the process is.

The first two-thirds is lively in pace, all of it is amiable in tone and sun-splashed in appearance. The final half hour gets a bit gushy. It’s mostly devoted to Alpert’s blissful second marriage, to singer Lani Hall — they’ve been married nearly 50 years — and his philanthropic largess. But since there’s a lot to gush about, that’s okay.

Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President isn’t a political documentary, but it is a civics lesson.

What’s best about the documentary is all that Obama sun. It’s hard to come by these days, even in retrospect. The shade, however, and what occasions it, is all too available.

The documentary’s chief virtue, after the very considerable pleasure of getting to spend time in Sacks’s company, is learning how much his personal life rivaled his career in remarkableness.

Moviemaking doesn’t come any tauter or with more velocity. But that confusion is a warning. It’s going to apply to the entire movie; and the longer “Tenet” lasts, the more of an issue confusion becomes.

A subplot involving Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) seems to have wandered in from another, less watchable movie. It might have been for the best if Eve Hewson, as J.P. Morgan’s daughter and Tesla’s sort-of love interest, had wandered out.

All the animals are computer-generated, not that you’d know it by looking at them. Their interactions with the human characters are seamless — and, it must be said, at times the animal characters come across as less cartoony than the human ones.