Owen Gleiberman

Anyone But You is a rom-com for the age of antipathy. It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.

Since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. Yet The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie.

Pandas is less sentimental than you expect, but you can respect the film’s honesty and still leave it hoping that the next true-life panda adventure delivers more of a feel-good ending — for the audience, and mostly for the pandas.

The Boys in the Boat is a gentleman’s sports movie, with Clooney working hard to make one “like they used to.” He brings it off, even if there’s a lingering quaintness to it all.

Last Breath delivers every incident with so much specificity that it’s like a cinematic piece of journalism. Yet it leaves you with a minor tingle of the uncanny.

It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.

Chastain and Garfield give performances that are brashly entertaining but also canny and layered, as the characters get caught up in something far bigger than themselves. The Bakkers were hucksters of a grand order, and the film uses their spectacular greedhead soap opera to tell the larger American story of how Christianity got turned into showbiz.

Woodley gives herself over to the physical and spiritual reality of each scene. She knows how to play an ordinary woman who’s wild at heart, and she keeps you captivated, even when the film itself is watchable in a perfectly competent, touching, and standard way.

Taking Venice is a very good documentary, though with a hint of pearl-clutching. There’s a “We were shocked, shocked…” undercurrent to the whole thing.

Wind River adds up, and skillfully, but in the end it’s not all that exciting. It’s a vision of the new American despair — not an inner-city movie, but an inner-wilderness movie — and it could have used another twist or two.

Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything is a documentary a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows just when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with clear-eyed worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power.

The movie will not exactly set your pulse racing. It’s staid. But there’s a hum of inspiration to its meditation.

It’s a processed confection that has come off the streaming assembly line. Yet if the comedy here is mostly routine, the romance is another thing. It really does work, because the actors don’t just phone in the love story — they dance with it, commit to it, and own it.

A vital and sobering documentary directed by Roberta Grossman, always knew that they were drafting the record of an existence whose memory — were it not for them — would be wiped away.

It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note. It’s also strikingly acted.

The heist is fun and convincing without being dazzling, and some of the most amusing stuff in the film is just character comedy.

This sequel to “The Shining” may register, in the end, as a long footnote, but it makes you glad that you got to play in that sinister funhouse again.

The movie is “Fatal Attraction” for the age of the revolving-door hook-up, and in its fevered low-budget way it’s just clever enough to do what it sets out to do. It gives toxic masculinity its just desserts.

You can rest assured that Mean Girls, the movie musical, sticks close to the spirit and to the letter of the movie that updated and mythologized the culture of gossip and backstabbing for a new generation. The new movie nudges the material into our own era in a handful of ways.

Though it’s far from the last word on ZZ Top, “That Little Ol’ Band From Texas” fills in the nuts and bolts, giving you enough of a glimpse of how it all happened to make it seem like a down-home rock ‘n’ roll mirage come true.

Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.

The Lost City of Z is a finely crafted, elegantly shot, sharply sincere movie that is more absorbing than powerful. It makes no major dramatic missteps, yet it could have used an added dimension — something to make the two-hour-and-20-minute running time feel like a transformative journey rather than an epic anecdotal crusade.

Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.

The film’s drama is B-movie basic. But the destructive colliding metal-on-metal inferno of what war is makes Midway a picture worth seeing.

To the extent that Born in China is, by its very existence, a minor act of cross-cultural diplomacy, its most progressive effect is to unveil the majestic diversity of Chinese landscapes.

Gray proves beyond measure that he’s got the chops to make a movie like this. He also has a vision, of sorts — one that’s expressed, nearly inadvertently, in the metaphor of that space antenna. Watching Ad Astra, you may think you’ve signed on for a journey that’s out of this world, but it turns out that the film’s concerns are somberly tethered to Earth.

As satire, Psycho Goreman is no “Planet Terror,” but it’s a droll enough schlock-in-quote-marks diversion, and part of its appeal is just how damn cheap it is. In the omni-tech era, it’s fun to see a filmmaker build an FX fantasy out of scraps, from the ground up.

Part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. The Card Counter is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.

It may be a slight entertainment in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made with a busy, nattering joy that is positively infectious

“The Lost Weekend” is a compelling movie and a valuable puzzle piece, but it’s only pretending to be the whole puzzle.

You can only hope, for these dudes’ sakes, that “Jackass” isn’t forever. But for now it’s earning its yucks, and its yuck.

The movie turns out to be a notch or two better than you expect.

“Blow the Man Down” has a few contrivances ... Yet Morgan Saylor and Sophie Lowe invest the embattled but loyal Connolly sisters with a desperate resonance, and the movie is clever enough to hold you, even when you wish it had taken the extra step and gone full Patricia Highsmith.

MLK/FBI leaves you wanting more, but it provides a gripping chapter in the story of how the forces of American power set out to destroy one of America’s greatest leaders, even as his private behavior had the effect of handing them a weapon.

Becoming a successful stand-up comic is an uphill climb, one that not everybody is cut out for, and The Opening Act is a likable ode to those hard knocks.

Midwinter Break does nothing earth-shattering (it remains wee), but the movie touchingly colors in how it might be possible for two people to know each other too well and also not well enough.

