Peter Rainer

What we do care about, and what “Final Reckoning” finally delivers on after an overly expository first hour, is watching Tom do stuff. Set pieces involving a sunken submarine and buzzing biplanes amply fulfill the franchise’s main selling point.

What may have begun as a descent into the personal depths of an enigmatic genius ends up as one more cog in the Bob Dylan myth machine.

Ostensibly it’s a tradition versus progress fable. In actuality, it’s a movie furiously, perhaps intentionally, at odds with itself.

The best addition is Austin Butler as the baron’s bald-pated, hypervicious nephew. It’s official: Butler no longer looks or sounds like Elvis Presley. Villeneuve is adept at staging grand-scale battles, but the movie’s best set piece is the climactic tooth-and-nail face-off between Paul and this grinning gargoyle.

Directed by Cooper, who also co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, the film serves up so much Sturm und Drang about the great man’s messed-up private life that it barely bothers to explore his creative genius.

It’s a serviceable thrill ride.

The film, directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, doesn’t add much to the existing record. What it does do, when it’s good, is something the news headlines could not: It dramatizes the survivors’ voices on camera.

Top Gun: Maverick is a perfectly tolerable time-killer, and I enjoy popcorn as much as anyone, but I just hope these won’t be the only kinds of movies that bring audiences back to the theaters.

Despite his sorcerer bona fides and voluminous cape, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange isn’t strange enough, and trying to parse the convolutions of the Marvel multiverse is more exhausting than engaging.

Even if Zhao and her co-screenwriters were more adept at establishing the family-style togetherness of the Eternals, the emotional continuity is shattered by the incessant time tripping and globe hopping. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings in South Dakota, you suddenly find yourself in Mesopotamia.

From a purely pictorial standpoint, this new Dune is indeed often overwhelming. The sheer monumentality of it all is impressive. Alas, the film’s emotional power underwhelms.

It offers up the requisite thrills, stunts, and bad guys. Beautiful people abound, and 007 still knows how to fill out a tux. I had a reasonably good time at it.

The problem is that there is very little chemistry between the actresses, and Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy are far too studied in their depiction of passion. The most impressive performance in the movie is given by Blanchett’s elaborately coiffed, cast-iron hairdo.

I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, but I can well imagine a world without this movie.

Rocketman is a campy, overblown, self-glorifying fantasia.

As the princess’s handmaiden, Nasim Pedrad at least has the comic timing that the rest of the cast, including, surprisingly, Will Smith, conspicuously lack. Smith understandably didn’t want to compete with Williams, but as the big, blue, top-knotted Genie, he’s uncharacteristically bland. Even the magic carpet in this movie looks bummed out.

Just in case we don’t register the mismatch, Rogen is outfitted to look especially shlubby, and he sports an unbecoming beard that never comes off. With his crack timing, he still manages to get a few laughs, but he would have gotten a whole lot more if the jokes were any good. Theron, meantime, is photographed in full glamour mode throughout. This is probably just as well, since, as an actress, she doesn’t appear to have a comic bone in her body. Therein lies the true mismatch in this coupling.

The latest entry in this dubious enterprise is “Dumbo,” a perfectly lovely 1941 animated movie that has been transformed by director Tim Burton into a cloddish fantasia that never soars.

This is one of those radical change-your-image performances that tries too hard to defy our expectations. Kidman has indeed proved in the past to be quite versatile, but this muddled, scabrous, neo-noir procedural does her no great favors.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

When, at the end, we hear Cheney intone “I was the bad guy so you didn’t have to be,” the self-serving gravity of that pronouncement rings hollow because the movie is hollow, too.

In real life, Mary and Elizabeth never met, but this film, directed by Josie Rourke and written by Beau Willimon, stages numerous interactions, many of them accompanied by flaring nostrils.

The actresses are so expert, especially Colman, with her grievous, hardbitten woe, that you may not care, but if one is to mock this sort of historical extravaganza, I much prefer the nutbrain Monty Python approach to all this deep-dish folderol.

Jackman, sporting a distracting, Hart-like brown hairpiece, seems miscast. He doesn’t convincingly convey this politician’s swagger and slickness, and Reitman’s attempts to mimic a loose-limbed political movie in the style of, say, Robert Altman’s “Tanner '88” series or “The Candidate” are rather leaden. It’s a film that’s less interesting to watch than to discuss afterward.

Whatever the approach, there isn’t enough psychological heft to the drama to make it seem much more than generic.

I hope this won’t be his last acting job. He’s too vital to go in for such a soggy send-off.

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.