Mick LaSalle

Two things to know about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It is appalling. And I haven’t laughed this hard at anything in months.

When it’s not repulsive, The Witches drags, but for one brief yet gripping sequence, in which the boy and his friends sneak into the head witch’s hotel suite.

Rebecca has a couple of slow stretches, but James is always interesting and always sympathetic, if only because we see her struggling to do her best. After all, it’s much easier to not give up on a character when we see she hasn’t given up on herself. The movie further benefits from the absence of 1940s-style censorship, which suppressed a key plot detail that’s restored here.

Still, if you love this kind of movie, you will at least like Honest Thief.

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the subject brings out everything that’s good about Sorkin’s writing — not just the clever banter, which is a constant delight, but his way of conveying who the good and bad guys are without succumbing to hero worship or moral posturing.

When the books are written, The War With Grandpa — the first family film to hit theaters since the pandemic — will have a special place in De Niro’s vast and varied cinematic legacy as the absolute worst movie he ever made.

Long before the finish, Possessor descends into ugliness, with grotesque scenes of violence and lots of blood. You may feel creeped out, like you want to take a bath. But no, not in a good way.

As for Murray, it’s just a shame he can’t make a Sofia Coppola movie every year. As in “Lost in Translation,” Coppola brings out all of Murray’s many colors, sometimes all at once — his flippancy, his authority, his warmth, his isolation, his expressiveness, his inability to say everything he wants to say.

The dreaded question with a film like this is, “Wouldn’t a documentary have been better?” In this case, there’s a double answer. The first half of The Glorias is better told as a drama, because it’s fascinating to see (and not just be told) the obstacles in front of Steinem and how she overcame them. But the second half would have been better as a documentary.

Like all great works of art, the story’s point has resonances beyond its era and even beyond the specific subject of gay people, generally.

Dolby provides Dern with a chance to be cranky and vicious, but what else is new? The revelation here is Lena Olin, who gets her best role in years as the artist’s second wife, Claire, an artist in her own right who gave it all up to make a home with and for a demanding husband.

At its best, Kajillionaire provides a chance for Rodriguez to play a breezy extrovert and for Wood to play a damaged introvert, and for their characters to alter and deepen through contact with each other. They’re both excellent, but they can’t make the movie any less slow, and July’s relentless whimsicality occasionally sounds some false notes.

A bright young actress, a movie-star actor and a potentially interesting concept gets smothered in 128 minutes of colorful, empty nonsense.

Unfortunately, there’s a gulf between a great idea and competent execution, and this first feature, from writer-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, can’t bridge it.

The Devil All the Time is really a portrait of a place, told through the lives of several people across a span of about a dozen years, and the thing that makes it interesting — from start to finish — is that this place is so brutal and appalling and unexpected in its various cruelties that we cannot stop watching.

The Social Dilemma should be mandatory viewing for everyone who has a social media account. After seeing it, you may look at your phone differently, as something that isn’t really your friend.

Sibyl is for people who like French movies even when they’re a little ridiculous.

The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.

Mulan is a spirit lifter, and though it doesn’t arrive as planned, it could not arrive at a better time.

Boys State is the most depressing film about boys since “Lord of the Flies.” If anything, it’s even more bleak, because it’s not fiction and it’s not allegory. No, this is a documentary about actual boys.

That none of this seems snarky, but sweetly human, is largely thanks to Rogen, who never makes Herschel ridiculous, but aspirational, as if he has a vision he’s working toward.

As the documentary shows, while it lasted, it was really something.

The film is deadly slow and uneventful, with brilliant scenes bursting to life, here and there, like roses in a wasteland.

An occasionally powerful, yet occasionally frustrating documentary.

The main appeal of Summerland, a considerable one, is that it allows Gemma Arterton to hold the screen for a nearly unbroken 90 minutes. It showcases her in a variety of modes and moods and provide some huge acting moments that make us recognize that, somewhere along the line, Arterton has become a powerhouse.

Pike’s own commitment is wonderful to witness. Radioactive is a good movie, a bit more imaginative than most (at several points, the movie takes a quick leap into the future to show the various ways radioactivity has been used, for good and for ill), but Pike makes it something to see, simply by giving it everything.

Instead of slavishly appending cliched horror tropes onto his otherwise worthy script, Franco should have at least taken the horror genre seriously enough to investigate how he might stretch it and make it better. That was within his reach, if only he’d reached for it. Maybe next time he will.