Michael Phillips

The movie doesn’t quite stick the landing, piling on while lingering at the gate for an extra 10 minutes or so. The gore level may not be a shock to fans of Alvarez’s previous features, but for the casual franchise fan, well, it’s gory. But the best of Alien: Romulus reminds us that some franchises are more open to a variety of directorial approaches than others.

The Instigators isn’t that bad, but it’s lazy, low-stakes stuff. Everyone on screen has done and been better.

If Kneecap has a somewhat pushy sense of broad comedy or, in the final third, some predictable dramatic beats, its visual invention wins the day, because it’s so comfortably allied with the songs of protest and release.

Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense.

Sing Sing exerts a strong pull on the heartstrings — but without the hard sell or the crafty, manipulative exertion.

This is an elegant and eloquent love letter from one master filmmaker to two of his prized idols.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

The biggest distinction between the first “Twister” and the new “Twisters” is one of conscience: This time, Kate, Javi and Tyler wrestle to varying degrees with how much of their time should be spent on their own pursuits versus helping tornado victims clean up after the latest round of misery.

It’s an unnerving portrait in forbidden desire and matched wills, sometimes acting as one barely controlled organism, often at fierce odds.

The script never quite feels itself; it feels like contradictory impulses playing out in shuffle mode. And the scale of the movie does the putative romance no favors.

I admire this film’s craft. And I would’ve appreciated a messier, inner-life impulse to go with it.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

If it has the edge over the 2018 and 2020 movies, the reason is simple though her talent certainly isn’t: Lupita Nyong’o.

The film is a mite thin, and occasionally glib. But Baker knows where the bittersweet human comedy lies in this mother, and this daughter.

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.

Chapter 1 feels like throat-clearing — a serviceable horse opera overture to a curiously dispassionate passion project.

Nichols has yet to make an uninteresting film; this one’s a stimulating collision of myth and realism, and keeping Comer at the core was a very smart move.

Now 94, Squibb takes care of business every minute in the enjoyable contrivance Thelma, which succeeds, sometimes in spite of itself, for reasons revealed in the first minute of writer-director Josh Margolin’s comedy.

It’s less about the healing power of theater and more about the persuasive power of the right actors working with two responsive filmmakers, sidestepping pitfalls and finding little nuggets of behavioral gold en route to a most unlikely Romeo’s opening night.

Even if “Inside Out 2” sometimes favors speed over, well, everything else, it’s gratifying to see an ordinary and, yes, anxious 13-year-old’s life, like millions and millions of lives right now, treated as plenty for a good, solid sequel, and without the dubious dramatics of the first movie’s climax.

Even with its drawbacks, I found “The Watchers” worth watching, even with its odd (and perhaps too faithful to the book) final 15 minutes. The director works well with cinematographer Eli Arenson to envelop the chamber-sized ensemble in various shades of dread, or comfort.

If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.

Based on Glenn Stout’s nonfiction account of the same title, “Young Woman and the Sea” gets by on the careful engineering of clichés, Daisy Ridley and a really good piece of irresistibly rousing history.

Not since “Out of Sight” has a sort-of-crime-thriller, sort-of-romantic-comedy led with its sensual interests over its violent ones. That’s my idea of a good trade, and Powell is more relaxed and easygoing on screen here than ever before.

Is the movie fun? Well, Furiosa’s story doesn’t really welcome that word. It’s gripping, even when it’s a bit of a trudge. Miller’s a visual genius. And a pile-driver. He’s also an adult, with a mature master filmmaker’s sensibility and serious intentions to go with his eternal-adolescent love of speed and noise.

See it, and see what you make of this new and quite wonderful example of this in-between cinematic tradition — and of Tony, Micah, Nichole, Nathaly and Makai, both real and imagined.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

I took the film not as any sort of design for living, or facile explanation of anything, but as a design for communicating — honestly, humanely, painfully, sometimes — for the good of whatever relationships yours happen to be.