Ty Burr

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

One Battle After Another isn’t really a political film, but neither is it not a political film. It just carries its concerns within the framework of a hellacious action movie, a sidesplitting character comedy, a riveting suspense thriller and various other genres the director makes up as he goes along, replete with a hapless hero, a warrior princess and the damnedest villain the movies have seen in a very long time.

The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Writer-director Russell, a producer and co-writer of TV’s “The Bear” and “Beef,” knows his Hollywood existentialism — the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody, the easy California vibe that hides gnawing insecurity, the understanding that a friend today can and certainly would cut your throat tomorrow.

Directed and co-written by the Samoan filmmaker Miki Magasiva, the movie features a unique central character, a powerhouse star performance and some truly uplifting choral singing. Those are the good parts. The less good part is a script that pummels audiences with melodrama, manipulation and sentimental clichés until we all cry uncle.

James Sweeney seems intent on leading us all merrily to hell.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

All of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.

The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.

Souleymane’s Story presents its hero’s life as an open-air prison. Scrupulously researched by Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut, it’s brutally frank about the predatory practices of some of Souleymane’s fellow West Africans.

Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go.

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A suspense comedy as breezy and noncommittal as its title, this sophomore feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks is a deceptively low-fi affair, but it keeps a cheeky premise going for longer than it has any right to.

The bones of this memory play are familiar, but Davidtz is a natural filmmaker, and the sense of a tattered but privileged world teetering on extinction is visualized with fresh and evocative details.

The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.

This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.

There’s nothing wrong with a good, dumb comedy, but “Bride Hard” doesn’t even qualify as in-flight entertainment.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

The Unholy Trinity is a reminder that they don’t make ’em like they used to — and maybe that’s a good thing. A pokey, low-budget Western enlivened by a couple of aging stars happily hamming it up, it’s the kind of B movie they used to program before the feature and after the cartoon in the old days.

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

Straw has all the feels it wants and little of the art it needs. But there’s nothing to suggest Tyler Perry would have it any other way.

De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.

It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.

Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.

It’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.

Henry Johnson is unusual for Mamet in that it focuses on the prey. It’s also as close as a movie can get to a filmed play without including your dinner and a ride home.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

Shakespeare this ain’t. In the long, long history of “Romeo and Juliet” movie adaptations, “Juliet & Romeo” lands well below the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and just above 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” in which the characters are portrayed as animated garden gnomes.

There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.

The Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

To paraphrase the T-shirt, everyone here went to the Isle of Capri, and all we got was this lousy movie.

As a director, Minahan knows his way around a track, but on the evidence of this film, he’s not yet ready to run wild.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

A remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same title...the new film is unnecessary as such, but it’s a determinedly openhearted crowd-pleaser with a handful of delicious performances, and it’s just about impossible to dislike.

Even if such murky doings aren’t your cup of absinthe, the skill with which Guiraudie weaves his web is mesmerizing.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

The Friend is a better dog movie than it is a people movie, but it’s such a wonderful dog movie that you may not mind that the people are merely fine.

The mystery is why a movie so hell-bent on having fun feels so formulaic.

Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

True, the CGI dwarves (not “dwarfs,” thank you) are a pox upon the eyeballs, but other than that? It’s pretty good.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

Eephus belongs with the great baseball movies not because of any major league ambitions but because it understands what the game has meant and still means in small towns, among average people and weekend players.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

It speaks to a cultural sisterhood that knows exactly what Paola Cortellesi is talking about. But some things get lost in translation, and this lovingly crafted work of neorealist cosplay is one of them.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

It’s as a satiric bourgeois psychodrama that “Armand” works best and reveals its genetic heritage to the works of Bergman and Ullmann (the latter no slouch as a director herself).

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

No Other Land, the Oscar-nominated documentary (and odds-on favorite to win), is the record of an atrocity: the erasure of a people from the land on which they’ve lived for centuries.

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

There’s just enough bite there to give the stars something to work with, and Diaz especially responds with the joy of the well-rested.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

Where some Leigh films bear down on their main characters, “Hard Truths” feels expansive and forgiving, except when it comes to the mystery of Pansy herself.

In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open.

September 5 is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.

Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning.

It is one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year, and it is also a tragedy that left me weeping for two men, this country and the world.

At times heavy-handed in its symbolism, “Seed” is still a gripping, provocative knockout — a domestic political thriller — that hints at the limits of oppression and the long, long bending of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral arc.”

A Complete Unknown just tells the story. But maybe that’s enough for a fresh generation to feel the joy of his apostasy at a moment when the world seems once more poised on a precipice of chicanery, treachery and disaster. If so, well, how does it feel?

The more interesting drama of Babygirl is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other.

“Nosferatu” haunts as you watch it and vanishes when the lights come up, leaving a viewer shaken but not stirred. Still: Fangs for the memories.

Mufasa at least has the grace to offer audiences a fresh story, but children and parents may find it surprisingly difficult to tell one exquisitely rendered lion from the next.

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

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.

