Steve Pond

You wouldn’t exactly call it fun or enjoyable, but it’s a thriller that does what it sets out to do, which is to make you uncomfortable and then wring you dry. And if you’re feeling cooped up being stuck at home, well, the proceedings here could make the smallest apartment feel spacious.

While an energetic kids’ fantasy with cool creatures fighting each other is probably a reasonable win for Disney’s new premium service in these days before most theaters reopen, it’s hard to watch it as an adult and not wish for something that produced a little more magic of its own.

The in-country trek at the heart of the film is pretty routine by Lee’s standards; it’s the way he tells that story, the asides and the history lessons and the cutaways and the tricks that have become the director’s singular cinematic vocabulary, that make it a must-see in these stormy times.

The King of Staten Island can test the patience of all but fervid Davidson devotees, but it also manages to be an affecting comedy that moves softly through some dangerous territory.

The film is both a deconstruction of myth and a twisted origin story for a slapsticky form of puppetry that was quite popular a couple hundred years ago, but it’s also a gory little bit of provocation that makes fun of bloodthirsty audiences but might appeal to some of them as well.

For all its wide-eyed embrace of murder and mayhem, the film feels rote as it goes about its bloody business.

Hawkes and Lerman are subtle, naturalistic performers who spin gold out of settings that could easily seem clichéd. You pretty much know that these guys are on the road to understanding, acceptance and reconciliation, but they fill in the details so quietly and surely that the deep ruts put in this road by a thousand other movies barely matter.

The High Note is a character study, it’s a romance, it’s a dismissive look at the music business and a celebration of the power of music, it’s a movie that refuses to go down the path it’s been telegraphing and a movie that pulls out all the stops to get where you figured it would all along.

Nanjiani and Rae are funny and likable people who try very hard to bring some life to this enterprise, but the action is too preposterous for the laughs to make much headway. They’re fun to watch, in a way, but you really wish they had something better to do.

The Painter and the Thief is a fascinating, perplexing, occasionally annoying but always involving chronicle of a truly crazy relationship.

A thriller that wants to be more than that and stretches the bounds of plausibility to get there, Inheritance may have you squirming in your seat and shaking your head in equal measure.

If “Greece” is the end of the “Trip” saga, as all involved say it will be, it’s a satisfying and even touching way to wrap up a decade-long demonstration of the proposition that all it takes is conversation to be entertaining.

If there’s something you remember, or liked, about any iteration of “Scooby-Doo,” you’ll probably find it, or a joke about it, in Scoob! It gets to be a little tiring, but maybe it helps all this frantic silliness go down just a little easier, too.

While Have a Good Trip tries really, really hard to not fall into the usual traps that make putting hallucinatory experiences on screen look silly, it can’t help itself.

It’s nuts, it’s a mess and it’s pretty damn entertaining if you don’t mind characters pooping the bed and getting stabbed in the neck.

You’ll walk away from Rewind shaken by the story, and haunted by the face of a little boy with a world of hurt and nowhere to run.

The way it rushes from silly to vicious to sappy can put you in a tonal whirl. But it’s also fun, and not insignificant in the way it puts an unconventional heroine on screen and then gives her the agency to act both stupid and smart as she sees fit.

The approach is dramatic and artful, to a degree, but also so studied and stylized that you yearn for some kind of release – and after about an hour, it becomes wearying unless you’re fully submerged in this world.

It’s tricky to tell a feel-good story in a time in which many people are feeling anything but good, but “Becoming” film insists on doing just that.

While it’s hard to watch Arkansas and not see its debt to the Coen brothers, Duke finds a voice of his own in quiet, deadpan absurdities and southern-fried eccentricities.

As Jahkor resists his father and then begins to make a tentative connection, Sanders and Wright let us feel the weight of generations — and All Day and a Night, which began in a blast of gunfire, ends as a sad but touching lament.

It’s a charming, light comedy that goes down easy and is distinguished mostly by how it takes the Cyrano story to high school and mixes in emojis, diversity, immigration, LGBT issues and lots of other stuff to set it in today’s world.

My Darling Vivian is an unmistakably loving and sensitive portrait, an imperfect but impassioned attempt to makes the case that the easy Johnny Cash narrative is missing an important figure, that the shadow his legend casts left at least one person in the darkness who ought not to be there.

Affecting at times and downright tear-jerking at others, their story is tied to the saga of gay life in America over the past 70-plus years. Still, it ends up feeling less like a history lesson and more like a universal acknowledgment: growing old with some kind of grace and peace should not be this hard.

While the film sometimes seems to be stretching to find problems in every corner of the environmental movement (apparently, no company that claims to be green can also plug into the power grid), it does a brutally effective job of suggesting that a dream of endless renewable energy may be unattainable.

As good as Hargrave is at staging and shooting action, you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns in a film built around fistfights and automatic weaponry.

Flynn’s ferocious commitment to the role is something to admire, even if we’re not completely convinced.

The new Sergio isn’t as seamless or as powerful as Barker’s work in the nonfiction arena, but it takes chances and finds some real lyricism along the way.