Michael Phillips

Some of Cregger’s swings between straight-up horror, missing children mystery and deliriously gory comedy may lead to mass audience whiplash. But it’s pretty gripping, fiercely well-acted and — paradoxically, given its devotion to pitch-black cold creeps — one of the bright lights of a generally disappointing movie summer.

Even when Shanks hits the primary theme of his movie a little too insistently, the actors are vivid throughout. Brie, especially, is spectacularly effective in every emotional register, in the keys of D (Distress), E (Eh what’s going on with our suction-lips?) and C (Commitment is all).

It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.

It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

Fleifel’s film favors well-paced if slightly schematic prose, though the actors are more than good enough to keep you with these people every fraught minute.

When Aster lays off the easy comic despair in favor of more ambiguous and dimensional feelings, interactions and moments, Eddington becomes the movie he wanted. His script has a million problems with clarity, coincidence and the nagging drag of a protagonist set up for a long, grisly comeuppance, yet Eddington is probably Aster’s strongest film visually.

It’s nicely packed and quite funny, when it isn’t giving into Gunn’s trademark air of merry depravity.

There are flashes and occasional whole sequences when Edwards’ directorial eye snaps into focus.

Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth’s life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time.

F1 is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we’d really have something.

Without playing with anyone’s life, A Photographic Memory makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries.

It may make true love look all too Hollywood-easy in the end, but en route it’s still a Celine Song film.

The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

A beautiful mixed bag, let’s say, all told. But I’ll see The Phoenician Scheme a second time sometime for Cera, who will surely return to the Anderson fold.

The new “John Wick” spinoff Ballerina is recommendable, -ish, primarily for the way Anjelica Huston, as the Russian mob boss, makes a meal out of a single-syllable word near the end, delivered after a pause so unerringly timed it’s almost too good for this world.

Piani did the right thing in casting Rutherford, whose physical embodiment of Agathe suggests a tall, gangly, striking woman trying not to be seen. The actress leans into the character’s unsettled, often sullen side, though not at the expense of the comic tropes.

The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters’ sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors.

The climax of “Final Reckoning” is likewise impressive and scenic, but paced and edited less for the good of the overall movie and more for risk-verification purposes. That said, this franchise has class.

Besides being super-duper gory, of course, the new movie is jaunty, good-looking and full of what you might call esprit de corpses.

The teaming of Robinson and Rudd periodically gets Friendship in gear. But the film’s primary comic impulse equates to the sound of gears grinding, in an attempt to shift from second to third.

It works, even when the material’s routine, because Pugh’s forceful yet subtle characterization of a heavy-hearted killing machine with an awful childhood feels like something’s at stake. She and the reliably witty Harbour work well together.

The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress.

Given its premise, you wouldn’t expect The Accountant 2 to go for quite so much buddy comedy, but life is full of surprises.

It’s consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny in its open-hearted embrace of the DIY spirit, legal or otherwise.

Sinners is all over the place yet somehow all of a piece. Its themes aren’t new, but the variations feel fresh.

The rhythm and plotting of Misericordia subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte.

The film may be a silly thing, with manic swings from intimate (and pretty rough) violence to abrupt comic relief. But Fahy and Sklenar provide the glue.