Michael O'Sullivan

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

"Luther” is not without its pleasures, assuming you have the stomach for the kind of theatrical crimes that exist only in filmdom.

During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), Cocaine Bear goes into snoring hibernation.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

Anton conveys a deep well of unrequited longing that is so powerful, it doesn’t really need storytelling gimmicks.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a mostly flat, flavorless cocktail of a sequel that tries to replicate the fizz of the 2012 original by stirring together elements of a getting-her-groove-back love story with music-video-style production numbers, lessons in female empowerment delivered with all the subtlety of a TED Talk and the kind of let’s-put-on-a-show energy that went out of style in 1940, has — despite those flaws — its moments.

In the case of Sharper, we’re treated to puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each one delivered in sequential chapters — titled after the film’s main characters, Tom, Sandra, Max and Madeline — and unpacked, initially in reverse chronological order, with satisfying, if somewhat predictable, style and suspense. If you’re seeking substance, look elsewhere.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.

To anyone who feels, at times, so overwhelmed by the drumbeat of climate disaster, economic collapse, crime, mass shooting and terrorism, deadly viruses, and political polarization that it feels as the apocalypse is upon us, Knock at the Cabin will resonate powerfully.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

You People sounds preachy, doesn’t it? Trust me, it’s not. What it really is is a master class on wedge issues and our shared humanity, delivered by comedians who know that laughter can be at once a bitter pill and the best medicine.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

Plane is a shot of adrenaline and fast-paced, brain-free fun.

Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s follow-up to “Shoplifters,” his Oscar-nominated 2018 film about a family of liars, cheats and thieves, is, like that unexpectedly heartwarming drama, a story whose darker themes of social dysfunction and fissure are sublimated into a fable of surprising sweetness.

Living mostly avoids sappiness. And it shows an actor at the peak of his powers.

Where The Pale Blue Eye succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar — yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember — got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.

There is little in the film that offers insight into what makes him tick as a person.

The discussions that take place on camera, in tastefully appointed suites, are frank and often offer fascinating insights into these dilemmas. But it is the sharply jarring — and dismayingly repetitive — footage of carnage that will stay with you long after the echoes of the film’s subjects’ words have faded from your mind.

The film, despite being mostly set in a huge, expensive apartment that inexplicably seems to be illuminated only by low-wattage lightbulbs, by and large resists the easy tropes of conventional horror. Instead, Jusu focuses, with an assured storytelling that slowly builds a mood of real-world dread, on more corporeal concerns.

The film follows two remarkable men in New Delhi: Mohammad Saud and his older brother Nadeem Shehzad, former bodybuilders who used their scientific curiosity, compassion and knowledge of human musculature to figure out how to care for sick and injured birds.

True to form for the horror-loving filmmaker behind Oscar winners “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water,” this is a dark affair, despite the occasional song. And yes, it’s a musical.

Retrograde is a handsome film, ironically, conveying a sense of the country that is at stake, and its people. And Heineman is smart to frame the story around a single individual, as he did in his fact-based drama about war correspondent Marie Colvin, “A Private War.”

NASA aficionados and connoisseurs of space exploration are the groups most likely to get a kick out of Good Night Oppy, a warmly charming, if far from essential, documentary that takes a look back at the robotic Martian rover Opportunity.

It’s a series of small and seemingly meaningless incidents that, in Wells’s telling, loom large only from the vantage of hindsight.

Mostly The Return is about listening to great music getting made by two women representing two generations of country music — Carlile is 41 — who genuinely seem to respect each other, and who have obvious talent.

Redmayne ultimately fails to crack the secret of what made this man — er, this monster — tick. But that’s not really the biggest mystery that hangs over “Nurse.” Rather, it is the question of why all these power players thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

Make no mistake: Black Adam proceeds with predictable action sequences, tiresome fight scenes and the now-requisite sacrifice of a major character. But it’s that seasoning of radical politics — the theme, expressed in the film as a question of whether freedom fighters should have to play by the rules of war — that gives it a bit of spice. Whether that’s enough to set Black Adam apart in a world that already arguably has too many superhero movies, is unclear.

Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

Propelled by Deadwyler’s unforgettable portrayal, Till leaves us with a sense of an indictment still unanswered in 2022.

Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems. That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.

In The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, deeper meaning is left by the wayside, in a tale with way too much story and not nearly enough life.

The filmmakers’ focus-shifting approach to telling this story is smart and effective. But its true power lies in the history lesson it eventually segues to, landing with a gut punch.

Young Plato is a fascinating, sometimes funny and often touching film. It’s easy to see why the directors were drawn to McArevey and his school.

The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.

Clerks III is a movie for die-hard fans and die-hards only.

