Mick LaSalle

Shirley is slow and uneventful, but intermittently interesting, and Moss is great. In the end, what tips Shirley into the realm of recommendation is that Moss will be the only thing anyone remembers of the movie. That means that, even if it’s only an OK experience, it should last as a good memory.

Becky is no “Straw Dogs.” Really, it’s mostly just a nasty genre movie with some gruesome scenes of violence. But it’s served well by a script that doesn’t merely embrace the gimmick of a pubescent girl fighting bad guys — it takes it seriously enough to explore it, at least a little.

The High Note begins well, ends well and even has a good middle, but there’s one extra plot turn, about 15 minutes before the finish, that’s one too many. It doesn’t spoil the movie, but it adds an unwelcome touch of sentimentality into a story that is otherwise fairly tough throughout.

The documentary is eye-opening and very much worth seeing, even though it can’t help but be disheartening.

The Trip to Greece isn’t nonstop hilarity, but if you get into the rhythm of it, it’s laidback and pleasing. It’s an enjoyable trip in good company.

Sure, not everything is great. Here and there, the movie goes out of its way to be sentimental. But The Lovebirds is a pleasing comedy, funny from beginning to end. That should be enough for anybody.

Ultimately, this is a very predictable picture, made by the director of “The Full Monty,” Peter Cattaneo. Its formula inevitably rises up like a wave and submerges everything Thomas is trying to do. To extend the metaphor, she swims along and doesn’t drown. But unless you love this kind of movie, Military Wives will be, at best, a pleasant diversion and, at worst, a not-so-bad waste of time.

I hope casting agents and other industry types see Fourteen, because I want them to see Norma Kuhling (of the NBC series “Chicago Med”), who plays Jo. She takes this strong role, by writer-director Dan Sallitt, and hits it exactly right.

Capone is about as demented a movie as you can see right now, and that’s apart from the fact that it’s about a demented person. If Al Capone were ever put in an insane asylum (he wasn’t), this movie could have been made by the guy in the next room.

Adapted by Caitlin Moran, from her own semi-autobiographical novel, it’s both a dead-on take on what it’s like to be a young critic as well as a smart movie about class and 1990s culture.

Deerskin is funny, weird and original; it features two charismatic stars, and it does everything it needs to do in only 77 minutes.

Measured and somber, with few surprises.

There’s a French saying, “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” and usually, the more interesting story belongs to the one doing the kissing. In A Secret Love, that’s Pat.

Not surprisingly for a movie of this type, there are lots of scenes of violence, including hand-to-hand combat. The fight choreography is exceptional. In the “John Wick” movies, the violence seems almost like a ballet. Here the fighting is just as intricate, but it also seems like actual fighting, and Hemsworth seems like an actual person who’s doing it.

An interesting movie that doesn’t completely satisfy, but its central character lingers in the mind.

A movie with the power to freeze the mind and make anyone watching just want to stagger away mumbling nothing but “This is awful,” over and over, until the pain goes away.

A funny action comedy that comes into your house in a good mood and gets the reaction it’s supposed to get: laughs.

Directed by the Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska, The Other Lamb is slow-moving but never dull, because the world of it is so distinct and odd.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has made a controlled and reserved film, and she has placed at its center a reserved and controlled protagonist named Autumn, played with restraint by newcomer Sidney Flanagan.

You should approach Resistance as a fact-based World War II movie and not think much about the Marceau connection. The truth is, even if young Marcel didn’t go on to become a major artist, this was a story worth telling.

Hooking Up is a pretty good movie. I enjoyed it and could even imagine watching it again. But it’s also the movie that shows that Brittany Snow doesn’t have to be relegated to pretty good movies. She’s ready for better.

Not a masterpiece that will change your life, but you’ve probably had your life changed enough lately. It’s 90 minutes of thoughtful, atmospheric, well-made entertainment, and that’s more than good enough.

A lively and amiably stupid action movie, given an extra dose of atmosphere by the presence of Vin Diesel. He is his own quality control, his own authentic center, so that even in a story like this — a kind of Philip K. Dick for dummies — there’s something onscreen that’s not ridiculous, that’s reliable and consistently cool.

At some point or another, you will be offended by The Hunt. But see it anyway, confident in the certainty that other people — people you don’t agree with, people you don’t like — will be offended, too.

With Reichardt, you really do feel like you’re actually there. The only problem is that, a lot of the time, you’re really not happy to be there.

At times, the story seems like a side-show, and at other times, the serious information just seems discordant. However, to the movie’s credit, none of it is boring.

Burden is a film of integrity, with something even better than a social conscience. It has a social purpose. If you see it, you’ll learn something.

Elisabeth Moss is an acting event all by herself, a modern version of Bette Davis, and The Invisible Man gives her a chance to embody all kinds of emotional extremes — terror, dread, madness, inconsolable grief and murderous rage.

It’s funnier than most Austen adaptations and more visually beautiful, and then there’s the movie’s odd tone, which combines a rigorous attention to period detail with an arch and seemingly modern sensibility.

With Stewart, we arrive at the only saving grace of Seberg, but a genuine saving grace. She is the only reason to see the movie, but she’s a really good reason.

Onward goes on and on, but it barely moves forward. Long before its 114-minute running time has elapsed, it has overstayed its welcome.

A small, independent comedy-drama that does a number of things very well. It does them all quietly. The scenes don’t swing for the fences. The emotional work is true, not pushed, and by the end, the movie ends up giving the sense of a world.

The characters are engaging, and writer-director Stella Meghie is able to keep us interested in them for about an hour — and then the drama leaks out of the movie completely.

Downhill is not a funny movie and wasn’t intended to be. It has moments of humor, but of the more uncomfortable variety, not the kind that provoke laughter, but cringing.

