Michael Phillips

This relaxed, agreeable comedy, filmed near but not in Montauk, works because the stars make it work, and the premise — a little hoary — doesn’t sweat the logic part. Lawrence has fantastic timing and a kind of take-it-or-leave-it confidence that energizes a formulaic comedy.

Anderson keeps inventing and detailing new unrealities to explore. They don’t all satisfy, certainly not the same way, but they’re his, and nobody else’s. And this is his best movie since “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Keaton is the one who brings both effortless gravity and subtle levity to a film that, without him, wouldn’t have much of either.

It’s a comedy with a lot of very big laughs.

You know what’s not bad? Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Dumber than a box of lugnuts, but superior to the Michael Bay-directed schlocktaculars that ran as long as 165 minutes. The new “Transformers” movie clocks in at 117 minutes, a lot of them pretty zippy.

It’s a rare movie that settles, quietly, into some part of your own experiences and memories without a speck of narrative contrivance gumming up your response to the story on the screen. Past Lives is that rarity.

If Across the Spider-Verse falls an inch or two short of the earlier film, it’s because screenwriters/producers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham pack the second half of a pretty long movie (24 minutes longer than “Into the Spider-Verse”) with an increasingly dark and heavy threat level.

The changes really help. The fleshed-out central romance, the performances of Halle Bailey (Ariel, the mermaid, with songs belted like nobody’s business) and, as her Above World love Prince Eric, Jonah Hauer-King — it all basically works.

The movie itself is more of a square than a circle — straightforward and honorific, peppered with old and newer archival footage.

Even when it falters, Master Gardener speaks from a place the filmmaker has always worked, with one foot in the character-building of “slow cinema,” and the other in spasms of violence. It may be hard to buy where this movie lands. But even an unstuck landing isn’t enough to un-recommend it.

My affection for a lot of the earlier F&F movies has everything to do with the people on the screen, and the squealing of the tires. Not so much the world destruction. Outlandish mayhem needs better visual stylists than Leterrier.

The second half of The Mother settles for the usual. But getting there makes for a fairly diverting series of melees in the name of child protection, with services rendered by a tough-love mom who does it all.

BlackBerry doesn’t sermonize or push the comedy or falsify the dramatic dynamics of wildly contrasting personalities. It’s a small but quite beautiful achievement, which you could also say about the smartphone that could, and did. For a while.

For some, Other People’s Children may feel a little too smooth. But the film’s success starts and ends with the natural vibrancy of the performances, and Efira leads the way.

Fox’s resolve, his ever-sharp wit and acuity, more than mitigates what’s not entirely useful in Guggenheim’s filmmaking approach.

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

The director and co-writer David Lowery has made nothing but interesting features, six so far, and while his latest (co-written by Toby Halbrooks) turns into a bit of a Lost Boy here and there in its brooding investigation of why Captain Hook, played by a happily camp-averse Jude Law, got that way, it’s a stirring adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s fantasy.

This book deserved a really good film version, and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (”The Edge of Seventeen,” also really good) captures Blume’s humane wit and spirit, while adding some new emotional and narrative wrinkles.

Phoenix acts his ass off, often entertainingly, and from the hoariest of ancient dark-comic tactics, Aster pulls off the occasional little miracle here and there, especially when LuPone and Posey are around.

The movie has a tiny motor of a narrative, but it’s just enough. Nothing is overstated, and a lot of Showing Up isn’t even stated; it’s simply shown, on the fly or with the merest emphasis on what Lizzie goes through as she completes her work.

Mainly, Cage keeps finding the damnedest ways to topspin his line readings so that you never know where a sentence is going. May the next outing with Renfield and Dracula, should the public and Universal decree it, be a little funnier and little less too much.

Air is a good time, as well as a triumph of sports marketing in every conceivable way.

A Thousand and One, this year’s top jury prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival, puts you through it, but with real feeling, real stakes and an authentic vision guided by a fiercely commanding performance by Teyana Taylor as Inez.

Rye Lane celebrates Black romantic adventure, simply by finding new avenues (literal and figurative) to explore. Director Allen-Miller works extensively in commercials, and it shows, but her compositional eye is very effective.

Too much of “John Wick 4″ mistakes grandiloquence for excitement. But yes, as bloody diversion goes, the audience gets its money’s worth.

Disarming one minute, baldly manipulative the next, Champions is a tricky one.

It treats Freddie not as a problem to be solved, but as a peripatetic life to be followed. What begins as two weeks in another town, in search of the past Freddie never knew, becomes a reminder that there are feelings, longings, connections in life that remain not impossible, but certainly elusive, and precarious.

Unlike “Creed II,” which had little visual distinction and a storyline forgettable enough to send me straight to Wikipedia for a refresher, Creed III tries a few things. And it showcases two charismatic stars who are also genuine, ambitious actors.

Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.

The movie, let it be said, is not awful, but the kinetic battles are chaotic, and the look of the Quantum Realm is oddly drab in its interweaving of digital and VFX elements, seeming at times to be more like several first drafts of a new “Star Wars” franchise instead of a natural extension of this one. Midway through, as everyone on screen was restating their interest in getting home again, I thought: Same!

