Owen Gleiberman

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.

In general le cinéma de Falcone is not a pretty (or hilarious) thing. Thunder Force is, at best, more a light chuckler than a laugher.

Voyagers is a dutiful thriller about the beast within, but there’s not a lot of surprise to it. Even when the characters let themselves go, the drama remains in lockdown.

The film asks us to indulge and share the privacy of its characters. That’s its moody, free-floating allure.

"Amundsen” is a visually stately yet naggingly underscripted movie that never quite finds its dramatic center.

The movie carries you along, and it’s got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters.

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.

The movie is diverting enough when it flirts with clerical politics, and that made me think it might be cool to make an exorcist film that dramatized the true-life ins and outs of the Catholic Church’s relationship to exorcism. There’s a major story there, and it could fuel a heady thriller. But The Seventh Day, having established Father Peter as a new kind of exorcist renegade, soon gets down to business as usual.

The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.

Nobody is a thoroughly over-the-top and, at times, loony-tunes entry in the live-and-let-die vengeance-is-mine genre. Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it’s a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in “Straw Dogs.”

For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.

It’s so removed from having a dark side that you know you’re getting the feel-good version of a Tom Petty portrait.

The tension that drives Here Before is our curiosity as to whether or not the film is taking place in the world of the uncanny. In a way we want it to be, because that would make it scary fun; in another way we don’t want it to be, because that would make it corny scary fun.

The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.

Yes Day strings together a series of just-say-yes set pieces that don’t play out the central premise so much as they turn it into an extended kiddie-action-movie burlesque.

I went into Tina feeling like I knew this story in my bones, but the film kept opening my eyes — to new insights, new tremors of empathy, and a new appreciation for what a towering artist Tina Turner is.

By the end of Boss Level, you may feel a lot like Pulver. Putting “Groundhog Day” on action steroids, the film has a patina of cleverness that’s pleasing enough, but you’ve seen it before. And you’ll see it again.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run is a capricious and touching surrealist kiddie ride that, in its sugar-high way, is as much a celebration of friendship as the “Toy Story” films.

I’d call it a deftly sincere and canny portrait, one that works precisely because it takes the time to sweat the small stuff.

There’s hardly a moment in Cherry that’s believable, but the film’s true crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s enjoyable either. The only emotion the movie conveys is being full of itself.

Made You Look is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?

A fervently topical, at times intriguing, but ultimately rather sketchy drama about the online black market.

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.

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).

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.

Much of the lure of Misha and the Wolves is that it’s simply a tricky good yarn spun around the unbelievable things that human beings will do. But the movie also, in its way, taps into the soul of an era when fake reality is threatening to dislodge actual reality.

It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them, and what it’s doing to all of us.

Carmichael, working from a script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, directs the movie with an aimless sly verve. He roots the combustible melancholia in the everyday.

The writing is so deft, and the actors so committed, that by the end you feel you’ve touched the burning core of something real.

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.

It’s a music documentary like no other, because while it’s a joyful, cataclysmic, and soulfully seductive concert movie, what it’s really about is a key turning point in Black life in America.

Siân Heder, who came up as a writer and story editor on “Orange Is the New Black,” has directed just one previous feature (“Tallulah”), but she’s got the gift — the holy essence of how to shape and craft a drama that spins and burbles and flows.

This sort of clinical detective movie hinges on creating a feeling of revelation, a kind of horror-saturated awe. The Little Things is just a warmed-over set of serial-killer-thriller clichés, like crime-scene photos we’ve seen before. And some of it doesn’t track all that well.

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.

Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.

In the last 20 minutes, Keean Johnson, who mostly acts cool and on top of things, drops his guard, letting in an honest ripple of pain and fear. He hits a true note, and the fact that Marcus can’t hear it almost makes up for the doom-laden whimsy of the rest of the movie.

Locked Down, at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops.

Nelson, who has the ace documentarian’s flair for making history far more interesting than the mythologies it’s cutting through, has directed a film that stays true to the epic devastation crack left in its wake and, at the same time, examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.

The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.

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.

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.