The film is acted with great flair and emotional precision, and it’s been staged by Taymor with vividly detailed historical flavor, yet it tells Steinem’s story in a way that’s more wide than deep.

The remarkable thing is that the movie acquires the quality of a time machine. You don’t just watch “Dawson City.” You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a lively formulaic action-hero origin story, dunked in combat grunge, that demonstrates how a resourceful lead actor can bend and heighten the meaning of a commercial thriller.

What’s funny and winning about Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is that it’s a comedy of equal-opportunity raunch, where everyone in sight is right at home inside the animal house.

The Lost Arcade is an engaging minor movie, but it touches on something that’s being lost in the age of technology that’s much bigger than video-game arcades: the feeling that there’s a reason — driving and inescapable and romantic — to leave home.

Sandler and Aniston mesh; they made you believe in Nick and Audrey’s cantankerous marriage, and in the love percolating just beneath the fighting. If what Nora Ephron devised was a clever Xerox of the rom-com, “Murder Mystery 2” is a Xerox of the Xerox, powered by a whodunit plot that’s a cheesy light parody of itself played just straight enough to work.

The film climaxes with a body-horror maximalism coupled with a minimum of logic. Until then, though, it wrings honest jolts out of the unnerving hothouse of unreality that is pop stardom.

Some of this is stirring stuff, and all of it is worth learning about, but as a documentary Citizen Penn is more diligent than riveting.

Rough Night, a bachelorette-party-from-hell thriller comedy that’s got some push and some laughs, despite its essentially formulaic nature, is a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers.

It’s a winsome screwball love story that grows on you and takes you somewhere charming.

I wish that “Queer Japan” had delved more into historical matters of fashion and androgyny, or into the life of someone like Yukio Mishima. It’s a very present-tense movie, but how did the movements on display evolve? Kolbeins would have done well to show us. Instead, he presents a snapshot of a revolution in midair, leaping to find a form for how to remake the future.

It’s the fastest, funniest “Madea” movie in quite some time.

Allied is tense and absorbing, yet the film’s climactic act somehow falls short.

You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.

As a satirical demagogic action movie, The Forever Purge is blatant, bare-bones, and entertainingly brutal.

The movie manipulates its audience in cunning and puckish ways. It’s no big whoop, but you’re happy to have been played.

It’s a highly competent and watchable paranoid metaphysical video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, includes some luridly entertaining visual effects, and — it has to be said — summons an emotional impact of close to zero. Which in a film like this one isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.

13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.

Dyrholm’s performance is a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny.

There’s no doubt that Dead Man’s Wire holds you. It’s Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time. The movie plays, and part of it is that it triggers our anti-institutional anger.

It’s a movie of minor fascinations and seductions; it exerts the pull of a natural-born filmmaker’s eye.

It’s a movie that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely.

When the mortars aren’t firing, the movie ebbs, flows, occasionally sags, and sometimes rivets.

Emergency, in its racially aware way, turns into something that feels not unlike an ’80s comedy. It has winning flashes of wit, of observation, of telling satire. But it’s fundamentally about the situation.

Even though Second Act shouldn’t work, it does (sort of). It’s got flow, a certain knowing ticky-tackiness about its own contrivances. You know you’re watching a connect-the-dots comedy, but the dots sparkle. And Lopez gives her first star performance in a while. Age has enriched her talent; she brings curlicues of experience to every scene.

It’s a sturdily built movie that gets the job done, and it’s got a likable retro vibe.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds.

The Night of the 12th is a mostly compelling sit, though what lends the film its singular texture is that it keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is.

It’s a lovingly crafted movie, and in many ways a good one, but before that it’s an enraptured piece of old-is-new nostalgia.

The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.

Shot for shot, line and line, it’s an extravagant and witty follow-up, made with the same friendly virtuosic dazzle. Yet this time you can sense just how hard the series’ wizard of a director, James Gunn (now taking off from a script he wrote solo), is working to entertain you. Maybe a little too hard.

These two actors, with nothing matching but their goatees, have a spiky bromantic chemistry. They don’t just ping off one another’s lines — they lock and load each other.

The movie takes Kornbluth’s stage show, recorded live, and intersperses it with dramatized scenes that are just deft and amusing enough to make you wish they were part of a larger indie production. Yet it all works together, as if Kornbluth was narrating and acting out the graphic novel of his life.

Bully. Coward. Victim. isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.

The film wants to be a puckish media satire and an earnest workplace dramedy about “growing,” and the fusion doesn’t always gel.

On the story level, Swapped is simple to a fault, yet there’s a surprise enchantment to it — it’s a woodland fairy tale for seven-year-olds, but on that score it’s visually ravishing and actually rather touching.

The film’s attitude seems to be: Come for the pierogis and goulash, stay for the humanitarian valor. Fair enough, but I wish the movie had drawn a deeper connection between the taste of freedom and the taste of Veselka.

What’s novel about Ema is that Pablo Larraín has made a movie that, in its form, is every bit as warped and jagged and jarring and difficult to cuddle up to as its heroine.

The movie is relentless, it’s pulpy and exciting, it’s unabashedly derivative, and at an hour and 58 minutes it’s a little too much of a rousingly of-the-moment feministic but still rather standard-issue thing.

