Owen Gleiberman

Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story.

In “Power to the People,” we see archival footage of John and Yoko onstage with Elephant’s Memory, who are a killer band, but thanks to the freshness of the editing (by Ben Wainwright-Pearce), one half of the screen will be on the singer, and the other half will be peering at a band member or three, soaking up their energy, making the two sections of the image feel unified in their very separation, as if the film were breaking down the atomic structure of rock ‘n’ roll.

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.

A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.

Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.

Simply put, this is not a movie about Michael Jackson’s dark side. Yet the surprise of “Michael” is how well it plays, and what an engrossing middle-of-the-road biopic it is. It’s basically an ’80s-TV-movie version of the Michael Jackson story with sharper acting and snazzier photography. It

Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together.

“Mother Mary” turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux.” It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.

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

It’s a mad jumble, an eager product-tie-in mess.

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.”

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.

Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.

What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.

“Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.

"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.

It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.

Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.

Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.

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.

It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.

It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.

Hoppers never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.

Simply put, Scream 7 isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).

In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.

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.

It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie.

Crime 101 is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways.

In outline, GOAT doesn’t do anything terribly unorthodox, but the joy of the film lies in its dreamscape design, in the funky cut and thrust of its patter, and in its touching off-center sincerity.

Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.

Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.

The Invite is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.

In short, Carousel is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others.

I actually think The Moment should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charli xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.

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

If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.

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

Greenland: Migration is a dystopian dud. It’s like the boring middle section of a picaresque disaster film, minus the showy kickoff and catchy climax.

“Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.

The Housemaid is one of those movies you go with. It’s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.

The new movie, for all its inevitable Breathless Technological Advances, doesn’t feel as visually unprecedented as the last one did. If anything, though, it’s a better film — bolder and tighter, with a more dramatically focused story — and it certainly has its share of amazements.

The movie, in its mud-on-the-doily way, is amusing enough to get by. But it never shocks you into laughter.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film.

Newport & the Great Folk Dream is a rapturous documentary — elegant and transporting, full of scratchy lyrical black-and-white images and performances that have a timeless power.

The mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good.

The Alabama Solution is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen.

It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.

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.

It’s Perry’s version of a holiday movie and a connect-the-dots love story, but it’s cliché-driven in such a minimal way that it almost makes you yearn for the Perry movies that can feel like a long night of channel surfing all rolled into one.

Stitch Head, while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to.

Brewer navigates this terrain like a jukebox Jonathan Demme.

The line between a good soap opera and a bad soap opera can sometimes be razor-thin. Regretting You walks the line for a while but lands on the wrong side of it.

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.

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.

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

At once a punchy celebration of Swift’s artistry and a piece of promotion that just exposes aspects of the album that may not wear so well over time.

2+2 = 5 is a movie that very much leans toward chronicling the brutality and violence of despotic regimes, and is less interested in exploring how they toy with your brain.

As you watch the film, though, it’s amazing how things that should mean a lot could come to so little, including the return of Daniel Day-Lewis.

The movie, make no mistake, is a genial throwaway that skitters through incidents with a G-rated innocuousness that makes it perfect for a very pint-sized demo. Yet the design of it is captivating, and so, in a minor way, is the affection with which the film’s director, Ryan Crego, embraces childhood things.

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.

The surprise of One Battle After Another is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it’s also a drama that’s totally grounded and relatable. There’s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it’s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. “One Battle After Another” is a vision of a society in captivity, but it’s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.

There’s a purity and natural-born dazzle to EPiC. What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn’t get any better than that.

Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has at nearly two hours. It’s a bauble that tries to stretch itself into a boutique dream.

The film presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today. But Nuremberg, competent and watchable as it is, isn’t big on psychological tension or insight.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is an enticingly clever and droll, nearly pitch-perfect piece of murder-mystery fun — a whodunit that lives up to the expectations set six years ago by “Knives Out,” which offered its own perfect revival of the Agatha Christie spirit, with a tasty frosting of meta cheekiness.

It’s a wrenching portrait of abuse, enabling, gaslighting, and just how far domestic violence can go. Yet part of the force of it is that Michôd has not contorted Christy Martin’s life into some false arc; what was going on beneath her triumph is portrayed with a desperate and idiosyncratic honesty.

As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception.

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 easy to watch, it’s wired to be exciting, with a showy hot-button relevance, but the problem with the movie is that it isn’t quite convincing. It’s trapped between trying to be a “serious” thriller and a piece of glorified schlock.

Even as The Wizard of the Kremlin flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.

The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavolvian response of triumph out of us. It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way.

Kent Jones is a filmmaker who’s deeply and dramatically curious, and that’s a quality he shares with the film’s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote May December.

After the Hunt has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it’s also a weirdly muddled experience — a tale that’s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That’s why, in the end, it’s a less than satisfying movie.

Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.

As terrific as Stone is, though, it’s Jesse Plemons who gives the film’s most extraordinary performance.

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

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.

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.

The Naked Gun has enough honest laughs to get by.

Happy Gilmore 2 is a happy orgy of raucously well-executed Adam Sandler fan service. It’s a pointed exercise in nostalgia, but with a present-tense edge. It’s not some fake update of the clever/dumb brand of slob comedy that made Sandler a superstar in the ’90s. It’s the genuine article, a true revival of Sandler’s Jerry Lewis-meets-rock ‘n’ roll rage. A sequel to his fabled 1996 golf comedy, it extends that movie’s anarchy-on-the-putting-green spirit as blithely as if the original had been made yesterday.

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

“Smurfs” might be the best of the Smurfs films. It’s an amiable diversion for kids.

I appreciated that Robinson was actually trying to make a real movie out of all this. Yet it’s not a real movie. It’s a concoction impersonating one.

The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.

The new movie isn’t “dark” (Zack Snyder’s ambitious mistake) so much as it’s a loopy, spinning, multifaceted story with genuine emotional stakes. That’s why it treats Superman’s powers as the most spectacular and least interesting thing about him.

for all the talk of centuries gone by, “The Old Guard 2” feels like a time-tripping action fantasy made on the cheap.

M3GAN 2.0 is amusing at moments, overblown at others. Here’s hoping that “M3GAN 3.0” is brasher, funkier, crazier.

In “Something Beautiful,” with the songs employed as catwalk power anthems, you see how Miley Cyrus, in elevating her erotic aura, is trying to be a performer of mystery — to let her beauty singe our eyeballs, to let it vibrate into the cosmos. Yet it’s all a little insular.

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.

We go into “F1” excited about being excited, and the film makes good on that. It’s nothing if not an adrenaline high. Yet it’s a high that may leave you feeling a bit empty afterwards.

Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.

It’s a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now, and about how connected that is (or not) to the way we’ve always lived. And there’s a dark side to it. It’s “Sex and the City” filtered through a sobering reality check.

Ballerina is a worthy entry in the “John Wick” canon, though I say that as someone who doesn’t think the “John Wick” canon is all that. By the end, Ana de Armas has proved that fighting like a girl and fighting like a guy need not be appreciably different, especially if they’re all fighting like a video game.

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.

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.

The History of Sound is a movie that never fully finds a life beyond what it is on paper.

Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card.