Mark Kennedy

Ron’s Gone Wrong thinks it’s being subversive when its really being very corporate. It wastes its voice cast — including Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis — and it never really connects, ending as awkwardly as a modern-day seventh-grader with a rock collection.

One problem here is time, something the film obviously plays with. The Many Saints of Newark arrives 14 years after The Sopranos ended and that may be too long for anyone but the most ardent fan to keep up. The brain strains trying to connect new faces with old ones.

The film is apparently supposed to be a meditation on masculinity, with Eastwood’s one-time rodeo star Mike Milo taming and rebuilding his young rebellious charge into an honorable young man. Instead, it’s a meditation on clumsy and predictable filmmaking.

Beneath the beauty and the violence is a story about the ties between siblings, fatherly expectations, the modern world’s demands versus traditions and our own legacies.

DaCosta can make a stroll down a well-lit, modern and clean hallway somehow creepy. This is confident, smart filmmaking. There’s a stunning scene in which the Candyman mirrors his prey’s movements and one in an elevator where blood droplets create their own horror-inside-horror.

At the film’s center is Q but there is a hollowness there. She can rappel down a staircase using a fire hose, endure waterboarding and use a dinner tray as an assault weapon, but there’s little insight in her inner life or emotions and her backstory appears too late.

The script by Tracey Scott Wilson (Fosse/Verdon) is a collection of scenes that don’t add up to much, never really building and interrupted — by necessity, of course — with overly long music sequences. This film needed someone to sharpen and clarify.

Bill is a hard part to pull off, but Damon does, creating a flawed but compassionate character, made doubly hard since he outwardly reveals little emotion.

Thanks to Kilmer’s relentless drive to document things, Val is a remarkably intimate film and a moving one, too. For a performer who has come off as chilly and difficult, this doc doesn’t counter those perceptions as much as explain them.

Here DeMonaco finds richness in flipping the script on traditional right-wing notions of the border and immigration.

With so many murky motives, there’s little to care about, no way to anticipate the next con and no sense of real peril.

If there was a stylish chic in the first film, it’s gone in the second, which sometimes seems cloying in its attempt to recreate the first.

While the franchise soldiers on unironically, the films may fail to keep up with the real world, where fears have metastasized.

Wrath of Man finds Ritchie in a moody midlife mood, his urge to be quirkily unpredictable now contained, even as his camera still swings around, going backward, ahead or soaring above. There is menace, a dull darkness and stillness, as if he’s watched “Heat” too many times.

Simon McQuoid does a decent job on his feature directorial debut, giving us a constantly staggered hits of dopamine in the form of controlled violence.

It’s a tedious mess to endure and seemed like way more fun making than watching.

Overly long, bombastic and poorly focused.

In the frustrating The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Day gives it her all as Holiday but she can’t save a film that is overstuffed and also thin. Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks offer an unfocused, meandering work for much of the time, interrupted by devastating scenes that feel like a punch to the gut.

The film nicely sends up spy capers, Broadway and buddy movies and is a lot like its two leading characters: Kindly, a little silly and as sweet as a candy-colored drink at the pool bar.

The actors Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth have been friends for 20 years and that is plainly evident watching them play longtime lovers in the wrenchingly beautiful film Supernova. The award-winning duo are like a well-worn sweater onscreen, comfortable and lived-in, showing the kind of tart affection people show when ardor’s lust has given way to the slow burn of adoration.

There is nothing terribly new in the telling, no huge revelations or bombshells. Most of the details — including King’s infidelity and the use of Withers as an FBI informant — have been known for years. But that’s not Pollard’s interest. His canvas is large, stretching back to post-Civil War Jim Crow, exploring how notions of Black sexuality were turned into social weapons and into the way FBI agents were made mythical in popular culture.

Many of the best scenes are silent, enhanced by a wonderfully wistful score by James Newton Howard.

Marder, who wrote the screenplay with his brother, Abraham Marder, takes far too long to get to his points in a sluggish middle but has crafted a quite lyrical tale of a man trying to find his way when everything he knows is taken away.

Utterly original and utterly excellent, the modern bromance The Climb is a thrilling ride, an unconventional and idiosyncratic American film that acts like a old-school arty European one.

This very American fable has been blessed with three remarkable performances.

As it races to its cool supernatural climax — and then a coda that connects it to the first film — “The Craft: Legacy” is firing on all cylinders, looking back respectfully but also showing how the same story in different hands can soar.

The transition — from hyperreal cooked crabs that glisten in a bowl in the first 30 minutes of the film to amorphous, gooey Candyland critters 30 minutes later — is jarring. The sequences on the moon grow tiresome, despite huge toads that fly and squeaky-voiced critters.

Honest Thief, co-written and directed by Mark Williams, is a predictable and slack affair, relying on eerie music, dark sets and smoke to create tension. There is no particular set of skills here.