In its relatively small-scale, often rather plodding B-movie way, it wants to do for apocalypse thrillers what “Contagion” did for outbreak movies. And there are moments when it does.

In its middlebrow celebratory way, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart reveals the Bee Gees’ saga to be one of the most fascinating and, at times, awe-inspiring in the history of pop.

When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more arresting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, seated before Morris’ camera, seems like a supporting player who’s been elevated to the lead.

“Alex Wheatle” is like a sketch for the biopic it might have been, but by the end you feel you’ve glimpsed the key fragment of a life.

Some viewers will surely be moved. To me, though, The Midnight Sky just proves that a movie that reaches for the stars can still come up empty-handed.

The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.

It’s a multimedia immersion, filled with rare footage of Zappa from his teenage years on and assembled with the loving dexterity we’ve come to expect from Alex Winter as a filmmaker.

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.

Sound of Metal is two hours and 10 minutes long, and it moves at a snail’s pace, not because “nothing happens,” but because Marder hasn’t filled in the dramatic interior of what does happen. He has made a movie about deafness that’s at once experiential and too muffled to hear.

When Christmas movies cease to be special (when they’re all scooped out of the same river of nonstop product), there’s something almost reassuring about a Christmas movie that lifts you up by knowingly dumbing Christmas down.

This, in other words, is not your father’s grungy one-joke yuletide action comedy. It’s “The Santa Clause” meets “Magnum Claus,” and it’s pitched to the Gibson faithful with the idea that they’ll follow him anywhere (which they probably will).

As long as Close is acting up an award-worthy storm (her performance is actually quite meticulous), Hillbilly Elegy is never less than alive. Adams does some showpiece acting of her own, but as skillful as her performance is, she never gets us to look at Bev with pity and terror.

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

Mank is a tale of Old Hollywood that’s more steeped in Old Hollywood — its glamour and sleaze, its layer-cake hierarchies, its corruption and glory — than just about any movie you’ve seen, and the effect is to lend it a dizzying time-machine splendor.

Let Him Go isn’t subtle, but as a genre film it’s original and shrewdly made, with a floridly gripping suspense. And Lane and Costner give it their all in a casual way that only pros this seasoned and gifted can. They turn the movie into an unlikely thing: a touchingly bone-weary romance steeped in vengeance.

In the film, Belushi’s own letters betray his fear that he had reached the point of no return. Yet there can be a shadow hint of intentionality to all that. Belushi was a bighearted person who craved no limits. In some terrible way, he went out like the rock star he was.

You may not agree with everything Dorothy Lewis says in “Crazy, Not Insane,” but you come out of the movie alive to the place where evil and insanity meet and then fall back apart.

White Noise is a deadly serious movie, but it is also, in a certain way, a funny one, because it captures the comedy of how much trouble even the influencers of hate now have squaring their lives with their belief systems

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.

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

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.

It’s a softheaded piece of morbid romantic treacle — two parallel cloying love stories for the price of one.

It’s a serviceably energized and routine action crime movie, with a few slammin’ fistfights and gun battles, and it proves once again that Liam Neeson is an actor who will take a paycheck gig without treating it like one.

The combat is neither funny nor intense. The War with Grandpa is like “Home Alone” replayed as a tit-for-tat battle of logistical booby traps that never rises above the innocuous slapstick benign.

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.

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.

It’s the casualness of the drug use, extreme yet just another part of life, that’s the 2020 element. Kristen wants to have her dope and eat it too. And that means turning herself into an invisible junkie.

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.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today.

What’s most moving about Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is that Sacks, whose extreme love of existence was there in every sentence he wrote, could embrace death because it would be the most out-there adventure of his life. What he saw is that we were all, in our ways, afflicted and all unique. And therefore all extraordinary.

On the Rocks turns into a boozy humanistic hang-out caper movie, one that’s light-spirited and compelling, mordantly alive to the ins and outs of marriage, and a winning showcase for Murray’s aging-like-fine-whisky brand of world-weary deviltry.

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.

Lovers Rock is nothing more (or less) than a snapshot of an era, a moment, a series of lives. Yet it lingers like a song you don’t want to get out of your head.