There are many great acting moments in this film, but you should especially savor the final shot, the long close-up of Haenel in profile. Put simply, it’s why we go to the movies.

It’s not for people in the midst of their teen years, but for kids who are right on the edge of that social, hormonal discombobulation and are anticipating it with fear and dread. If “To All the Boys” gives courage and reassurance to apprehensive preteens — and is there any other kind? — then it will have served its public service. Still, as a movie, as entertainment … eh, it’s OK.

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is more than horrible. It should not exist. Money should never have been raised for it. The screenplay should never have been filmed. Margot Robbie shouldn’t have produced it. She certainly shouldn’t have starred in it. It’s just a terrible thing to inflict on audiences, who, after all, didn’t hurt anyone and just hoped to have a nice time.

The Assistant isn’t a particularly enjoyable film, but its message and quiet power linger for days.

It’s Lively’s movie, and it’s she who kicks this superior thriller up an extra notch, to the point that it’s not only worth seeing for the excitement and thrills, but for her.

Of course, the real problem here isn’t that Ritchie isn’t Noel Coward, but that he’s not clever or funny in his own right. The Gentleman isn’t offensive, and it’s not even good enough to qualify as coarse. If it weren’t mildly annoying, it would be as close to nothing as an experience can be.

So there you have it, a so-so movie with a lot of good parts. In truth, The Last Full Measure has more good parts than most better movies, but everything connecting those parts feels rote, sometimes ham-fisted.

Clemency is slow and without much suspense. The real question isn’t whether this person or that person will be executed, but whether Bernardine will go to pieces, and yet with a performance like Woodard’s at the center, that’s all a movie needs.

A funny, satisfying action comedy that never disappoints.

As a slice of life, Les Misérables is satisfying enough, but as the film wears on, the movie goes beyond the slice of life. It steers in the direction of drama and consequences, as the story narrows, and pressures come to a boil.

Eubanks takes someone else’s screenplay, one that’s full of incident, and infuses it with his own sensibility. Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t a writer, either. Being a good director with a real point of view — that’s plenty.

It’s just cheap, it’s bad, and a completely out-of-left-field Pink Floyd reference — one of their employees is named Syd, the other Barrett — doesn’t help. It just feels like part of the general sloppiness.

Just Mercy isn’t the best movie that could have been made from its subject, but it’s good enough.

I saw this movie in the middle of the day, having had a great night’s sleep, and I had to slap myself awake a few times.

Invisible Life is not an entirely fun watch, and its 139-minute running time is an investment and sometimes feels like it. But it offers something more than the usual experience.

There’s a mystery at the heart of The Song of Names, but it isn’t much of a mystery, and once it’s solved, the movie loses what little interest it has. Though not exactly a Holocaust drama, the film is one in which the Holocaust figures tangentially, but crucially. Yet the movie’s overall effect is strangely inert.

So the most noticeable thing about the first minutes of Greta Gerwig’s new screen adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is that the women in Little Women seem just a little bit snooty here, more like privileged actresses from 2019 than like a Northern family living in genteel poverty during the Civil War.

By the time it ends, Mendes has built within the audience an intense desire to see the men’s message successfully delivered, and like a true dramatist, Mendes milks it for every drop of tension. He does not blow his big finish.

Uncut Gems remains, from start to finish, a tale told about an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. By the time it’s all over, nothing is exactly what you might feel. But Sandler and Fox give it the humanity the Safdies wanted there. The movie needed it and got it from the actors.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does the most important thing, the one thing it absolutely had to do. It ends well.

Jewell is not just a man, but a type, and his story is a warning, not just about the excesses of power, but about our own reflexive assumptions. Paul Walter Hauser gives us the soul of a man that deserved respect even before he did something heroic, but one that people might never have noticed.

A superb drama about sexual harassment at Fox News.

Even worse, Little Joe is a horror movie that, rather astonishingly, lacks a climax. The ending falls off a cliff. The result is not to make viewers ponder the unresolved and wonder what might happen next, but to question how they’ve spent the past 105 minutes.

If you have any fear of heights, The Aeronauts is one of the most excruciating movie experiences since “The Walk” (2015), which replicated Philippe Petit’s high-wire stunt between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.

The Two Popes is movie nirvana, but anyone watching could appreciate the clash between these opposing dispositions and world views.

One of the consistent pleasures of Knives Out is that, while its style evokes an earlier era, the script is very much a witty response to today’s world.

Essentially, this is a two-person picture that falls flat.

But let’s be fair: If this were the first cop movie ever made, we’d be grateful for it. It holds interest. It’s never quite boring. And there are worse things you can do with your time than watch Boseman, Miller and Simmons for an hour and a half. Just know that 21 Bridges is the kind of movie you’ll forget five minutes after seeing it.

As Mister Rogers, Tom Hanks does something very important, besides looking and sounding enough like Fred Rogers that we can accept him in the role. He captures the supreme self-confidence it takes to be that nice and giving.

At its best, and it’s mostly at its best, Frozen II has an air of enchantment.

As a movie, Charlie’s Angels has serious problems, but the new Angels trio is promising and shows there’s life yet in the old formula. There’s something going on here. It’s just not quite there yet.

This is interesting, at least reasonably. But to a large extent, how you perceive the film will have much to do with how you see the story as relating to today’s headlines.

Ultimately, Ford v Ferrari is about art versus commerce, devotion versus cynicism, and inspiration versus deadness. It’s one of the year’s great films, and of all the great films so far, the most accessible.

The back and forth, the listening and reacting between Mirren and McKellen, as each of their characters gauges the other and as we mark the incremental shifts and exchanges of power, is pure pleasure.

