Ty Burr

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.

The Piano Lesson offers a spirited if uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

Emilia Pérez is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

It’s the kind of movie that some will deem important enough to merit end-of-year awards and others will find portentous enough to give them the giggles — again, not unpleasurably.

How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.

Rumours is too slap-happy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end.

In any event, Pugh uses her expressive eyes and ardent, intelligent sensibilities to paint a touching if underdeveloped portrait of an artist desperate to leave her mark before being rushed too soon from the show.

The movie serves as product placement for a brand of toys but also as a form of creative brick-olage, one that reflects a modern music producer’s ability to weave small units of musical noise into an epic canvas that gets the whole world up offa that thing.

It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.

The Outrun is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology.

With more daring than success, Joker: Folie à Deux says that anyone who takes the Joker for a hero to be emulated is as delusional as Arthur Fleck, and it serves up its comic-book cake at the same time it stuffs it with rat poison.

Saturday Night is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia.

An existential black comedy delivered with flair and a steady gaze — and two remarkable performances at its center — it mucks about in themes of identity and exploitation, perception and personality, fate and foolishness.

The Wild Robot has reduced a lot of respectable early reviewers to happy tears, and chances are that you and your children will feel the same.

Is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too.

As written by Park and performed by Stella and Plaza — both players with crack comic timing — the interplay between the two Elliotts is the best part of “My Old Ass.”

With wit, style and ruthlessness, Fargeat has made a movie that’s an example of the soulless pop-culture object she’s spoofing.

At 85, Ian McKellen doesn’t have many performances left in him, so any movie that lets the actor carve ham with such exuberant relish as “The Critic” is worth his time and ours.

The movie’s also a salve to anyone who has watched a parent die and felt panic about everything left unasked and unsaid. It’s a love letter to the siblings who know us too well and not at all. And finally, it’s a profound act of letting go — of resentments and of fear and of the people who stand us on our feet before sending us out into the world.

It’s sprightly enough to make a lot of audiences and Warner Bros. bean-counters happy, but it also confirms that one of the most distinct visionaries in American film history has become a corporate repurposing machine. It’s not insane, and that hurts.

You Gotta Believe is an entry in the “heartwarming true story” genre, Little League subdivision, and it isn’t bad so much as resolutely average.

The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next.

For a movie about the Great Communicator, “Reagan” communicates surprisingly little.

It’s a tricky balancing act to find humor in stereotypes while seeing the human beings behind them — affection and a few years of distance can help — but “Between the Temples” walks the tightrope with wobbly yet confident grace.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better — for Kravitz’s filmmaking future and for us — if we just forgot the whole thing.

Good One takes advantage of the summer lushness of the Catskills, Wilson Cameron’s nature-centric cinematography and Celia Hollander’s ruminative acoustic score to cast a spell over its 89 sure-footed minutes.

It’s a critic’s failure to gauge the movie he wishes had been against the movie that is, but in this case the movie that is is disappointingly bloodless, cold rather than chilling, with a payoff that isn’t shocking so much as an admission that we’ve spent 90 minutes we’ll never get back.

Directed by the inventive Uruguayan horror specialist Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), the new “Alien: Romulus” was billed as a back-to-basics reboot, and to its credit, it’s a no-frills, straight-up genre piece built largely on the bones of the first two movies. All that’s missing are originality and a convincing final act, and, honestly, you could do worse for a Saturday night eek-a-thon.

If you’re already a subscriber to Apple TV Plus and have absolutely nothing else to do, “The Instigators” is worth a look.

The trick is in the details — in letting the personal bring specificity to the universal while letting the universal illuminate the personal. It’s a balancing act, and writer/director/former teen disaster Sean Wang gets it mostly right in “Dìdi,” his fictionalized memory play of being a floundering Taiwanese American skate kid in 2008 Fremont, Calif.

In “Kneecap,” a frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. Very little gets lost in the translation.

Made in England is more than a great filmmaker’s genuflection. It’s a welcome introductory immersion for newcomers to Powell and Pressburger and, for old hands, a way to connect the dots of their films and their singular place in the history of cinema.

National Anthem is that rarity, a genuinely sensual American movie, and in that sensuality it connects its characters to the transcendence and union promised by Emerson, Whitman, Melville and all the rest of our country’s great literary dreamers.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies while sitting beneath a city bridge — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down. “Dandelion” is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.

Fly Me to the Moon strains to achieve liftoff, sometimes quite amusingly. But in the end, it’s just too heavy to get off the ground.

The problem with making homages to junky genre movies is that sometimes you just end up with a junky genre movie.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

Maybe there’s an epic novel in his head, but what [Costner's] given us with “Chapter 1” is a table of contents instead.

Daddio may stay too long at the fare, but its maker is hardly a hack.

Lanthimos and his company still dare to find a bracing, disconsolate farce in our brief and helpless thrashing through life. For that, most people will never forgive them.

Made without stars or much of a budget but with a lot of heart and good vibes, it’s an exemplary and moving independent film.

All that’s missing, really, is a story. “The Bikeriders” is almost good enough to convince us we don’t need one.

Thelma is about the indomitable human urge to keep going and the hard-won wisdom to know when to heed time’s warnings. It’s a movie that rages against the dying of the light — at 30 mph.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb.

