Mark Kennedy

Can you parody your own previous parody? While we’re at it, why is “Scream” so lazily and heavily leaned on in 2026? Why are there so many sex toys? And how much did Angry Orchard hard cider pay for its product placement?

It’s been nearly seven years since there was a new “Star Wars” movie released in theaters and there are lots of ways to do it. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, a disjointed off-ramp that lacks the scale and ambition of its sisters, fails the task. As the Mandalorians might say, this is not the way.

Put down Orwell’s book and you’ll shiver, convinced to redouble your efforts to protect civil society, stand for dignity and fight for the rule of law. Walk out of this new animated movie and you’ll likely just want to inhale more M&Ms. And fart.

The tagline for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is “Some things are meant to stay buried.” That also applies to the misguided “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” which should definitely stay deep underground for eternity.

Maybe [Borgli's] trolling America but “The Drama” is clearly the worst thing he’s ever done.

They Will Kill You may remind you of the marriage between madcap, social satire and bloody mayhem from “Ready or Not” but it’s a warning of how hard that combo is to get correctly.

Reminders of Him is a well-crafted, well-acted sad-happy Hoover adaptation.

Lumbering along while fatally wounded, this is a franchise that doesn’t know it is dead, staggering ever onward without an ending in sight.

It’s not as funny as it thinks it is and tiresome in its overly familiar redemption arc.

Shelter is everything you expect a Jason Statham movie to be, no more and no less.

There’s plenty of good music in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, including Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and one of the most gloriously unhinged uses of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” ever conceived. If the previous film had a Fellini-esque vibe, this one has punky, anarchic feel.

Overall, it’s just not so good, so good.

Based on Freida McFadden’s novel, “The Housemaid” rides waves of manipulation and then turns the tables on what we think we’ve just seen, looking at male-female power structures and how privilege can trap people without it.

It’s an incoherent mess, something that, back in the day, would be straight to DVD. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has an after-school special vibe with no real horror and no real awareness that it should.

A satisfying conclusion awaits but, truth be told, it has been a bit of a slog, with soft digressions into social critiques and the meaning of faith grafted onto a setup that, by the third movie in the franchise, shows its seams instantly. Wake up, indeed.

Could the movie have hit harder at the self-involved stars we often worship? Of course. But what makes it powerful is not the Hollywood drama. This is a movie for any of us who have missed a child’s school recital, asked an assistant to work late or skipped a family dinner because a client was running behind. It’s about time. It’s about where we choose to spend our time.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t does what sequels apparently must do these days — load up the characters, return to favorite bits and go global — but nails the trick, a crowd-pleasing return that already has a fourth in the works.

Trachtenberg who previously directed and co-wrote the story of “Prey” in 2022 and the animated “Predator: Killer of Killers” earlier this year, is confident in this world and it shows. He’s created a story about the betrayal of family and the joy of found family — and slicing horrific, nightmare creatures in half with a laser sword. But it’s both parts of Fanning that steal the show.

In many ways, this movie is, then, a mirror of “Nebraska” itself — unexpected, complicated and very American gothic.

Watch it and it will linger in your mind. It’s a movie for Iranians, of course, but it’s valuable for any society hoping to one day mend a divided country.

How do you go back and yet forward at the same time? The filmmakers have rather cleverly done that by incorporating plot points from the first two movies and building out with new characters and blurring the divide between flesh and digital worlds.

All of You is a sort of second stab at this story, which Goldstein and Bridges (“Black Mirror”) first explored in the canceled-too-soon AMC anthology series “Soulmates.” Fittingly for a story about second chances, this time it sticks.

Fitting for a movie with an actual skeleton in a closet, “Adulthood” is about legacy and how we become our parents. It’s also about recognizing that our parents are human and complicated.

Spinal Tap II is filled with ghosts. It’s like watching a cover band playing the hits but then realizing it’s actually the original band onstage after all.

"Last Rights” — part of a universe that includes “The Nun” and “Annabelle” franchises — is a decent enough final cinematic prayer for this franchise, combining the personal story of the Warrens and their daughter, Judy, with a new paranormal possession that’s created a freaked-out family.

There are dark marriage comedies and then there’s “The Roses,” an escalating hatefest that, by the time a loaded gun comes out, all the fun has been sucked out. It’s hard tonally to go from microaggressions to the burning of someone’s prized books to attempted murder and stay a comedy.

Somebody, anybody, should drag Odenkirk away from this nobody franchise.