A sleekly unnerving thriller.

Given its gnarly small focus, Hopper/Welles is surprisingly entertaining to sit through.

Another Round is the kind of movie that’s so into its cool concept that it doesn’t sweat the details. Yet the film’s sloppy broadness ends up fighting the Dogme style, which keeps telling us that these people are authentic.

King turns One Night in Miami into a real movie, staging it with a flowing visual confidence and vibrant emotional flair that gives it a fly-on-the-wall authenticity.

The Devil All the Time shows us a lot of bad behavior, but the movie isn’t really interested in what makes the sinners tick. And without that lurid curiosity, it’s just a series of Sunday School lessons: a noir that wants to scrub away the darkness.

There’s nothing ironic about the title of American Utopia. It’s David Byrne and Spike Lee reveling in the majesty, and hidden magic, of the here and now.

A powerfully timely and absorbing documentary.

The Broken Hearts Gallery pushes all the rom-com buttons but does it knowingly, with a spirit that embraces killer cynicism and then comes out the other side.

It’s still, in the end, a bit of a connect-the-inspirational-dots movie, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be inspired.

A documentary that’s honest and scary, wrenching and moving.

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.

The film is weightless and super-goofy — a blissed-out air balloon of nostalgia. It zips right along, it makes you smile and chortle, it’s a surprisingly sweet-spirited love story.

It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose.

Is Arquette a has-been actor trumping up his biggest failure so that he can exploit it? Or is he a lionhearted wrestler who finds triumph by going the distance? The weird thing is that there’s no difference.

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.

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.

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.

Cut Throat City has vivid moments, but RZA’s direction is better than P.G Cuschieri’s script. The film is a muddled social-protest thriller that tries to bridge the corrupt machinations upstairs with the desperation of the streets, and can’t find a way to connect them convincingly.

Project Power has propulsion, little detonations of visual magic, the resonant setting of a still desperate New Orleans, and a better cast than a movie like this one tends to have. Yet watching it, you may find yourself aware of how patched together the whole thing is.

In its top-heavy image-driven way, The Secret Garden is trying for some of the atmospheric poetry that was missing from Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 version. Yet if anything, that just makes it fall further away from the novel’s essence. The garden isn’t a supernatural place, but it’s supposed to be a mystical place. In this movie, it comes closer to being a special effect.

Of course, the essence of the fish-out-of-water comedy is that it’s never been a realistic genre — it’s pure Hollywood fantasy. Yet An American Pickle, in its ethnically satirical and scattered way, lacks the integrity of its own ridiculousness. It’s pungent but flavorless: an unkosher dill.

Highly entertaining documentary about the folk-pop troubadour of Canada.

Rebuilding Paradise is a movie that shows us a great deal without necessarily exploring what it shows.

In the fresh bopping beauty of their punk romantic sound, they kicked open a door of perception. They said to a generation: We got the beat, and you can too.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It’s a badly shot one-joke movie that sits there and goes thud.

Irresistible scores points yet feels behind the curve. You wish it were a bold satirical bulletin, or maybe just Stewart’s pricelessly amusing version of a Christopher Guest movie. Instead, the film is a lot like a politician: It makes a big show of leading the viewer, but without rocking the boat.

Athlete A is a testament to their perseverance, and to the courage of all those who stood up in court to face the man who had violated their humanity. But it’s also a testament to the obsession that gave cover to their abuse — to a culture that wanted winners at any cost.

The movie won’t disturb your dreams, but it grabs hold of you and keeps tugging.

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.

If there were any lingering doubts that Pete Davidson has what it takes to be a terrific actor, this movie should dispel them. In “The King of Staten Island,” he holds the screen with his blinkered, scurrilous, and oddly innocent I did-what? personality, and for the first time he makes the sociopathic goofball he’s playing a fully dimensional presence.

This is a fuzzy-headed, badly made cheeseball schlock fable for everyone!

Why watch Screened Out? Because it shows you something you didn’t know.