Most of Last Christmas consists of watching this young woman stumble and fumble through life, and thanks to Clarke’s effortless ability to engage a viewer’s sympathy, that’s almost enough.

From the beginning, Midway has awkward dialogue and an atmosphere that seems a bit too 2019, but for a time, the movie’s high stakes make up for that.

The Irishman is all about the end of something. It is to gangster movies what John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” was to westerns. Without a doubt, it’s a masterpiece.

By the Grace of God begins to spin its wheels, with unnecessary scenes that give color to the events, when we’re more interested in the grand movements.

In the end, the great fault of Terminator: Dark Fate is that the filmmakers didn’t trust what they had. They didn’t trust how much audiences enjoy Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They didn’t trust their audience’s interest enough to let the movie breathe. They thought Hamilton and Schwarzenegger could be seasonings for a dish of the usual slop.

It’s far from the worst movie ever produced, but it’s a one-of-a-kind disaster, and therefore interesting.

At times, Harriet is a little too romantic — never quite schmaltzy — but it feels like a movie perhaps a bit more than it should. Still, it’s effective and, at times, moving, and it has a major asset in Erivo.

Waititi adopts a tone that’s wild enough to accommodate all possibilities, so that even while we’re laughing, we’re in a state of anxiety.

The Current War is even better than it has to be. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung give the film a swooping elegance, so that shots that start as close-ups gracefully glide into medium shots, and medium shots give way to vistas. The camera is always moving in a way that suggests grace and flow.

Its main virtue is that it provides Murphy with a juicy role.

Pure fun and worth seeing if you want to laugh.

Cohn was a strange mix of self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, or maybe that’s a familiar mix. In any case, he emerges from the film partly sympathetic, if only because he seemed so miserable all his life, but mainly as the prime example of what Shakespeare meant when he said, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

The saddest thing about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is that it’s not bad, but typical, that this emptiness — this immersion in mass numbification — is the modern style.

The Lighthouse is more than four times longer than a “Twilight Zone” episode, and 100 times worse.

Incidentally, this is an Ang Lee film, though, beyond the first-rate production values, you wouldn’t know it. Lee seems happy that he has embraced technology, but what’s the point if the technology is in the service of an empty exercise? He has made one movie like this and doesn’t need to make another.

Economically and stunningly, Almodovar combines a high sense of style with a deep sense of humanity, along with a touch of erotic beauty that has always characterized his work.

But throwing fairy dust in our eyes can’t make us think we’ve entered Fairy Land. It just takes a lowdown tale and inflates it until it bursts.

The Laundromat finds director Steven Soderbergh in a playful mood, but this time he’s a little too playful, and the result is a scattered and seemingly trivial movie about a serious subject — a lighthearted, jolly expose of international money laundering.

It’s a very good movie, and it features a blood-curdling performance from Joaquin Phoenix, in the most frightening portrayal of a violent maniac in decades. One more thing: It’s clearly a response to the times.

To be sure, The Death of Dick Long is a weird one, in that it starts out intense and gradually loses steam, until nothing really matters and the audience might as well leave. This movie could be used in film schools to teach how not to structure a story.

A great movie was within reach with Judy — the new Judy Garland biopic starring Renee Zellweger — but the producers and creators made an epic mistake: They didn’t use Garland’s actual vocals. Instead, they let Zellweger pinch-hit for Babe Ruth and ended up spoiling the movie.

In fact, none of the performances here are phoned in. Freeman shows great aptitude for the presidency and should consider running — then he could play the president onscreen and off. And as the vice president, Tim Blake Nelson finally gets a role worthy of his depth.

You can watch 100 movies and never see such joyless joy as in Blinded by the Light.

There are a lot of little things wrong with Where’d You Go, Bernadette, but one big thing right: Cate Blanchett. She takes the title role and has a party with it. The little things wrong can’t be summed up in a sentence, but they linger in the mind and intrude on the memory of the movie, once the bedazzlement of Blanchett’s performance starts to wear off.

The big problem of Good Boys is not that it’s harsh or nasty or outrageous or tasteless or shocking or appalling. The problem is that it’s none of those things, when it should have been all of those things. It’s safe and sentimental, with just a few mild laughs.

There’s a Danish film called “After the Wedding” which was released here in 2007 and nominated for the foreign film Oscar. It didn’t win — it had the bad luck to be nominated against “The Lives of Others,” which was even better. But it’s a great film. The new After the Wedding is the American remake, and it’s fascinating. That is, it’s fascinating in that it’s not even close to great, despite using the same scenario. Indeed, it would be a real lesson in filmmaking to watch both movies back to back, just to see how to do things and how not to do things. And, just to clarify, the new After the Wedding would be in the “how not to do things” category.

Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up and the rest of the movie disappears.

Speaking of female gangsters, no review of The Kitchen should overlook Margo Martindale, who steals every scene she’s in as a mob matriarch — a gravelly voiced monster with a gutter mouth and a big photo of John F. Kennedy on her wall. Martindale gets to be evil and has as much fun onscreen as she can without smiling.

These scenes of raving nonsense might have seemed radical in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re just tiresome.

Despite some real virtues, Brian Banks as a whole, is only a break-even experience.

Late Night is a fairly agreeable experience, and every time Thompson is on screen, there’s a reason to keep watching.

“Hobbs & Shaw” is witty and mischievous, full of surprise and invention, and a total blast.

Throughout the film, Pitt exudes charm and a philosophical nature, but also the possibility of explosiveness. He doesn’t show you everything. What do you say about a performance like this? Scene by scene, Pitt seems to know what to do, all the time — and he never makes it look like work.

If Zabeil didn’t want to deliver a formula picture, he needed to come up with something better than the formula.