The Booksellers is a documentary for anyone who can still look at a book and see a dream, a magic teleportation device, an object that contains the world.

Honey Don’t! is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.

"Dark Fate” is a lean, tough, and absorbing sequel that taps back into the enthralling surface of the “Terminator” series’ comic-book kinetics as well as the sinister sweet spot of its grandiose pulp mythology.

By the end of Onward, you’ll have chuckled and maybe choked up, and enjoyed a conventional ride.

The kinds of connections that Take Your Pills makes, between the culture of information overload and a radically tightened job market and heightened personal performance and the chemical itch that fuels this whole late-stage capitalist dynamic, may strike some as too speculative for comfort. Yet it’s precisely by making connections like these that a documentary can fire up your perceptions enough to burn through the cumulative effects of advertising.

Love, Gilda is plain but beautifully crafted. It draws you close to Radner, presenting her rise through the world of ’70s comedy as a journey of discovery.

The first-time director, Sam Yates, working from a utilitarian script by Tom Bateman, slathers on mood, yet there’s a primitive charge to the film’s no-frills staging.

"The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers” is totally worth seeing, but the film feels like an indirect act of contrition, which may be why it turns into an overdone lament.

This is gripping stuff, to be sure, yet the movie, volatile as it is, lacks a full dramatic center and the momentum that would flow out of it.

"The Caine Mutiny,” for all the tinkering, remains a warhorse of a play. And that’s both a good and a limited thing. The way Friedkin has directed it, it certainly plays.

Roma is no mere movie — it’s a vision, a memory play that unfolds with a gritty and virtuosic time-machine austerity. It’s a Proustian reverie, dreamed and designed down to the last street corner and scuffed piece of furniture. Yet I actually think it’s far from a masterpiece, because as a viewing experience it has a slightly hermetic coffee-table-book purity. Every moment comes at you in the same methodically objective and caressing Zen way.

Anne Hathaway’s performance provides the film with a sick-joke center of gravity, and Zemeckis, sticking to Dahl’s elemental storyline, stages it all with a prankish flair that leaves you buzzed.

In The Killer, David Fincher is hooked on his own obsession with technique, his mystique of filmmaking-as-virtuoso-procedure. It’s not that he’s anything less than great at it, but he may think there’s more shading, more revelation in how he has staged The Killer than there actually is.

Too many movies set in this period end up as action films in medieval drag. The excitement of “The King” is that Michôd lays out the consequences of combat with gruesome precision, demythologizing the battle.

It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.

Gimme Danger has an ironic tone for a Stooges portrait: dutiful and engrossing, but not electric or crazy.

It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.

In Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt revel in the crack timing, in the I-truly-do-not-like-you obscene banter, that makes even the most casual insult take wing.

McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.

Gudegast, for all his casualness toward plausibility, is an energizing filmmaker. He keeps the mano-a-mano standoffs humming, and he’s got a sixth sense for how to showcase Butler as a glamorously disheveled schlock version of Dirty Harry–meets–Popeye Doyle-meets– “Lethal Weapon”-gone-lone-wolf.

Bloodshot is a trash compactor of a comic-book film, but it’s smart trash, an action matrix that’s fun to plug into.

The drama of “Narcissister Organ Player” is that Narcissister isn’t layering her demons onto the culture; she’s layering the culture onto herself. That’s why that mask of hers looks more and more like one we’re all capable of hiding behind.

Willy’s Wonderland has the garish stop-and-go rhythm of an ’80s slasher film, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a gorefest to relax into with a can of Punch (or something stronger).

“Money Shot,” with a no-fuss journalistic evenhandedness, makes the case that the reaction against the site, though most of it came from an unassailable moral place, may have been out of balance — that it wound up hurting sex workers without actually doing anything tangible to help the victims of trafficking.

The film is cheeky and blithe and situational, suffused with enough upscale Christmas froth to get the audience high on spiced-cocktail fumes. In a key scene near the end, it’s more than willing to go over-the-top. Yet Happiest Season is also a deft and humane dramedy of manners that’s really about something.

Yet Red, White and Blue mostly lacks the gritty period flavor of the other Small Axe films. It’s a little glossed over. The (minor) daring of the movie is its downbeat narrative. It’s structured like the air seeping out of a tire, so that it presents us with a character of idealistic strength, commitment, and personal heroism only to plop him into a set of circumstances that won’t allow him to be a hero.

Adams draws on her gift for making each and every moment quiver with discovery. The actress is alive to what’s around her, even when it’s just ordinary, and when it’s extraordinary the inner fervor she communicates is quietly transporting.

Cocaine Bear is less formulaic than a slasher film and more stylishly made. It’s a true oddball, one that mixes yocks and mock desperation and disembodied limbs. So when it’s over you can say, “Well, we definitely saw that.”

Matt Wolf directs “Recorder” with a lot of lively skill. He presents the eccentricity of Marion Stokes’ personality with supreme sympathetic understanding, or maybe you could say a bit more romanticism than it deserves.

You emerge from Desert One knowing certain aspects of the Iran-hostage crisis better than you did before. That makes it a worthy film, and an absorbing one.

The White Tiger isn’t a fairy tale, but by the end the movie still leaves you feeling that it has made a wish into a command.

