Mick LaSalle

Somebody I Used to Know comes dangerously close to being interesting. It’s a romantic comedy, but it’s almost a twisted drama about a seriously damaged creep who goes back to her hometown and starts wrecking people’s lives.

Though One Fine Morning is low-key and flows easily from one scene to the next, it’s truly innovative and original. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve has cracked a code. She figured out how to make a kind of movie that other filmmakers would love to make but don’t know how.

80 for Brady is a good-natured effort, and that good nature keeps it from becoming hateable. But still, it’s fairly awful.

If you watch “Pamela, A Love Story,” you will probably discover a few things: that you like Pamela Anderson more than you realized, that she’s probably nicer than you think, that she’s an open book, that her sons are eminently normal and proud of her, and that she has some of the worst taste in men of any woman in public life. (She makes even Liza Minnelli seem lucky in love.)

The only thing wrong with “Shotgun Wedding” is that it isn’t any good. Aside from that, it’s a pleasant experience.

The truth is, “You People” is too confused to be offensive — too inconsequential to merit that level of engagement. But it’s certainly disappointing, virtually from its opening minutes.

We still have Kendrick’s performance. We still have the compelling situation. We still have the unusual subject matter. But it’s enmeshed with unreal nonsense.

Though hardly anybody’s idea of a jolly time at the movies — and not nearly the equal of Florian Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” — “The Son” provides an arresting and unsettling experience. It’s an interesting movie, and different.

The movie’s overall aura of cheapness, the cast of unknowns and the half-baked theology all call to mind the low-budget horror of the 1980s.

We’ve gotten too used to action as mere spectacle, explosions on a video screen. Plane takes time — not a lot of time, but just enough — to make this a story about people.

This Place Rules isn’t the last or best word on the events of that day in 2021, but it’s a fresh angle and one that was hard-won. Callaghan didn’t just turn over a rock to get this story, he burrowed under the rock and lived there for months.

Because Living is all about unexpressed emotion — and an unexpressed life — there are times when we’ll feel impatient with the characters; we’ll want them to throw off their restraints and say everything they’re thinking. Just don’t be in a hurry. Living gets where it needs to go, and gets its characters where they need to be, in its own good time.

A Man Called Otto is a formula movie, and no matter the nuances, this formula is not that satisfying.

The worst failing of Corsage is that it makes Sisi boring and unsympathetic when it’s trying to do the opposite. You kind of catch on that there’s something wrong with a Sisi biopic when you start sympathizing with Franz Joseph, who not only was a lousy husband but helped start World War I.

Though specific to the stories of its central characters, this documentary is as complicated as life. It’s happy, sad and uncertain — genuinely moving and uplifting, yet never reassuring.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

It’s easy enough to have problems with Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It’s not nearly as truthful or as dramatic as it could have been, and it glosses over things that could have added those elements. But it’s hard to argue with a movie-length experience of listening to Whitney Houston’s voice.