Michael Phillips

This material, though, is damn thin. Like so many films derived from the pictures and words of a graphic novel, The Kitchen feels perfunctory and sterile and under-detailed.

Not everything here is perfect; the musical score, by Norwegian composer John Erik Kaada, favors ambient sonic wanderings that smooth over the conflicts on screen. But by the end, you feel as though you’ve truly gotten to know a full range of Kabul residents through their daily routines, joys, recreational diversions (kite-flying, slingshots, the international language of soccer) and bone-deep skepticism about the future.

Brian Banks proceeds non-chronologically, toggling between high school years and Banks’ post-prison life. This helps keep the audience on its toes. But it’s the actors who complicate things most fruitfully.

Vanessa Kirby of “The Crown” and “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is the primary reason “Hobbs & Shaw” rises above pure formula and borderline-contemptible familiarity.

Writer-director Tilman Singer casts a trancelike swirl incorporating elements of hypnosis, demonic transference, memories of sexual abuse and one of the furthest-out, least by-the-book police procedurals put on film.

A determinedly easygoing comedy about the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Tel Aviv on Fire gets by on the low-keyed assurance of its cast and its medium-grade amusements.

The results? More evocative than provocative. But evocative is not nothing.

A glass three-fifths full, writer-director Lynn Shelton’s affable comedy Sword of Trust gets by on the improvisational wiles of its cast.

Crucially, Wang and company found all the right actors to populate a semi-autobiographical tale of familial deception.

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

The new music helps, a little. But the movie is a karaoke act, re-creating the original movie’s story beats beat-by-beat-by-beat.

It’s good. It’s fun. It goes out of its way to salute the visual effects armies that have made the MCU what it is today, for better or worse.

Pugh excels throughout. The movie works best, I think, as a black-comic treatise on what can befall a garden-variety passive-aggressive mixed blessing of a boyfriend if he’s not careful.

Set in 1973, amid a forest of shag carpeting, Annabelle Comes Home is a nice little summer surprise, and quite unexpectedly the freshest of the three “Annabelle” movies spun off from the larger “Conjuring” galaxy of horror films.

The stars, it must be said, are slightly more interesting than the characters, which is another way of saying Rogowski and Huller amplify what’s there on the page.

How did an apparently sincere tribute turn into such a weirdly clueless vanity project?

While we all, as moviegoers, experience franchise and sequel fatigue on our own unpredictable timetables, this film brightens the summer without simply going through the motions.

The musical score by Emile Mosseri of the band The Dig, is very fine stuff, supple and surprising in its blend of classical, jazz and pop strains. It adds to the otherworldly quality established and sustained so well by Talbot, and by the actors.

Men in Black: International isn’t bad; it’s an improvement over “Men in Black II” (2002) and “Men in Black 3” (2012), sequels that even its makers may have forgotten.

Amiable if frustrating picture.

Though jarringly violent at times, the film becomes a wash of low-keyed comic attitudes thrown into the works of a crime story.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

It moves with confidence; it’s vivid; it pulls off a riskier, full-on musical fantasy version of one pop superstar’s story.

In every good way, thanks primarily to Wong and Park and their chemistry, Always Be My Maybe is pure commercial product, yet it feels authentically alive where it counts.

The script’s quippy streak could’ve used better jokes. But this is one franchise that doesn’t feel fished out or exhausted or exhausting.The monsters, Toho studio classics redesigned but faithfully so, are pretty swell and monumentally destructive.

It plays as a comedy in its structure, and a drama in the margins, on the sidelines. Minor, clever, wonderfully acted, Non-Fiction makes room for jokes about “Star Wars,” Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and, at one point, Binoche herself. It’s funny that way.

Mainly, Booksmart works because Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are so magically right together.

As stand-alones, some of these work better than others. Director Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book” came off as a real movie unto itself, as did Kenneth Branagh’s sincere, well-acted “Cinderella” (I was in the minority on that one). Aladdin, though, feels pointless. It’s cinematic karaoke. It’s an ice show without the ice.