UglyDolls is “Trolls Lite,” and the way things work I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a movie in the next few years that’s “UglyDolls Lite.” Yet this is still a winsomely appealing and joke-happy bauble for kiddies.

The movie is a total trifle, but it’s often a diverting one — a wide-eyed sci-fi adventure with a screwball buoyancy.

The movie is full of vine-swinging, bow-and-arrow-shooting, ancient-spirit-meeting action, but most of it is staged on a convincing human scale, one that’s been expertly tailored to its star’s understated directness.

It’s a lean, tight, and stylishly clever B-movie about a bank robbery gone wrong.

The new documentary Ben-Gurion, Epilogue offers a rare intimate look at what went on inside Ben-Gurion’s heart and mind.

If it’s less punchy and original than “(500) Days of Summer,” it’s still a wry tale that deserves to be seen. Gerald keeps telling Thomas that life should be a mess, but in The Only Living Boy in New York it’s a pleasingly witty and well-observed one.

What holds the movie together, apart from Quinto’s dreamy geek mystique and delectable delivery of every line, is the tormented passion that Jim Parsons brings to it.

There’s some crafty artistry at work in The Rental, and also some fairly standard pandering, which feels like a violation of the movie’s better instincts. That said, most of it is skillful and engrossing enough to establish Franco as a director to watch.

The bottom line is that none of these characters, after the swap, seem different enough from themselves to allow the comedy to detonate. That said, the double swap lends “Freakier Friday” a juggling-balls-in-the-air quality that gives off a pleasant hum. It’s fun to ride the film’s complications.

It’s the bright and daffy absurdist spinoff that these weren’t-but-could-have-been-sketch-comedy characters deserve, and it feels, in its modestly clever and diverting way, just right.

While the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.

If you let yourself get on that wavelength of frisky innocence, The Bad Guys 2 exerts a wholesome and slightly mischievous appeal.

The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.

Larry Flynt for President tells a story so wild that the documentary plays as a succulent time machine of sordid 1980s mishegas.

The Journey, thanks to its buddy-movie structure, is destined to feel a little corny, but the movie gets at something real. It’s a celebration, by two splendid actors, of the art of political theater.

Hacksaw Ridge is the work of a director possessed by the reality of violence as an unholy yet unavoidable truth.

Kindred is a demonstration of how a naturalistic horror film can be derivative, in the most flagrant and shameless way, and still work.

Tully has its heart (and many other things) in the right place, but by the end you wish it had an imagination finely executed enough to match its empathy.

The story takes no outsize turns, no big surprise twists. Perhaps the only surprise is how touching it is: a tale that will caress you, and your children, in a way that speaks to something true. It reminds you of what it’s like to be moved by a kids’ film that’s driven by more than nonstop movement.

Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.

Nudity, as “Skin” captures in its lively and disarming way, is the great leveler: the thing that makes us all gawk, no matter what the context.

It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality.

The movie is product, but by the end you want to see this team again.

What’s ultimately moving about Along for the Ride is that it communicates how Dennis Hopper, by sticking true to his reckless muse, was an artist who changed things, and maybe changed everything.

The strength, and fascination, of The Force is that the movie isn’t on anyone’s side. It’s cognizant of the brutality and violence that police officers, in our era, have been caught on phone cameras committing. At the same time, it’s not out to demonize the police — it’s out to capture the pressures they’re under, and to show us what their job looks like from the inside.

In Path of Blood, the masks come off, and we literally see the faces of Al Qaeda in action, with the propaganda machine turned off. What’s shocking is how ordinary and high-spirited they appear.

The Unholy is a good tight scary commercial theological horror film. Its spooks and demons unfurl within a pop version of Christianity, which makes it sound no more exotic than last week’s “Exorcist” knockoff or last year’s helping of the “Conjuring” franchise. But The Unholy has a religious plot that actually works for it.

There are moments when the movie tugs at your heart, but the subject matter, because it’s so epic, deserves an even more probing and definitive treatment.

Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, one that’s going to leave anything too dark or messy or random on the cutting-room floor. Yet what matters is that the things we do see ring true. In “Miss Americana,” the vision Taylor Swift presents of herself is just chancy and sincere enough to draw us in.

It’s a looser, warmer, and more meditative romance, one that takes its time by giving its actors room to breathe.

That The Trip to Spain is unabashedly more of the same is good news…but not entirely good news.

“Fireball” is a documentary about meteorites, but what makes it a Herzog film is that it’s in love with meteorites.

It’s a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint.

The movie, in its way, summons something ominous and powerful. It’s not a screed — it’s a warning. It says, quite wisely: Take action now, or you may no longer have the opportunity to do so.

What was organic, and even obsessive, in the first outing comes off as pat and elaborate formula here. The new movie, energized as it is, too often feels like warmed-over sloppy seconds, with a what-do-we-do-now? riff that turns into an overly on-the-nose plot.

Phantom Thread sweeps you up and carries you along, much more, to my mind, than “The Master” did. Yet it’s a thesis movie: the story of a bullying narcissist who lacks the ability to have a relationship, and the outrageous way he’s schooled into becoming a human being. It’s the story of a control freak made by a control freak.

