Owen Gleiberman

House of Gucci is an icepick docudrama that has a great deal of fun with its grand roster of ambitious scoundrels, but it’s never less than a straight-faced and nimbly accomplished movie.

Encanto is a lively, lovely, lushly enveloping digitally animated musical fairy tale.

Mayor Pete shows us the trial by fire of it all, and also the jubilant grind.

It’s a small, impressionistic, oddly heartfelt movie about beauty, stardom, adoration, exploitation, and loss. Oh, is it ever about loss.

Clifford the Big Red Dog becomes a rowdy chase film — as agreeable as Clifford himself, as simultaneously cute and in-your-face, and as genially random in its ability to create chaos.

Dangerous is a bits-and-pieces action thriller with a fluky premise and a lead actor good enough to embody it. Made in the slipshod, overlit style of a straight-to-streaming potboiler, it’s not a rip-off so much as a film built out of spare parts from other movies, to the point that it never fully becomes itself.

The dark-side-of-the-L.A.-club-scene premise has potential, but the movie turns out to be a cut-and-paste thriller without any night-world bloom to it.

Becoming Cousteau, Liz Garbus’s ardent and transporting documentary, is one of those movies that puts a life together so beautifully that you feel it heightening your awareness of everyday things.

It’s a performance film, a delectable slice of nostalgia, and a testament to how one gorgeously raucous rock ‘n’ roll moment can reverberate through the decades.

On some level, every “Paranormal Activity” film is about monsters caught on camera, but in this one the demons remain scariest when they’re sight unseen

Army of Thieves is one of those bombastically blithe and fanciful Netflix action movies, in this case with a romantic heart.

Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.

The movie gives Jason Sudeikis a chance to act without the safety net of comedy, and he proves that he’s got the right stuff. But next time he needs to do it in a movie that offers the safety net of believability.

Madame X, on the joy scale, feels drained. The show is a concert that plays, at times, like a lecture — or maybe the world’s most extended Oscar/Grammy star-makes-a-statement speech. But I don’t say that because I begrudge Madonna’s message. It’s just that she didn’t use to be so deadly serious and, at times, almost punitive about it.

In the case of The Addams Family 2, Tiernan and Vernon have used the sequel as an opportunity for an upgrade. The script is by an entirely new team (Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Ben Queen, and Susanna Fogel), and in some ineffable bats-in-the-belfry way the jokes now land with a more inspired and spontaneous creepy kookiness.

No Time to Die is a terrific movie: an up-to-the-minute, down-to-the-wire James Bond thriller with a satisfying neo-classical edge. It’s an unabashedly conventional Bond film that’s been made with high finesse and just the right touch of soul, as well as enough sleek surprise to keep you on edge.

It shows you, through the ironic empathy summoned by Washington’s performance, just how fast the human race can slip off the tracks. And it brings that drama into ravishing deep focus.

It’s a sharp, lively, and engrossing movie, one that provides a fascinating running commentary on how the world of “The Sopranos” came into being. Yet we can’t help but notice the difference in tone.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a lark, a contradiction — a lurid, violent, caught-in-the-gutter movie that’s also a nimble and knowing tall tale for adults.

We know in our bones where the movie is going, and it’s a steady enjoyable ride, a touch prosaic at times, one that turns into a kind of minimalist chamber-room version of “Unforgiven,” with a surprisingly touching upshot.

The Survivor is a Holocaust movie that’s fresh enough to make you laugh between the tears, the gasps of terror, the long road out of the inferno.

Copshop is a processed slice of genre meatloaf with the gravy occasionally dribbled in ornate patterns. It’s junky and synthetic, but it fills you up.

It’s friendly and diverting and formulaic, in an inoffensive and good-natured way, and it’s a totally minor affair.

Watts’ commitment holds the movie together. She acts as if that phone were her flesh-and-blood partner. But it’s not. It’s a device impersonating something human. And so is Lakewood.

Chastain and Garfield give performances that are brashly entertaining but also canny and layered, as the characters get caught up in something far bigger than themselves. The Bakkers were hucksters of a grand order, and the film uses their spectacular greedhead soap opera to tell the larger American story of how Christianity got turned into showbiz.

Despite a brief action interlude here or there, The Last Duel turns out to be a lavishly convoluted and, at times, rather interesting medieval soap opera.

Halloween night may be Michael Myers’ masterpiece, but Halloween Kills is no masterpiece. It’s a mess — a slasher movie that‘s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere.

Becoming Led Zeppelin is full of essential stuff, but on some level it feels like a Led Zeppelin infomercial.