The script of The High Note, by Flora Greeson, is long on wish-fulfillment and short on inside authority, and the director, Nisha Ganatra (“Late Night”), stages it with a hit-or-miss geniality that keeps cutting corners on the story’s emotional honesty. The feel-good factor hovers over this movie like a fuzzy bland cloud.

Bits and pieces of the movie are funny.

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.

The Wrong Missy is a harmless dumb-meets-smart-mouth comedy that doesn’t necessarily feed your appetite for more Netflix throwaways. But it does make you want to see Lauren Lapkus’s next act.

Handsomely shot and small of scale, Capone ambles along without catching fire. That’s because the movie, at heart, is shaped as a pedestal for Hardy’s prankish mumbly Method showboating.

Kubrick by Kubrick is most interesting for the ways that it undercuts the Kubrick mythology.

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.

All Day and a Night is made with empathy and skill, but it’s as clear-eyed and remorseless as a news report.

McGowan knows how to invest ire with intelligence, and he has mastered the art of making riding a horse look like a form of strutting. When he’s onscreen, the film vibrates. When you’re watching MacFadyen’s Robert, it swells with nobility and deflates at the same time.

In The Quarry, sin has its wages, but that’s all it has. It’s too dry to offer anything like temptation.

Beastie Boys Story is less seamless, but more personal, than a classic documentary. Horovitz and Diamond are infectious company, and the film does a meticulous job of presenting the evolution of Adam Yauch, who was always on the edge of technology (it was his idea to tape-loop “When the Levee Breaks”), as well as postmodern pranksterism.

The movie gives us only a small taste of it, but it’s enough to whet your appetite: for a Bowie biopic that captures this cracked actor in all his funhouse-mirror rock ‘n’ roll glory.

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.

As it goes on, this all becomes a marketing hook for an increasingly flaked-out fantasy.

We Summon the Darkness is a psycho thriller that pulls the bloody rug out from under you, and does it in a shivery sly way.

When someone finally make that great drama about our national addictions, it will need to be a more complex horror film. This one is a little too much “Alien Invaders,” not enough “They Came From Within.”

Yet for all its surface pleasures, it’s a likable but underimagined one, with more enthusiasm than surprise and, at the same time, an overprogrammed sense of its own thematic destiny.

Slay the Dragon is an incisively made and morally suspenseful film, at once chilling and stirring.

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.

A Disneynature documentary that drops on Disney Plus on April 3, simply get out of the way and let the ancient creatures of the sea seduce us with their surreal evolutionary form-follows-function wild splendor.

The herd’s endless quest to find water becomes a repetitive (and rather dry) theme. And to the extent that super-square anthropomorphic Disney filmmaking isn’t merely a form but a skill, I never felt overwhelmingly close to Gaia or Shanti or Jomo. The Disney nature films have always had a certain hermetic quality, but this one feels more sealed-off than usual.

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.

The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.

Vivarium has a canny visual design (you won’t soon forget the rows of Monopoly houses), but the movie becomes an example of the imitative fallacy. It makes the audience feel deadened too.

“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.

This is a subject that deserves a rigorous documentary exploration, like Alison Klayman’s must-see psychotropic exposé “Take Your Pills.” But Dosed isn’t that kind of movie.

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 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.

You may wish that you were reading about these events in The New Yorker, because the movie is so choked with neutral detail that it’s a little bloodless. It lacks fire.

I’d love to see Affleck star in a film about an addict with nothing to explain his addiction but his own flawed, desperate, hungry soul. That’s a movie that could speak to us — the way that Ben Affleck’s real story already does — far more than this modestly well-made Sunday-school lesson.

A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. Straight Up is the work of a startling talent.

This gratifyingly clever and, at times, powerfully staged thriller is too rooted in our era to be called old-fashioned — its release, in fact, feels almost karmically synched to the week of the Harvey Weinstein verdict. Yet there’s one way that the movie is old-fashioned: It does an admirable job of taking us back to a time when a horror film could actually mean something.

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

For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.

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

We all know that your average Hollywood comedy tends to include some on-set improvisation, but in this case the contrast between the leaden pseudo-brashness of the rest of the movie and the ping! of Carrey’s dialogue is so marked that it almost feels like he made up his entire character on the spot. (I’m not declaring that he actually did. I’m just sayin’.)