The Price of Freedom is an absorbing, disturbing, and scrupulously well-researched documentary.

More than just another documentary, it’s a crucial and stirring document — of racism and injustice, of politics and the big-picture design of America — that, I believe, will be watched and referenced for years to come.

The documentary captures how Shatner, as he began to make a career out of performing his public legend, merged his very identity with that of the hambone thespian inside him.

Making Waves is a brisk 94 minutes, the last half hour of which is a quick-study primer on the categories of movie sound. The film is quite educational.

Robin Hood is no classic, but if it sometimes seems like it’s trying to be “Baz Luhrmann’s Robin Hood,” more power to it. The movie is a diverting live-wire lark — one that, for my money, gets closer to the spirit of what Robin Hood is about than the logy 1991 Kevin Costner version or the dismal 2010 Russell Crowe version.

Angarano has the showpiece role, but it’s Cera who proves himself, more than ever, to be a major actor.

Hit Man is studded with delicious moments, but as amusing as the movie is it has a plot that sprawls forward in a rather ungainly fashion, and it goes on for too long.

The Best of Enemies while not nearly as good as “Green Book,” is a rock-solid movie: squarely deliberate, a little long and predictable, but honest and thoughtful enough, precise in its period and locale, with very strong performances.

The Lie is far from a total success, but it has enough tension and talent to make you hope that Blumhouse keeps aiming a quiet thriller or two at adults.

M3GAN, as you may have gathered, is overly steeped in pop-culture role models, but in its trivial way it’s a diverting genre film, one that possesses a healthy sense of its own absurdity.

The thing you want from a documentary about his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the chance to get right up close to him, in the way that movies can do. You want the chance to bask in his presence and come out with a heightened sense of what he’s about. The Last Dalai Lama? accomplishes that, and with an offhand eloquence, though it’s a sketchy, catch-as-catch-can movie.

Thornton gives a hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fiendish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown way, he imitates ordinary human emotion — the grins and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns — with a stylized frivolity.

As directed by Trish Sie, the movie is bubbly, it’s fast, it’s hella synthetic-clever, and it’s an avid showcase for the personalities of its stars: the skeptically pert Anna Kendrick, the radiant and vivacious Hailee Steinfeld, and the terrifyingly droll Rebel Wilson.

Individual moments are gripping, and Kirby’s performance puts its queasy hooks in you, but the film, overall, has a scattershot momentum until the last act, set in 1989, when Bundy is about to be executed.

The appeal of “Eno” — like the appeal of Brian Eno himself — is that the film conjures a wholehearted and accessible experience within an experimental veneer.

As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.

You could call The Circle a dystopian thriller, yet it’s not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that.

Widows, while a highly original and entertaining variation on the heist film, isn’t a home run.

I enjoyed the film as far is it goes, especially John C. Reilly’s straight-shooter performance, yet I also found myself, at certain points, growing impatient with it.

It reveals Robert Cenedella to be an artist far too infused with life to ever let a movie like this one live up to its title.

I found Skinamarink to be terrifying, but it’s a film that asks for (and rewards) patience, and can therefore invite revolt (not to mention abysmal grades from Cinemascore). Yet if you go with it, you may feel that you’ve touched the uncanny

The story worked brilliantly before. In Downhill, it works…well enough. The new movie is a teasing trifle with something real on its mind.

Nerve is a comic-book vision of how the Internet has become a gladiatorial arena of voyeurism. But the movie, like the game it’s about, is hard to stop watching, even when you know it’s playing you.

In “Mechanic,” [Statham's] a mechanic of murder, of escape, of ingenuity, of combat. He’s too good (and too badass) to be true, but that’s why we like him. It would be nice to see Statham make a movie one day that’s accomplished enough to raise his game. Until that happens, Mechanic: Resurrection will do.

The fascination of You Don’t Nomi is that it doesn’t find some fatal contradiction among the three views. “Showgirls,” it says, is a bad movie that also is a tasty slice of kitsch that also is a flawed but honestly bracing drama.

The documentary tells the fascinating, and moving, tale of how Trejo got off the road to ruin and became the unlikeliest of Hollywood character actors.

A Jazzman’s Blues overflows with melodrama, yet it isn’t staged broadly. It’s closer to Perry’s version of a Douglas Sirk film, one that takes a romance and heightens it until the complications are growing and twisting around it like vines.

The film’s form is glancing, exploratory, open to the moment. Yet Nanfu Wang captures things that other documentaries leave out, like the private emotions bred by policies of neglect. And her theme, in the end, is larger than you think. It’s that big governments failed to control the virus because their real investment was in controlling everything else.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a nimble documentary made with a personal touch of nostalgia, and it should prove nothing less than catnip to Sondheim obsessives.

Blue Story is very much a blast of something present tense. Rapman’s scenes boil over with life, as he crafts an opera of innocence infected by gangsta pathology.

Magnus, it turns out, is the anti-Bobby: a fascinatingly “normalized” prodigy.

A Quiet Place is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.

All of this should build, slowly and inexorably, in force and emotion. But for a film that’s actually, at heart, rather tidy and old-fashioned in its triangular gamesmanship, “The Power of the Dog” needed to get to a more bruising catharsis. In its crucial last act, the film becomes too oblique.

