Michael O'Sullivan

McQueen makes the case that its subject was an artist whose clay was clothing. It also, despite giving short shrift to psychoanalysis, reminds us that everything you might want to know about the artist can be found in the art.

Vreeland’s film, for the most part, is structured around spoken passages from Beaton’s voluminous diaries, which are read, expressively, by Rupert Everett. The actor ably channels the persona of the self-described “rabid aesthete.”

Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment.

It’s purely unintentional, but the little numeral dangling, like a broken, mangled finger, from the end of the title of The Equalizer 2 signals more than the fact that this is a sequel to the 2014 action thriller about a violent vigilante. It also lets you know that there are two, and only two, pleasures to be had here.

As Ravel puts it, the disproportionate influence of money on elections isn’t a Democratic or Republican problem, but a “gateway issue to every other issue you might care about.” Dark Money makes the case, as well as any film can, that she’s pretty much right on the money.

There are few surprises delivered in Skyscraper, an entertaining if middlebrow thriller whose very name — blandly descriptive, generic — seems to advertise its fungibility.

It’s one that speaks not just to Presley’s (and, arguably, America’s) fall from grace, but to the imperfections — and, yes, the lofty ambitions — of this strange, in some ways beautiful and in some ways overburdened little film.

Leave No Trace is not a sociological treatise. It has nothing grandiose to say about homelessness or PTSD. It does, however, deliver an effective (and deeply affecting) allegory of the inevitable leave-taking that all of us — housed or unhoused, happy or half mad — must undergo with our loved ones.

Despite the hot-button subject matter, there is no sense of currency, or even controversy, here. The drama seems less personal or political than one calculated for shock value. One late, violent plot twist is so preposterous as to defy the level of credulity one normally reserves for a horror film.

Plummer is particularly good, delivering every line of dialogue as if it’s improvised, and with an astringent snort that only partially hides the fact that Jack really does care about people. Farmiga, for her part, never strays into histrionics, although she comes close after allowing herself to be seduced by her caddish ex.

Portman, a vegan, is the main tour guide to this challenging excursion to the world of slaughterhouses and CAFOs, which one commentator likens to petri dishes for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Ironically, the film is conspicuous not for its brio but its blandness.

Its smallness is its strength — as is its silence. That’s the odd and evocative resonance of Hearts Beat Loud. For a movie that is so rock-and-roll, it turns out to be less about making noise than about listening to the message that can only be heard in the stillness that comes after the song.

It’s been a long time coming for Incredibles 2, but the punchline is worth the setup.

American Animals, while an entertaining version of a heist film at times, is no “Ocean’s 8.” Its signature moment occurs not during the reenactment of the inept crime, or its planning and antic aftermath. Rather, it comes in the middle of one of Lipka’s interview scenes.

Like the gender-flipped “Ghostbusters” before it, this new movie neither reinvents not dishonors its inspiration, instead adding a modicum of zip — if less than turbocharged horsepower — to a vehicle that runs you through the staging of a crime by, ironically, obeying all the traffic laws.

Litte Pink House feels like it’s only ever checking off the requisite moments of civic outrage, while failing to connect with viewers on a level that’s deeper than the average made-for-TV issue-of-the-week movie.

Setting the film in the punk heyday underscores the film’s themes of personal freedom and defying authority. And there are heartwarming touches, despite a plot that is muddied by sci-fi mumbo-jumbo about cannibalism.

On Chesil Beach can feel like observing a deli worker slice a small piece of rancid cured meat, in increasingly transparent slivers of prosciutto-like thinness, and then holding them up to the light for inspection.

It transfixes, not with artifice or cheap sentiment, but with a strange alchemy of gloom and light.

Beast sounds like a straightforward erotic mystery thriller, but that atmosphere is at times overshadowed by Pearce’s exploration of British classism, bullying and bigotry.

There is also something over-intellectualized and bloodless about this version.

Far from lazy, it is a fairly brilliant sendup of comic-book action movies, as well as also being an excellent example of one.

A largely laugh-free exercise in cliche.

Although Measure of a Man is less gut-wrenching than director Jim Loach’s only previous theatrical film, “Oranges and Sunshine” — about the cruel fate of unwanted children shipped from England to Australia during the United Kingdom’s mid-20th-century “child migrant” program — the British filmmaker shows himself to have an affinity for tales of the abuse of power.

Things are never exactly what they seem here — but there’s a deeper, more authentic story Reitman and Cody are interested in telling, even when — maybe especially when — the film veers toward fantasy. If Tully is a movie that cheats, even lies to us a little bit, it’s to get at a more real and recognizable truth.

Despite her biting legal writing, she comes across, on camera, as unfailingly mild-mannered, decorous and polite, especially when the film explores her rather unlikely friendship, based on a shared love of opera, with her late conservative colleague Antonin Scalia.

After Auschwitz also addresses more mundane subjects as well: making a wedding dress from leftover parachute silk, emigrating to America, finding jobs, buying cars, registering to vote. The smallest things become imbued with an importance out of proportion to their significance to the rest of us.

Infinity War is big, blustery and brave, taking viewers to places that they may not be used to going.

These ghost stories, if that’s what they are, aren’t terribly original, or even especially scary — at least, not by the standards of the genre.

I Feel Pretty suffers from a fatal flaw: its premise.

The new movie — a sci-fi freakout that, like “Spring,” includes an “it,” but one that’s far less easy to define — is spooky, funny, touching and very, very well made.

