Owen Gleiberman

Native Son, after its promising first half, leaves you dispirited, because it’s a movie where hope gets snuffed by a stacked deck.

Burns, by trusting the audience, has created a darkly authentic political thriller that does exactly what a movie like this one should do. It leaves you chastened and inspired.

The film wants to be a puckish media satire and an earnest workplace dramedy about “growing,” and the fusion doesn’t always gel.

In my judgment, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is an honestly unsettling and authentic inquiry into the question of who Ted Bundy was, how he operated, what his capture and trial and ongoing infamy has meant, and what, if anything, his existence tells us about our individual relationship to toxic evil.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld doesn’t offer the last word about the issues it raises. But it’s a movie that should be seen, grappled with, argued with, and experienced, because the questions it plants in us are dark enough to reverberate as powerfully as answers.

In David Crosby: Remember My Name, Crosby is more than just a rock ‘n’ roll survivor nursing a lifetime of second thoughts. He’s a romantic witness to a time that was genuinely about following the road of excess to the palace of wisdom.

It’s the sort of unguarded drama they used to make in the ‘80s — a coming-of-age tale of unabashed earnestness — but it’s also a delirious and romantic rock ‘n’ roll parable.

Big Time Adolescence isn’t bad, but it’s a trifle.

Apollo 11 is a cool, meticulous, at times enthralling documentary that captures the Apollo 11 flight in its entirety through raw footage drawn from the NASA vaults.

A vital and sobering documentary directed by Roberta Grossman, always knew that they were drafting the record of an existence whose memory — were it not for them — would be wiped away.

It’s good to see Shyamalan back (to a degree) in form, to the extent that he’s recovered his basic mojo as a yarn spinner. But Glass occupies us without haunting us; it’s more busy than it is stirring or exciting.

American Hangman belongs to that species of grade-Z movie that’s at once grisly and pretentious. It’s trash with a lot on its mind.

The first part of the film gets some airy momentum going. Then, however, we learn the secret of what the characters have in common, and it gives you that slightly sinking feeling of one contrivance too many.

The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.

Even though Second Act shouldn’t work, it does (sort of). It’s got flow, a certain knowing ticky-tackiness about its own contrivances. You know you’re watching a connect-the-dots comedy, but the dots sparkle. And Lopez gives her first star performance in a while. Age has enriched her talent; she brings curlicues of experience to every scene.

The film is far from incompetent, and it brims with ambition, but too much of the time what’s happening just sits there. It’s a lavishly odd concoction, like a feel-good movie for OCD miniature-world Barbie-doll fetishists.

The movie, though it pretends to reveal how power works, is ultimately content to remain on the outside, sticking its finger in the eye of power.

It’s a rapturous piece of nostalgia — a film that devotes itself, in every madly obsessive frame, to making you feel happy in the guileless way a movie still could back in 1964.

It now takes more than it once did to shock us, and Back Roads wants to do just that, but the effect, in this case, is more audacious than it is convincing.

In the piercing and perceptive documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, it’s fascinating, in an outrageous and distressing way, to witness the moment when Ailes transformed the nation’s political landscape virtually overnight.

The American Meme is a film I very much recommend, since it’s both highly entertaining and an essential snapshot of the voyeuristic parasitic American fishbowl.

Viewers hooked on the spectacle of demonic possession tend to like their satanic tropes served neat. The Possession of Hannah Grace serves them sloppy, if not without a certain random soupçon of grisly style.

Robin Hood is no classic, but if it sometimes seems like it’s trying to be “Baz Luhrmann’s Robin Hood,” more power to it. The movie is a diverting live-wire lark — one that, for my money, gets closer to the spirit of what Robin Hood is about than the logy 1991 Kevin Costner version or the dismal 2010 Russell Crowe version.

Creed II has been made with heart and skill, and Jordan invests each moment with such fierce conviction that he makes it all seem like it matters.

It redefines family craziness as normal in a way that those who seek it out will gratefully relate to.

The effect is ecstatic; she sounds like the holiest of trumpets, with every note piercingly bright yet as soft as velvet. Listening to Franklin, you feel like you could ride that voice into the heavens. She’s not just a singer, she’s a human chariot.

The drama of “Narcissister Organ Player” is that Narcissister isn’t layering her demons onto the culture; she’s layering the culture onto herself. That’s why that mask of hers looks more and more like one we’re all capable of hiding behind.

For anyone who grew up with “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” The Grinch won’t replace it, yet it’s nimble and affectionate in a way that can hook today’s children, and more than a few adults, by conjuring a feeling that comes close enough.

In Nobody’s Fool, Tiffany Haddish is just furious and funny enough to make you wish that the rest of the movie wasn’t a droopy romantic comedy without the comedy.

