William Bibbiani

Morgan Neville may have made the latest in a long line of giant LEGO commercials, but he’s made one with real human decency and soul.

Marshall’s Hellboy is a horrifyingly good time. It captures the breathless quality of reading 30 issues of a single comic-book series in one sugar-addled afternoon, shoving as many amazing characters and storylines and images into one film as it can possibly hold. It could have seemed overstuffed and frenetic, but this new “Hellboy” instead comes across as imaginative and freewheeling.

It’s an engaging slasher movie amusement park ride – but just like any amusement park ride, it’s not as exhilarating the sixth time around, it probably won’t impress you with its subtext, and you can usually see the ending coming around the bend.

The House With a Clock in Its Walls is easily Eli Roth’s best motion picture, and that’s not an attempt to damn the film with faint praise. It’s a spooky and amusing piece of family-friendly Halloween cinema, sharply produced and mostly effective, told with skill and panache.

Writer-director Mariama Diallo’s debut feature Master doesn’t just blur the lines between the horror genre and institutionalized racism; it convincingly argues that there’s no meaningful difference.

Roberts wraps his audience around his finger and then points us in the direction of gruesome, darkly humorous devilry.

It is, most importantly, amusing and creative. It may not follow its storylines to the most logical conclusions, and it may not reinvent the action movie as we know it. It’s still an enjoyable blockbuster sequel that tries to infuse the original idea with a couple new ideas, while setting the stage for more exciting adventures to come.

The Happytime Murders may not be a timeless classic on par with Roger Rabbit, but it’s more interesting and nuanced than its raunchy, violent humor suggests. The puppeteering is fantastic, the characters are interesting, and although the story isn’t ingenious the jokes are usually funny.

Vice is a funny and vicious political commentary, revealing in clear, thrilling detail a man whom filmmaker Adam McKay considers one of the most insidious and dangerous political figures of the last fifty years. But that viciousness also makes Vice one-sided, even reductive.

The Eggers Brothers have a canny way of balancing those wildly different tones. We’re frightened for each character, even when we point and giggle at them. It’s a twisted film.

There are no small parts in a Michael Showalter movie. Every actor is a star when they’re on camera.

Whenever the filmmaker’s emphasis is on the sinful humanity of these men of God, reducing them to Machiavellian backstabbers, it’s a satisfying and absorbing yarn. When it tries to say something profound — while refusing to acknowledge the many elephants who populate the Vatican’s many rooms — it makes cardinal errors.

A sadistic delight, just like its predecessor.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is such an absorbing airplane novel of a movie that you half expect to walk out of the theater and into O’Hare International. Your flight was on time, and the turbulence was totally badass.

Greutert’s film brings back the core elements that made these movies work. It’s an uncomplicated, effective horror thriller, even though it’s trapped itself in the past with nowhere else to go.

The Greatest Showman is wildly entertaining even when it’s spectacularly false, which is a lot of the time. But everyone is enjoying themselves on-screen, so you might as well enjoy yourself too.

Alpha comes close to greatness, specifically that rare kind of greatness that we reserve for timeless epics, or at least gorgeous Frank Frazetta illustrations. The story and protagonist aren’t quite rich enough to take it to the next level.

It’s a film about a bleak and cruel universe that is unkind to victims and eager to ignore reasonable pleas, a world that has a conscious and subconscious vendetta against women in general. It’s also a film that thinks it’s entirely possible to destroy that world, as terrifying as it is, and ultimately, it’s the movie’s principled strength that endures.

Clerks III is serious to a minor fault and breezy to a minor fault. It’s got all the same laid-back, chill vibes cinema that Smith is well-known for, and the same immature approach to genuine maturity that he’s also known for, with a new sense of emotional severity that makes it harder to laugh than it probably should be.

Whether the love story completely works or not, ChaO is such a visual wonder that it hardly matters.

It’s gorgeous, it’s distinctive, it’s quirky, it’s definitely about mermaids, and it might just make you question your sanity.

An incredibly direct motion picture, and sometimes the limitations of its budget put a strain on the ambitious multi-decade narrative, but it’s a film — and a cast — that demands thunderous applause anyway.

Swapped won’t change the world, probably, but it’s a step above a lot of similar films and an effective fantasy story for all ages.

It’s like a National Lampoon movie where Chevy Chase is a mass murderer. That’s a great pitch, dang it, and Timo Tjahjanto throws it at 105 miles per hour.

With striking scares, moody atmosphere, and impressive performances, You Are Not My Mother gradually reveals itself to be a wicked, wicked work of horror, with perhaps only a few unanswered questions holding it back from true greatness.

When Cameron’s film calms down, and the stunning imagery that cinematographer Russell Carpenter (“Titanic”) has created with the film’s enormous visual-effects team can linger for a while, the imagination and scope of Avatar: The Way of Water can occasionally feel quite magical.

Beneath Us never lets the exploitation cinema elements get in the way of the serious conversation about actual, real-life exploitation. That makes it frightening, and that makes it bold.

A welcome new patch in the sprawling 'Bridget Jones' tapestry. It’s got all the humor and romance we’ve come to enjoy and all the caring and maturity we’ve come to depend on.