If “Barbarian” came out of left field three years ago and heralded an exciting new voice in filmmaking, “Weapons” doesn’t disappoint but it doesn’t have the advantage of surprise. It will, at the very least, make you feel a little dread when the clock hits 2:17 a.m.

The Bad Guys 2 has clearly lost its moorings.

Look, we hate to break it to you, it’s not going to end well for many of this privileged set, as they hunt whoever is hunting them. Coherence is also stabbed a lot because a clear motive for the mass murder is really hard to understand.

In many ways, the folks behind Jurassic World Rebirth are trying to do the same thing as their mercenaries: Going back to the source code to recapture the magic of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster original. They’ve thrillingly succeeded.

Two hours later, it’s not clear if this is really an upgrade.

Bride Hard — which combines thrusting male strippers dressed as Vikings as well as deadly automatic weapon fire — isn’t funny or thrilling. It has the kind of lazy pacing you’d usually find on the Hallmark Channel and a level of acting not much better than porn.

The setting of a boat in the middle of the Coral Sea unlocks a delicious new home for terror.

Disney should have left the original alone.

Most impressive is that DeYoung has not created a collection of connected “SNL” skits. Each part cleverly feeds to another, with echoes throughout the script.

On Swift Horses belongs in the same category as other hushed ’50s-set same-sex romances, like Todd Haynes’ “Carol” or Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer.” But this adaptation hasn’t made the leap to the screen very well. Sometimes swift horses stumble.

The Jared Hess-directed action-adventure artfully straddles the line between delighting preteen gamers and keeping their parents awake.

A Working Man is exactly what you expect when you unleash Statham on a noble mission.

Green wobbles as he tries to land this plane and what had been an intriguing premise to talk about fame and the parasitic industries that live off it turns into a gross-out, run-for-it bloodfest and a plot that unravels. It becomes what it intended to satirize — a pop spectacle.

Director Julius Onah does well with the action but fumbles the quieter moments and supervises editing that’s the opposite of crisp, not helped by script writers who ape military language — “Negative, the package is the priority” — and grandiose sentiment — “The country is lost.”

No Other Land is a piece of resistance but also humanization.

Peter Hastings, director, screenwriter and animal voice of Dog Man, has had a hand in Pilkey’s much better adaption of “Captain Underpants,” but this time smashes together characters and plot lines from several of the books in a way that is hard to follow even for fans.

But no one emerges unscathed from this funny-when-it-shouldn’t-be mess. The movie’s slogan is the weird “Y’all Need a Pilot?” but it should be “Y’all Need a Filmmaker?”

Slack when it should be terrifying, “Wolf Man” suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.

A Complete Unknown is utterly fascinating, capturing a moment in time when songs had weight, when they could move the culture — even if the singer who made them was as puzzling as a rolling stone.

Kraven the Hunter can climb sheer walls like a gorilla, snatch fish out of streams like a bear and outrun deer. But there’s something this slab of human beef can’t do: Anchor a decent movie.

Queer is best when it’s a character study of Lee, who in Craig’s hands is charming, selfish, arrogant, abrasive, foppish and sometimes unable to read a room. It’s a million miles from 007, even if Lee carries a pistol.

Joy is not all joy. There is frustration and loss and tears along the way, but it is a triumphant film about the way humans can make the world better and how a baby’s cry can be a priceless gift.

So beautifully constructed and acted in the first half is “Heretic” that you won’t really notice when it turns into a horror movie.

Here fails to connect all these centuries of human experiences, other than to celebrate the human experience in all its messiness, triumph and sadness.

Over two hours ends up being too long. But [Finn] has found a great satirical target, given life to a third film easily and showcased another rising star to watch. That’s a reason to, well, smile about.

It is deep and surreal and often adorable. Is it high concept or low? Like Williams, it’s a bit of both.

Is this the best animated movie of the year? Totally, so far. It might even be the best movie of the year.

The saddest thing about “Transformers One” is the wastefulness of another dull outing in a universe geared toward kids just learning to transform themselves.

Director-writer Megan Park has crafted a wistful coming-of-age tale using this comedic device for “My Old Ass” and the results are uneven even though she nails the landing.

It’s a triumph of small-budget, naturalistic filmmaking, where cars on a gravel road kick up choking clouds of dust and arm bones crack when pressure is applied.

In his attempt to give new life to the cult hero of comics and film, [Sanders has] given us plenty of beauty at the expense of depth or coherence.

