Peter Debruge

Impressive as Berry’s commitment to the role can be, there’s a mirthless predictability to the whole ordeal. This pro-forma sports drama, which clearly means so much to its creator, unfolds pretty much exactly as you’d expect, leaning hard on pathos, when what it really needs is personality.

What’s refreshing about the debuting director’s approach is that it feels relatively egoless. His style is playful and energetic, often intercutting between multiple threads within a given song or scene, but it doesn’t feel as if Miranda is calling attention to himself so much as trying to open up the show.

In the end, this is the movie — not “The Closer” — that deserves the widest possible audience.

A fun, fast-paced and frequently amusing divertissement.

What makes suggestion-driven Antlers so disturbing isn’t the movie’s tension- and dread-building mechanics so much as the way the filmmaker burrows into the minds of his two main characters.

It’s not easy being Ben Affleck, by which I mean, there aren’t many actors who seem so comfortably themselves on-screen, and now that Affleck has reached middle age, he’s capable of bringing fresh depth to his performances.

It’s a shame that the mile-a-minute plot of “Ron’s Gone Wrong” isn’t more focused.

The good news for “Ghostbusters” fans is that “Afterlife” does nothing to tarnish what has come before.

As much fun as Majors, Elba, Beetz and King are to watch in roles that allow for plenty of scenery chewing (and oh what scenery!), it’s Stanfield who steals the show here as the part-Indian, part-Black Cherokee Bill.

Managed (more than directed) by motion-capture star-turned-aspiring blockbuster helmer Andy Serkis, Venom: Let There Be Carnage has all the indications of a slap-dash cash grab. The set-pieces look sloppy, the visual effects are all over the place, and the laughs come largely at the movie’s expense.

I’ll admit that Karam’s camera strays down one too many empty hallways for my taste, but I love the patience with which he lets things unfold, the respect he shows this family, and the way these characters don’t feel like characters at all, but real people — fellow humans.

Ruthlessly entertaining ... Lane is a master archive digger, unearthing priceless artifacts, some damning, others endearing.

Drowning in style but shallow in substance.

McDonagh’s characters are more complex than the initial caricatures make them out to be — perhaps, in the end, even pitiful — leaving audiences to decide how they feel about their ultimate fates.

Whether one considers said work to be worthy of a feature-length movie is almost entirely beside the point, since Stephenson and Sharpe have unearthed so much else that’s engaging about Wain’s story.

The affectionate cine-memoir is rendered all the more effective on account of young discovery Jude Hill and its portrayal of a close-knit family (Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench and stay-put grandparents) crowded under one roof.

Gyllenhaal’s impressive, but The Guilty almost certainly would have been more effective if he’d dialed down the intensity a bit.

Dever is the best thing about this adaptation, which feels slightly less creepy in the lied-about-knowing-your-brother-to-worm-my-way-into-your-heart department, if only because Dever’s so good at balancing Zoe’s strength and vulnerability that the situation doesn’t read as a nearly 30-year-old creep manipulating a minor.

Although the director cut his teeth working in commercials and on more comedic material, he has no trouble orchestrating the breath-catching suspense of Dogs, depicting violent confrontations with a certain chilling detachment, then reveling in the gruesome result.

Yes, Sundown is a mystery, but it’s also a Rorschach test. No two people will see the film the same way.

Don’t miss this strange, special little film.

Through it all, Gyllenhaal assumes an unfussy, practically invisible non-style that conveys the essential (like that missing doll, visible in the background of a key scene) while privileging the performances.

With its swooping cameras and beyond-dazzling production design, Wright’s style is more alive than ever, giving new meaning to the word “panache.”

The beauty of Zach Baylin’s script is that while the arc is familiar, hardly a single detail could be described as clichéd, seeing as how the specifics are virtually unprecedented.

C’mon C’mon proves plenty poignant, but it’s less entertaining than it might have been.

The songs are nearly all bouncy, look-at-me numbers intended for Jamie and his inner circle . . . . But there’s one new addition that makes all the difference: an original number called “This Was Me,” a terrific ’80s-style anthem (performed by Grant and Frankie Goes to Hollywood lead singer Holly Johnson) that provides younger audiences with some much-needed queer history.

Here we have seven escape routes, each one reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic — a world where art lives on.

Like virtually every stand-alone MCU movie to come before, “Shang-Chi” does a fine job of presenting its hero as a relatable everyman during the first half before spiraling off into bombastic, brain-numbing supernatural mayhem for the final act.

There’s precious little in The Protégé that audiences haven’t seen before in some form or another, but that’s hardly a liability, since the script recombines those familiar elements in such entertaining ways, counting on Q, Jackson and Keaton to make these stock characters come alive.

There’s plenty of fan service (including a whole new list for Elle and Lee to exhaust), but also a late-arriving sense of identity that gives this junk-food sequel just enough nutritional value to help its young audiences reconsider how to determine their own post-high school priorities.

I confess my incapacity for his particular strain of slow cinema for two reasons: First, to let audiences know that it’s OK to be frustrated by the experience — you’re not alone. And second, so you might appreciate what it means that Days worked on me. Instead of leaning in, as I’m wont to do with challenging movies, I settled back into my chair and let the rhythm wash over me, lull me into its relaxing embrace.

Though Respect can feel a little soft in the drama department, it delivers the added pleasure of hearing Hudson re-create Franklin’s key songs, from the early jazz standards she covered for Columbia to her reinvention of the Otis Redding single that lends the film its name.