The film is a master class in reactivity, and Calamy manages it with perfect dramatic pitch.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance might’ve worked better if it had fully embraced the mantle of 21st century comedy of manners. As is, it’s tentative, wanly comic. As the great Russian stripper Anton Chekhov showed us: Without the funny, the serious has a harder go of it.

Death, dying, hearts in winter, the thrill of a sexual reawakening: Sandra’s life, as “One Fine Morning” delineates, makes room for it all because it must. Hers is an ordinary life, in the end, full of small, extraordinary grace notes. Thanks to both filmmaker and star, it’s a consistently screenworthy one.

It’s ungallant to single out MVPs in this ensemble. Nonetheless: If it weren’t for Moreno’s wizardly comic wiles and Field’s unerring, unforced timing, “80 for Brady” would not be here, there or much of anywhere.

Knock at the Cabin is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.

Cronenberg knows what he’s doing, and this is his most assured act of science-fiction effrontery to date.

With a smooth overlay of LA sights and sounds, and a side of blueprints stolen from “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Meet the Fockers,” “You People” ends up a lot less insightfully funny than “Black-ish.”

Above all Saint Omer is a singularly moving courtroom drama.

It’s a low-fi rumination on inexplicable and gradually more threatening loneliness — the sort of childhood trauma typically explained to death by horror movies less interesting than this one.

It’s the junky, janky mid-winter Liam Neeson thriller we used to get with that first flip of the calendar, only this one stars Gerard Butler, and is directed by Jean-Francois Richet, whose two-part gangster biopic “Mesrine” was pretty juicy. This one’s more pulp than juice, but it’s enjoyable.

A pleasantly nutty thriller about a crafty, high-end toy, M3GAN exploits a child’s grief for the greater good of the killer-doll genre. That may be enough for 100 minutes of your early January.

Not all the anachronisms work, but Corsage works anyway because Krieps makes Elisabeth a dimensional woman for all seasons.

The actors and director Lemmons accomplish what the screenplay does only partially: make us believe the circumstances and the behavior.

I love what The Whale is doing for Fraser’s career. But not since John Wells blanded out the movie version of “August: Osage County” has a well-regarded play looked quite so at sea on screen.

Loosely entwining a half-dozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen.

The film is a gem — a supple, unpredictably structured and deeply personal portrait of its primary subject, the photographer, visual artist and activist Nan Goldin.

As with most Cameron blockbusters, “The Way of Water” has a way of pulling you in, surrounding you with gorgeous, violent chaos and finishing with a quick rinse to get the remnants of its teeny-tiny plot out of your eyes by the final credits.

What the film has is visual authority and an eye for composition.

As written by Field and modulated, brilliantly, by Blanchett, Lydia becomes a rhapsody in contrasts, controlling, fastidious, witty, steely, imperious, hubristic. It’s a huge, showy role, and the beautiful paradox — one among many here — is that Blanchett has never been subtler.

Emancipation is never dull, but it’s rarely without its box office instincts for falsification front and center, alongside its star. And while it has been built on the scarred back of a real man, the movie is too busy with the business of entertainment to focus on the “real” part for long.

Diop is a reactive wonder as well as an exceptional scene partner as she strategizes, subtly, how to work with or around or deflect the microaggressions coming from her “new family” and, more happily, her few friends in this strange new land.

I found Violent Night to be a joyless slay ride, not to mention verbally witless. There’s not much kick in seeing an R-rated version of “Home Alone,” and even that owed its home-invasion nastiness to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”

This filmmaker has earned the right to make a movie about why he makes movies the way he does. And with Williams and Dano, especially, he gets performances that can match the technique.

I hoped for a movie relatively free of Hollywood hogwash and melodramatics, and got it. What I didn’t expect was the calm brilliance of scenes such as Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, playing two of Weinstein’s 1990s targets, telling their stories so truthfully, with such economical emotional punch, that it’s both heartbreaking and enough to make you seethe.

Part “Seven,” part haute-cuisine “Saw,” part reality cooking show, director Mylod’s film finally isn’t sure of how far to push the effrontery. It helps, however, to have Fiennes in the kitchen and a Nordic smokehouse out back.

[Mitchell’s] celebration of these films is seriously entertaining.

Most films would take pains to spell out the answers, eventually. “Aftersun” works more obliquely and poetically, leaving prosaic touches to other filmmakers.

I do think “Wakanda Forever” has plenty of what the enormous “Black Panther” fan base wants in a “Black Panther” sequel. There’s real emotion in the best material here. The loss of Boseman was enormous. So is the skill level of the actors, returning and new, who make the most of a pretty good sequel.

The movie has a sense of humor, but its sense of dread, micro and macro, overrules it.

Wendell & Wild may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”

Decision to Leave, director and co-writer Park Chan-wook’s dazzling, confounding, gorgeously crafted variation on a dangerously familiar film trope, takes its component parts and comes up with something no one has ever built before.

The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.

It’s a premise for a pitch, not a screenplay, at least not a sharp-witted or interesting one. I’m not fussy. I’m not looking for the most interesting romantic comedy in history with this one. But I do wonder if some writers are so determined to stick to a formula so slavishly, they forget to make the characters funny, or to make characters rather than vaguely delineated personae in the Clooney vein or Roberts vibe.