Soren Andersen

Director Michael Cuesta and a platoon of credited screenwriters have dutifully checked all the usual spy-thriller boxes but bring nothing new to the party.

It’s essentially a plotless montage, a spellbinding filmic tapestry. Its visuals are out of this world, quite literally in the early going, as it presents the story of the creation of the universe.

Phantasm remains a pretty effective fright fest.

It’s all kind of funny, actually, and deliberately so. Director Chad Stahelskii, a former stunt man, stages a flailing fight down a seemingly endless flight of stairs that is like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Horror is a fragile thing. Suspension of disbelief is key to its effectiveness. A sudden inappropriate guffaw from someone in the audience can be enough to break the spell. In Midsommar, the spell breaks at the end and the picture collapses.

Monster-movie fans will certainly get their money’s worth in this one.

The pacing of the picture is problematical. It’s curiously inert in the early going, with a lot of time spent in cars with the characters as they drive around and around on freeways, side streets and boulevards in Hollywood.

Ball takes his time presenting Noa’s world in detail. Too much time, frankly. There is no real sense of urgency here. Everything is carefully worked out. The visuals are handsome but unremarkable. Consequently, the picture feels dutiful and oddly bloodless.

“Link” is fun as far as it goes, but from Laika we expect something with a little more depth.

The humor is broad and obvious (yes, Ferdinand winds up in a china shop, with predictable results), but there are a number of scenes that hit the mark.

Limited by his budget, Woo makes the most of what he has, but the whole thing feels like he’s cautiously dipping his toe back in the Hollywood pool.

As far as truly caring about anything that goes on in this epic, well, that’s a chore. And with a run time of more than 2½ hours, that chore becomes ever more burdensome as the minutes tick away.

Sonic the Hedgehog is bright. It’s cheery. It’s here and then it’s gone in a relatively compact 100 minutes, leaving little beyond a slightly sweet aftertaste to mark its passage.

Affleck, who has struggled in real life with alcoholism and has been in and out of rehab on a number of occasions over the years, makes his character’s pain palpable and totally believable.

Kids will likely be diverted by the colorful excess of A Minecraft Movie, but fans of the game may feel it misses the mark. More creativity, please.

All Is True is handsomely mounted, filled with shadowed interiors underscoring the darkness of its story, the darkness artfully interrupted by candlelight and firelight. The movie’s impressive appearance notwithstanding, Shakespeare’s domestic problems do not a classic make.

Thanks to its two central performances, Chuck is a solid contender.

Taylor-Johnson’s agonized performance holds the audience’s attention, but his portrayal doesn’t really take the character anywhere.

Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee (the latter also wrote the screenplay, both directed the original), it’s gorgeous-looking. It’s briskly paced. And it’s tuneful. Uh, about those tunes: They’re blaringly, oppressively, crushingly LOUD! With “Frozen” we got the rousing Oscar-winning “Let It Go.” With Frozen II, someone should have told the songwriters to tone it down.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is reasonably clever and reasonably diverting.

Snowtime! is by turns ribald (there’s a flatulent dog), boisterous (there’s charging through the snow with wooden swords wildly waved), tender (there’s a boy grieving quietly for a father killed in a real war) and, yes, tragic.

So there’s not a single surprise along the way. But there is the comfort of familiarity operating in the movie’s favor. And it’s fun.

The camera is fixated on the face of Alice, the lead character in The Girl in the Book. And no wonder. There’s a lot going on there.

Director Raman Hui mixes martial-arts fights and slapstick comedy (lots of mugging by Jing) into a whimsical, fast-paced monster mash.

There are lots of ideas rattling around in it — about artificial intelligence, about racism, about American aggression on the world stage, about the future of humanity. And rattle and clang they do. And also clunk. The various elements are not well integrated.

[Ip Man] is the calm at the center of a storm of kung-fu combat sequences, and Yen plays him with grace and serenity.

Part 2 is undeniably lively and very obviously pitched to young kids. It’s colorful but not especially distinctive.

There’s the old cliché that says, “so-and-so is such a great actor he could read the phone book (whatever that is; as I said, it’s an old cliché) and make it interesting.” That’s pretty much what Washington pulls off in EQ2.