Were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, in some rollicking sex-positive way, an intrinsic part of the feminist revolution? Or did they represent one step forward and one high kick back? You could make the case either way, but the film pushes the clean and forceful — if highly ironic — argument that the Cheerleaders were nothing more or less than empowered entertainers who seized control of their sexuality and, in doing so, advanced the liberation of women.

The Panama Papers captures and celebrates a different concentration of power: that of the journalists who’ve begun to band together by thinking globally, following the money as it travels — and does its best to hide — around the world.

It’s an investigation in the form of a highly personalized meditation.

Hunter Killer has good enough actors, but it never figures out what to do with them. They’re stuck in an underwater vacuum, a submarine movie that submerges anything of interest.

The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.

Okoro has bent over backwards not to make the poverty-row version of a glib crime thriller, but he shouldn’t have bent so far.

The way a movie like “Goosebumps 2” works, even a weary adult will be grateful, by the time it finally kicks in, for all the brainless whirling distraction. I almost wrote fun, but that would be pushing it. To achieve that F-word, the film would have to ground its amusing effects in a story that was less skittery yet leaden.

The Price of Everything exalts in the spirt of art over commerce, yet what’s thrilling about the film — and what echoes in your mind after it’s over — is that it captures all the ways those two forces can’t be separated.

The film shows you the club from every angle, and seems to be gawking at every patron. It puts us right inside.

Venom is a textbook case of a comic-book film that’s unexciting in its ho-hum competence, and even its visual-effects bravura.

There are a minor handful of scenes in Johnny English Strikes Again that will make you laugh. A bit.

Night School has a handful of laughs, but it’s a bloated trifle that, at 111 minutes, overstays its welcome.

The pull of Garry Winogrand’s photographs is that they dissolve the line between art and life.

Teen Spirit is too tidy, concocted, and safe. It longs to channel the high of great pop, but as a movie it lacks the ecstatic imagination to do what great pop does. It never soars.

It’s a riveting and spectacular documentary.

No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.

Mid90s, though made by a Hollywood star, isn’t a nostalgic indie “fable” in gritty skate-punk drag. It’s something smaller and purer: a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality.

Widows, while a highly original and entertaining variation on the heist film, isn’t a home run.

The movie, in its way, summons something ominous and powerful. It’s not a screed — it’s a warning. It says, quite wisely: Take action now, or you may no longer have the opportunity to do so.

Beautiful Boy, made by the Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”), from a script by Luke Davies, is scrupulous and tenderly wounding — a drama that seizes and holds you.

What you see in American Dharma isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.

Wang Bing’s Dead Souls is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.

Hal has a once-over-lightly quality, but at times it offers a telling window into how the New Hollywood worked.

Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.

I enjoyed the film as far is it goes, especially John C. Reilly’s straight-shooter performance, yet I also found myself, at certain points, growing impatient with it.

Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.

Since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. Yet The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie.

Cooper has made a jaggedly tender love story that is never over-the-top, an operatic movie that dares to be quiet.

The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.

It’s a perfectly cut diamond of a movie — a finely executed, coldly entertaining entry in the genre of savage misanthropic baroque costume drama.

Roma is no mere movie — it’s a vision, a memory play that unfolds with a gritty and virtuosic time-machine austerity. It’s a Proustian reverie, dreamed and designed down to the last street corner and scuffed piece of furniture. Yet I actually think it’s far from a masterpiece, because as a viewing experience it has a slightly hermetic coffee-table-book purity. Every moment comes at you in the same methodically objective and caressing Zen way.

After seeing First Man, it’s doubtful you’ll think about space flight, or Armstrong’s historic walk, in quite the same way. You’ll know more deeply how it happened, what it meant and what it was, and why its mystery — more than ever — still lingers.

The Elephant and the Butterfly is a movie too cool-headed and present tense for backstory.

While it’s not as if the film comes up with some smoking gun that Robert Mueller hasn’t yet, it fills in the Trump-Russia connection in a dogged, rigorously reported, eyebrow-raising way.

Lively, confessional, and entertaining.

The last thing you want a movie like this one to feel like is a slick Hollywood suspense drama with famous historical names plugged in. Operation Finale doesn’t feel like that, yet taken on its own here’s how it really happened terms, the movie is at once plausible and sketchy, intriguing and not fully satisfying.

Berg, when he wants to be, is a surgical craftsman of chaos. Yet Mile 22 has little weight or resonance.

Alpha, a spectacular prehistoric eye-candy survival yarn, is enthralling in a square and slightly stolid way.

Slender Man is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic. There’s just a movie out to goose you.

If there’s a disappointment to The Meg, it’s not just that the movie isn’t good enough. It’s that it’s not bad enough.

In Death of a Nation, Dinesh D’Souza is no longer preaching to the choir; he’s preaching to the mentally unsound. That’s how detached from reality his “philosophy,” his armchair rage, and his passionate and consuming desire to be a radical-right shill have become.