One nice thing about Mila Kunis’s portrayal of a heroin addict in Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days is that the vanity’s up front, in the character and in the star’s nervy embrace of a woman who has become human wreckage.

Hardcore fans and gamers will thrill to the contractually required scene where a fighter has his still-beating heart ripped out of his chest. But that’s the only time Mortal Kombat shows a pulse.

Writer-director Sødahl expertly balances the sentimental and the acerbic, the grave and the altar. But Hope lives or dies on its central performances, and they are perfectly realized.

Together Together sounds like a really bad idea on paper, and for the first half-hour or so, it’s a really bad idea on screen. Yet a funny thing happens to this surrogate-pregnancy romantic comedy (I told you it was a bad idea) as it bumps along: It develops curious and unexpected pockets of feeling.

Believability takes a back seat here, obviously, and the special effects are so over-the-top bloody as to be more comical than scary; unlike In the Earth, a much slicker British horror film opening in theaters this week, Jakob’s Wife proudly embraces its inherent B-ness. But it’s the star who makes this a low-down hoot while rooting it in some tart and deserved observations about the battle of the sexes.

We’ve been here before and many, many times, and Monday, newly available on demand, doesn’t give us enough reason to be here again.

Like Field, the new movie has a sneakily dark sense of humor, a taste for the odd bit of gore, and a love of psychedelic mushrooms and cinematic hallucinations.

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

The movie, a balm for the senses and the soul, celebrates and discreetly mourns an activity that stretches back to antiquity and is slowly being snuffed out by global market forces.

From its title on down to the rugelach, Shiva Baby is an instant classic in the Jewish comedy of mortification, a genre that combines hilarity, anxiety, resentment and schmaltz.

The film is a shrine to a hardy subculture, its people, and the animals they love. Long may they run.

French Exit allows Pfeiffer free rein to play, and her performance is glorious in a major key of scornful hauteur and a minor key of self-pity.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

The Human Voice is a banquet disguised as a light lunch, heady with flavors; you come away blissfully sated and hungry for more.

It’s a shame: Odenkirk begins the movie with a rep as a smart and slippery performer, but by the end of Nobody, he could be anybody.

Tina is celebratory and glossy, with no mention of her recent health issues, her son’s 2018 suicide, or other painful subjects. The life is still more than eventful enough.

Is all the sound and fury worthwhile, the four years of championing, the four hours up on the screen? To the fans who’ve been in it for the long haul, of course. To HBO Max executives, you bet. To casual moviegoers, probably not.

Quo Vadis, Aida? has the narrative beats and the intensity of a classic thriller: a cornered protagonist, an implacable villain, a breathless pace, hair’s-breadth escapes.

As Anthony, a blustery London widower whose grip on reality slowly comes unglued over the course of the film, Hopkins does it again. This is a magnificent and harrowing performance: A lion in winter slowly coming to ground.

The Inheritance is a welcome reminder of film’s flexibility as a medium of protest, a vessel of cultural history, and an agent of change.

Cherry is three movies in one, none of them fresh, all of them overlong.

True to its title, Moxie has a lot of moxie, and it’s an easy watch, smartly acted by a crew of young talents.

My Salinger Year isn’t much, but it isn’t phony.

It’s silly of mind and open of heart, full of visual and sonic eye candy while telling a predictable story with pleasurable generosity. The laughs are pitched right over the plate with the skill and enjoyment of a team of vaudeville pros. As reunions go, it’s a success.

There’s not a lot of depth to Keep an Eye Out, but there is a singular vision at work and at play.

A tribute to the power of imagination and storytelling, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.

The director is Lee Daniels, of Precious (2009) and The Butler (2013), here evoking the historical era and its figures with verve and intelligence but unable to find a dramatic center other than his electrifying star.

Nomadland balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for that restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it.

A ferocious and first-rate drama.

A startling psychological horror story with a breakout performance by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark.

As directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s a steady, compelling accounting of events that intends to leave you infuriated and succeeds.

Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.

McQueen has matters of life and death on his mind, and the final act of “Supernova” puts them on the table with a frankness that’s admirable without wholly succeeding as drama; the script’s schematic nature shows through the cracks even as the actors themselves can’t be faulted.

The movie’s a watchable affair for most of the running time, not so much subverting cliches of the serial-killer genre as keeping the audience in suspense as to how, if, and when those cliches will be observed.

This is still a rich and worthy journey, comfort food that’s also food for thought. It invites us to consider timelines longer than a day, a year, a war, and a life, and to tread carefully on the kings and commoners who might lie beneath our feet.

Animal lovers stand to flinch at the hunting scenes and other moments of violence, all of which appear to have been staged aside from documentary footage of creatures fleeing from gunshots. By contrast, the movie makes a dark but compelling case that the people on the other end of the barrel deserve whatever’s coming to them.

The movie ultimately seems to suggest that the evils unleashed upon Mexico come from a place beyond humankind, which seems an easy way out after all Magdalena and Miguel have been put through. That said, this remains a terrifying cinematic vision that can’t be ignored, from a young filmmaker who won’t be.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Time is a lovely visit to a Budapest that yields its secrets more willingly than the sad, repressed woman at the story’s center.