Yes, “Honk” picks some low-hanging fruit. But it also, as it turns out, leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth.

There are pleasures to be had here, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call “Peter” fun, by any stretch of the imagination. At times this admiring but uninspired making-of movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Karl/Marlene character: fawning to the point of sycophancy.

In the end, “Breaking” feels like a foregone conclusion: a dismal portrait of a system — and a someone — already irreparably broken.

The jump scares are genuinely jumpy, but the film plays out more like a theme park ride than a family drama with teeth. It’s pulse-pounding, in other words, from a cardiac perspective, but not especially engaging as a narrative, despite the earnest efforts of the cast to breathe life into a personal story arc that feels pasted onto another one.

A fascinating saga, especially for fans of animation.

Lots of people pay good money to endure the kinds of thrill rides that make them wish they were back on solid ground. Fall does the same thing, but with the added benefit of being entirely vicarious.

A kind of gravitational pull emanates from Aubrey Plaza as the title character in Emily the Criminal, a passably diverting crime thriller where, in place of a moral center, Plaza delivers a performance that is entertainingly blackhearted.

It’s intentionally chaotic and, now and again, surprisingly funny.

Thirteen Lives is a solid achievement, technically and dramatically, using a ticktock timeline and periodically superimposing on-screen maps of the miles-long cave system to build tension. Like its protagonists, it isn’t flashy but is all business. It gets the job done with a minimum of histrionics, yet a mountain of suspense.

Luck takes things that are intangible — in this case, random felicity and affliction — and imagines them as palpable. It doesn’t quite work.

The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie.

Vengeance is an arrestingly smart, funny and affecting take on a slice of the American zeitgeist, one in which both the divisions between and connections with our fellow citizens are brought into sharp relief.

Resurrection ultimately leaves us, like Gwyn, wondering if the story that’s just been dropped in our laps — a kind of sick, surreal poetry, fashioned out of curdled blood and guts — is a new breed of monster movie or some old-fashioned metaphor of loss made flesh. Sadly, given its acting pedigree, it doesn’t really work on either level.

The horror auteur’s third film is a sci-fi epic that feels both comfortably familiar and fresh.

The film and the ticktock of recovery it follows are at times difficult to watch. At the same time, watching feels almost necessary in an age when mass shootings seem to have become all too common.

The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.

At times, Apples feels superficially slight, even — pardon me — forgettable. But Nikou, in his feature directorial debut after working as an assistant director on sets with such filmmakers as Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) and Richard Linklater (“Before Midnight”), has pulled off a neat little trick: He’s told a story that, for reasons that are more easily felt than explained, is hard to shake off.

There’s nothing unheard of here: a bad guy, a haunted house, a hero. But it’s what The Black Phone does with those simple parts that sparks a spooky connection.

The pretentiousness of acting is a fun thing to lampoon, and “Official Competition” does it with surgical precision.

Like Charles himself (and maybe Brian, too), it’s an odd hodgepodge of a story: a sweet, eccentric misfit, just waiting for someone to find it, and love it, despite its flaws.

There are gray hairs on some of the people in this fascinating film: Jimmy Buffett, Tom Jones (yes, that Tom Jones — he played the 2019 show) and others. But the energy that the film puts out is vital and full of sap.

Despite its light subject matter, “Phantom” is about something more than an obscure British folk hero (although it is also that). It’s a story about following your passion, not because of the heights this path will take you to, but because it makes you happy.

Fiddler’s Journey aims to tell a story that delves into more than creative and technical details. Although it is also about those details.

Put in terms that Bob (and perhaps only Bob fans) can understand: This movie may not be the Meatsiah — beef tartare inside a medium-well burger inside beef Wellington — but it’s pretty well done.

The subtitle refers not only to the twilight of the 1920s but to a changing of the guard in this entertainment franchise as well. In that sense, maybe Downton Abbey isn’t really giving its fans what they want, but what they have always needed to accept in this epic saga: that time doesn’t stand still.

The most fruitful aspect of the film may be its themes, which unbraid and retwist the threads and conventions of the damsel-in-distress narrative even as they superficially follow them.

There’s plenty of food for thought here too, and Carmichael clearly hasn’t set out to trivialize a serious subject. But the film may inadvertently end up doing that, by delivering a message that can be boiled down to a platitude: Live every day as if it is your last.

The film is a sobering reminder that the consequences of limiting access to safe medical care aren’t just theoretical but existential.

Petite Maman is what every film should be: powerfully, even arrestingly original; grounded in emotional truth; hyper-specific; deeply universal; strange; mesmerizing; and not a minute longer than necessary. It is, in short, a small wonder.