The Bleeding Edge needs to be seen, so that it can change hearts and minds.

The Spy Who Dumped Me is no debacle, but it’s an over-the-top and weirdly combustible entertainment, a movie that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a light comedy caper or a top-heavy exercise in B-movie mega-violence.

In Path of Blood, the masks come off, and we literally see the faces of Al Qaeda in action, with the propaganda machine turned off. What’s shocking is how ordinary and high-spirited they appear.

The movie’s message, if it has one, is that you don’t have to be super to be a superhero. Teen Titans GO! is fun in a defiantly unsuper way, and that’s a recommendation.

Constructing Albert remains an oddly unsatisfying movie about food that’s so tasteful you can barely imagine what it tastes like.

“Here We Go Again” is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end — a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.

The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”

Ideal Home is a trifle, but more than that it’s caught between eras, poised between wanting to crack you up at what cranky prima donnas its characters are and to make you tear up at the revelation of their normal hearts. The result? A comedy of flamboyant banality.

Ant-Man and the Wasp has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale.

The film simply examines the prejudice that’s standing right in front of it. It’s chilling, but it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Promised Land is a searching, flawed, let’s-try-this-on-and-see-how-it-looks movie. At times, it veers too close to being a standard Elvis chronicle, and at others its insight into our national neurosis may strike you as a tad ethereal. It’s an essay in the form of an investigation. Yet it’s the definition of tasty food for thought.

Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that’s less sensually stylish than you’d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.

What was organic, and even obsessive, in the first outing comes off as pat and elaborate formula here. The new movie, energized as it is, too often feels like warmed-over sloppy seconds, with a what-do-we-do-now? riff that turns into an overly on-the-nose plot.

The heist is fun and convincing without being dazzling, and some of the most amusing stuff in the film is just character comedy.

The first “Jurassic World” was, quite simply, not a good ride. “Fallen Kingdom” is an improvement, but it’s the first “Jurassic” film to come close to pretending it isn’t a ride at all, and as a result it ends up being just a passable ride.

The film isn’t a dud — it “delivers the goods” in a certain reductive, baseline action-fanboy way. Yet Upgrade is the sort of movie that thinks it’s more ingenious than it is, starting with the premise, which is a semi-catchy, semi-stupido hoot in a way that the movie couldn’t have completely intended.

Woodley gives herself over to the physical and spiritual reality of each scene. She knows how to play an ordinary woman who’s wild at heart, and she keeps you captivated, even when the film itself is watchable in a perfectly competent, touching, and standard way.

Each elegantly framed shot, every deftly observed moment expresses something organic and moving.

Fonte, it must be said, gives an expert performance as a saintly scamp who “blooms” into a butterfly of vengeance. I might have bought what he’s doing in a different film, but the one that Garrone has made strains too hard to have it both ways.

Our world, in The Image Book, has finally caught up to Jean-Luc Godard’s doom-laden dream of it. He seems to be saying that we all have a choice: to change it, or to sit back in our TV armchairs and watch.

Macdonald’s multi-faceted portrait of Houston allows us to touch the intertwined forces that did her in.

Under the Silver Lake gets its hooks in you, but it’s a good-bad movie: an academic stab at making the darkness visible.

The House That Jack Built, however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive.

Penna works in what you might call a gratifyingly prosaic style. He doesn’t wow you (though the film, in its level way, is elegantly shot). But he doesn’t cheat you, either, so you come to trust the gravity of his nuts-and-bolts storytelling.

Climax works, at least when it’s willing to be a human drama. But then it sinks in that you’re watching “Fame” directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam.

Sara Driver, the director of “Boom for Real” (who was there at the time, as Jim Jarmusch’s early producer and romantic partner), creates an alluring and detailed portrait of how the downtown scene came together, springing up like weeds between the cracks of a broken New York, its poverty-row aesthetic infused with the energy of punk and the vivacity of hip-hop (before it was called that).

Overboard has been made with enough bubbly comic spirit and skill that the gender switch turns out to be a smart move, from both an entertainment and commercial vantage. Like the original, the new version is a snarky situational farce that evolves into a cheese-dog fable of home and hearth, and the role reversal lets it feel halfway fresh.

The whole thing becomes drenched in a kind of downbeat sentimental martyrdom that feels oppressively old-fashioned and moribund.

There’s dialogue, but very little interchange. The movie makes your average mumblecore mumblefest sound like Preston Sturges.

It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger.

Zoe, like Cole, ties itself up in a lot of high-minded hand-wringing, and the result is that the movie, though it’s not badly told, fails to grip you.

The opening title says “Based on an absurd but true story,” yet there’s nothing absurd about the facts. Improbable? Yes. Hapless and desperate? Most definitely. But the absurdity — the impulse to giggle — is mostly there in the eye of the writer-director, Robert Budreau, who collaborated with Hawke two years ago on the entrancing Chet Baker biopic “Born to Be Blue” but here comes off as a far less sure-handed filmmaker.