The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.

As a documentary, “Olympic Pride” is a little on the staid side. The film’s writer-producer-director, Deborah Riley Draper, works in a variation on the Ken Burns style.... Yet she does an absorbing job of capturing a historical moment that was even more fraught than it’s generally imagined to be.

Stan Lee is a fan-service documentary released by Disney+ (it drops on June 16), yet it’s very well-made, and watching it you’re confronted with a revelation: that the comic books that Lee began to create in 1961 didn’t just mark a seismic break with the comic books of the past.

It’s like an immortal-mercenary hangout movie. Chunks of the picture are logy and formulaic (it dawdles on for two hours), but the director, Gina Prince-Bythewood (making a major lane change after “Love & Basketball” and “The Secret Life of Bees”), stages the fight scenes with ripe executionary finesse, and she teases out a certain soulful quality in her cast.

There’s an innocence to this one, and a surprise authenticity. It’s like a “Fast and Furious” movie made without cynicism, and it gets to you.

So what is The Ghost of Peter Sellers? It’s a record of what it was like to shoot an empty shambolic piece of junk that drained the coffers of everyone involved. It’s a record of the kind of damage that a debonair misfit like Peter Sellers could cause when he put his mischievous (and maybe, in some ways, unstable) mind to it.

The genius of Pavarotti’s voice is that it had the power to heal. The movie pays ample testament to how that voice, for 40 years, poured out of him, rapturous and tragic, soaring on wings of pure emotion, at times wracked with a spiritual pain that was surely his own, but always lifting his audience to the mountaintop of beauty, saying, “This is where I live. And you can too.”

Cars 3 is a friendly, rollicking movie made with warmth and dash, and to the extent that it taps our primal affection for this series, it more than gets the job done.

After Parkland has its gun politics, and its aching heart, in the right place, but we need more from a movie about this subject. We need to ask how where the contemporary American heart of darkness is coming from.

Cha Cha Real Smooth works overtime to be an honest movie, and it also works overtime to ingratiate itself. In a sense, it accomplishes both aims, but I’m not sure that they entirely go together.

Wan has a gift that most slam-bang horror directors today do not: a sense of the audience — of their rhythm and pulse, of how to manipulate a moment so that he’s practically controlling your breathing.

Fiennes, in his beautifully grave way, slows the poem down for us, speaking the words with rapt deliberation, so that we live in their moment.

You can’t take a movie like this too seriously, but it’s still one of the rare slasher films that offers a holiday from bloodshed for its own sake.

A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).

Atarrabi and Mikelats isn’t a movie for everyone — in fact, by design, it’s probably a movie for very few. Yet it confirms the reverent audacity of Eugène Green’s talent. He’s 73 years young. He still has the chance to make a film that will blow the world away.

I’m glad to report that All the Old Knives is a minor but engrossing genre movie: tightly wound, more or less rooted in the real world, with taut dialogue and espionage gambits that fall just this side of contrived. It’s not John le Carré, but it’s not thinly patched together pulp either.

This is a genre thriller. That said, it’s an urgent and honest one, and Caviezel gives his most committed performance since “The Passion of the Christ.”

Faces of Death is “ambitious” trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence.

An earnest, scrappy, and finally touching drama about a young man from Memphis who’s got a dream — he’s a wine buff who wants to become a sommelier — but if he follows it, it will tear him away from everything his father yearned for him to be. That, of course, is part of why it’s a tasty dream.

It’s a movie that’s unapologetically basic and wholesome and, at 94 minutes, refreshingly stripped down. In its formulaic way, it works as an antidote to the bloat and clutter of your average “high-powered” teenage/kiddie flick.

It turns out to be a very good film — canny and honest and unexpectedly moving. But it’s layered with a thick and sugary frosting of adoration.

Name your fear trigger, and it’s probably there, somewhere, in Annabelle Comes Home. It looks like a horror film, but it’s really the horror equivalent of speed dating.

The movie is just a lightweight riff on “Beetlejuice” — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

There’s a playfulness to Every Day, to how the film says to its audience — through the very structure of its Afterschool Special sci-fi design — that if you want to find love, you’ve got to look beyond the surface.

Happy Death Day is “Groundhog Day” dipped in blood, and if the movie isn’t all that clever, it’s just clever enough to get by.

We know in our bones where the movie is going, and it’s a steady enjoyable ride, a touch prosaic at times, one that turns into a kind of minimalist chamber-room version of “Unforgiven,” with a surprisingly touching upshot.

Ailey, directed by Jamila Wignot, doesn’t always answer the questions you expect it to. It can be a tantalizing watch, but it’s a poetic and meditative documentary that often skimps on the nuts and bolts.

Dune is out to wow us, and sometimes succeeds, but it also wants to get under your skin like a hypnotically toxic mosquito. It does…until it doesn’t.

The movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be.

This is Ethan’s chance to strut his solo stuff. And he does, in a very Ethan Coen way: clever, modest, borderline invisible, but with a kick that sneaks up on you. ... 'Trouble in Mind' plays like an undiluted shot of rock ‘n’ roll moonshine joy.

This is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.