But It Ends With Us doesn’t end quickly enough — more than two hours drag — with tangents and poor editing, like sudden scene cuts that leave viewers looking for clues to where they are.

This is a premise that could turn horrifically treacly or maudlin. But Greg Kwedar — who directs and co-writes with Clint Bentley — has a firm, no-nonsense but emotional hand, even if he uses a few too many razor wire-though-the-window shots.

“Axel F” is not exactly Murphy’s finest hour, either. But Murphy just saying “Jesus!” is funny. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 30 years for our next Axel Foley fix. God, we’ve missed him.

Part of the problem of “Chapter 1” is that in addition to overstuffing it with too many characters, the editing is pretty bad. Viewers will struggle with some violent cuts in which Costner has jumped the action forward months within the same chapter without any clues.

McCarthy’s visual style is too fragmented, happy to capture his scrambling camera and sound operators in the frame and changing up his shots from guerilla-style jerky iPhone images to tasteful, polished portraits.

It’s a documentary, ultimately, about creativity and a singular mind, one who dreamed up a gaggle of friends for life: Big Bird, Cookie Monster, the Count and, of course, Kermit, stitched from an old coat.

A curious new animated attempt to monetize the comic icon again by giving him an origin story and then asking him to do things a galaxy away from what he does in the funny pages.

By the time Miller is finished, he’s built an epic, gritty history in the Wasteland like “Lord of the Rings” or “Game of Thrones.” But was the point of this franchise a better understanding of the negotiating tactics of untrusty warlords in a hellscape? No: It was rocket-propelled grenades, motorcycles, chains, massive sandstorms and cracked skulls.

Starting with the potentially crippling proposition of a key death, this franchise has somehow found new vibrancy.

If you always thought your garden-variety heist movies could do with a bit more blood-sucking vampire, have we got a flick for you.

A bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

Writer and director Goran Stolevski gives us an atypical family portrait that’s brilliantly political without being preachy, loving without being maudlin and epic by being specifically tiny.

The action scenes are dynamite, layering POV camera work with great, thundering, bottle smashing stunts. It knows it’s silly, but it’s still a good time.

The series’ first new installment in eight years is a reliably funny, sweet and wonderfully realized passing of the torch, with a paw in the past and another into the future — an elegant goodbye and a hello. Many other filmmakers — ahem, Marvel and DC — might learn a thing.

Problemista is not like a Wes Anderson-type hyper-whimsy, but more like the surreal bursting joy of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It even breaks space and time like the latter. It is absolutely captivating.

This is pure lazy storytelling, like thinking that just showing us a clip of Bob Ross painting is somehow uproariously funny.

Orion and the Dark is about fear and overcoming it but this movie directed by Sean Charmatz has too much junk clogging up the vision.

Jenna Ortega’s stark rise as Gen Z’s goth-glam princess takes a pointless, awkward turn in “Miller’s Girl,” a new romantic horror movie about cerebral people that’s simply tiresome.

Samuel never stays with any idea for long and “The Book of Clarence” lacks cohesion, as well as consistency, even if the acting is superb, especially from a soulful Stanfield.

It’s perhaps appropriate that the latest Aquaman movie is about a lost kingdom. In many ways, this mini-franchise is just that, a Jason Momoa kingdom that could just quietly sink below the cinematic waves.

Most of Mann’s toolkit is here — slick and moody camerawork, a poetic surrounding and heightened use of music, even the car porn of “Miami Vice.” But Ferrari — despite Mann’s leaning on Italian opera — fails to ignite.

It’s a story brilliantly adapted and directed by Sam Esmail, showrunner of “Mr. Robot,” who has made Leave the World Behind into a homage of Alfred Hitchcock, complete with the image of a man trying to outrun a crashing plane and using the master’s discordant loud music.

By sanding off all the dark human quirks from their deeply human heroine, the filmmakers have left us a film that’s just filling the space.

Next Goal Wins isn’t a tale of “woe” or “woah!” but “meh.”

As wonderful as Domingo is, it’s the astonishing amount of talent in front of and behind the camera that will take your breath away. No matter how small, each performance brings fire and makes the most of a few minutes on camera.

Caught between PG and R, as well as lost at the crossroads of inadvertent comedy and horror, the PG-13 Five Nights at Freddy’s has to go down as one of the poorest films in any genre this year.

It’s so dated there’s even a mention of Halliburton.