At the center of this oddly riveting little picaresque is a performance of such quiet power by Plummer — as an antihero both rash and precociously resourceful — that it’s easy to overlook the film’s flaws.

It becomes clear that the situation is exactly as we imagine it to be, and that the sense of mystery that Shoaf has spent so much energy weaving is a red herring.

The real problem isn’t an overabundance of potential killers. Rather, it’s the fact that the film, from writer-director Aaron Katz (“Land Ho!”), does so little to make you care about the crime, or its victim, that the whole thing feels like an academic exercise.

There’s an air of “High Noon” to Török’s drama, which features an intrusive sound design, including Tibor Szemzö’s jarringly contemporary score and sound effects that include the ringing of a clock tower, buzzing flies, rumbling thunder and noisy birds — which transition from pleasant tweets to ominous caws of crows by the climax.

It’s a mildly engrossing if wonky exercise in what could be called a kind of selfish activism.

If Ready Player One is tedious at times, it’s also oodles of fun at others.

Uprising is loud, packed with impressive effects and propulsive — or as propulsive as a car with no brakes going downhill — but it lacks the heart of del Toro’s original.

A straightforward, B-movie horror flick — “The Snake Pit” without the prestige — complete with intentional overdosing, electroshock torture and patients threatening each other with a sharpened spoons, when they’re not either screaming or catatonic. It also is very, very bad.

The dance itself makes a much more powerful, and ultimately poetic, point. On the most superficial level, it serves as a blunt metaphor for the elaborate choreography of the rescue operation, which entailed its own intense rehearsals, undertaken in a scale mock-up of the Entebbe airport that had been re-created back in Israel.

It is not a story of justice, but of a kind of standoff between good and evil. Initially, there seems precious little of the former.

Despite such flashes of originality, the whole thing has the air of a cynical, low-quality knockoff of something that wasn’t very good to begin with.

Lamarr had been blessed — or, perhaps more appropriately, cursed — with leading an interesting life, and Dean’s film seems both too conventional and too shallow for its subject, who seems as hard to pigeonhole, at times, as to understand.

Stagnation, collapse, heartlessness — whether on an individual level or a national one — are the true subjects of Zvyagintsev’s film. Its message isn’t subtle, but it is delivered with deadly, haunting finality.

A slow, talky and only faintly moving meditation on mortality and memory.

Happy End, for its part, signals a return to form for the director, who here makes a stark departure from the sweet tone of “Amour” — perhaps his most mainstream work — in favor of the vinegary outlook on life manifested in such films as “Funny Games,” his 2007 horror movie about violently psychopathic home invaders, and “The White Ribbon,” his 2009 pre-World War I period piece about, among other things, child abuse.

Thomas keeps things at a simmer for the longest time, forestalling the story’s ultimate boil-over until the final minute or so of the tale.

While it’s gratifying — and occasionally gripping — to see that story told in 12 Strong, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film contains few genuine surprises, at least from a cinematic standpoint.

The fly-on-the-wall film is fascinating at times, but less than essential.

The story (by Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle) does not exist to serve the needs of logic, but those of Neeson, who, as has become his habit in this sort of thing, delivers, at minimum, a modicum of guilty pleasure as the middle-aged, tender-but-tough Everyman in a tight spot.

All the Money in the World may not have that many surprises up its sleeve, especially if you already know how this story ends. You will, however, get your money’s worth, one way or another: whether it’s from the crime thriller or the thought-provoking sermon on filthy lucre that it throws in, at no extra charge.

Funny when it wants to be, poignant when it needs to be, and surprisingly effective in harnessing these deeper themes to a character who might otherwise be dismissed as a lightweight laughingstock.

Wonder Wheel may be scenic, but it goes nowhere — and slowly.

This sweet, affectionate (and unapologetically slight) comedy is an all-too-rare homage to harmless, hilarious incompetence, at a time when there is plenty of the more hurtful kind to go around. If it isn’t quite up to the standards of “Ed Wood,” Tim Burton’s 1994 tribute to the auteur of such misbegotten fruits of moviemaking as “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” it is nonetheless a much-needed distraction.

Most of the brights spots in Justice League involve Miller’s Flash — literally.

Betts has put together a talented acting ensemble, and the performances are, for the most part, uniformly good and subtle, particularly among the actresses who play the young novices.

It’s a movie that, to put it in terms that the film’s screenwriters might appreciate, is Thor-ly needed.

The secrets that are revealed, to the extent that a viewer is able to make out what they are, remain murky, even to the end of the movie.

In his most bracing and maddening morality tale yet, Lanthimos doesn’t so much paint himself into a corner as he runs into it, headlong, dragging us with him all the way.

Structurally, The Meyerowitz Stories is a shapeless and baggy thing.

Human Flow asks us, implicitly, why we seem to care so much about certain living creatures and not others.

The performances are fine and nuanced, but the stakes seem, for some reason, more theoretical than actual.

Blade Runner 2049, the superb new sequel by Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), doesn’t just honor that legacy, but, arguably, surpasses it, with a smart, grimly lyrical script (by Fancher and Michael Green of the top-notch “Logan”); bleakly beautiful cinematography (by Roger Deakins); and an even deeper dive into questions of the soul.

The question that looms large here, lingering long after the closing credits, is whether, despite our human need for forgiveness, absolution is ever truly possible.