The Farewell has a special feeling about it. It’s full of truth and emotion, and lacking in sentimentality. It has an eye for absurdity and for the telling detail, and it marks Lulu Wang as a director with the rare but essential ability to make you care about what she cares about. It will go down as one of the standout movies of 2019.

The main pleasure of Sword of Trust is in watching an ensemble of expert comic actors play off of each other. The movie was improvised, based on a tightly constructed story, and every scene has some comic jewel in it, some unexpected touch or moment.

The upshot is a film that is stunning to look at, even inspiring at times, but dramatically bizarre. Obviously, this technology has its place, but it makes too strong a statement to be casually used in remakes.

Written and directed by Riley Stearns, The Art of Self-Defense brings out a particularly skillful performance from Eisenberg, whose job is to harmonize the film’s odd shifts in tone and make something real and heartfelt of the central character’s journey.

This film is like cynicism transformed into celluloid, a movie made without love and with no vision, except of dollar signs.

Ultimately Maiden is very much a feel-good movie, a tale of underdogs finding their strength, combined with a character study and a sprinkling of social history. After the Maiden, women in sailing had to be taken seriously.

Don’t be misled by the middling rating attached to this review. Midsommar is anything but mediocre. It’s horrible and brilliant, a crashing failure but one with many good moments. What do you say about a movie that’s both a disgusting, tiresome and predictable endurance test and an irrefutable demonstration of real directorial talent? Perhaps, this: Ari Aster is definitely someone who should be making movies. But maybe not this movie.

One thing Yesterday does is rather miraculous. It forces us to hear these Beatles songs as if for the first time.

A smart, controlled film, made with considerable integrity. It doesn’t try to scare you with loud noises or threaten you with the imminent certainty of seeing something disgusting. Instead, it throws a handful of characters into a simple, yet harrowing, situation and then explores that situation in depth.

If there were any justice in the world — there often isn’t — Alice Guy-Blaché would be remembered alongside D.W. Griffith as one of the great pioneers of the early screen. The good news is that she is becoming better known, but as the new documentary, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché makes clear, not nearly as much as she deserves, nor for the right reasons.

Toy Story 4 is genuinely gripping for most of the way, with just a couple of minor dips. But it arrives at a lovely place, with an embrace of life in all its danger and uncertainty.

Indeed, it's hard to figure out why this film was even made, beyond the fact that it could be made, that there was a loose idea and talented people willing to join in the fun. It's neither serious nor funny enough, and it adds nothing to Jarmusch's reputation. If anything, it might hurt it retroactively.

This is a tale from the front lines, before the disease had a name, through the early days when no one knew for sure how it was transmitted.

The film is mildly diverting, occasionally engaging, certifiably workmanlike and altogether too flat an experience to inspire any strong feelings, positive or negative. It’s just there. Some people watch movies for the same reason others climb mountains, because they are there. Well, this is a movie for that audience.

With Pavarotti, director Ron Howard serves up a straightforward documentary about the great tenor’s life and career. It’s just a birth-to-death saga, featuring interviews with colleagues and loved ones and a catalogue of greatest hits, so nothing fancy here. But if you can find a better way to spend two hours, take it — I’ll stick with this.

To an extent, the movie waters down its moral complexity by introducing a flat-out villainess, who begins to guide Jean’s actions, thus absolving Jean of some moral responsibility. Still, it’s hard to complain when the villainess is played by Jessica Chastain, the best person in the world to play a cool, coiffed, composed entity of evil, looking for a new planet for her displaced people.

Audiences will walk out with that good chiropractor feeling, the one that says, “Yes, I have been manipulated. I have been nothing but manipulated and pounded on for the past 90 minutes. And it was a very satisfying thing.”

What little pleasures the movie offers are small and intermittent. Kyle Chandler gets to unleash his inner Shatner by acting intense every moment that he’s on screen.

Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.

With Brightburn there’s not even the pretense of idealism. It’s a superhero movie with the soul of an ’80s slasher film.

Aladdin, the live-action remake of the 1992 Disney animation, is more than a pleasant surprise. It’s a complete delight that stands up its own and is, in many ways, an improvement on the original.

The experience of watching it is rather like swooping down and catching people living their lives.

You know what movie is even better than this? “Never Goin’ Back” (2018) from writer-director Augustine Frizzell, about two 17-year-old girls trying to raise money for a weekend getaway. It’s something like Booksmart, minus the rich Californians and the faint whiff of politically correct self-congratulation. Unfortunately, no one saw “Never Goin’ Back,” because it’s about working-class girls in Texas.

When the end finally arrives, it brings no sense of completion, just a sort of numb awareness that the pain has stopped.

Aside from the defection scene, the only tension in The White Crow concerns whether Nureyev will achieve the renown he deserves or whether his career will be killed in the crib. That’s not nothing, but it’s small stuff to peg a two-hour movie on, especially one with an unsympathetic protagonist.

There is a kind of historical British movie — Tolkien is one of them — that almost feels as if the subject were incidental.

Like the best love stories, funny or otherwise, this movie also recognizes that being in love is an education, and that, if people are lucky, they choose the right teacher.

It’s rather amazing that Sophie Cookson, who has most of the screen time as young Joan, isn’t detestable in the role. It tells you that she’d be perfectly charming in another movie. Actually, Dench is more off-putting here, if only because destructive naivete is more forgivable in the young.

If you partake of the Marvel universe, this movie is for you no matter what. And if you don’t, seeing it would be like going to church if you’re an atheist — an experience of spectacle unmoored from any purpose or definition. In the case of “Endgame,” we’re talking fine spectacle, to be sure, the best that money can buy. But all the same, this one is strictly for the faithful.

So, Dogman is a strange case: Great actor, great character, but a story that’s like an overstretched anecdote infused with art-film portent.