Smile will likely be a hit, because it’s a horror film that delivers without making you feel cheated. At 90 minutes, though, with less repetition, it might have been a more ingenious movie.

For anyone who grew up with “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” The Grinch won’t replace it, yet it’s nimble and affectionate in a way that can hook today’s children, and more than a few adults, by conjuring a feeling that comes close enough.

Candace Against the Universe has been made for “Phineas and Ferb” believers, and like such hipster kiddie brand extensions as “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies,” it’s not necessarily more fun than three good episodes of the show stacked together. But that’s fun enough.

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil brings us literally closer to Bosch’s images than one could probably get in almost any museum. As directed by Pieter van Huystee, the film offers a true immersion in his artistry. But it’s also a little slipshod — an off-kilter window into the politics of the art world. It’s like a fascinating magazine feature with some missing pieces.

Promised Land is a searching, flawed, let’s-try-this-on-and-see-how-it-looks movie. At times, it veers too close to being a standard Elvis chronicle, and at others its insight into our national neurosis may strike you as a tad ethereal. It’s an essay in the form of an investigation. Yet it’s the definition of tasty food for thought.

It’s basically a soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie, stocked with homilies about the game of football vs. the game of life. Yet it’s an effective soft-hearted paint-by-numbers TV-movie.

Scream VI, while it goes on for too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a homicidal shell game that‘s clever in all the right ways, staged and shot more forcefully than the previous film, eager to take advantage of its more sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.

It unfolds, more or less, in real time, which gives it an existential comedy-of-suspense element that trumps the usual Styrofoam rom-com plotting. The classical music playing in the background doesn’t make the film stodgy; it creates a sustained operatic flow. And the actors are simply terrific.

For a while, the movie is like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” if Clark Griswold had secretly been Steven Seagal. Is it remotely “believable”? No. But “Nobody 2,” like “Nobody” before it, unfolds in its own weirdly grounded action-fantasy universe. Odenkirk has the ability to make behaving glumly fretful seem like a form of slyness; he’s really creating a conspiracy with the audience.

No Safe Spaces is a smart, vital, urgent, and provocative exploration of that question.

What brings a documentary like this one to life is a central character with something going on that’s thornier than his official idealism. Fortunately, that’s Padraig O’Malley.

“Bombshell” aside, Tape is one of the very first dramas of the #MeToo era to confront, head-on, what harassment looks like and how it really works. Yet even as the film feels up-to-the-minute, it’s been made with a certain threadbare, streets-of-New-York punk feminist mythologizing that may remind you, at times, of the films of Beth B.

The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.

The movie’s message, if it has one, is that you don’t have to be super to be a superhero. Teen Titans GO! is fun in a defiantly unsuper way, and that’s a recommendation.

It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.

Searchingly directed by John Scheinfeld (“The U.S. vs. John Lennon”), What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? is a tasty and urgent piece of rock history, but in a strange way the film never comes close to answering its own question.

The Trip to Greece marks a spirited and convivial return to form, even if it’s lofty enough to present Coogan and Brydon’s six-day journey through Greece as a retracing of the path of Odysseus.

“Wonka” makes you feel good, but it never makes you levitate.

Brendan Fitzgerald, the director of The Oxy Kingpins, fills in the nuts and bolts of how the racket actually operated the way Scorsese did in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Casino,” giving the audience a wide-eyed, engrossing, information-packed street-smart tutorial.

As a movie with the title A-ha: The Movie should do, this one, directed by the Norwegian filmmaker Thomas Robsahm (with Aslaug Holm as co-director), tells you everything you need to know about the career of A-ha, even as it leaves out most of their personal lives.

It’s a willfully idiosyncratic movie that feels like a strangely fitting final film, since it amounts to Michell’s cockeyed tip of the hat to the monarchy and what it means. You could have a good debate about what, exactly, he’s trying to express in “Elizabeth,” but what I saw is a level-headed adoration that is neither fussy nor old-fashioned, since it’s cut with an acerbic awareness of the absurdity of royalty in the contemporary age.

So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality.

Sinners works more than it doesn’t, even if it doesn’t always gel, but it’s a commanding demonstration of how lavishly spirited and “serious” a popcorn movie can be.

Ti West is a good filmmaker, but it may be time for him to stop reconfiguring trash. He needs to try embedding A ideas in an A-movie.

It’s bluntly cheeky, it goes on for too long, but the concept keeps on giving.

Harriet is a conscientiously uplifting, devoted, rock-solid version of her story. Yet when it comes to putting the audience in touch with what’s extraordinary about Harriet Tubman — not just illustrating what she did but letting us connect with that quest, and with her, on a moment-to-moment level — Harriet is a conventional and rather prosaic piece of filmmaking.

The new Candyman references the plot of the original as a sinister fanfare of shadow puppets, as if to say, “That was mythology. This is reality.” It’s less a “slasher film” than a drama with a slasher in the middle of it.

An engaging and surprisingly playful documentary about the man who was arguably the most transgressive photographer to emerge from the 1960s and ’70s.

It redefines family craziness as normal in a way that those who seek it out will gratefully relate to.

What makes Val a good and heartfelt movie, rather than just some glorified movie-star-as-trashed-parody-of-himself piece of reality-show exploitation, is that Kilmer brings the film an incredible sense of self-awareness.

