Stephanie Zacharek

This is a movie that’s both entertainment and spiritual toolkit — take from it what you need.

A shaggy, listless action movie that’s too messy to be fun.

Ford v Ferrari is a little too long; some scenes leave unnecessary skidmark trails. But the movie still has amiable style and energy to spare. It’s fast but never furious.

It’s LaBeouf’s performance as his father that haunts the movie. He’s hateful, but even within the context of this upbringing-as-horror-show, LaBeouf locates crystalline reflections of the better man his father might have been. His performance both exorcises a demon and makes peace with it, which may be a better gift than his father deserves. But then, it’s the giving that counts.

Lemmons – who has directed some splendid pictures over the years, among them "Eve’s Bayou" and "The Caveman’s Valentine" – is fully alive to both the danger and beauty of the landscape of the American South – even the shape of a tree, craggy and twisted or lush with leaves, could be either a warning or a welcome. Erivo shines through it all, giving us a glimpse into the mind of a steadfast woman of purpose.

It’s Waititi’s ability to balance unassailably goofy moments with an acknowledgment of real-life horrors that makes the movie exceptional.

See it for the inventive, elaborate costumes (designed by Ellen Mirojnick), for the tiny — albeit slightly creepy — mushroom people and the miniature fairies wearing dandelion tutus, and for Jolie.

Parasite won the top prize at Cannes, and it’s South Korea’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. There are good reasons why it’s poised to resonate worldwide. It tells a story you could probably follow without subtitles, or any dialogue at all: the faces of these actors show with piercing clarity how it feels to be outsiders in a world of wealth and privilege.

It’s also hugely entertaining and joyously profane, a movie whose spirit is so big the screen can barely contain it.

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

This is less a straight-up biopic than a meditation on the texture of one vibrant but troubled life; Zellweger goes just far enough into Garland’s pathology of suffering without fetishizing it.

As a one-off, it’s a featherweight delight, like the prettiest pink-and-white cake on the tea tray.

The Goldfinch, director John Crowley’s prestige adaptation of Donna Tartt’s beautifully detailed novel, isn’t a great movie; it’s hardly even an OK one. Yet there’s something wistfully unfortunate about it. From its casting to its structure to its layering of visual textures, you can almost see how every good intention and carefully considered judgment call has somehow gone wrong.

As an actor and overall performer, Jennifer Lopez has always been charming. In Hustlers, she’s also great — as if two translucent hues spontaneously overlapped to make a new color.

The King, written by Michôd and Edgerton, zips along—it never feels like a slog, though it still has a satisfyingly hefty dramatic weight.

Much of the movie is bitterly funny; some of it just amusingly droll. But the finale, a rallying cry that’s both galvanizing and wistful, is a wrap-up worth waiting for.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

The picture is potent and engaging; even its fictionalized elements ring with the spirit of truth. And Stewart is off the charts, though that’s hardly a surprise.

Even if Ad Astra doesn’t have the mystical power of Gray’s last film, the magisterial "Lost City of Z" (based on David Grann’s book of the same name), it has enough magnetic pull to keep us close.

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

There are no noisy meltdowns or hyper-dramatic revelations in Brittany Runs a Marathon; even the lines that sting have some buoyancy. Brittany has a tough outer shell — you need it in New York, and you need it just being a woman. But Bell makes that shell translucent; her character’s vulnerability shimmers through it, in a gorgeous everyday way.

Mostly, with the exception of a tiresome, protracted gag involving a parental stash of sex toys, it’s more funny and charming than it is raunchy. If these boys are the men of the future, their parents have done something right.

Joyous and funny even as it strikes the occasional melancholy chord, Blinded by the Light is a testament to the small miracle of how the right music manages to find us at just the right time, even when it has to travel from New Jersey all the way to that four-letter word, Luton.

Mostly, The Kitchen flounders, taking one page from Quentin Tarantino here and another from Martin Scorsese there, without ever finding its own sense of authorship. Even the movie’s soundtrack — featuring Etta James, Heart and Fleetwood Mac, among others — feels like a desperate attempt to set a mood that never quite jells. There’s not enough heat in this Kitchen, but there’s nothing cool about it, either.

It’s nearly impossible to care about any of the humans. For a guy with a job that almost no one on the planet has, Denny is shockingly dull, and Ventimiglia fails to vest him with even an iota of personality. The generally charming Seyfried is saddled with a bum role that mostly requires her to suffer beatifically, and Donovan and Baker, both marvelously subtle actors, are badly suited to playing monsters-in-law.

Somewhere around the midpoint of Hobbs & Shaw, the action sequences become so elaborate that they start to weigh the movie down; it becomes less a lean machine than an unwieldy, chubby sausage. And even if you feel certain there’s no such thing as too much action, you surely know when you’ve had too much sausage.

Doesn’t always have the dramatic force it should, and unanswered questions linger.

And while the new Lion King is slightly easier to take—maybe because these heavily CGI-enhanced “real” lions don’t have the same cartoon humanity of the earlier version’s animated ones—the picture still has a manufactured, preachy sheen. This is calculated virtuousness masquerading as imagination, though it’s easy to be sidetracked by how adorable the cub Simba is.