Created Equal is structured as a monologue of self-justification, a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas.

Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments.

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 Father is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt.

Assassins is a terrific true-crime story, but it’s also a documentary thriller about the new world disorder.

In Lost Girls, Liz Garbus takes the serial-killer thriller and turns it on its head, insisting that we see the victims as larger than the crimes that destroyed them.

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

On the Record presents a searing, at times shocking exposé of alleged criminal acts. Yet here, as in those earlier chronicles, what’s extraordinary is the disturbingly intimate communion the film creates between the audience and the survivors. Not just the facts but the meaning of these alleged crimes comes scarily alive in the emotional details of their telling.

The Dissident is riveting, but it’s also a moving testament to a man whose courage burned too brightly to die with him.

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.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bring their A game; they never let us feel as if they’re going through the motions. The marks may be standard issue, but they hit them with fury and flair.

Underwater is a stupefying entertainment in which every claustrophobic space and apocalyptic crash of water registers as a slick visual trigger, yet it’s all built on top of a dramatic void. It’s boredom in Sensurround.

The Grudge plods on as if it were something more than formula gunk, cutting back and forth among the thinly written unfortunates who’ve been touched by the curse of that house.

The Rise of Skywalker is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying “Star Wars” adventure since the glory days of “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” (I mean that, but given the last eight films, the bar isn’t that high

The trouble with a film like Spies in Disguise isn’t that it’s less than sparklingly animated but that as technically bravura as it is, there is never anything at stake.

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.

Bombshell is a scalding and powerful movie about what selling, in America, has become. The film is about selling sex, selling a candidate, selling yourself, selling the truth. And about how at Fox News all those things came together.

An exquisitely crafted documentary about the woman who was arguably the greatest movie critic who ever lived.

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.

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

What you see a movie like Noelle, what the experience comes down to is: It’s something you’re not watching in a theater because most of us wouldn’t watch it in a theater. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. Whatever your idea of a sentimental connect-the-dots Christmas comedy is, this is sub that.

What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.

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.

Playing with Fire . . . is a barely glorified sitcom made in the overlit and benignly smart-mouth Nickelodeon house style.

The pleasure of The Good Liar, and it’s a major one, is the chance to watch Mirren and McKellen act together in a cat-and-mouse duet that turns into an elegant waltz of affection and deception.

As much as we go into Last Christmas eager to see a nicely wrapped package of acerbic fun, the film falls short of that. It’s not so much clever, toasty, and affectionate as it is the faux version of those things. It’s twee, it’s precious, it’s forced. And it’s light on true romance, maybe because the movie itself is a little too in love with itself.

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.

You should never take for granted a documentary that fills in the basics with flair and feeling. Especially when the basics consist of great big gobs of some of the most revolutionary and exhilarating popular art ever created in this country.

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.

Ne Zha has something vital to teach the American animation industry — about the glories of letting the dark side rip — but it’s also clear that Chinese animators, working under more restrictions than we have, have absorbed a great many of the breakneck freedoms of American pop culture. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful symbiosis.

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.

"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.

Smith has every right to be older and wiser here, and Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, with its gentle anarchy and not-quite-mock nostalgia, is a time-machine sequel that passes the time amiably enough. But if Jay and Silent Bob get any older or wiser than this, they’re going to stop being who they are.

Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.

The Addams Family has an overly processed outré harmlessness. It’s so busy treating its famous domesticated ghouls as icons that it forgets to rediscover what’s memorable about them.

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.

“Memory” captures the hypnotic layers of history and meaning that were folded into the shock value of “Alien.”

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout — a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. It’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.

The distinguishing quality of its jokey, can-you-believe-this? tone is that the two millennial hayseeds at its center are so richly incompetent that they seem to be inventing a new low place on the totem pole of backwoods idiocy.

The Times of Bill Cunningham is only 74 minutes long, yet it’s a snapshot of a life that leaves you grateful for having encountered it.

The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie has some laughs, but it’s essentially the tossed-together version of a hangout movie. It’s a roast served at room temperature.