There’s stuff to like in “Multiverse”: amazing effects, surprise cameos, even the unexpectedly moving scene in which Wanda realizes she has, at last, become a monster. But there’s also stuff that’s just, for lack of a better word, annoying.

Memory is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind.

The Duke, based on the 1961 theft of Francisco de Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London, features delightful performances by Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, both of whom help ground this strenuously heartwarming film in something a little more solid than the ether in which it otherwise seems to be set.

Gradually, a story of bittersweet beauty and unexpected tenderness emerges.

Its clumsy, inert storytelling seems less interested in converting nonbelievers than in convincing us of Wahlberg’s piety.

It may not be the most spellbinding of the prequels so far, but it does advance this saga in an entertaining, if less than fantastic way.

The framing device of the conversation between Henry and Celia, which includes a bit of flirtation, necessitates a certain ennui, though director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) does his level best to open up the claustrophobic setting with frequent jaunts to other times and locales. Come to think of it, there’s an air of a tennis match to the proceedings of All the Old Knives, with its two protagonists playing a mental game of volley and return, as it were.

Beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently.

The screenplay is thoughtful and nuanced, and Epps’s performance anchors the narrative with a solid, unfussy portrayal of ethical indecision, even if the third act detours into more melodramatic territory.

You Won’t Be Alone can be ghoulish at times, but also gorgeous, in the swooning manner of a Terrence Malick film: all grass and leaves and sky and water, captured by tumbling camerawork that evokes the wide-eyed wonder of someone experiencing the world for the first time.

What this movie could use a little more of is the rigor and self-discipline to pull off all the imagination and originality in a way that does more than leave you gobsmacked.

The film’s inertness is unexpected, and a tad disappointing, considering that first-time screenwriter Joshua Rollins has unearthed some genuinely fascinating details about Bales’s backstory that were not in either published account of the rescue.

It has certain je ne sais quoi, if graphic nudity, self-referential humor and serial murder — neck stabbing, eye gouging, alligator munching and shotgun blasting — are your thing.

Set in 1956, it’s a cleverly twisty crime story constructed of many invisible folds and threads, yet it fits Rylance like custom-made clothing.

I Am Here is, at its core, something much less complicated: a bearing of witness to horror. It’s inspirational, yes, but sadly far from unique. In its oft-heard contours, then, lies both its power and its tragic familiarity.

The Adam Project isn’t especially smart, but it does leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling. Its science grade is only passing, but its emotional IQ is above average.

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a red panda is just a red panda. And sometimes it’s a metaphor for that inner spark of creativity, the flame of originality that is to be cherished, not extinguished. With “Turning Red,” Shi demonstrates that she’s got it, in spades.

Cyrano, like the best art its implacable hero celebrates, is full of poetry, romance, terror and truth.

Studio 666 is either a delightful lark or a mystifying waste of time: Your pleasure will probably depend entirely on how you feel about Grohl.

What transpires is part heist flick, part Mission: Impossible-lite, with a dollop of Dan Brown (for the puzzles), the DNA of Nicolas Cage in National Treasure and mildly zingy buddy-banter dressed up with a bit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s existential darkness.

The Cursed is stylish and scary enough for what it is. That’s an old-fashioned creature feature, effective enough to give you a mild case of the heebie-jeebies but nothing chronic.

For fans of Neeson as action hero, “Blacklight” may be something of a disappointment, at least measuring it against the yardstick of previous thrillers in this particular branch of the actor’s body of work.

The crime’s solution is fine and dandy, but it’s Poirot himself who most fascinates. This isn’t your grandmother’s Agatha Christie, in other words. It belongs to Branagh, heart and soul.

The combined impact of these scenes, augmented with Robinson’s lecture — which, while deeply informed and informative, is anything but dull or academic — makes for a powerful one-two punch.

Sundown is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate. Roth is still a great and mesmerizing actor, even when he’s drifting, vacantly, through a hellscape.

It’s a yarn that’s made for a great storyteller, with thrills and chills to burn. But the way Tulis spins the thread is wonkier and clunkier than it could, or should, be.

Dumont is clearly critiquing the way we mediate life via screens, large and small. There are times in this rambling story when the filmmaker’s point isn’t quite as obvious, but that’s only because he has a habit of trying to jab several moving targets with a sharp stick all at the same time.

Like a dream you’ve half forgotten by the time you get to the breakfast table, it’s neither good enough to make much of an impression or bad enough to completely forget.

Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy.

It feels sharply, even painfully true, while also hazy and nonspecific. Its head is in the clouds, while its feet are grounded in the very real catastrophe we are all currently suffering through.

There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.

A mixture of well-researched historical fact and pure fiction, “Munich: The Edge of War” is a smart and entertaining thriller that suffers from just one thing: We all know how it ends.