The Royal Hotel shares a vibe with Alex Garland’s sophisticated horror film “Men” — an arty indictment of toxic masculinity that often felt like a lecture. But Green’s film doesn’t feel like that. The final scene will make you cheer, even if the ultimate message is murky.

It’s lovingly told — and intimate.

The populist message here is clear — the longer Wall Street overlooks the value of people, the financial system will remain broken.

A Million Miles is wisely more about one man’s obsession and nicely touches on topics like racism, assimilation, deferred dreams, family guilt and dedication.

A new directing and writing team fails to shock or scare with a color-by-numbers plot and a meandering, languid wannabe frightfest.

Golda has seeds of interesting insights, like the suggestion that she was betrayed by some of the men she relied on during the war and yet protected them. Or how false intelligence is nothing new when it comes to Middle Eastern conflicts. Or how female leaders inevitably face catch-22s. But none of these is taken.

The loving, lyrical Maite Alberdi -directed documentary is the story of one man’s decline due to Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s so much more. It’s a stronger love story and one that tries to say things about a country’s collective memory, too.

A stylish, well-crafted piece of filmmaking that marks the auspicious arrival of twin Australian filmmakers Michael and Danny Philippou.

If you do give in, you’re in for a treat — a heart-pounding, never dragging, mission accomplished that takes audiences from the frozen Bering Sea to the rooftop of Abu Dhabi International Airport and the narrow alleyways of Venice.

If the “Insidious” franchise is your jam, by all means go and see the original Fab Four of the Lambert family battle hollow-eyed demons for perhaps the last time. But for everyone else, why not let the past stay in the past?

Hemsworth is re-joined here by Marvel Comic Universe–screenwriter Joe Russo and stunt-specialist-turned-director Sam Hargrave, but their ace-in-the-hole is cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. He creates impossibly long single takes of complicated fighting or driving scenes that put the viewer directly into the action like few other thrillers.

This is more than just a snack-version “Rocky” story, with the filmmakers exploring the insecurity of factory shift workers, the stress of integrating into white culture, how hard it is for corporations to innovate and the ability to silence the voices in your head that urge you to quit.

The problem with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the same problem faced by all of the installments — balancing the humanity with the metal.

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco has co-written and stars in this big sloppy Italian American kiss about family that not only leans into stereotypes — working-class Italians on one side, WASPs on the other — but plows the field with them.

With a foot in the past, one in the future and one on the gas, Fast X is pure popcorn lunacy. Was that too many feet? Oh, excuse us, you wanted logic?

The gripping and hugely enjoyable BlackBerry is about the famous — and later infamous — Research in Motion gadget that helped trigger the global smartphone era as we know it, before sliding into obsolescence.

Cortés argues that Little Richard created the template for the rock icon and she’s got the receipts, tracing his musical and stylistic influences through everyone from the Beatles to David Bowie, Elton John and Lizzo. If there was a king, he was it.

Showing Up may be a rallying cry to let artists just be artists — Reichardt is famously an artist in residence at Bard College, in large part to have health insurance — but she may have miscalculated how much compassion is generated by a supposed lover of beauty who is as cold and off-putting as her figurines.

How these two 20-somethings actually hook up is the subject of this sweet, down-to-earth, funny and thoughtful rom-com that shows two strangers moving though London and visibly falling in love over a matter of hours.

The fourth installment is more stylish, more elegant and more bonkers — kind of like Paris itself.

Despite the change of scenery, Scream VI is less a sequel and more a stutter-step, a half-movie with some very satisfying stabbings but no real progress or even movement. It’s like treading water in gore. And to fully enjoy this “sequel to the requel,” you need to have watched most of the others.

The filmmakers are also clearly trying their hand at satire, but ham-fistedly. Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. Neither work.

The film allows Witherspoon and Kutcher to show off their naturally funny sides, especially when they’re fishes out of water. But many of the scenes drag on and sometimes the exposition is chalky.

Director Kyle Marvin fails to build any real tension as he frighteningly shifts from farce to cringe to melancholy, but real footage of the big game is nicely knitted into the second half.

Hill and “black-ish” creator Kenya Barris have written a rom-com with teeth, a film not afraid to air long-simmering cultural grievances.

Missing, building off the related film “Searching” from 2018, manages to make a film about small screens feel electric on a big one.

The film has a few odd jumps and seemingly comes to a fiery conclusion — finally some warmth, good God — but it’s a false ending. A much better one awaits, one that’s unexpected and very, very satisfying. Stay to the end — as long as you’re bundled up.