The movie, a wayward portrait with surrealist touches, is trying for something genuine. Yet despite some good scenes, some tart lines...and an atmosphere of saintly desperation that suggests “Trainspotting” redone as a darkened YA fable, the movie is wispy and meandering; it doesn’t gather power as it goes along.

Love, Gilda is plain but beautifully crafted. It draws you close to Radner, presenting her rise through the world of ’70s comedy as a journey of discovery.

It’s a sleekly witty action opera that’s at once overstuffed and bedazzling.

Super Troopers 2 is an aggressively lame and slobby comedy full of cardboard characters and in-your-face naughty jokes that feel about as dangerous as old vaudeville routines.

The movie is a mess, yet once the thriller plot kicks in, you do start to absorb it as a “silent” film, tuning into the visual atmosphere of stalker fear and rusty chemical entropy.

It’s a pensive and heartfelt movie, assuming that you let yourself get caught up in its moody-minimalist, more-visual-than-verbal style.

The movie isn’t scary, it isn’t gripping, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t fueled by any sort of clever compulsion. It’s just a strangely arduous exercise that feels increasingly frantic and arbitrary as it goes along.

Blaze, which leaps around in time, telling Blaze Foley’s story by zeroing in on a handful of disparate moments, is beautifully made. It’s an organic slice of life — raw and untidy, deceptively aimless but always exploratory.

Spinning Man, like a film noir turned into a video game, winds up crafting a rickety atmosphere of deception out of the question of guilt or innocence. The result keeps you guessing, but it forgets to keep you caring.

Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.

Pandas is less sentimental than you expect, but you can respect the film’s honesty and still leave it hoping that the next true-life panda adventure delivers more of a feel-good ending — for the audience, and mostly for the pandas.

A ludicrously scattershot drama in which overwrought feminine rage, diary-of-a-mad-woman craziness, and inept filmmaking are all but inseparable.

This one, taken on its own terms, isn’t bad in a TV-movie-fodder-as-parable way.

King in the Wilderness is a searing film because it takes Martin Luther King Jr. down from the mountaintop. You glimpse the real glory of who he was: not a walking monument but a human being with fear, humor, guts, and (amazing) grace under pressure.

The actors give little life to the proceedings, since no one’s bothered to figure what this movie has to offer beyond terrifically tactile stone figures going through the motions of what might be called Generic Animated Action Rescue Plot.

It is often an oddly compelling tabloid foray, since it winds up shedding a crucial ray of light on the mad moment we’re in now. Whether or not you believe in the Devil, the film helps to color in how our culture got possessed.

It’s a vivid and unusually honest drama about the pain and bravado that were the fuel of hip-hop.

At Thunder Road, you’ll giggle at moments, and you’ll also be moved, but mostly you’ll know the precise crazy-sane reality of who this man is.

Boundaries, to be sure, delivers you to a place you know you’re going, but there should always be room for a movie that does that this well.

The kinds of connections that Take Your Pills makes, between the culture of information overload and a radically tightened job market and heightened personal performance and the chemical itch that fuels this whole late-stage capitalist dynamic, may strike some as too speculative for comfort. Yet it’s precisely by making connections like these that a documentary can fire up your perceptions enough to burn through the cumulative effects of advertising.

The movie is full of vine-swinging, bow-and-arrow-shooting, ancient-spirit-meeting action, but most of it is staged on a convincing human scale, one that’s been expertly tailored to its star’s understated directness.

It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.

Blockers isn’t really about these girls losing their virginity. It’s about how they seize control of their destinies, one triumphantly lewd zinger at a time.

A Quiet Place is a tautly original genre-bending exercise, technically sleek and accomplished, with some vivid, scary moments, though it’s a little too in love with the stoned logic of its own premise.

There are moments when the film has the ability to absorb us, however fleetingly.

There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.

One emerges from Breaking Point stunned and moved, with the realization that the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves, as they have for centuries, but also that they’re now fighting for all of us.

The movie is avidly told and often suspenseful, but it’s really a fascinating study of how corruption in America works. It sears you with its relevance.

All the new Death Wish is truly committed to is getting a rise out of the audience. It’s a first-person-shooter fantasy. The film’s only real view of justice is that it’s a blast.

Levine, who wrote the script, knows how to stage an energized intellectual battle, but adapting “The Blue Angel” to a 21st-century setting turns out to be a distinctly musty and unrewarding idea.

There’s a playfulness to Every Day, to how the film says to its audience — through the very structure of its Afterschool Special sci-fi design — that if you want to find love, you’ve got to look beyond the surface.

The movie manipulates its audience in cunning and puckish ways. It’s no big whoop, but you’re happy to have been played.

