Mark Feeney

As directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Old Guard is assured and textureless: competence doing the work of inspiration. The movie is like an extended trailer for itself.

John Lewis: Good Trouble isn’t a great film, but it has a great subject — and excellent timing.

One wonders if a director more playful than Kenneth Branagh might have come up with something less hectic and more fun — or even just as hectic and more fun. Taika Waititi, anyone? Jojo Rabbit is almost as odd a name as Artemis Fowl.

This extremely dry film mixes humor and melancholy to distinctive, if muffled, effect. Take away the muffled part, and that’s very Nighy, too. In being winningly understated and sometimes maddeningly stylized, Sometimes Always Never is a bit like Alan.

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

Everyone in the documentary agrees that the undertaking was truly terrible and misconceived. The extensive footage here does nothing to contradict such a view.

What makes Steve and Rob so funny is that they’re so human: petty, insecure, rivalrous, as well as charming and hilarious. Nothing’s more human than sadness, not even laughter, and laughter The Trip to Greece has to offer in plenty. What’s their next destination? Wherever it is, the important thing is that there be one.

If anything, the film does a bit too much, going for variety and breadth sometimes at the expense of depth. There are a lot of bases to touch here, and touching pretty much all of them means several get touched too lightly. Jazz trumpeter and New Orleans native Terence Blanchard serves as a passionate, highly informed guide.

So it’s no small tribute to Feldstein — who really is something — to say that she’s the very best thing in How to Build a Girl despite being so wildly miscast. Her performance is a tour de force, even if it’s too forceful for either its own good or that of the movie.

Even when events get intense, even violent, and they do, there’s nothing abrupt. Corpus Christi never erupts. It unfolds.

Balloon manages to combine slickness and sentimentality, predictability and implausibility. The fact that it’s based on a true story — the closing credits include photographs of the actual families — does not make up for the amassing of red herrings, close calls, and occasions for head-scratching.

Fatiguing for grown-ups, “TWT” may well scare, or at least unsettle, kids under 6. And kids much over 6 are likely to tire of the unrelenting cutesiness.

The best thing about Akin’s film is the dance stuff. The movie begins with arresting black-and-white archival footage of Georgian dancing. The rehearsals in the dance studio come alive, thanks in no small part to the drum-and-accordion accompaniment. Kinetically, the style of dance is percussive and assertive. It doesn’t so much flow as boil.

Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique. Her thoughtful presence is a very welcome departure from the standard rock-doc formula. She provides the kind of reality check — an under-the-influence Manuel almost got her killed when he totaled her Mustang, with her in the passenger seat — rarely found in such films. In that sense, it isn’t just the Band that was different but “Once Were Brothers” is, too.

The documentary loses a bit when Dagg returns home, and an alarmingly perky score doesn’t help. Late in life, after her tenure struggles, she published a new edition of her dissertation and found herself rediscovered.

When the best thing about a movie is the title, that’s never a good sign. It’s all downhill from there? Exactly, and that’s the case with Downhill.

Both Pryce and Hopkins are fine. But on the basis of the rest of the movie they shouldn’t have a prayer.

Wolf relies on the videos far too much. That over-reliance makes Recorder feel padded, as does his frequent use of reenactments.

With so much going on, it’s easy to overlook that the most profound and moving relationship in either film is the bond between Elsa and Anna. It’s the most human and least-calculated thing in “Frozen” or Frozen II. Their love is the ultimate special effect. Ice is nice. But sisterhood is what’s really powerful.

The Cotton Club does look terrific and has its moments. It’s certainly not an embarrassment. It’s just not . . . very good.

It’s McKellen’s and Mirren’s. Their back-and-forth provides a satisfaction akin to watching two masters volley at Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the ball these masters are playing with manages the perplexing trick of being worn and waterlogged while also far too bouncy: stodginess and over-plotting is not a good combination.

It’s never a good sign when the most dramatic scene in a movie owes its power to C-SPAN footage. That’s the case with The Report.

What’s best about the movie is mood and texture, and the ensemble cast (the second best thing about the movie) mostly defers to those qualities. In that sense, Motherless Brooklyn might be described as novelistic, and in a good way.

Just to remind us that he’s Almodóvar — and to make it up to us that Serrano looks so implausibly different from Cruz — the movie ends with a bravura, meta-movie flourish that’s at once dazzling and matter of fact. It’s one more example here of Almodóvar’s ability to take pairs — not just people, but concepts (like, say, present and past, or pain and glory) — and happily join them.

The biggest problem with Where’s My Roy Cohn? is the documentary’s attitude toward its subject: not that it’s critical (an uncritical approach to Cohn would be about as interesting as a daytime visit to Studio 54), but that it so thoroughly accepts his view of himself.

So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.

Ad Astra is moody, meditative, and slow (though not the knife fight or rover demolition derby).

What’s stimulating and fun about “Raise Hell” is quite stimulating and fun. But the more smitten you become with its subject — and it’s hard not to be — the more you feel there’s something missing or that what isn’t missing is yet too thin.