Ackie’s performance is something to be cheered, reaching for the the kind of authenticity that Andra Day channeled when she also tackled a doomed musical icon in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” But so much clumsiness, scenes featuring unnaturally heightened drama with little insight and the compromised authenticity of the performances drag I Wanna Dance With Somebody down — ultimately, it’s not right but it’s just OK.

This is a film that stays with you and changes you. It is heavy, indeed.

It’s easy to initially dismiss it as an “SNL” digital short that got high on its own tinsel but there is a sort of perverse glee to seeing Santa suck on the tip of a candy cane until it is a sharp shard and then plunge it into a bad guy’s neck.

Writer-director Florian Zeller’s second installment in his trilogy examining mental health is an emotional wrecking ball almost exquisite in its destructive power.

The script by Jake Crane and Jonathan A. H. Stewart is a slow-burning affair that will have audiences tugging at the leash.

The focus sometimes gets a bit blurry, to be honest and the whole thing often doesn’t add up to much.

Causeway, directed by Lila Neugebauer with a straightforward honesty, sounds more manipulative and manufactured than it is. At its best, it’s a quietly affective portrait of unlikely friends hoping they can help each other make it to the shore.

Beneath it all is the story of a child’s love and guilt — and an education and judicial system letting her down — which propels her to bring her parents back from the dead, but that gets a little lost in the gross-out humor, Addams Family-level weirdness and shock-for-shock’s sake visual gags like a demonic teddy bear. For all the lovingly crafted spectacle, Selick’s agonizing, shot-by-shot film, is as overstuffed as that bear.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and the design team do a great job in every department but are let down by a derivative and baggy screenplay by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani that goes from one violent scene to another like a video game in order to paper over a plot both undercooked and overcooked.

Amsterdam reaches for something contemporary to say about race relations, concentration of wealth, veterans and fascism but ends up with a plodding, mannerist noise.

It’s not a perfect film — the first half sags a little, the jump in Bobby’s career is jarring and some soliloquies land with a thud — but name us a perfect rom-com. This one has what the best have: heart, good faith and good old fashioned love. Welcome, “Bros,” to the canon.

It glows with respect for a man who earned it.

The filmmakers employ all kinds of ways to try to keep viewers interested, like split screens, some farce and a surreal dream sequence, but there’s not enough humor or grit or anything other than actors swanning around in period clothing.

Barbarian is firmly of it’s time — online house rental bookings, smart-phone flashlights and real estate square footage listings — and yet timeless, like an arm ripped off and used as a club. It was predictable and yet was impossible to predict.

As for the documentary about the man of the hour, do as the title suggests: Run away.

Virtually no one associated with this film should be congratulated in any way, having ruptured any bridges between Hollywood and senior citizens or for the shocking misuse of Diane Keaton’s considerable skills.

Neither the divers nor kids, government officials nor families and volunteers really come into focus, staying as murky as the miles of submerged cave.

As a viewer, you may leave the theater with more answers than when you arrived — and that’s refreshing. Walker-Silverman has no interest in putting pretty bows on things, loads of past histories or sentimentality. This is what love looks like with wrinkles and sorrow but also sunshine and joy — it pushes through the harshness of life and blooms with possibility.

Paramount’s limp, animated remake actually triggers new stereotypes in the service of trying to expose racism for a pre-teen audience. The studio seems to have reached for legitimacy by bringing the venerated Brooks along for the bumpy ride, darkening both legacies. What emerged sits uneasily at the corner of tribute, parody, theft and laziness.

What to make of this glorious, intergalactic mess? There is no better answer than to swipe one of our hero’s catchphrases: “What a classic Thor adventure, Hurrah!”

What makes The Black Phone stand out is how it perfectly captures what growing up was like in the often raw ’70s and an utter respect for the world of kids. Every adult is either dismissive and distant — or downright murderous.

Lessin and Pildes do a masterful job of putting the Janes in historical context, seeing how their desire to offer safe abortions grew out of the revolutionary ’60s and yet how women’s issues were often deemed secondary to male-led efforts.

The problem with Men isn’t with the acting. It’s with a script that could be described as attempting at something like arty horror and can’t stick the landing. Often it is tedious, slow to build and pretentious.

The film handles Maverick’s personal stuff — wooing the barmaid, repairing his relationship with Goose’s kid — while also fulfilling its promise as an action movie. There are jets pulling 10Gs, the metal sound of cockpit sticks pulled in gear, epic dogfights and the whine of machinery balking at the demands put on it. The action even takes a few unexpected and thrilling turns.

