Ty Burr

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.