Lawrence, in this movie, shows you what true screen stardom is all about. She cues each scene to a different mood, leaving the audience in a dangling state of discovery. We’re on her side, but more than that we’re in her head. Even when (of course) we’re being played.

Even at 40 minutes, America’s Musical Journey could have taken us on an organic and inspiring musical adventure. But what’s odd about the movie is that instead of reveling in the jewels of our cultural past, it seems to be twisting itself in knots to avoid the past.

Basmati Blues is one of those movies that isn’t terrible but still leaves you wondering why it exists.

What brings a documentary like this one to life is a central character with something going on that’s thornier than his official idealism. Fortunately, that’s Padraig O’Malley.

The oddity of the movie — and this is baked into the way Eastwood conceived it, sticking to the facts and not over-hyping anything — is that this vision of real-life heroism is so much less charged than the Hollywood version might be that it often feels as if a dramatic spark plug is missing.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a mind-boggling mish-mosh. It squanders whatever stray crumbs were left of the “Cloverfield” mystique by banging together bits and pieces of what must be a dozen genres. The result is a desperate plunge into the abyss of shoddy sci-fi.

Winchester is the supernatural-schlock version of a liberal think-tank paper.

Tully has its heart (and many other things) in the right place, but by the end you wish it had an imagination finely executed enough to match its empathy.

Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.

A Worthy Companion is a lacerating snapshot of what abuse really does: how it can tear away someone’s identity.

Den of Thieves is better at set-up than follow-through. The movie is clever enough, until it cheats. It tries to fill in its characters, until reducing them to plot devices.

On its own terms, the film is watchable enough, but it’s blunt and stolid and under-characterized, and at 130 minutes it plods.

Henson is the right actress to play a contract killer grown weary, but as a thriller Proud Mary doesn’t quite do her justice. It’s a connect-the-dots underworld trifle, watchable and minimal...though Henson holds it together and, at moments, comes close to convincing you that you’re watching a better movie.

Shephard has a lively eye for the neurotic ripples of high-school society, but her most audacious gambit is to dare to place the audience in a grey zone between innocence and judgment regarding a relationship that plays out more sympathetically than it should.

Father Figures...is a limply spritzing fountain of unconvincing (and unfunny) tricks out of the how-to-write-a-comedy-hit manual.

The director, Michael Gracey, is an Australian maker of commercials who has never directed a feature before, and he works with an exuberant sincerity that can’t be faked. The Greatest Showman is a concoction, the kind of film where the pieces all click into place, yet at an hour and 45 minutes it flies by, and the link it draws between P.T. Barnum and the spirit of today is more than hype.

As directed by Trish Sie, the movie is bubbly, it’s fast, it’s hella synthetic-clever, and it’s an avid showcase for the personalities of its stars: the skeptically pert Anna Kendrick, the radiant and vivacious Hailee Steinfeld, and the terrifyingly droll Rebel Wilson.

It’s a low-budget generic shrug of a movie, one that recycles clichés both ancient (testy drug dealers) and slightly less ancient (the hero films his life with a camcorder).

It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.

What’s ultimately moving about Along for the Ride is that it communicates how Dennis Hopper, by sticking true to his reckless muse, was an artist who changed things, and maybe changed everything.

Phantom Thread sweeps you up and carries you along, much more, to my mind, than “The Master” did. Yet it’s a thesis movie: the story of a bullying narcissist who lacks the ability to have a relationship, and the outrageous way he’s schooled into becoming a human being. It’s the story of a control freak made by a control freak.

The Pentagon Papers marked an iconic moment in American history: the press claiming its own freedom to call out the excesses of power. The Post celebrates what that means, tapping into an enlightened nostalgia for the glory days of newspapers, but the film also takes you back to a time when the outcome was precarious, and the freedoms we thought we took for granted hung in the balance. Just as they do today.

The movie is “Fatal Attraction” for the age of the revolving-door hook-up, and in its fevered low-budget way it’s just clever enough to do what it sets out to do. It gives toxic masculinity its just desserts.

The movie is no cheat. It’s a tasty franchise delivery system that kicks a certain series back into gear.

It’s a very tasteful heart-tugger — a drama of disarmingly level-headed empathy that glides along with wit, assurance, and grace, and has something touching and resonant to say about the current climate of American bullying.

In a strange way, the movie, as doggedly made as it is, remains stubbornly uncompelling. That, I think, is because Gibney’s own connection to the subject, while it charges him with righteous passion, has resulted in a rare loss of perspective.

It arrives at a moment when the crackling voltage of the culture wars — blue state vs. red state, Trump haters vs. Trump lovers — is coursing through every fiber of the nation. This means that a film like Daddy’s Home 2, in its stupido-on-purpose way, can seem almost relevant in its trivial hit-or-miss yocks.