Bourgeois-Tacquet, making her feature debut, struggles to find ways to tell the audience what’s going on her heroine’s head.

There’s always something a little off about Father Stu, a sense that the filmmakers have taken a lot of liberties with a real life to make it extra saintly.

The filmmakers — director Daniel Espinosa, hobbled by a meandering script from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless — simply do not know what to do with this creature once they’ve given us his backstory.

Deep Water, despite an all-star team behind it, barely makes a splash. Although it is being billed as an erotic thriller, it’s tedious and clunky. Trips to the supermarket are more exciting.

Lucy and Desi traces the rise, union and collapse of this larger-than-life couple who made a fortune thanks to “I Love Lucy” and remade TV along the way. There’s a lot to chew on and the film lacks a certain sharpness, exploring one fascinating framing device after another only to eventually abandon each one.

As an acting exercise, it’s intriguing — barely any scene partners and all unfolding in real time. As a film, not so much: After a plodding, placid start, it goes from first gear into fifth and never relents as the woes pile on.

After a bit of a slow start, “Moonfall” gets absolutely trippy in the last third as it details a mind-blowing alternative history to mankind that spans millennia and distant planets and backs it all up with gorgeous, massive special effects. Logic is abandoned altogether but few will care.

Visually and storytelling-wise it’s not a cut above much of what kids can watch on TV these days. This is a franchise that looks like it’s slowly going the way of the dinos, while we drool.

January is often where bad films are stashed, but “The King’s Daughter” isn’t just bad, it’s a cloying, cliched mess that’s not worth even the slightest risk of contacting COVID-19 to see in theaters.

Washington earns his audience’s tears with an unrushed, unshowy style, letting an adult and very human relationship evolve on camera, skipping back and forth through years as it goes from love, birth, death and acceptance.

The Tender Bar is a gentle, oddly crafted but loving look at men, fueled by a soundtrack of classics like Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.” It’s a valentine to guys who step up.

Red Rocket could have soared in a traditional Hollywood feel-good way but instead stays small and down to the ground, sticking with you uncomfortably and brilliantly.

There is perhaps an intriguing movie here somewhere — “Who decides what is God’s will?” is one lingering question —but to find it you have to slice away all the bawdy and ultra-violent excesses that are clearly intended to push buttons, like a 5-year-old testing her parents’ patience. Yawn.

It’s only appropriate that Encanto — fueled by eight original songs by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda — turns into that most special thing of all: A triumph in every category: art, songs and heart.

It is more like half a movie, standing in the shadow of its parent. It is a film made to sell us more lunchboxes.

Zhao, whose film Nomadland was everything this is not — spare, naturalistic, moody — struggles with so much going on. The fight scenes are repetitive and the dialogue often stilted.

It’s a film no one really demanded and yet is loads of fun.

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.

The last few moments contain some of the most exhilarating and moving moments ever committed to film.

Have plenty of tissues nearby when you watch the top-notch Netflix film All Together Now, a teary tale of fellowship.

Project Power nicely mixes elements of sci-fi and crime thriller to create a cool trip with a wink, set against a soundtrack that includes 2 Chainz, Nipsey Hussle and Curtis Mayfield.

Kail’s camera captures actors’ intimate faces during key moments in a way impossible for theater-goers and incorporates audience reaction to create an electric filmed version.

Objectivity is not Meeropol’s goal here but better understanding of who this slippery character is, and this film succeeds in that.

It’s not a compelling environmental film or a good drama about racers. Like many of the electric cars on the track that season, it stalls.

More concrete examples of how mushrooms or dropping acid aided life are sorely needed.

The editing is more than a little rough and the plot gets a little stretched, but just as things start to get seriously hairy, the Pierce brothers suddenly have something really interesting to say about erasure and how families can abandon their histories.

The Hunt is not great satire or even a great film. It’s an unstylish and heavy-handed horror-thriller that turns into a revenge gore-fest as it mocks everyone with a big clumsy paw.

Spenser Confidential is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

For all of the inherent drama, it becomes clear that Burden, the man at the center of a film which bears his name, is really just a cipher, a sponge upon which we put meaning.

Written and directed by Stella Meghie, the film is a gentle and attentive inter-generational tale with a first-rate cast.