Western Stars isn’t a rockin’-out extravaganza; it’s intimate in its embrace. Yet it’s a moving testament to how much Bruce Springsteen has still got it. It’s a concert film you’ll want to experience with others, as a ray of light in the dark.

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.

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.

It’s like a Wes Anderson movie set during the Third Reich. ... And yet it’s not as if it’s a terrible movie; it’s actually a studiously conventional movie dressed up in the self-congratulatory “daring” of its look!-let’s-prank-the-Nazis cachet.

What you experience isn’t the book, exactly; it’s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration.

A total motherf—kin’ blast. ... You might have to go all the way back to the ’80s to find a Murphy performance driven by this much pleasurable funky verve.

Cretton ... finds a newly supple way to deliver a liberal Hollywood knockout punch.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a soft-hearted fable that works on you in an enchanting way.

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 good movie: tense, bold, angry, empathetic, provocative, observant, morally engaged. And also, to be honest, a trifle gimmicky.

The Laundromat is Soderbergh at his most playful, and also Soderbergh at his most wonkish, and damned, in this case, if the two don’t chime together.

Phoenix’s performance is astonishing.

An Officer and a Spy has a this-happened-and-then-this-happened quality. And that’s why the movie, beneath the two-dimensional jauntiness of its acting and the period vividness of its sets and costumes, feels more dutiful than riveting.

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.

At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

From first shot to last, it’s a film of high wit and confidence and verve, an astonishingly fluid and accomplished act of boundary-leaping.

It has its amusing (and enlightening) moments, but in many ways it’s just dancing around the meat of the matter.

As someone who’s absorbed bits and pieces of the Miles Davis story over the years but never felt like I had the big picture, I found “Birth of the Cool” to be intensely gratifying. Nelson is a filmmaker with a sixth sense for how to nudge history into the present.

You can forge a decent drama out of elements this scrappy, but not necessarily a film like Jacob’s Ladder.

The plot — which is to say, the plot against the president — is, once again, a violently overwrought confection of “topical” comic-strip ludicrousness; that’s the DNA of the “Fallen” series. Yet when you’re watching a big-budget B-movie, there’s good preposterous and there’s bad preposterous.

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.

Linklater, as brilliant a filmmaker as he is, is a kind of Zen rationalist; his shot language and essential humanity invite us to look at Bernadette and think, “You need help.” But that stops the character, even in her baroquely witty lashing out, from becoming a projection of a larger passion.

It takes a lot of chops to shoot the majority of a movie underwater, and Johannes Roberts is a skillful crafter of images ... But he’s a throw-what-he-can-at-the-audience director, and there’s little in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged that really sticks. The shocks, however, are consistently well-timed, and for the audience that seeks out a movie like this one that’s probably enough.

The emotions of the stories have been lost. We could be watching the standard ghoulish CGI effects that take place in any horror movie of the week.

We see, in Melissa McCarthy’s increasingly fierce performance, a hint of what the movie might have been: the tale of a new kind of feminine mystique — a methodical fury that weds the imperatives of a mother to the style of a gangster. But that movie needed a better script.

After watching Jay Myself, you yourself may begin to see the world in a whole new way, as if you’d woken up to all the images that might have been invisible before, but only because you passed them by.

The movie itself isn’t bad, though I wish it were better.

Privacy issues aside (and I’m second to none in my concern about them), the movie, in its ham-fisted fashion, is trying to come up with some way to regulate what it despises.

A documentary that recaps Hamilton’s life in compelling fashion without adding anything of special novelty or depth (though much of the surfing footage is spectacular), it can feel like you’re seeing a perfectly fine devotional sports biography that doesn’t elevate the saga it’s telling to the next level.

Crawl has no pretense and not very much range; it’s “Jaws” set in an old dark house.

"American Heretics" is eye-opening, but it's never explosive.

Phil is a trifle, and there’s no harm in that, but it’s an unconvincing trifle. The words “coy” and “whimsical” scarcely do justice to its coy whimsicality.

