Mick LaSalle

There should be a special category for movies, like “Dog,” that are hard to enjoy but easy to take. They’re not entertainment. They’re more like a vague form of companionship. They aspire to little but demand nothing, and, if you like, they can keep you company. You can’t call that a good movie, but you’d have to be a creep to call it a bad movie.

What garbage. Seriously. What absolute, bereft, witless, unoriginal, unrewarding, soulless garbage that’s 40 years past scaring anybody. The only power this formula retains is the power to make you feel a little sad — at the ugliness, at the cynicism, and at the pathetic waste of your own mind as you watch it.

Uncharted isn’t a classic, but for an action movie coming out in the doldrums of February, it’s practically Citizen Kane.

Marry Me is entirely Lopez’s movie, and she’s terrific, right there emotionally in some difficult scenes. But it’s too much Lopez’s movie — too many (lousy) songs, too many dance numbers. A half hour in, there’s no mistaking it: Lopez was one of the producers.

The most glaring problem here, and the one hardest to explain, is Soderbergh’s failure to elicit any warmth or charm from Zoë Kravitz, who has been consistently appealing in her every other screen performance, from blockbusters like the “Divergent” series to little independents like “The Road Within.”

The film has the measured and expansive quality of real life, which could have been dull. It’s anything but that. Instead, by making Julie so real and vivid, Reinsve and Trier accomplish something rare. They make everything that happens to her feel as interesting as if it were happening to you.

The only problem with this movie, a substantial one, is that there’s a major sag in the story about halfway through. For its first hour, Moonfall is a blast.

It’s an inward-looking film that seems to be saying something about life. Whatever it’s saying — and it’s not clear that it’s saying anything specific — it connects. It’s not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

It’s a school shooting movie for this particular moment and plays like a dispatch from the front lines. It’s past trying to figure out what these tragedies mean. It just wants to explore how a person might assimilate such a trauma and go forward in life.

Fortunately, Arbid didn’t want to make a movie about crazy people or about people going crazy, so she pursued a third option: She made the woman interesting. So “Simple Passion” is a movie about something that, sooner or later, happens to lots of people, but the fun of this story is that it happens to someone we want to watch.

To watch Rifkin’s Festival and Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York (2019), is to wonder whether this is a filmmaker who has ceased to understand the world.

The King’s Daughter has a script that reads like it was written in crayon, by someone using only their thumbs. But two good performances make the film watchable: Pierce Brosnan as King Louis XIV and William Hurt as his adviser and confessor, Pere Francois de La Chaise.

It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

The best thing to say about “Munich: The Edge of War” is that it has an interesting take on Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who preceded Winston Churchill. In the opinion of many historians, it’s not the correct take, but at least the movie has a point of view.

In “France,” Dumont has not created a commentary on modern life, so don’t approach the movie looking for that. He’s made a movie about the consequences of modern life for one person, a portrait of contemporary mores as seen from the inside.

The lesson here is something we already know but sometimes don’t admit: A movie doesn’t have to be any good in order to be good. Sometimes it can just be nonsense that’s easy to watch. “The 355” is a guilty pleasure, only don’t waste time feeling guilty.

What keeps us glued to our seats are a series of unexpected plot turns, little and surprising story moments that create curiosity and sometimes anxiety. Just as one of these elements resolve, Almodóvar presents another, so that there is no point in Parallel Mothers at which the audience can become bored or complacent.

The best aspect of “A Hero,” and probably the aspect which Farhadi would most like us to contemplate, is the internal journey of Rahim, who, over the course of his difficulties, slowly and belatedly seems to come into his manhood.

Everything about Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is striking and remarkable — except Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth. This is not to say that they’re terrible, because they’re not. They’re better than decent. If you saw them in a regional stage production, and you didn’t know who they were, you might go home saying you saw a pretty good show. But neither is quite up for their role nor quite right for it.

Watching Licorice Pizza is simultaneously like watching life with all the boring parts cut out and like watching movies with all the phony parts cut out.

In the end, it’s the ideas at work in The Matrix Resurrections, much more than the action, that keep us contentedly in our seats for well over two hours.

So, The King’s Man is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.

Tender Bar is a lovely movie — so long as it stays within a half mile radius of the bar. When it drifts from the bar, it collapses. When it goes back to the bar, it lifts a little. But it stays away too often to be called a success.

The filmmakers put their faith in a character, not fireworks, and the result is big blockbuster that feels more like a sweet little movie.

Though it never runs out of gas or even shows signs of sluggishness, del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” runs out of importance about a half hour before the finish. But it’s still an entertaining movie by a distinctive filmmaker.

Still, no matter how flat “The Lost Daughter” can sometimes seem, there’s always something to hold our attention. The movie is never great, but it’s never exactly dull. There’s always a reason to stick around for the next scene.

Don’t Look Up might be the funniest movie of 2021. It’s the most depressing too, and that odd combination makes for a one-of-a-kind experience. Writer-director Adam McKay gives you over two hours of laughs while convincing you that the world is coming to an end.

The bottom line on Being the Ricardos is that it’s irresistible. It’s an invitation to go behind the scenes of the “I Love Lucy” show and to see what Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were really like. It’s also an invitation to travel back to the 1950s, with writer-director Aaron Sorkin as your guide.