The movie’s one flaw, a notable one, is that the first hour is better than the second. The first is jaw-dropping. In the second half, the film slow downs somewhat, but by then, the audience is hooked into the movie’s reality, so there’s no turning away.

Everyone comes out of Little Woods looking good, and DaCosta comes out with a directing career.

Fast Color is not a success, in that it’s not enjoyable as entertainment. It doesn’t hold an audience.

It’s admirable, but it has long stretches of dull, and the tickets aren’t free.

Is Little lousy? No. It goes along pleasantly, unimportantly, predictably. Here and there, a mild chuckle might escape your lips. Ten minutes later, a half-hearted titter, or perhaps a knowing chortle. Just don’t expect to guffaw or cachinnate, and forget all about busting a gut. It’s not that kind of comedy.

In The Chaperone, Brooks is something of a fixed entity, a fully-formed force of nature already heading toward her peculiar form of glory. She has stuff to do all day — studying by day and partying by night, while Elizabeth McGovern as Norma has time to look inside.

Estevez further undermines the film by casting himself in the lead role. He gives an odd performance, in which he consistently seems to be going for enigmatic, but he ends up just inexpressive.

The movie also benefits from the presence of Anne Heche as Ellis’ wife. Heche doesn’t say much, but she conveys a lot.

With Diane, as in life, it feels like nothing’s going on, but everything’s going on.

Yes, eventually, after about 100 minutes, it does default back to the usual nonsense, of protracted superhero battles in which no one can get hurt, and of commotion that makes a movie screen seem like a very big computer monitor. But until then, Shazam! is sensitive, imaginative and funny, with a good story and a smart premise.

It’s a lovely children’s movie, which isn’t to say that every moment of it is splendid and enchanted, because that’s not the case. The experience of watching Dumbo is more like, “This is OK, this is all very pleasant” — and then suddenly, there are tears in your eyes, and not from allergy season.

We can only describe the result, which is that this director — in her first feature film — has the ability to synthesize emotions and ideas through pictures. She shows you something; it means something, and you know what it means. She has an emotion, so she shows you something else, and you feel it, too.

Last time, Peele made a movie about the country. This time he made a movie about himself, and it’s even better.

There’s nothing wrong with Aftermath, but for one strange and nagging thing: To watch it is to want to be faraway from its world and everyone in it. The movie draws a circle around itself that holds no attraction or appeal, though it’s in every other way competent, well-acted and reasonably intelligent.

At 116 minutes, Five Feet Apart is too much of a just-OK thing. All the same, I want to see Haley Lu Richardson’s next movie.

The story, based on a novel by Victor Headley, is pointless and occasionally ridiculous. And the movie is hardly helped by a protagonist that we’re expected to care about, even as he does an unending series of colossally stupid, violent and self-destructive things.

The good news is that the pace picks up — Giant Little Ones actually gets better as it goes along. And despite its lapses into self-consciousness, the movie presents us with a set of characters that we end up believing and caring about – not tremendously, but enough to keep watching to see how they all turn out.

The best we can hope to get from a movie of this kind is an interesting story, a hint of the artist’s work, some factual accuracy and surfaces that make sense. We get that from Mapplethorpe. And while Smith can’t show us Mapplethorpe’s depths, he can suggest them, enough so that, if anyone wants to know more, they can consult the ultimate source — Mapplethorpe’s own work.

Let’s get the bad news over with quickly: Captain Marvel is no “Wonder Woman.”

It’s innovative and exhilarating at times, and then innovative and oppressive and relentless and repetitive and tiresome, but it’s never exactly boring. People will walk out of Climax, not for lack of interest, but for lack of endurance.

Greta is not just silly but obvious, and without any hint of a larger purpose, beyond hitting the various plot points of the human monster genre. Twenty minutes before the finish, it degenerates into a joke, and not a good one, but just fair enough to see through to the end.

The movie’s failure to engage is illustrated by directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s approach to the climactic scene. They shoot it almost entirely in long shot, as if inviting the audience not to care — or worse, as if admitting there was nothing to care about, after all.

Refreshing and worth seeing.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the subliminal appeal of the dragons — why these animated creatures look adorable on screen and not menacing at all — here’s why: Their movements, behaviors and expressions are based on cats. Once you know, it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Isn’t It Romantic isn’t romantic, and it isn’t funny. It’s a bad idea stretched to feature length, a gimmick picture that never gets past its gimmick and never grows into something better. It runs 88 minutes and runs about 80 minutes too long.

As is often the case with Farhadi’s films, Everybody Knows progresses as though nothing special were happening, and yet it’s all very interesting, anyway.

"Alita” is an action movie, and some of that is who-cares. But the bigger thing about this film is that it makes us think about humanness, what it means, what it is, and what it might be in the future.

Despite very little dialogue and only one actor with a speaking role, Arctic has a smart script. Something is always happening.

Neeson is as earnest as ever, but the movie’s tone is arch. Neeson doesn’t think he’s funny, but the director thinks everything is funny, or at the very least, absurd.

A real surprise. It seems to promise an exploitative genre movie, about gangsters and drug deals, and it delivers on that, but it’s something more. Director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocet have taken a Mexican thriller, with a female victim at its center, and have turned it into an intelligent feminist film.

But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that the rewards of They Shall Not Grow Old are in any way akin to that of the usual BBC historical documentary. There is some overlap, to be sure, but by and large this Peter Jackson film does not offer a historical encounter, so much as an encounter of humanity, a psychic linking of hands across time.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: If Gilroy wanted to set a horror movie in the world of art commerce, fine. No problem. It’s not a bad idea. But to do it, Gilroy needed to respect the horror genre enough to create something sophisticated. Instead he went to the horror bargain basement and pulled out the cheapest horror conventions he could find, straight out of slasher bin.