The key to the new movie’s appeal, apart from the fact that Tom Holland acts with far greater confidence and verve in the title role, is that the entire film is a bit of a fake-out, and I mean that in a very positive way.

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 Specials, in the end, is not a very compelling movie. It’s arduous and rambling and repetitive; it skitters across the surface of the story it’s telling. The film lacks a vibrant structure, but more than that, it never brings us close to the people it shows us.

Burn Your Maps is one of those movies that’s glib and facile and threadbare all the way through, then the ending sort of gets to you (you’d have to be made of pretty stern stuff if it didn’t), so you think back over what you’ve seen — and it’s still a crock.

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

Rolling Thunder Revue celebrates the let’s-try-it-on, let-it-all-hang-out spirit of the era, and as a time capsule the film is a gift that keeps on giving.

Essential and absorbing documentary.

Turner’s damaged conviction holds Dark Phoenix together, giving it a treacherous life force.

To hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller Domino is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.

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.”

You can’t take Ma seriously. It’s a squalid formula picture that’s too busy connecting dots, hitting beats, engineering situations designed to make you squirm. But you will squirm.

You won’t feel cheated; at stray moments, you’ll feel the wonder. But for every high point, there’s a moment when the thrill threatens to leak away.

On a Magical Night is whimsically cute, provocative in a coy way, and more than a little in love with itself.

A movie that’s a loosely structured ramble can work, and about half of “Tommaso” feels more vital than anything Ferrara has made in a while. But the film should have been shapelier and 20 minutes shorter, with a more focused dramatic psychology.

There are a few surprises in Frankie, and the movie, in its placid way, wants to deliver a tug of revelation of what life is about. The trouble is, life at the end of this day doesn’t look very much different than it did at the start of the day.

DiCaprio and Pitt fill out their roles with such rawhide movie-star conviction that we’re happy to settle back and watch Tarantino unfurl this tale in any direction he wants.

It’s a heady, engrossing, indulgently sprawling profile of a modern athlete in all his glory and contradiction, but it’s also a film that leaves you with more questions than it should.

The movie, building on “The Witch,” proves that Robert Eggers possesses something more than impeccable genre skill. He has the ability to lock you into the fever of what’s happening onscreen.

Another intimate and powerful drama about what’s going on in people’s everyday lives. ... Loach stages all of this with supreme confidence and flow.

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant.

A loopy entertaining WTF lark. ... The fact that it holds you, for 77 minutes, is a testament to the debauched rigor of Dupieux’s filmmaking.

The Dead Don’t Die fancies itself a cutting-edge macabre comedy, but the truth is that it’s behind the curve of pop culture. That’s why it’s a disappointing trifle.

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

The Hustle, fun as some of it is, is a tall fizzy drink in which the fizz never completely rises to the top of the glass.

It doesn’t sentimentalize Theo’s illness (much) or pull back from how disconnected he can be. “Lost Transmissions” may even sound like it deserves props for its straight-up, objective view of mental illness. Except for one small detail: That stance ends up removing the basic dramatic motor of the film.

In Yesterday, [Boyle and Curtis] reduce the Beatles to the ultimate product by declaring, at every turn, “These songs are transcendent!” And it’s the fact that they keep telling us, rather than showing us (i.e., with musical sequences that earned their transcendence), that makes Yesterday, for all the timeless songs in it, a cut-and-dried, rotely whimsical, prefab experience.

An adventurous hybrid. ... It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Watching the movie is like staring at a blurred image of the past that gradually, over 86 minutes, comes into terrifying focus.

Laced with colorful stories. ... The movie is mostly content to be a portrait of Ronstadt the artist, and it’s more than satisfying on that front.

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.

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.

Nureyev delivers Nureyev’s life in all its ecstasy and tragedy. As a documentary, it’s not definitive, but it’s good enough to leave you thrilled and haunted by this man who, at the height of his artistry, seemed to leap off the earth and leave it behind.

Carmine Street Guitars is a one-of-a-kind documentary that exudes a gentle, homespun magic.

An innocuous teen pulp soap opera that flirts with “danger” but, in fact, keeps surprising you with how mild and safe and predictable it turns out to be.

