Owen Gleiberman

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.