Frank Serpico is a finely etched and fascinating documentary.

The new film, while just okay enough to get by, takes a step back from the audacity of “Bad Moms” to something more cautiously conventional.

The great strength of The New Radical is that it’s not on its subjects’ side (or totally against them either). It’s the rare documentary that lets you decide.

For 92 minutes, it more or less succeeds in sawing through your boredom, slicing and dicing with a glum explicitness that raises the occasional tingle of gross-out suspense but no longer carries any kick of true shock value.

No film drama can make us “know” PTSD, but by the end of Thank You for Your Service, you feel as if the agony, and bravery, of our soldiers has become less remote and more tangible. Hall’s filmmaking is crisp, assured, and, at times, quietly audacious.

Tyler Perry hasn’t generally been in the business of sequels, but apart from Joe’s overly salty soul-food patter, this one has a joyless, obligatory, cardboard feeling that marks it as one of Perry’s least satisfying films.

Jim & Andy is fleetly edited and engrossing, animated by a sense of discovery.

It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note. It’s also strikingly acted.

For a long time now, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” has been two movies, and the hypnotic film-geek documentary 78/52 is an ingenious and irreverent master class in both of them.

Happy Death Day is “Groundhog Day” dipped in blood, and if the movie isn’t all that clever, it’s just clever enough to get by.

The central reason that Last Flag Flying fails to take wing is that its characters don’t ring true. Not really. You never feel, in your bones, that you’re watching battle-scarred veterans.

Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives...is an example of how a movie can be flagrantly hagiographic, sentimental, and hypnotized by its own subject — and still make you want to keep watching it.

Victoria & Abdul is a pleasant enough entertainment, and it will bring the inevitable awards chatter Dench’s way (is her acting ever less than pinpoint? Never). But as prestige period pieces go, it’s far from top-drawer (more like second drawer, or even third), because its cozy lack of enlightenment is echoed in the standard but far from scintillating play of its drama.

It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.

"Mark Felt,” despite bits of bureaucratic cloak-and-dagger intrigue and a commanding lead performance by Liam Neeson, is a film that pings off relevance more than it feels charged with it.

It’s far from a masterpiece, yet it holds you, it adds up, and it’s something to see.

I found the film intensely revealing of Gaga’s life and personality, especially when she’s getting treatments to deal with the pain that’s dogged her for three years, ever since she suffered a broken hip (misdiagnosed at the time) on tour.

Once Nancy Meyers went out on her own, she became a wittier and more nimble filmmaker. So maybe Hallie Meyers-Shyer will follow in her footsteps and improve. Right now, she’s got nowhere to go but up.

Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.

It’s a movie that reels the audience in and keeps it hooked: with smart little kicks of surprise.

It’s a moving film, but it leaves a hole in one’s outrage.

Downsizing is an ingenious comedy of scale, a touching tale of a man whose problems grow bigger as he gets smaller, and an earnest environmental parable.

Polina is vivid as dance but vague as drama.

A lively and appealing analog-nostalgia documentary.

As an animated entertainment, The Nut Job 2 lacks several key factors: memorable characters, a fun story, jokes that will appeal to adults as well as little kids. But one thing it does not lack is visual momentum.

The thing you want from a documentary about his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the chance to get right up close to him, in the way that movies can do. You want the chance to bask in his presence and come out with a heightened sense of what he’s about. The Last Dalai Lama? accomplishes that, and with an offhand eloquence, though it’s a sketchy, catch-as-catch-can movie.

If it’s less punchy and original than “(500) Days of Summer,” it’s still a wry tale that deserves to be seen. Gerald keeps telling Thomas that life should be a mess, but in The Only Living Boy in New York it’s a pleasingly witty and well-observed one.

It’s a highly competent and watchable paranoid metaphysical video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, includes some luridly entertaining visual effects, and — it has to be said — summons an emotional impact of close to zero. Which in a film like this one isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.

The strength, and fascination, of The Force is that the movie isn’t on anyone’s side. It’s cognizant of the brutality and violence that police officers, in our era, have been caught on phone cameras committing. At the same time, it’s not out to demonize the police — it’s out to capture the pressures they’re under, and to show us what their job looks like from the inside.

There have been worse ideas, but in this case the execution isn’t good enough to bring the notion of an emoji movie to funky, surprising life.

Logan Lucky is Soderbergh in mid-season form, and there should be a solid summer niche for a movie that’s this much ripsnorting fun.

Bigelow, working from a script by her regular collaborator Mark Boal (it’s their first film since “Zero Dark Thirty”), has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons — we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are.

What do you call a movie about a midlife non-crisis? How about tame, competent, mildly touching, and a little dull — except for Catherine Deneuve's fearless turn as a boozing, ailing wreck.

