Ty Burr

Here’s the thing about Disney’s “live-action” remakes of its animated classics: The new versions may be bigger, louder, and more lavish, but they’ll never be original. The thrill of first impact is gone.

All is True is expertly acted and handsomely filmed but suffers from an excess of sentimentality, a rash of revelations, and a surfeit of subtext, with characters blurting out the hidden motives for their behavior instead of simply behaving them. I imagine Shakespeare himself might be simultaneously tickled and appalled.

The Souvenir demands to be seen. Hogg is a major filmmaker pointing herself in new directions -- the past and future simultaneously – and hashing out the places where memory tells the truth and where it only offers more romanticism, more lies.

Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.

It’s a fond comedy of manners and pretentions, a film for literate audiences that gently bites the hands that buy the tickets.

Another tale of timid souls united by a sweet movie gimmick.

Powerful stuff, but unpowerfully told.

A watchable, unnecessary re-do that works hard but lacks the charm to really zing.

Tolkien gives us the passing of a vanished England and the loss of a generation but not quite enough about what was won, by him for us, nor the mystery of how he won it.

Shadow shows a master at the top of his game, and if you have any love at all for the movies and the places they can take you, catch this one on the biggest screen possible.

Without stooping to the uselessness of style, Working Woman makes its points simply by staying with Orna as she proceeds through stages of shock, humiliation, self-loathing, self-censorship, all emotions her husband finds difficult to understand and which the Bennys of the world rely on.

Long Shot is awfully funny when it’s not being completely preposterous — and sometimes even when it is.

The movie convinces us that the hero sees and understands Simone’s evil even as he continues to enable it — even as he allows his own life to be ruined. Dogman ends with a paroxysm of cathartic violence and an eerie echo of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (also with Mastroianni).

Very like a gummy bear, Teen Spirit gives you a nice little sugar rush until the lights come up and you realize you’re still hungry. Part of the problem is the script, which includes lines of dialogue so generic it’s as if Minghella is daring himself to squeeze a drop more juice out of them.

Under DaCosta’s sure, steady direction, Little Woods belongs with movies like “Frozen River” (2008), “Winter’s Bone” (2010), “Wind River” (2017), and last year’s “Leave No Trace” — dramas about overlooked communities that ache with empathetic detail. The movie steers clear of polemics, though, and puts its faith in its characters, specifically the exhausted, unbreakable bond of sisterhood that unites these siblings.

Beneath the japery and rough-edged filmmaking is an abiding love for the work — its passion and resilience — and respect for the women whose hidden lifelong language that work may have been.

It’s silly-sweet rather than silly-stupid, the script has enough snap to count, and – really, now – it allows us to spend time with Issa Rae.

The echoes of Chekhov are earned, the strains of Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor don’t feel at all out of place. The final sequence leaves Sinan and the audience at a crossroads between giving up and carrying on, as absurd as the latter is and always will be. That choice haunts everyone: The hero, his creator, and all of us watching in the dark.

Both in spite of and because of the dichotomy, Amazing Grace demands to be seen, preferably in a crowded, testifying theater. The movie allows us the great, rare privilege of seeing (and hearing) the Queen of Soul reclaiming her soul, by herself, for herself, for her God.

The Brink shows a salesman tirelessly peddling poison door to door and knowing it’s only a matter of time before someone lets him in.

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.