Serenity is not just awful. It’s amazingly awful, which means that very few people will want to see it, but some probably will. People who can enjoy laughing at something made in dead earnest, who can appreciate, in a perverse way, a phenomenal, jaw-dropping mess, may find an experience close to pleasure in this strange, misbegotten, three-headed freak of a movie.

The young actors are adequate, but they’re not intrinsically interesting, so their interior movements hold no fascination. With that in mind, The Kid Who Would Be King should have been an hour long, but an extra 20 minutes, just to stretch it to feature length, would have been forgivable. But a full 120 minutes for this was just borderline crazy.

Polish actress Joanna Kulig has been waiting for years to show what she can do, and in Cold War she gets the chance. She takes the role of a lifetime between her teeth, chomps on it, pounds it into the ground and never lets go for a second. Ferocity and intensity are present in every moment of her performance, even when she’s contained. With Cold War, Kulig breaks out as a lioness of international cinema.

Unoriginal, except in the ways that it’s bad.

French cinema has a lot going for it, but the one thing Americans do best is story. And so “Intouchables,” now The Upside, has a story that finally works.

Destroyer makes “Manchester By the Sea” seem like an afternoon party with clowns and balloon animals. But if there’s a reason to see Destroyer, it’s for Kidman’s performance. It’s to take that journey with her.

A gentle movie. It’s valedictory, with a sense of the ephemeral nature of life, the inevitability of regret, and the bittersweetness of looking back on past happiness.

As an exploration and celebration of a sub-culture, the movie fails. The people don’t seem especially bright or interesting. Whatever fascination Moselle felt for this world doesn’t come across in the movie.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in this role but Redford. Without him, there would be little here worth seeing.

To be clear, there are dazzling sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, and virtually every minute has something interesting in it. It’s absolutely worth seeing as a curiosity. But as a work of narrative art it doesn’t sustain itself for its full two-hour running time. After an hour, you might even have to struggle to stay awake.

Escape Room is an amusement park ride. It has no reason for being beyond that base-level kick, and it doesn’t, as they say, transcend the genre. But there’s something to be said for amusement park rides. People like them for good reason.

A serious movie that slowly earns its emotion and enlists our involvement. Even before the finish, it’s goosebumps all around.

Perhaps because Jenkins can’t translate to the screen the incisiveness and music of Baldwin’s prose, he brings on real music from other sources. Over and over, and increasingly as the movie wears on, Jenkins drowns his film in mirthless jazz and pop interludes to the point that the action feels stuck in cement.

Dick Cheney deserves better than this — or worse. So does Lynn Cheney, played by Amy Adams, who strains in vain to give dimension to a script that paints Mrs. Cheney as little more than an amoral social climber.

So, there you have it, a bad good movie, or a good bad movie, but a very decent Jennifer Lopez movie.

The story doesn’t deliver. The songs are forgettable. And the magic never descends. Supposedly, Mary Poppins returns, but that’s not Mary. Emily Blunt stole somebody’s umbrella.

This is a moderately but consistently entertaining film, with but one extraordinary thing about it, which is Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

What makes Ben Is Back different is that, even if this kind of pain is completely outside your own experience, you’ll feel some of it watching this movie.

The effort behind Bird Box was to make something better than a standard horror movie, but the result is dull and half-hearted. It’s not serious enough or important enough to transcend the horror genre, but neither is it visceral enough to hold up as a regulation horror movie.

The filmmaking seems caught between a genuine desire to present life as it’s actually lived and an obligation (self-imposed) to be politically correct at all times. Even so, the filmmakers, here and there, craft scenes that have the ring of truth.

There are great movies every year, but every so often there’s a movie that’s not only great but new, that advances the form a little, that pushes movies to a different place. Such movies get remembered as the thing that happened in cinema that year. The thing that happened in 2018 is Vox Lux.

It’s a bit crazy, wild yet precise, a mix of comedy and drama that feints in the direction of anachronism, even as it provides a grand showcase for Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, who are extraordinary.

Far from the year’s best movie, but in its best moments, it demonstrates a profound cinematic mastery.

Creed II can’t be new this time out, but it does prove that the characters and relationships introduced in the first movie have staying power. People can keep making these movies and no one will mind.

A near-miss, but a miss all the same.

There’s something so deeply right about this movie, so true to the time depicted and so welcome in this moment; so light in its touch, so properly respectful of its characters, and so big in its spirit that the movie acquires a glow.

Most of Widows isn’t felt. It’s a cold exercise, and occasionally a ridiculous one, as when McQueen tries to get fancy, with camera angles that make no sense.

The strength of the Coens is that they are so witty, skilled and smart, so in command of their medium, so fluid and agile, so capable of surprising and delighting from every angle, that they can make the grimmest story bearable, even palatable.

Foy is anything but mysterious or feral. Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace, who previously played this role, seemed appropriately weird, but weird depends on hiding something, and Foy hides nothing.

Pike’s Colvin is brave, but she’s not tough, and, scene by scene, she reveals more and gives more than she probably means to.

Maria By Callas finds lots of press footage that most of us have never seen, filmed interviews either for television or newsreels, and it’s all fascinating.

Joel Edgerton, who wrote and directed, co-stars in Boy Erased. Edgerton casts himself as Sykes, who runs the conversion program, and he couldn’t have found a better actor for the role.

Suspiria is not just a movie unworthy of your time. It’s an experience one should reflexively recoil from, up there with things like fire, pain, humiliation and embarrassment. Easily, it’s one of the worst movies of 2018.