The little blue alien who can sprint quicker than the speed of light has ironically benefited from slowing it down, taking a pit stop to retool and emerge this month as a total crowd-pleaser.

The first half doesn’t fit with the second half, there are too many distractions and the filmmakers think it’s clever to leave clues but they do it clumsily and at the last minute and it’s really exhausting for the viewer.

Morano is absolutely adept in keeping tension rising, her characters grounded and her audience intrigued, a half-step behind.

Gretel & Hansel is as visually arresting as it is tedious, a 90-minute movie that really should have been a 3-minute music video for Marilyn Manson or Ozzy Osbourne. It’s in the horror genre only loosely. It’s more eerie, if that’s a genre. Actually, it’s like dread for 90 minutes. It’s dreadful.

Despite its flaws, this movie reminds us all of the sacrifices made by soldiers and to be mindful of how we treat them when they come home.

“Bad Boys” only works when the bickering cops are center stage.

Director William Eubank keeps the action taut and the look of the film is realistically impressive and dark, with grimy, dirty workers donning cool dive suits that make them each look like Transformers. His camera often goes tight on the shocked faces inside the helmets. Stewart, in particular, shines with a combination of steely nerves and harrowing expressions.

Just Mercy is not always an easy film to watch, but it is necessary.

Like all sequels, the second suffers from not having the delicious surprise of the first, but the seed to a third film is hinted at in the closing credits, which is more than the first film promised.

The remarkable Queen & Slim is a romance and a road movie, a film about outlaws on the run, two journeys of self-discovery and a nuanced social commentary. It’s not perfect but it’s close — an urgent, beautiful and socially conscious trip through the American racial psyche in 2019.

This infectious and engrossing story of the 1966 showdown on a French racetrack between car giants Ford and Ferrari is a high-octane ride that will make you instinctively stomp on a ghostly gas pedal from your movie seat.

The first thing director Roland Emmerich should do after his latest movie Midway hits theaters is apologize. Apologize to the visual effects crew, the stuntmen, the carpenters, the costumers and artists. He has squandered their considerable visual skill in retelling the crucial World War II battle at Midway by melding some of the best action sequences in years with the most banal of words.

This dark, socially conscious film about the intertwining of two families is an intricately plotted, adult thriller. We can go up, for sure, but Bong can also take us deeper down. There’s always an extra floor somewhere in this masterpiece.

The director ends on a righteous note but he’s not earned it.

The uplifting Edie is worthy of your time, mostly thanks to Hancock and Scotland’s natural beauty.

It’s a well-plotted film that excellently mixes gore and humor while also offering some social commentary by torching the clueless rich.

Roberts has clearly been given a bigger budget and it shows in the nicely realized submerged city the poor young women must navigate. He’s saddled with a terrible film title — 47 meters was the depth of the ocean floor in the first film — but none of that matters once the air tanks and masks go on.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is terribly overcooked, turning the real-life drama into a light caper like “Ocean’s 11,” adding cartoonish dialogue from hack superhero films and slathering the whole mess in white savior complex.

Over the course of an hour and half, we learn a ton but never come much closer to understanding him. It’s as if he traveled back in time to flip us the bird just to mock us for trying.

The thing keeping this together is Holland. He is utterly endearing as a goofy, insecure now-16-year-old hero with a cracked cellphone and who often makes things worse, apologizing along the way.

It’s a winking, self-aware horror movie that will make you laugh even when things are drenched in blood.

If the knock on “The Secret Life of Pets” was that it was a rip-off of “Toy Story,” then the second film better grounds itself in its own universe. Like its main three characters, it has learned to be comfortable in its own animated skin.

It’s pretty clear after watching the new live-action Aladdin that doubts about Will Smith’s casting as the Genie are overblown. It’s the guy behind the camera who should be doubted. And stuffed into a small lamp forever.

You’ve played Pokémon Go, right? Call this one Pokémon Don’t Go.

It’s really a series of violent vignettes strung together, getting more and more outlandish and introducing characters at such a blistering pace that you just want it to stop already.

The film often feels in many ways as an attempt to correct history, or at least the previous Dunaway-Beatty-led portrayal of a bumbling Hamer. But there are moments of beautiful stillness and nicely-filmed sequences — like a nifty car chase in dust clouds — that make the hunt enjoyable.

Wonder Park has a great premise about a spunky kid engineer and a world she constructs taking flight, but takes a few too many dark loop-de-loops and crashes hard. If you pass this amusement park, skip it.