Shyamalan the elder makes suspense-horror dramas that either give a half-baked idea a fully baked cinematic treatment or vice versa; Shyamalan the daughter’s first feature-length film is just half-baked all around.

A blast of pure pleasure and one of the year’s best films, “Hit Man” should be seen with a crowd grooving on its devilish comic energy, its off-the-charts sexual chemistry and the star-making turn at its center.

The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash.

Because there’s little internal logic in IF, you may find yourself constantly asking why the characters are doing what they do, or how the whole imaginary-friend thing works within the context of the movie.

Visually, sonically and thematically, “Evil Does Not Exist” is a rich and subtle experience.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise, itself one of the more successful second go-rounds, commercially and artistically, of Hollywood’s modern corporate era. Yet the movie, like its three predecessors, is a fascinating case of content following form.

Civics lessons rarely come this disturbing or this convincing.

Unfrosted may be the Platonic ideal of the Netflix movie: ephemeral, edible, enjoyable, forgettable.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.

Boy Kills World, a cheeky and extremely bloody action extravaganza, keeps an audience so off-balance for so long that you may throw in the towel well before the final bad guy falls.

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

Monkey Man seems hellbent on establishing itself as the latest wrinkle in post-Wickian cinema: nonstop mayhem featuring an actor previously thought of as a sweetie pie.

Wicked Little Letters manages the paradoxical trick of being both broadly played and finely acted, the first due to a director intent on underlining every action with a heavy Sharpie and the second to a cast that colors in the outlines of their characters with finesse, depth and life.

The pace is daringly languid — at times it seems more like a daydream on a sunny park bench than a movie — but you’ll emerge from this wonderland as if from vacation, and you’ll never look at the intersection between life and storytelling in quite the same way.

Old is a fiendish idea only partially realized.

The movies have a long history of “kids putting on a show.” Summertime belongs to that tradition even as it expands its boundaries into the heartsore world offscreen.

Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.

If you miss Anthony Bourdain — and for many, the celebrity chef’s death in 2018 felt like the loss of a close and troubled friend — Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a salve.

It’s fiery. It’s big. It’s deafening. It’s dull.

Summer of 85, the latest from the prolific director of Swimming Pool (2002) and By the Grace of God (2018), looks like a sunny, sybaritic gay coming-of-age story along the lines of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), but it turns out to be something darker and more ambiguous, less about sexuality than self.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

Summer of Soul captures a moment of the past that was launching itself into the future in a way that feels wholly relevant and inspirational to the present. The movie is a gift.

No Sudden Move is a terrific movie — an unflashy near-masterpiece of professionalism on both sides of the camera.

A cautionary tale for the fleet-fingered social media generation, Zola explodes off the screen in a burst of emoji confetti.

Now “the best British band to ever come out of America” gets the documentary treatment from director Edgar Wright, himself a cheeky bugger (Sean of the Dead, Baby Driver), and it is superbly entertaining whether you love Sparks, hate them, or just have never heard of them.

Siberia is a Freudian wallow made by a New York street fighter of a Fellini, and it is nothing if not authentic in its stress-fractured machismo.

Almost as generic as its title, Fatherhood is made real enough to matter by the strength of its performances and the sincerity of its makers.

Luca has energy to spare and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, if not as visually outrageous as, say, the recent Coco. The moral lessons — be true to your friends, overcome your fears — are tidy and shopworn, fresh to young audiences but lacking the jolts of originality that make classic Pixar films an all-ages proposition.

Well, there are worse ideas for movies and certainly worse casts, and Michael Lembeck’s genial, predictable comedy rolls along on well-worn tracks elevated by the class and commitment of actors who’ve earned our affection over decades of work.

Like a cool lemon ice on a blistering summer day, In the Heights feels like a reward.

Heading straight to streaming platform Paramount+ without the embarrassment of appearing in theaters first, the movie is both blissfully incoherent and weirdly generic, as if it had been assembled from the spare parts of other movies and glued together with stuntwork.

A stultifying drama based on the 2009 season of the Abilene High Eagles, Lights suffers from sermonizing dialogue, amateurish performances, and an ugly racial blind spot disguised as white savior paternalism.

Petzold is a gifted filmmaker pulled in opposite directions by politics and melodrama, and when they’re in perfect tension, as in Barbara (2012) and Phoenix (2014), a masterpiece can result. Undine, by contrast, is the slightest bit waterlogged.

Dream Horse is a very nice movie, about very nice people, but nice is rarely enough, and thank goodness Toni Collette knows that.

Some films wear their length like an epic and some just wear you out; Army of the Dead tends increasingly toward the latter.

The scariest aspect of New Order is that in 2021 it doesn’t feel far-fetched at all.

It’s solid, well-acted, thought-provoking fare, if rarely rising to the level of inspired.

Even the gunplay, of which there is plenty, feels secondhand.

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.

The producers include Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the inspired duo behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines has the same breakneck gift for comic timing and a willingness to throw anything at the screen if it’ll get a laugh, including an angry Furby the size of an office tower.

Writer-director Casimir Nozkowski has great fun coming up with new exasperations for his main character, and Henry has a slow burn to rival old-time masters like Edgar Kennedy.

The film has an epic sense of devastated wonder that can only come from standing as far back from the parade as one possibly can while still holding on to one’s empathy.