Bohemian Rhapsody is probably what Freddie Mercury was aiming for all along, a big, splashy, half-true biopic in the Hollywood style. It’s a bit corny, but grand; a bit obvious, but entertaining, and inspiring almost in spite of itself.

Wildlife isn’t dazzling entertainment but an intelligent, low-key and satisfying film with a rare respect for every character.

Hunter Killer seems old-fashioned. It belongs to a genre that was pretty much exhausted before the Cold War was over. And it threatens us with a world that, from the standpoint of 2018, doesn’t look all that bad. The movie is overlong, at times confusing, and it’s self-important, with a soundtrack that keeps telling us we feel things that we don’t.

A breakthrough for McCarthy and a highlight of the movie year.

The Oath is harsh. It’s extreme. It goes to places you don’t expect, and then past those places. It’s the most unpleasant comedy in a long time, and lots of people will absolutely hate it. It’s also one of the best movies of the year.

The directorial talent is there. Now if he can just be persuaded to let someone else write the script next time, we might have something serious to talk about.

Can’t we just stipulate that everything that Greengrass is saying is right, and then go see “A Star Is Born” again? Can’t we give ourselves a break?

In the end, Venom exists in what may end up being regarded as a no-man’s land — too much like a superhero movie to appeal to people who despise the genre, and yet too deliberately silly to be taken seriously by superhero fans. There’s nothing memorable in Venom, nothing to talk about the next day. But if it happens to hit you right, its lightness is refreshing.

There is plenty that’s wrong with it, and there’s plenty that’s right with it. But the truth is, in the moment, no one is balancing pros and cons. I just loved it. It’s a film that combines an overall feeling of modernity and relevance with the glow of old-time glamour.

Colette is never dazzling. It has erotic elements, but nothing like “Becoming Colette,” which is, on balance, a weaker film. There’s not a single great scene. But there is no scene that is less than intelligent. Colette is smart, conscientious and absorbing, and gradually, in its diligent way, achieves a certain fascination.

The promise is double the fun, double the laughs, and the movie can’t quite deliver on that. But there are still big laughs to be had, and there’s the pleasure of watching these two gifted comedians sharing the same frame.

Thanks to Radner’s letters, diaries and autobiography, director Lisa D’Apolito is able to tell us, with great immediacy, what Radner’s thoughts were at the time. We come away with the portrait of someone who was never just going along for the ride, but who was always questioning and challenging herself, working toward professional excellence and hoping for an ideal romance.

Juliet, Naked is very like a Hornby novel in that it’s irresistible and appealing and full of tenderness and idiosyncrasy, and yet when you try to tell people what was so great about it, you can’t do it justice.

Hunnam makes a strong impression as a tough guy in the title role, but there’s something about either him or the filmmaking or the subject matter that allows viewers to resist making his problems our problems.

The movies have been heading toward this for a while, and now with Mile 22 we get a film that is almost wall-to-wall violence. There is very little talk, and what little talk there is is entirely confrontational. People are either cursing at each other, threatening each other or killing each other.

As Hunt’s life unravels, so does the movie, though the story maintains a certain baseline of interest just by virtue of being sordid.

Spike Lee is relevant again. He's necessary again.

Wondering what’s real and what’s just a carefully crafted crock doesn’t make Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood a better experience. It makes it a little pointless and frustrating.

It’s a tired, inert sci-fi thriller featuring a succession of escalating action sequences that all, somehow, fail to ignite. The cliches mount.

In any case, Puzzle ends strangely, in a way that’s not clear what the filmmakers intended or how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional.

It is never remotely serious, and yet for the most part it isn’t funny, either.

The movie is 105 minutes long but seems about 45 minutes longer, with uneventful stretches and at least three sections where the action stops for musical interludes featuring goopy pop music.

Cruise and McQuarrie have made the best film in the franchise’s history and the most enjoyable and exciting action movie in several years.

Even now, I can’t decide if it was horrible or if I liked it and must conclude that both things must be true. It really was horrible, and I liked it, anyway.

One of the year’s great films, and somehow you can tell from the opening moments.

Something about Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot keeps it from adding up to a satisfying movie experience. It has the feeling, rather, of a story you might hear about a friend of friend.

Too bad. The trappings of The Equalizer 2 are first-rate — the star, the director, the central character, the concept — and they make for a movie that’s watchable and intermittently pleasing. But not enough time was spent getting the substance right.

Shock and Awe is no “All the President’s Men,” but it does present a nice balance to the earlier film’s ultimately rosy picture.

It’s slow getting off the ground, and never completely achieves flight, at least not in the sense of transport. It remains a series of sequences, some terrific and some less so, but at least the movie keeps finding new ways for people to fall off a building while on fire. So there’s that.

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind captures that special quality that Williams had, the extra quality that went beyond the laughs, that communicated his whole being.

As fresh as today’s newspaper — or a blog post — or a tweet from a minute ago. It’s a response to what is going on right now, and it feels like it, not only in content, but in form.

Three Identical Strangers tells a remarkable story. In fact, it tells several. It’s already extraordinary 20 minutes in, and then it goes to unexpected and yet more amazing places, like a narrative feature by a master storyteller.

If you liked Whitney Houston before, you’ll like her even more after seeing this. You’ll also admire her and feel pity for her and feel frustrated by her.

Damsel is a misguided exercise, a 113-minute mistake and a waste of time, but it does have a good opening.

Boundaries is a slog, a succession of weak and uninteresting incidents, leading to a conclusion that seems foreordained.

Howard and Pratt don’t get to do much besides run like hell, but a movie like this in a way emphasizes rather than obscures the importance of star quality. They’re just so good-looking that it’s a pleasure to watch them -- idealized surrogates for humanity.