The Wedding Guest might not completely work as a thriller or a satisfying romance, but for anyone missing India or planning to go, it’s a film worth getting lost in.

The film crams in so many plot lines that it risks being overstuffed but somehow stays true to its mesmerizing vision and emerges as a sci-fi success, if not a triumph.

Henson does as best she can with this material, attempting Lucille Ball-level physical comedy. But she’s laboring and often overshadowed by the one unpredictable spark in the film — provided by Erykah Badu.

Few films in memory have squandered so much acting talent in such a cliche-ridden, exploitative and dishonest way.

Jones is truly marvelous in the role, showing Ginsburg’s burning desire to change societal unfairness and also, more intimately, coming to terms with her own daughter’s rebelliousness.

Hopefully it will attract an audience either tired or turned off by the franchise’s past rigidity and addiction to spectacle. This is what we needed: Smaller, quieter, more human and sweeter.

A film that’s fantastically fresh, both visually and narratively, trippy and post-modern at the same time and packed with intriguing storytelling tools, humor, empathy and action, while also true to its roots — still telling the story of a young man learning to accept the responsibility of fighting for what’s right.

Creed II pulls off a rather amazing feat by adding to the luster of its predecessor and propelling the narrative into a bright future while also reaching back to honor its past, resurrecting unfinished business from “Rocky IV” and adding a dash of “Rocky III.” Pound per pound, the sequel might even be better than its predecessor.

Credit goes to the film’s visual effects folk, who made fur alive and gave texture to smoke. But retreading this story with a Cumberbatch, should send Hollywood bigwigs into the booby hatch.

The Front Runner is appropriately paced like a thriller, as everyone involved gets pulled down into the drain, helplessly.

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is visually marvelous, inconsistently acted and rather incoherent in that fantasy genre way.

With tenderness and toughness, Greengrass has made a great film about a terrible act.

The script crackles with small, brilliant moments.

The film somehow manages its own witchcraft in finding the perfect un-sweet spot — it’s too scary for little kids, not scary enough for older ones, not funny or clever enough for their parents, and too redundant for everyone. Poof! Watch the audience disappear.

Black’s filmmaking is old-school, grounded in ’80s humor, reveling at its over-the-topness and often gleefully thumbing its nose at political correctness. That might be refreshing, but it also can lead to questionable decisions.

Teen Titans GO! to the Movies is the sort of silly film you and your kids can both enjoy, a slice of pure escapist fare in these divisive days.

Fuqua is a lyrical director who directed Washington to an Oscar in “Training Day.” He’s not afraid to spend time in the still darkness with McCall and likes to focus on small moody elements, like rain hitting the gutters. But he can also deliver red meat: A sequence in which McCall fights off a passenger in the back seat of his car is a mini-masterpiece of taut, sinewy direction.

McMurray has a deft touch juggling action sequences, humor and intimate dialogue.

Throughout The King, you can feel Jarecki desperately working, slicing, trying to make connections. What could have been a gentle, personal travelogue is reworked and reworked until it’s often guilty of the last sin of Elvis — excess.

Writer and director Drew Pearce has made an uneven feature film directorial debut. He flaps around for a consistent tone, stunts some potential story lines and kicks out a bunch of cliches. Then, clearly unable to find a rational way to end his film, he adds two massive doses of nonsensical ultra-violence.

Reynolds is once again at his arch and nihilist best here, while acting and jumping in so much facial prosthetics that it makes him look like he’s inside melted cheese — or, as the first movie put it, an avocado that had relations with an older avocado.

Wandering aimlessly in the well-worn corridors of 1980s puerile frat flicks, Life of the Party wobbles to a predictable end and then sort of finishes without a bang.

The Rachel Divide is a fascinating, comprehensive and well-crafted documentary.

This fabulous, moody film isn’t your typical jock flick where bitter rivals compete to a crowning, sweaty end. There isn’t a real victor in Borg Vs. McEnroe and the points don’t prove anything. It’s less a tennis movie than a meditation on the personal costs of chasing excellence.

It may not be nuanced, but it taps into something mythical — ferocious monsters rising from nowhere to be battled by 21st century swordfighters. And it’s exhilarating.

This dark, meandering and cliche-ridden bummer starring a trying-hard Jennifer Lawrence tries to reach for a cool and stylish look at contemporary spycraft but often falls victim to cartoon violence and a muddled story. The creators may call it erotic but it’s as erotic as a visit to the dentist.