Ty Burr

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

Thus the hapless hordes of college kids who went to see “Spring Breakers” hoping for a mindless good time and were appalled when the fun got spit back in their faces with candy-colored brio. That movie was and is a conceptual masterpiece, a movie specifically built to cross an audience’s wires. The Beach Bum, by contrast, isn’t close to that level.

Dumbo flies! The movie, sadly, never soars.

Throughout, Knightley gives this genteel silliness conviction, grace, heart, and nerve. Sarsgaard gives it smolder and sex appeal. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s all a movie needs.

Us is, in many ways, even more get-under-your-skin-and-into-your-nightmares creepy/funny/scary than “Get Out.”

Because it’s an Icelandic movie, and absurdism seems to bubble up in the hot springs and the bloodstreams, Woman at War exudes a puckish sense of humor even as it deals with dire matters.

This is a movie that wants to reflect the limbo of war refugees and the greater limbo of life itself — the circles we run in while believing we’re walking a straight line. It does so with a precise, observant tone that’s cool, sometimes cruel, and ultimately coldly reductive.

Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention.

Climax is the first Noé film, though, to flirt with the novel sensation of boredom.

In fact, without in the least playing like an agenda-driven blockbuster, Captain Marvel posits that female superheroes don’t have time for bullroar and might just be better at taking care of business.

Like much of Godard’s recent work, The Image Book is a rumination on art, politics, history, and mankind’s eternal folly disguised as a cinematic collage. It’s plotless but it has shape; random but with purpose. After initially fighting the movie, one might find oneself giving into its flow, the visuals scudding across one’s retina, the assemblage of quotes and mournful pensees on the soundtrack seducing one into following along in its wake.

Isn’t it a bit early for Isabelle Huppert to be entering the late Bette Davis era of her career? Why else on God’s green earth would she be appearing in Greta, a botched attempt to build a camp horror movie around a grand diva of the screen?

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World has a visual sumptuousness and a fluid agility that make it worth experiencing even if you’re not paying attention to the story. It moves the way you imagine a flying dragon might.

The Invisibles favors quantity of remembrance over quality of any one experience.

I do know that Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem make this brooding suspense melodrama with tragic undertones more watchable than it deserves to be.

Above all, it’s a meditation on art and creativity that’s by turns earnest, troubled, sentimental, and middlebrow. It’s a big, glossy affair that somehow feels rather small.

A sequel that is noisy, fast, and pretty smart but that lacks the spark of gonzo originality that made the first movie an out-of-nowhere treat.

A guilty pleasure that’s guiltier than most, a southern-fried potboiler that seems to be settling in as a camp remake of “Body Heat” before it turns itself inside out and becomes something else entirely.

Capernaum is a hard, hard watch meant to force comfortable moviegoers out of their bubbles of ease. The rewards, in no particular order, are the central figure, the young actor playing him, and the film’s magnanimous windows onto suffering and resilience.

Cold War is a ravishment, a cinematic feast for the senses, and it packs an epic inner landscape into a dense 88 minutes.

Glass isn’t a terrible film but neither is it a particularly good one, and it certainly doesn’t stick the landing the way the filmmaker and his hardy fans have probably hoped. It’s by turns intriguing, awkward, inspired, misguided, and very, very talky.

Museo is slightly frustrating on first watch, as its themes lie partly hidden behind Bernal’s intentionally abrasive performance and the mix-and-match filmmaking of Ruizpalacios: Bursts of faux-epic movie music in Tomas Barreiro’s score, camerawork that can be ironically portentous, scenes that flit along the edge of the surreal. The connective tissue is sometimes hard to discern.

Is it horror? Drama? Love story? Allegory? Maybe best to think of it as a chilly Scandinavian bedtime tale, the type to unsettle bothersome children and leave them identifying with the ogre.

Baldwin knew that hope is the engine that takes us to the future, to a changed and better day, and whether that hope is embodied in action, in expression, or in a child is immaterial. If Beale Street Could Talk is a stained-glass window looking out onto what could still be.

This is a story that needs to be told, but McKay turns out to be precisely the wrong man to tell it. By comparison, Oliver Stone is a model of sober restraint.

Watchable, illuminating, and ultimately unmemorable — inspiring without being inspired.

The tone is almost willfully off-putting. The parts that are supposed to be cute could give you the creeps. The film is almost a Platonic ideal of how to take an emotionally transfixing real-life story and get it wrong.

Mary Poppins Returns is torn between taking audiences back to their childhoods and treating them like children. You might have a good time but don’t be surprised if you feel a little dociousaliexpeisticfragicalirupus afterward.

Rather than a suspenseful action exercise with volleys of gunfire, The Mule is more of a quixotic character picaresque, a distant relative of the recent Robert Redford farewell, “The Old Man & the Gun,” without being nearly as well written.

Any movie on this subject that’s not uncomfortable isn’t really doing its job, and Ben Is Back puts an audience through a wringer of emotional and physical suspense. If you’ve dealt with addiction, personally or in your extended family, the movie should probably come with a trigger warning.

One of the wittiest and most creatively exuberant movies of the year, and maybe one of the best.