Free Guy is a lot of fun, despite the fact that Levy and the screenwriters seem to be changing the rules as they go.

It’s intriguing to see Filomarino experiment with the formula and exciting to imagine where his career might go from here.

Vivo is strategically contrived to hit audiences’ pleasure spots, blending a grown-up-friendly story of a Latin-music couple whose careers took them in separate directions with all the hyper-caffeinated comedy action the kiddos expect from the medium. Plus, the songs build on one another, hooking in your head and snowballing as the movie develops.

Dumont has studied the media enough to get in a few genuinely effective jabs, though it’s hard to engage with the half of France that concerns itself with her private life since she’s such a cold and inscrutable character.

It’s not one of those filmmaking-as-therapy grudge sessions, but a wrenchingly fair-minded look at complicated family dynamics.

A silky, soulful black-and-white tapestry of single millennials seeking connection.

In Memoria, the disruptive sounds Jessica hears are a wake-up call of sorts, forcing her to engage with those dimensions of the world humans are ill-equipped to explain: what lives on when someone dies, and the way places serve as a kind of fossil imprint of everything they’ve witnessed.

The characters can be so grating, watching The Divide feels like sticking your head in the garbage disposal. But as unwieldy as the multi-tentacled narrative can be — just think of the logistics required to stage it! — the experience adds up to something unshakeable.

The movie provides some nice, memorable bonding moments between Marianne and her subjects, including Cédric (nonactor Dominique Pupin), a decent if slightly pathetic middle-aged man also looking for work. But its portrayal of cleaning women ultimately feels flat, and it’s not clear whether watching Binoche scrub a few toilets is meant to dignify/humanize those stuck doing such chores, or to underscore the lengths to which she’ll go as an actor.

There’s room for infinite points of view behind the camera, as well as among those who do the watching. Offering the tools for unpacking potentially challenging movies, Cousins teaches people how to be better spectators — not by telling them the right way to watch, but by encouraging them to engage more deeply with what they see.

Everything in Red Rocket happens just a little too easily, which is one of the weaknesses of a self-indulgent regional satire that stretches its perhaps-80-minute plot over more than two hours.

With Titane, audiences occasionally just have to give themselves over to the movie’s demented momentum, taking whatever perverse pleasure they can from Ducournau’s willingness to push the boundaries

In the past, the director has been accused of making overly contrived dollhouse movies, and while he repeats many of his favorite tricks — toying with aspect ratios, centering characters in symmetric compositions, revealing a large building in intricate cross-section — this time it feels as if there’s a full world teeming beyond the carefully controlled edges of the frame.

With its haters-be-damned approach to all things carnal, Benedetta is intended to arouse, thereby satisfying the most basic definition of pornography, even if Verhoeven (who claims a certain scholarly interest in the subject as well) does surround the titillating bits with illuminating insights into Renaissance religious life.

The movie’s pulse seldom rises above resting, but the director invites audiences to dive as deep as they want to go into the film’s themes, to read subtext into body language, silence and the space between characters.

The movie’s more interesting for being less obvious.

In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.

“Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.

It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.

It’s all engineered to pay off in familiar ways, though the movie isn’t quite as predictable as you might think.

Wish Dragon delivers a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view, and that’s plenty.

Awake is bonkers in a fun way from time to time . . . but gives the distinct impression that the most interesting crises are happening off screen.

The movie feels like both an advertisement for this posh, ultra-modern oasis and a late-20th-century smear of the people and culture one might expect to find there.

The more you start to nitpick this movie, the more innumerable its plot holes appear, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.

The film’s texture is in the details. There’s nothing glamorous about this kind of subsistence, and nothing invented.

Van Grinsven is conscious of consequences, but more interested in exploring the newfound freedoms that technology offers queer self-discovery.

Rogers’ stage play is a smart, mature piece of writing, but one that transfers rather clumsily to the small screen, in part because its makers don’t show quite the same confidence in their audience’s intelligence.

Very little of Spirit Untamed lives up to what the studio is selling.

The director, who brought a wicked edge to pop-culture redux “I, Tonya” a few years back, has rescued Cruella from the predictability of the earlier “101 Dalmatians” remakes and created a stylish new franchise of its own in which a one-time villain has been reborn as the unlikeliest of role models.

Like its source, the movie is a blast, one that benefits enormously from being shot on the streets of Washington Heights.

It can be hard to believe that both the sequel and the instant-classic 2018 original were produced by Michael Bay, a filmmaker who has pushed the moviegoing experience to ear-splitting extremes, since Krasinski so effectively embraces the opposite strategy: Less is more, suggestion can be scarier than showing everything, and few things are more unnerving than silence.

As directed by Taylor Sheridan, Those Who Wish Me Dead offers a much bigger sandbox for the gifted actor-turned-action maven, whose scripts for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” have launched him to the front of a genre dominated by CG robots, superheroes and other IP once associated with Saturday morning cartoons. Such movies are plenty popular, but this one marks a welcome departure — one intended for grown-ups seeking more “realistic” diversion — without shortchanging audiences when it comes to either spectacle or sound.

Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.

A clever example of creativity thriving within the strict protocols of the coronavirus pandemic, tense confinement thriller Oxygen plays like “Buried” in outer space.

An engaging for-kids ghost story whose fantasy elements are thoughtfully grounded by real-world concerns.