Owen Gleiberman

Maestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.

The specter of death haunts the racing scenes in “Ferrari.” That’s part of their intoxicating charge. But it isn’t just the action that’s fraught with thrilling danger. Every moment of the drama moves with a sense of high-stakes dread, of underlying emotional turbulence.

If the characters, apart from Salvatore, had been more developed, there might be more drama to it, but Comandante, in its honorable and slightly gloomy way, has been conceived as the delivery system for a humanitarian message.

The film’s 90 minutes whiz by.

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.

What makes Heart of Stone such an enervating experience isn’t that it’s incompetent but that nothing in it matters. It’s all bombast and noise, all hollow logistics, all virtual “Minority Report” screens and clattering fury signifying nothing. In other words: Time to start planning the sequel.

That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.

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.

The Meg 2 is numbingly formulaic, promiscuously derivative and, for a few stretches (like the over-the-top third act), diverting in its very shamelessness. It is, in other words, all an August movie really needs to be. But there’s a way that the line between August movies and movies, period, is growing thinner every day.

Even when "Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning.

The Modelizer feels like a sketchbook version of the movie it could, or should, have been.

For a first-time director, Patrick Wilson doesn’t do a bad job, but he’s working with tropes that have already been worked to death. It’s time to close this carnival of souls down.

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.”

When you see No Hard Feelings, you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease.

The Blackening is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere.

As a documentary, Milli Vanilli brings off something at once strategic, artful, and humane: It presents what happened to Milli Vanilli so that we empathize directly with these two young men who were drawn, like sacrificial virgins, into the pop maelstrom.

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.

The trouble with The Flash is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.

There’s a bombast built into the material, but let it be said that the “Transformers” movies have been transformed. They’re no longer the kind of fun you have to hate.

They’ve done it. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t just extend the tale of Miles Morales. The film advances that story into newly jacked-up realms of wow-ness that make it a genuine spiritual companion piece to the first film. That one spun our heads and then some; this one spins our heads even more (and would fans, including me, have it any other way?).

Ebla Mari, the actor who plays Yara, makes Yara’s despair over her missing and possibly murdered father, and her agony at having had to abandon her country, incredibly layered and precise. Her performance doesn’t allow us to phone in our empathy.

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

What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.

Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.

The flamboyantly heavy, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-it-ends drama of Black Flies isn’t much fun to sit through, but I think that’s ultimately because the movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake.

In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.

It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum.

The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.

It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.

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.

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.

The case it makes for nuclear power is sober, grounded, journalistic. But don’t take my word for it — seek the movie out. It demands and deserves to be seen.

It’s prosaic and conventional and a touch stolid, but it stays true to the facts and the spirit of the man (he’s both sinner and saint), and the saga they add up to is singular in the history of sports.

The interviews are illuminating; Summer’s family members speak of her with complicated reverence, and with an appreciation for the currents of despair that she nurtured in private.

The movie is a romantic action comedy that starts off light and breezy but turns, before you know it, into a dead-weight spectacle of wretched excess.

In “The Covenant,” Guy Ritchie tells a story of two men, but he’s really giving this war that never succeeded a kind of closure. He uses the power of movies to coax out the heart that fueled our actions, and that made our loss so hard to bear.

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

Cage’s Dracula, sipping blood out of a martini glass, is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.

In its dry deliberate way, Paint skewers something all too real: a certain kind of toxic self-deluding male myopia.

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.

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.

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 Thief Collector is a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime. It’s also a portrait of art and obsession. But by the time it makes you say “Oh. My. God.,” it’s a movie that has used art to touch something essential about how strangers — or maybe I should just say the downright strange — walk among us.

“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.

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is like that.

It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it.

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.

The origin story was the charm, but the sequel is hobbled by a less buoyant hero and bland villains.

The movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds.

Bottoms is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect.

It’s at once cheesy and charming, synthetic and spectacular, cozily derivative and rambunctiously inventive, a processed piece of junk-culture joy that, by the end, may bring a tear to your eye.

Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary “Risk” was a close-up portrait of Assange, shot during his early years of infamy and as fascinating, in a squirmy way, as Assange himself. “Ithaka” is less about the man than the cause — how the continued prosecution of Assange fits into the issue of free speech. It’s a more morally clean-cut watch. But it’s a lot less dramatic.

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.

Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.

Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, Children of the Corn is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.

Creed III is a sports drama that feels like a thriller with an urgent conscience.

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.”

Golda is a good drama about Israel. But it will take a great drama about Israel to dig into the nation’s long-simmering moral ambiguities.

We’re invited to laugh at what we’re seeing, yet Miller works in such a heartfelt and unassuming way that we’re never standing outside the quirks.

“Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.

In Consecration Jena Malone doesn’t just sport a casually impeccable British accent. She becomes British — her mood and manners, the way she rocks the sweaters and bangs and debonair politeness. She creates a compelling character, only to see the film’s director, Christopher Smith, swallow her up in all the ecclesiastical gothic malarkey.

Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.

Pathaan has a stop-and-go rhythm, and a strung-together structure, that grows wearying. (Two-and-a-half hours of frenetic derivative pulp is a lot of pulp.)

What we’ve forgotten about, for too long, is the North Korean people. For years, their misery has existed under a blackout. Beyond Utopia looks behind the wall and shines a light.

It’s catchy and touching, it weaves the music into the story with a spontaneity that can leave you laughing with pleasure, and it navigates an honest path from despair to belief, which is Carney’s disarmingly sweet calling card.

You Hurt My Feelings stays true to the droll casualness of its title. It’s not a major Holofcener movie; it’s closer to a lively and digressive short story. Yet it’s compelling to see Holofcener merge the fates of all her characters through a grand tweak of the piety of positivity.

The Pod Generation is very much about our flesh, and the forces that are only too happy to take it away from us.

The key to the film’s potential success isn’t just that it’s made in a commercial genre. It’s that Fair Play, while full of sex, money, corporate backstabbing, and a lot of other things that are fun to watch, really is a good little movie.

Magazine Dreams creates a character haunting in his extremity. But his dream becomes ours, as does the heartbreaking prospect of it being snuffed before our eyes.

The film taps into the glitz ethos of the age of social-media envy without necessarily scrutinizing what it all means. Kid ‘n Play had put on a party to remember, but the new movie, much like Kevin and Damon themselves, just goes with the flow of the scam.

Plane is fodder, but the picture brazens through its own implausibilities, carried along — and occasionally aloft — by Gerard Butler’s squinty dynamo resolve.

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

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 movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.

The Pale Blue Eye wants to get into the 19th-century darkness, but it’s suffocatingly somber and static. The film showcases its two investigators in an ostensibly enigmatic dance-of-the-seven-frontier-high-collars way, but for much of the movie we’re a step ahead of them.

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is the kind of lavishly impassioned all-stops-out biopic you either give into or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby.

At its height, it feels exhilarating. But not all the way through. Cameron, in "The Way of Water," remains a fleet and exacting classical popcorn storyteller, but oh, the story he’s telling! The script he has co-written is a string of serviceable clichés that give the film the domestic adventure-thriller spine it needs, but not anything more than that.

The film, at two hours, still feels padded out with recent history. I would have liked, instead, to see some other dimension of Sharpton — who he is away from the protest marches. “Loudmouth” feels highly controlled, almost overly focused on Sharpton’s political identity at the expense of everything else.

The movie has no comic-book hook; it’s a trash-compactor genre buffet that smashes together a dozen things you’ve seen before. But that’s the hook. Violent Night is amusing in a few spots, wearying in more than a few others, but to complain about it in the way that I’m doing is to come off as churlish. It’s a movie that feeds the beast.

The film is a record of what went on during the War of Independence — a much uglier and more brutal story than Israel has ever wanted to acknowledge. The film includes graphic testimony, and it comes from the most authoritative sources possible: those who fought in the war and lived it — the Palestinians, but also the Israeli soldiers themselves.

Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.

The film is meticulously evenhanded and revealing.

A Christmas Story Christmas is like “A Christmas Story” with a softer center, but at least it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve had a glass of eggnog spiked with Long Island Iced Tea.

Loughren is a compelling character. So are the cops, and so, in his way, is the documentary’s “star,” who we hear on tape (from Graeber’s extensive interviews with him), and who comes equipped with an earnest explanation for why he killed all those people.

“Wakanda Forever” has a slow-burn emotional suspense. Once the film starts to gather steam, it doesn’t let up.

Terrifier 2 is essentially a series of grotesque homicidal set pieces stitched together into a threadbare narrative of midnight funhouse clichés.

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.

Halloween Ends doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.

The beauty of the documentary is that Mitchell invites the audience to share in the transformational quality — the life force — that he experienced in Black cinema.

Lynch/Oz is bursting with ideas about it, and about how it colonized the consciousness of David Lynch, but the movie is too pie-in-the-sky to quite make it over the rainbow.

For all the purity of its pedigree, and as agreeable and lightly touching as it sometimes is, I wish that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile didn’t still seem, at heart, like a likable movie that had come out of the processor.

The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.

The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way.

It’s both a highly entertaining movie and, by the end, a haunting one. It revels in Dalí’s artifice even as it mercilessly peels away his layers.

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.

“The Greatest Beer Run Ever” lumbers and meanders, and not just because the structure isn’t there. What we’re seeing, on a human level, is only half-interesting and rather slipshod. Like “Green Book,” “Greatest Beer Run” is based on a true story, but what Peter Farrelly responded to in that story translates, this time, into a token “relevant” boomer nostalgia that hasn’t been fully thought through.

Causeway is a drama of redemption that’s both touching and a little arduous. Just because your characters are suffering doesn’t mean they have to mostly stop talking.