In the case of The Addams Family 2, Tiernan and Vernon have used the sequel as an opportunity for an upgrade. The script is by an entirely new team (Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Ben Queen, and Susanna Fogel), and in some ineffable bats-in-the-belfry way the jokes now land with a more inspired and spontaneous creepy kookiness.

Maridueña, playing Hollywood’s first Latino superhero, proves an appealing star. And the novelty of casting a comic-book blockbuster with a mostly unknown crew of vibrant Latino actors finds its emotional grounding in Jaime’s family.

Given that it’s a spinoff of the “Toy Story” series, which is the greatest and most sustained achievement in contemporary animation, it should be noted that this is one of those Pixar movies that feels like it has 50 percent Disney DNA.

It’s witty and moving but a touch repetitive, and it goes on for too long. That said, Jenkins has made the most intimate comedy imaginable about the fertility blues. Private Life hits some delicate nerves, and heals a few of them too.

Drop Dead City captures how New York fell into a hole of its own devising, then made an essential correction. But it’s not like this was simply a matter of bad bookkeeping. What New York’s fiscal crisis revealed, for maybe the first time, was a crack in the liberal dream.

Alpha, a spectacular prehistoric eye-candy survival yarn, is enthralling in a square and slightly stolid way.

The movie, in its conventional and likable way, knocks the stuffing out of superhero fantasy. Its joke is that a mangy crew of animals doing outlandish CGI magic tricks is essentially what a comic-book movie is.

“Dreaming Walls” sets out to capture not the history of the Chelsea, or even the experience of the people who’ve lived there, so much as the afterglow of the Chelsea. The aging residents it shows us can check out anytime (or get kicked out), but they can never leave.

It omits a crucial detail of the “Play” success story (that the album took off through the licensing of songs for commercials — not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it captures the astonishing ride to icon status it put Moby on. He didn’t stop drinking and drugging; that would take years. But he found a groove he could stay on, even after the mega-sales cooled.

Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.

Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives...is an example of how a movie can be flagrantly hagiographic, sentimental, and hypnotized by its own subject — and still make you want to keep watching it.

You’ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In The Drama he’s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and “Wedding Crashers.”

Clifford the Big Red Dog becomes a rowdy chase film — as agreeable as Clifford himself, as simultaneously cute and in-your-face, and as genially random in its ability to create chaos.

It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.

Though the movie is too long, I was more gratified than not to sink into its relatively old-fashioned dramatic restraint.

“Here We Go Again” is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end — a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.

Depardieu and Marie Bunel (as Bellamy's wife) have a terrific interplay, but Chabrol's sharp direction can't quite rescue his fuzzy script.

Every movie about cuddly dwarf statues in an English garden should have music this big.

There are limits to how much comic irony can be wrung out of the sight of two grown men acting like complete cretins.

An eminently watchable B-movie nightmare.

Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache...But then comes the blood, the shrieking midnight chase scenes, the anything-goes over-the-top-ness. In other words, everything that we liked the movie for not being.

Features a supernatural twist that is merely okay, but the film's mood of fractured anxiety and longing made me eager to see what the director, Christoffer Boe, does next.

It's an okay brat movie.

In the brutally efficient Under Siege, Seagal, with his soft-spoken nihilist charm, attempts to move beyond limb-snapping exploitation and into epically scaled mainstream thrillers. He succeeds — but only because this sort of slick action bash doesn’t require a star with much personality. At this point, personality might only get in the way.

DiCaprio, having a blast, makes Candie the equivalent of Waltz's Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds": a racist villain who mesmerizes us by elevating his ideology into a puckishly thought-out vision of the world. Yet Django isn't nearly the film that Inglourious was.

It's an irony too significant to ignore that the movie, which proselytizes against penning up whales in order to make them do cute tricks for humans, spends much of its time making Willy do cute tricks for humans.

This is one nowhere boy who commands your attention.

As Zeus, Liam Neeson twinkles where Laurence Olivier kvetched, and Ralph Fiennes, as Zeus' dark brother Hades (who has egged on the revolt to challenge Zeus), has a slinky nastiness.

In Proof, Paltrow plays yet another young woman who is being gnawed at by termites of instability, only this time out, her performance, rather than startling, is merely competent: earnest and overly familiar.

Glum and preposterous -- an operatically stilted adolescent martyr fantasy -- and yet, as staged by Coppola, it's well worth seeing.

Directed by the ingenious documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), A Brief History of Time held out the promise of being an audacious, brain-bending experience. Instead, it's plodding and disappointingly conventional.

Coppola, who has made clever music videos, including the one for Moby's ''Honey,'' clearly had a lot of fun detailing the mod cheesiness of this intergalactic period piece, though the satire would have been more ticklish if ''Austin Powers'' hadn't gotten there first.

A number of scenes have been staged with satisfying kinetic flair, and Willis once again makes an appealing superhero. Yet without that great big booby-trapped skyscraper to hold the action together, the suspense dissipates.

Rumble in the Bronx never quite achieves the smack-you-around zest of Chan's Hong Kong pictures. Still, it's hard to dislike a movie with such a friendly sense of the preposterous.

Walker forged an out-of-time mystique that is vividly captured here.