Some things remain a mystery. If we were a little bit better as people, this decent, clear-eyed movie hints, they might not.

Director Bahrani has always buried his social concerns in story and character; he’s one of the very few American filmmakers to pay attention to this country’s poor, and he applies his creativity to the paradoxes of India without missing a step.

To be successful and Black in America, this movie says, is to tell your own story even as you live it, in the pages of a book or the grooves of a record, in the end zone of a football field or the battleground of a boxing ring. To understand the weight and importance of having to be an example. And to understand when being an example just isn’t enough.

My Little Sister comes from an unusual creative team: Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, Swiss friends from childhood who write and direct films together. Their fourth feature, it combines a fluid visual realism — there are some astonishing sequences of Alpine parasailing — with an emotional intimacy that’s its own form of jumping off a cliff. This time, they’re collaborating with an actress willing to take a blind leap and bring us with her. It’s a bracing trip, a work of daredevil nerve that serves as its own reward.

The film is especially clear-eyed about the ways the state bureaucracy designed to help women like Sandra can sometimes stymie their best efforts.

The best moments are cinematic or actorly; the former come early and the latter are concentrated in the poised, agonized figure of the title character.

News of the World is a satisfying movie without ever becoming a great one.

Fennell is a fearsome sensibility and a talent to watch out for, and the arguments you may have after the lights come up will be well worth having. But it’s the sadness behind Cassie’s practiced smile, the wildfire fury behind that sadness, and the reasons for that fury, that may haunt you when the arguments are over.

Soul is messy, maudlin, funny, ridiculous, and poignant. In other words, it has soul.

This is more than retro, it’s a re-imagination of the past, of the stories and role models that could have been available to Black audiences (and white ones) but weren’t. Better late than never.

The sequel isn’t a disaster, but it’s a dud.

Greenland, a solid, stolid disaster film arriving on major streaming platforms this week, posits that the sky is falling, puts manly Gerard Butler in the middle of it, and asks us to be diverted by the spectacle of civic breakdown and mass panic. Are you not entertained? Somewhat surprisingly, yes.

The Midnight Sky is handsome to look at and, in its early scenes, quite engrossing. But it’s an oddly structured affair and, in the end, the director can’t keep it on course.

Hart is interested in scrambling our sympathies yet not deft enough to manage where they land, and the female buddy movie I’m Your Woman wants to be unintentionally ends up feeling like a story about a Black couple as seen by their less interesting white acquaintance.

Wild Mountain Thyme is not a good movie. Rather, it’s one that believes so deeply and joyously in its potted romantic Oirishness that the audience doesn’t have to.

If you haven’t left your house since March, this movie counts as a legitimate vacation.

A stinging, gorgeously filmed tragicomedy about male insecurity and the power of positive drinking.

With Black Bear, Plaza pushes her talent into raw new places.

One hundred and thirty-two minutes of shrill, self-satisfied jazz hands, The Prom may be the biggest disappointment of the season.

The scenes with Keaton and Irons, too, rise above the mediocrity-unto-badness of Love, Weddings & Other Disasters on the strength of the actors’ charisma alone. Irons thaws satisfyingly as a snob finding unexpected love, and Keaton remains adorably, engagingly herself, turning her character’s blindness into a la-di-da form of grace. They are diamonds at a garage sale, and they deserve better.

Zappa also gently touches on Frank’s contempt for the general run of humanity, not just Tipper Gore and other members of the Parents Music Resource Center. He spoke witheringly of his appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” where the cast made fun of his lifelong no-drugs stance.

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

The movie rarely takes the easy way out of a scene, and the observational details can be rich.

Boseman makes the character’s eyes glitter with humor and rage and fear; Levee knows what he deserves and how far it remains out of his reach, and maybe so did the man playing him. It’s a magisterial performance.

Mank is one of the year’s best movies if you’re the kind of person who genuinely loves movies and damn close if you’re not.

The Twentieth Century exists somewhere on the Venn diagram between midnight movie, fever dream, Turner Classics fetish object, and all-Canadian prank. Does that sound interesting? By all means. Does the movie go anywhere? Not really. Will you mind? I didn’t.

The final moments, however, are all Ruben’s, which is to say they’re all Ahmed’s, and the actor makes his character’s ultimate decision feel both hard won and achingly simple. Coming out toward the end of a year of great and terrible cacophony, Sound of Metal understands the gift that is hearing and the blessings of silence alike.

Belushi was at his best when he was allowed to build, moving from soft-spoken sanity to a maelstrom of fury over the course of a two-minute sketch. We get the infamous Joe Cocker impression, flailing away next to the real thing; we’re reminded of his truly remarkable skills as a physical comedian; and we get most of my favorite skit, the “Little Chocolate Donuts” ad. But a full measure of the man’s art (and it was art) is missing.

It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.

The sex scenes, when they arrive, are unexpectedly, passionately frank, and the characters and the film alike seem stunned in their aftermath. It’s not a movie that has figured out how to end.