Owen Gleiberman

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.