Lemon is a comedy of miserablism that keeps poking you in the ribs — and, quite often, fails to hit the rib it’s aiming for. Yet it’s a watchable curio, because beneath it all the director, the Panamanian-born Janicza Bravo, has a more conventional sensibility than she lets on.

The Reagan Show, unfortunately, isn’t the movie that it pretends to be. It’s a glib and scattered exposé.

Sin, more stylized than the director’s previous work, is also more detached.

The Rehearsal is engrossing, but it’s not a major vision.

The remarkable thing is that the movie acquires the quality of a time machine. You don’t just watch “Dawson City.” You step into it to and draw back a magical curtain on the past, entering a world of buried memory that’s the precursor to our own.

A massive Hollywood biopic about a man who never quite seems there.

For Patriot Games to have been more than a generic international thriller, it would have needed to take us deep inside the clandestine organizations — the IRA and the CIA — on which Clancy is fixated. That doesn’t happen.

The House, like too many Hollywood comedies of outrage, turns the extreme into the innocuous.

Hot Shots! offers a satisfying kick in the pants to a movie (and an era) that has more than earned it.

It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.

What the film offers is evidence of a pattern, the shadows of a disturbing trend that add up to a warning: If we, as a society, don’t push back against the chipping away of the freedom of information, it’s only going to get worse, until it eats us alive.

For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.

Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.

The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.

Rough Night, a bachelorette-party-from-hell thriller comedy that’s got some push and some laughs, despite its essentially formulaic nature, is a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers.

The Journey, thanks to its buddy-movie structure, is destined to feel a little corny, but the movie gets at something real. It’s a celebration, by two splendid actors, of the art of political theater.

Cars 3 is a friendly, rollicking movie made with warmth and dash, and to the extent that it taps our primal affection for this series, it more than gets the job done.

The Mummy is a literal-minded, bumptious monster mash of a movie. It keeps throwing things at you, and the more you learn about the ersatz intricacy of its “universe,” the less compelling it becomes.

Captain Underpants isn’t out to be more than a trifle; that’s part of its appeal. It’s not so much potty-mouthed as it is a potty-minded kiddie burlesque, one that finds the supreme innocence in naughtiness.

Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.

Agnès Varda, in the glory of her golden years, has become a humanist magician.

The film enunciates its raw themes — punk means individuality! the aliens are all about conformity! — but never begins to figure out how to embody those themes in a narrative that could lure in the audience.

It’s an elegantly oblique movie, even for Kiarostami, whose art thrums with quiet ethereal metaphor.

A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).

The dramatic aesthetic of a movie like Loveless — rock-solid yet leisurely in its observance, grounded yet metaphorical — makes it a quietly commanding film.

Filmworker is a brisk, compelling movie that’s pure candy for Kubrick buffs, yet there are oddities about it.

Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.

As a filmmaker, Baker is a graceful neorealist voyeur who thrives on improvisation, and his storytelling, in The Florida Project, is mostly just a series of anecdotes. But that turns out to be enough.

Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.

The trouble is that the movie plays it boringly straight.

Mamet has a quick, spry reaction time and a gently forlorn focus that holds the screen, and she holds this movie together.

When you watch Get Me Roger Stone, the lively, fun, sickening, and essential new documentary, you realize that Atwater and Rove may have excelled at what they did, but there was — and is — only one king.

It Comes at Night is a good, tight, impressive little exercise. I was held by it, but the movie, while tense and absorbing, is ultimately a tad forgettable, because it thinks it’s up to more than it is.

A powerful and important documentary.

The movie is diligent and, to a degree, absorbing — a legal/business saga that’s also the story of a family in crisis.

Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, directed by Daniel Raim, is a passionate and beguiling movie-love documentary that shines a light on two of the unsung artisan heroes of Hollywood.

The movie’s mother-daughter jokes are like firecrackers with damp fuses.

It has the sprawl and generosity of a good Dead show, yet there’s nothing indulgent about it — it’s an ardent piece of documentary classicism.

It just has a story to tell, and it does that incredibly compellingly.

I Am Heath Ledger is a catchy and seductive portrait of an extraordinary artist, but it leaves you wanting more, because you know it’s not close to being all of Heath Ledger.

That The Trip to Spain is unabashedly more of the same is good news…but not entirely good news.

The Lovers is a comedy of Middle American doldrums that leaves you rooting for its characters instead of smirking at them.

You could call The Circle a dystopian thriller, yet it’s not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that.

Shot for shot, line and line, it’s an extravagant and witty follow-up, made with the same friendly virtuosic dazzle. Yet this time you can sense just how hard the series’ wizard of a director, James Gunn (now taking off from a script he wrote solo), is working to entertain you. Maybe a little too hard.

There was a time when audiences lined up around city blocks to see the movies of Lina Wertmüller. Behind the White Glasses lets you revisit a bit of that passion, without quite nailing what it was.

The movie just about pulses with contemporary resonance.