Wild Rose, the closest thing to a sleeper I’ve seen at Toronto this year, is a happy-sad drama of starstruck fever that lifts you up and sweeps you along, touching you down in a puddle of well-earned tears.

It’s lunging to be a badass hard-R epic, but it’s basically a pile of origin-story gobbledygook, frenetic and undercooked, full of limb-hacking, eye-gouging monster battles as well as an atmosphere of apocalyptic grunge that signifies next to nothing.

What you don’t feel, ever, in this fundamentalist weeper is a sense of drama rising out of feelings that are less than absolute.

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 movie’s petty folly — its failure of imagination and morality — is that it actually goes out of its way to turn the Manson murders into schlock horror.

The Chaperone leaves you wanting to see a movie about the star Louise Brooks became, on camera and off. It could be the great movie that has yet to be made about the silent era, and about the things that women in Hollywood have always faced. Especially one who was unlike any woman the world had seen.

Unplanned isn’t a good movie, but it’s effective propaganda — or, at least, it is if you belong to the group it’s targeting: those who believe that abortion in America, though a legal right, is really a crime. It’s hard to imagine the movie drawing many viewers outside that self-selected demographic.

And that’s what this overly eager, fractious, Burtonized but standardized, loudly comic but ultimately rather mirthless remake does to Dumbo. It transforms a miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need. The character of Dumbo is still touching, but the tale of entrapment and rescue that surrounds him is not. It’s arduous and forgettable, done in busy italicized strokes, and apart from that FX elephant the movie doesn’t come up with a single character who hooks us emotionally.

As an actress, Olivia Wilde has been something of a shape-shifter, but in this movie she seems to be burning through all her previous roles to find something essential. She grabs hold of the spectacle of agonized female anger, and does it with a grace and power that easily matches that of Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

A light, funny, grounded, engagingly unpretentious sleight-of-hand action comedy.

It’s just a thinly written (by Rich Wilkes and Amanda Adelson), generically staged (by Jeff Tremaine, director of the “Jackass” films) VH1-style sketchbook of a movie — which is to say, it’s a Netflix film, with zero atmosphere, overly blunt lighting, and a threadbare post-psychological telegraphed quality that gives you nothing to read between the lines.

The phenomenon of rape culture has emerged, more than anywhere, from the frat house (and from spring break, that ritualized bacchanal for kids who aren’t necessarily in frats), and it has been growing there — metastasizing — for decades. Roll Red Roll captures, with potent power, how the “If it feels good, wreck it” ethos of the beer-pong drink-till-you-submit forced “hookup” is finding more and more of a home among high schoolers.

Finding Steve McQueen is a ramshackle indie heist drama that has a little bit (but not much) to do with Steve McQueen.

The notion of a larger-than-life theme-park world as a projection of what June is going through comes directly out of “Inside Out,” but the comparison does Wonder Park no favors, because the earlier film was a masterpiece of bursting ingenuity, leaving this one to play like the scaled-down toddler version. On that score, it must be said that little kids will like Wonder Park just fine. But there’s a difference between a great escape and a winsomely crafted pacifier.

There’s a dullness at the core of Triple Frontier.

Boden and Fleck are low-key American neorealists, and in Captain Marvel they barely retain a vestige of their signature style. Yet they have brought off something exciting, embracing the Marvel house style and, within that, crafting a tale with enough tricks and moods and sleight-of-hand layers to keep us honestly absorbed.

A Madea Family Funeral isn’t good, exactly, but it’s Perry good. It combines weaponized comedy and sexualized soap opera in a way that defuses all shame.

Something has a few observations to make about the perils of contemporary parenthood, but instead of whipping them into tension it douses them in catch-as-catch-can thriller vagueness.

The Brink is an impeccably crafted verité ramble — an engaging and enraging, disturbing and highly revealing movie.

Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.

Happy Death Day 2U is more complicated than the first “Happy Death Day,” but in this case more complicated means less fun.

But the thoughts she overhears don’t, for the most part, have the snap of comic surprise. They just fill in the walking alpha blanks we already know.