The movie is less a movie than a collection of scenes lined up in a row, and the tone wobbles between pomp and circumstantial melodrama.

A brisk and reasonably thorough dog trot through a life that was simultaneously invisible and all powerful, and it’s goosed along with slick production techniques that more than once get in the way.

Like all the best films, Roma is achingly specific while constantly opening up to the universal.

It’s in theory the worst family movie of 2018 — and in practice one of the year’s best films.

The movie itself is great fun before it curdles intentionally into nastiness and drift.

By far the best part of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland is that we get to see her face and hear her words.

The movie’s dramatically uneven, as anthology movies tend to be, but is it worth watching on the big screen? If the idea of Monument Valley peopled with classic Coen misfits hits your sweet spot, by all means go.

It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.

Burning, from South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, is a beautifully cryptic slow burner that lingers long in the senses. It’s the kind of film where you obsess over what it means, the better to avoid thinking about how it makes you feel.

A reporter is never the story — the story is the story. But if looking at the reporter helps you see the story, and the human beings the story is about, then the effort may be worth it. A Private War is worth it.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Boy Erased is strongest when it simply focuses on Jared as he copes with the trauma of coming out in a repressed society. This includes, in the film’s most shocking scene, a sequence of collegiate gay rape that leaves the boy with PTSD, which goes unnoticed and untreated by parents, authorities, and, to some extent, the film itself.

The stone-faced silent comedian’s influence on every possible aspect of physical comedy is wide and deep, attested to in this movie by entertainers old (Bill Irwin, Paul Dooley, Richard Lewis), ancient (Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner), youngish (Bill Hader, Quentin Tarantino), and random (Cybill Shepherd, Werner Herzog).

All in all, the movie’s a muddled and overlong experience, one that every so often drifts into dull, unintentional camp.

When art-minded film directors stoop to genre-minded filmmaking, it’s generally a good idea to duck. Despite sequences that may lodge in your memory forever, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is no exception to this rule.

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.

As franchise reboots go, the new Halloween is top shelf. Jamie Lee Curtis returns with a vengeance to the role of Laurie Strode.

First Man plays a different and arguably more rewarding game, one that looks for the man behind the hero. It’s a movie that shows how the most personal moments can coexist within and alongside the most momentous events. It’s a film that insists history is made from private lives.

Mostly, though, the movie succeeds because of the actress at its center.

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

On the basis of The Sisters Brothers, we’d all be better off handing our westerns to Frenchmen. Especially if the results do right by John C. Reilly. That fine, ursine character actor — our generation’s Wallace Beery, as I live and breathe — is one of the four corners of the movie’s acting pleasures, the other three being Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed (HBO’s “The Night Of”).

A modern comedy-drama in the Woody Allen-Noah Baumbach mold — urban intellectuals talking their lives in circles — but what keeps it from being a live-action New Yorker cartoon is the heart beating away in the script and the performances. At over two hours, it’s long but it’s true.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

Most refreshingly, Science Fair illustrates the many different kinds of STEM students out there.

Broad as the side of a city bus and about as lumbering, Night School is a better-than-average Kevin Hart comedy — meaning that it’s an average comedy overall. It’s silly and rather sweet, and it’s blessed with an ensemble that makes the most of the dopey cartoon script patched together by Hart and five other writers.

Hal is a soft-edged memorial that should direct you, or re-direct you, to some terrific and tough-edged films.

The movie is Hawke’s fourth and best feature as a director; it’s immensely touching, and only deceptively shapeless.

The resulting movie is atmospheric and compelling, and it makes an empathetic case for Borden as an intelligent, passionate woman so stifled by her father and the suffocating society he represented that she lashed out (and then some).

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

In a way I’ve never before seen done onscreen, Madeline’s Madeline fuses triumph and tragedy until the two feel strong and indistinguishable.

“Pick” often feels like a project that has been overly groomed. Will you still be moved to tears? Most likely.

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.

The cast — Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, comic sad sack Chris O’Dowd (“Bridesmaids,” “The Sapphires”) — is in a higher weight class than the material and, rather than be dragged down into formula, they raise the movie up to the nearly scintillating.

In its tactful, observant way, the film is unrelenting in assessing the damage that blind faith can wreak on its children and heartening in showing how those damaged find strength in each other.

It’s Dyrholm’s film, though, and Nicchiarelli’s, and between them the two women do honor to their subject in all her contradictions.

A ferocious mix of prankishness and cold fury that is one of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years.

Brisk and deeply engrossing.

It’s essentially “Romy and Michelle’s Mission Impossible” or “Lucy and Ethel Live and Let Die,” and it’s an easy, awfully disposable two hours that scatters some off-kilter belly laughs among a lot of labored gags and efficiently-shot action movie setpieces.

The best parts are the breezes of real, observed life that breathe through many of the scenes — the street corners, the storefronts, the rough camaraderie of guys hanging out, the wary warmth of women.

Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.

The Green Fog is a cinephile’s mash note — and a glimpse of the beautiful film library of Babel that lives in Guy Maddin’s head.

At times, Eighth Grade plays like a nature documentary about life and death on the savannas of suburbia.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.