Tag isn’t interesting at all, but its failure is. It’s the kind of movie that makes the viewer ask questions, such as, why isn’t this working? Why is this bombing? Why is this dying the death? Why am I shifting in my seat just to stay conscious? The movie seems like it should be funny, but it’s not, so why?

One of the nicest things about Hearts Beat Loud, and there are several nice things, is the way that Offerman and Clemons seem like father and daughter. This is the work of the actors, but also of the director.

Incredibles 2 was 14 years in the making, and it feels almost that long watching it.

As a first-time director, Pearce manages something difficult. He creates a tone that acknowledges absurdity, but also consequences. He finds an edge that’s extreme, that’s weird, that’s satirical and that goes right to the edge of farce, and yet the movie is at all points as involving as an intense drama.

From a narrative feature, we want drama and illumination, the truths that go beyond the plain facts. That’s where Mary Shelley comes up a bit short. It’s never less than competent and intelligent, and here and there it’s better than that.

Woodley has been first-rate in everything she’s been in, particularly the “Divergent” series. But there’s something about her performance here that feels like the sincere and dutiful dispersal of medicine.

As entertainment, On Chesil Beach isn’t remotely satisfying, but it does deserve credit for being weird.

First Reformed has a confidence about it, the presence of filmmaking consciousness that can’t do wrong, because this time he knows exactly what he wants to say, not only in a general sense, but second by second and shot by shot.

There is a built-in pleasure in seeing Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda and Mary Steenburgen in the same movie. We’re used to them. We like them. We like being around them — but not so much that we can’t notice that Book Club is a pretty strained affair, not especially funny and weirdly off key.

The performances are extraordinary, as they often are in Beauvois’ films, with Baye a study in quiet suffering and Bry wonderfully enigmatic — seemingly simple, but hinting at a soul capable of expansion and adaptation.

The Seagull has all the big things going for it and yet so many little things going against it that it’s just not the movie it might have been.

The last half hour and the lively opening make us almost forget the movie’s so-so middle. It brings all the elements together, points to the future and keeps the action to a human-scale minimum. If you want to see Solo: A Star Wars Story, I wouldn’t talk you out of it.

After shooting lots of people and cutting lots of throats, Deadpool tries blowing himself up, something he probably should have done first. And with that, the movie shifts. Deadpool 2 becomes less violent and a lot funnier. It becomes a much better movie than the original “Deadpool,” not an action bloodbath with laughs, but a knowing spoof of the superhero genre.

Measure of a Man is intended as a touching coming-of-age film about one crucial summer in a young man’s life. But it’s a movie of gestures and feints, in which we’re constantly being told of events and relationships rather than seeing or feeling them.

If there’s a weakness to the movie, it’s that, despite its gut-level appeal, it doesn’t dazzle us with anything brilliant or unexpected. However, there are some nifty turns here and there, so it’s not entirely mediocre.

Life of the Party presents a situation more than a story, and in that it’s more like a sitcom than a conventional movie.

Two good characters and two good performances go into the old poubelle — or, as we say in English, the garbage bin.

Tully doesn’t expand as it goes along. It feels insulated and hermetically sealed, and it seems to get smaller.

The women are remarkable, unforgettable. But don’t overlook Nivola, an enigmatic figure as the rabbi and husband.

Ginsburg herself is determined to last. Several scenes show her working out with a trainer. Her goal is to live long enough for a Democratic president to appoint her successor.

It’s a deep and moving investigation into one woman’s inner struggle as she goes about looking for true love.

In color, style and humor — even in its graphics and editing — it’s very much like a Godard film from the mid-1960s. Thus, the experience is like watching an actual Godard film — the first great Godard film since “Masculin Féminin” in 1966.

All this makes Zama interesting and unique and something to be respected. But none of this translates into anything resembling a satisfying narrative or even entertainment as we know it. Still, as bleak experiments go, Zama is the real thing.

Over the last few years, the Avengers, together and separately, have spawned a number of good, very good, or reasonably entertaining movies. But with Avengers: Infinity War, the Marvel Comics franchise arrives at the stage of decadence. There’s just too much of it. A victim of its own success, there are just too many appealing characters here to stuff into one story.

This whole concept is a rich vein for gags, especially with a comic as at-home with herself as Schumer. But there’s something sweet and wise about it, too.

A particularly strong element is the story of Carlotta’s father, played with arresting intensity by Laszlo Szabo.

Much of the success of Little Pink House comes from the casting and the performance of Catherine Keener, an actress that has, simultaneously, an aura of glumness and an atmosphere of fun about her.

What makes Rampage especially enjoyable is the way it sneaks up on the audience. Before casting off every shred of dignity and abandoning itself to good-humored excess, the movie passes itself off as a reasonably serious science-fiction movie.

The result is like any other Lynne Ramsay movie, whether it’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” or “Ratcatcher” — slow, soporific and, here and there, wonderful.

The movie’s stylistic idea gets in the way of its story, and the story is too slim to sustain a full-length feature. And as the political ideas become as self-conscious as the style, Where Is Kyra? starts to feel a little like poverty porn.

This is a good movie for Hamm, and also for Pike who, in her recent films, has too often been either a madwoman or a victim of circumstance (and sometimes both). Here she gets to be active and think on her feet, and it makes a big difference.

A Quiet Place is the closest thing to a silent movie since “The Artist.”

This much is certain: The cover-up was grotesque.

If you want to know what a culture thinks it thinks, watch drama. But if you want to know how it really thinks, watch comedy. Watch, for example, Blockers, which is exuberant in its crudeness and coarseness. It’s where comedy is now, and it’s very funny.

A brisk, entertaining documentary that shows how the world of investment works.

To the extent Final Portrait succeeds, and it does intermittently, it’s a rather deadpan comedy about two men trying to understand each other against a cultural and generational gulf.