“Chasing Trane” is a seductive piece of middle-of-the-road documentary filmmaking; it gives you the basics, but beautifully.

To the extent that Born in China is, by its very existence, a minor act of cross-cultural diplomacy, its most progressive effect is to unveil the majestic diversity of Chinese landscapes.

The Fate of the Furious is nothing more than pulp done smart, but scene for scene it’s elegant rather than bombastic, and it packs a heady escapist wallop.

Going in Style coasts along on the testy spiky charms of its leading men, who have 246 years of life on earth between them (Caine is 84, Freeman 79, and Arkin 83), but it’s nothing more than an amiable connect-the-dots movie.

The Fabios appear to have some talent, but not a lot of common sense. They’ve made a land-mine suspense thriller with a few heart-in-the-throat, hair-trigger moments, but Mine is so eager to be a “metaphor” (it’s a little Beckett, a little Tarantino, a little Lifetime channel) that it’s the film’s pretension that winds up exploding in your face.

When a film’s basic strategy is to cut between the past and the present, it should create ripples of anticipatory tension. But Despite the Falling Snow is one of those movies in which the cross-cutting keeps destroying all mood and momentum — it feels more like channel-surfing.

Gifted wants to be an “honest” tearjerker, but it’s as plotted out as an equation on a blackboard. It’s the undergirding of formula that roots the movie in the commercial marketplace, but that may ultimately limit its appeal.

Tickling Giants is a terrific movie that leaves you cherishing (a little more) the freedom we have, and holding in contempt (a little more) those who would compromise it. Mostly, the movie makes you understand how every society — and ours more than ever — needs people like Bassem Youssef to demonstrate that laughter will always be one of the essential ways to keep power in check.

A Woman, a Part knows how to hold an audience, and it’s got a fresh, if commercially limited, subject: What happens when hipsters get old.

It’s not a rousing animated comedy that parents will cherish along with their kids. It’s more like a colorful and diverting pacifier.

Shepard just sprinkles overstated banter onto a generic plot and bits of pedal-to-the-metal action, as if he was serving the action-comedy gods by sticking the usual ingredients in a blender and pushing “puree.”

We’re now so awash in superhero culture that kids no longer need the safe, lame, pandering junior-league version of it. They can just watch “Ant-Man” or the PG-13 “Suicide Squad.” Safe, lame, and pandering have all grown up.

By the end of I Am Another You, what starts off as a celebration of reckless freedom turns into a revelation of a broken yet soaring soul: the story of a life that resists being judged as much as it does being pigeonholed.

The new documentary Ben-Gurion, Epilogue offers a rare intimate look at what went on inside Ben-Gurion’s heart and mind.

The Boss Baby, the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (it’s being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.

The movie takes Kornbluth’s stage show, recorded live, and intersperses it with dramatized scenes that are just deft and amusing enough to make you wish they were part of a larger indie production. Yet it all works together, as if Kornbluth was narrating and acting out the graphic novel of his life.

The film has gruesomely effective moments, and one at times gets caught up in the gears of its big interlocked narrative, but it also has serious longueurs.

It’s a lovingly crafted movie, and in many ways a good one, but before that it’s an enraptured piece of old-is-new nostalgia.

The surprise is that “Skull Island” isn’t just ten times as good as “Jurassic World”; it’s a rousing and smartly crafted primordial-beastie spectacular.

The strangest thing about The Shack, and the reason it’s finally a so-so movie, is that all the rage and terror and dark-side vengeance that Mack has to learn to transcend is something we’re told about, but we never actually see him mired in it.

Almost everything that happens in this movie rings cloyingly false. It wants to make you laugh and cry, but you may be too busy cringing.

It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.

The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.

Moverman balances the potential for staginess with his flowing cinematic bravura; he keeps surprising you, and he gives the drama a dash of poison elegance.

Each time the violence explodes, it’s slashingly satisfying, because it’s earned, and also because Mangold knows just how to stage it.

As long as Kaurismäki presents this tidy a vision (aesthetically and morally), he’ll continue to be an engagingly hermetic art-house curio impersonating an artist.

Rush and Tucci create a captivating portrait of an artist who’s at once elated, haunted, and utterly possessed.

You walk out of Chasing Coral feeling that Richard Vevers is correct: The more that people see, and understand, the death of our coral, the more they’ll realize that climate change isn’t just about wrecking the planet, it’s about humanity destroying itself.

The first thing to say about The Lego Batman Movie is that it’s kicky, bedazzling, and super-fun.

The movie gives us bits and pieces of drama, but in a larger way it doesn’t invite us in.

The movie, which will be lucky to eke out a weekend’s worth of business, isn’t scary, it isn’t awesome, and it doesn’t nudge you to think of technology in a new way. But it does make you wish that you could rewind those two hours, or maybe just erase them.