Randall Park, the actor (“Fresh Off the Boat”) making his feature-directing debut with a script Adrian Tomine adapted from his graphic novel, displays a confidence here that is infectious.

Highlighted by great voice acting, especially from the four actors playing the main teenagers who are relatively unknown actors — and by Ayo Edebiri, who is taking over the summer with her starring role in "The Bear" — the movie will catapult the ninja turtle lore into yet another generation. Cowabunga!

The elements of a good story are here, and the talent to tell it is more than willing. The movie just never quite gets there.

If you have young kids and want to spend two hours out of the house in a cool, air-conditioned theater, then go see “Haunted Mansion.” But if you can hold out until it’s released on Disney+ all the better. It’s really not worth spending money on the ticket.

It’s a horror movie that is actually scary; it’s got a good idea that feels both relevant and contemporary; and it’s really gross. (That’s a plus — it is a horror movie, after all. Sometimes they skimp.) I just wish I understood its logic a little better.

It’s powerful, a technically dazzling achievement; so audacious is Nolan’s filmmaking that if it didn’t serve the story you’d think at times he was just showing off. He’s not.

It's Gerwig’s movie, Gerwig’s take on childhood and the patriarchy and feminism and love and death — boy, death — all wrapped in a package that continually surprises. So yeah, it’s not what you think it is. It’s better.

If you were a theater kid, this movie will feel like an inside joke written just for you.

The plot is lacking in emotional weight, even though the adversities are right there on paper.

What makes Joy Ride stand out among other R-rated comedies is its heart, smart writing and attention to detail in each of the characters that comes from the unique perspective of an Asian director and cast tapping into shared experiences, stereotypes and cultural particularities. I haven’t laughed this hard in a movie theater in a very long time.

But it’s Atwell who steps up the most. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” her motives are fluid, which makes her more fun.

The Lesson is a quiet little film with surprisingly sharp teeth.

It’s heartbreaking at times, but it’s also uplifting — the three subjects are fierce advocates and activists, and Cohen’s empathetic storytelling makes it a personal journey. It’s also often entertaining, because the three are so expressive and engaging.

For all its issues, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is a good excuse to get out of the house with the family and take the kids to see something fun. And that’s what this movie is: fun. Even if I was bored and unmoved, the target audience will have a great time.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is ultimately an OK entry in a legendary franchise. It’s fun enough, but why bother?

Lawrence delivers a performance that’s long overdue. She finally gets an opportunity to show off her comedic chops and her biting humor and executes it with years of dramatic acting in her bag. She is brash yet warm, making this character extremely believable.

It unfolds in ways both comic and affecting.

On the surface, the story might feel rote. But Pixar’s crew has returned to what it does best: Exposing the deepest feelings of the heart under the guise of everyday emotions. Ember and Wade’s relationship is both "Romeo and Juliet," but also the story of many immigrant families.

Not every bit lands and the social commentary is not always exactly incisive. Sometimes it is, though. When a character says they should call the police and everyone breaks out into simultaneous guffaws, the point is made — fittingly, with laughter.

Emotionally engaging from the start, bolstered by brilliant performances and held together by Song’s understated direction that weaves timelines together flawlessly, it’s more than just good.

Logic devolves, cameos abound — there are two that are truly inspired, one of which involves legendary recasting — and lessons are learned.

On the whole, Flamin’ Hot plays like a feel-good family flick. Nothing is too heavy, and some parts feel a bit overdone, but it’s fun for the most part.

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is a horror movie, no doubt. It’s also an intelligent one, with the courage to challenge its audience, to make it see the horrors not just in the monster, but in the societal inequities that ultimately created him. Thankfully, Story isn’t afraid to rework a classic.

The movie is emotional without feeling manipulative. It’s progressive without feeling heavy handed. It’s dazzling without feeling like it was made completely on a computer, despite literally being made on a computer! Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is exhilarating, touching, creative and a shoo-in for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards again this year.

What the movie needs is a more coherent story. While keeping an audience off-kilter and disoriented is a worthy goal, particularly in a horror film, it’s got to add up to something. In this case it’s more like meandering.

About My Father isn’t horrible. It’s not great. It just sort of exists as a passion project for Maniscalco, an OK gig for most of the rest of the cast and another curious line on De Niro’s resume.

The Little Mermaid delivers on every front and will likely be one of the summer’s biggest box-office winners.

It’s not a warts-and-all treatment because, at least in this telling, there are no warts. It’s more about securing Berra among a new generation of fans as one of the greatest players who ever lived. And on that front, it more than succeeds.

Fans of the “Fast and Furious” franchise are sure to enjoy the latest model.

In many ways BlackBerry is the standard-fare cautionary tale of tech start-ups. Insert your Icarus metaphors here. But there is a kind of sweetness to the film that makes it more compelling than the typical rise, crash and burn movie.

All of this is interesting, in varying degrees. But watching and listening to Fox talk is magnetic.

It’s not a disaster, and it doesn’t lack for ambition. But it’s wildly uneven and kind of blah, if that can be said of a movie with nonstop, often incoherent action, self-aware needle drops and not nearly enough smart-aleck quips from a cast we’ve seen deliver plenty of them in the past.

Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret is a delightful film, just lovely.

The violence is gory enough to make the audience squirm, and just cartoonish enough to give it permission to laugh. Like the “John Wick” movies, it’s really one brutal set piece after another, though the choreography is not as poetic here.

Aster, who also directed the excellent “Hereditary” and the somewhat less excellent “Midsommar,” has the audience where he wants it — off-kilter, uncomfortable, bewildered. It’s his comfort zone, but not ours. Whether you enjoy this kind of manipulation will go a long way toward deciding how much you like the film.

Of its many brilliant aspects, the film does illuminate the numbing grind of real life when you’re trying to make art.

Using the horror genre to tell a faith-based story is an interesting idea, even if it doesn’t really work in the end. And then Beck shows up, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

The actors are having fun here and, for a while, so will the audience. But the payoff just isn’t there. It’s not-a-stake-through-the-heart disappointment, but the only eternal life Renfield will enjoy is in late-night channel surfing.

Paint is one of those good ideas that doesn’t quite make a good movie. Until it does.

The Super Mario Bros. is family-friendly movie theater catnip over the Easter weekend, and it’s sure to be an enjoyable watch for the average viewer. I’ll leave the “Mario” superfans to determine if every frame, line of dialogue and reference to the video games lives up to the hype around the film.

Air isn’t a documentary, it's better — a brilliantly acted, fascinating true story.

What makes this film work is that it is exactly as advertised: a chaotic romp through a fantasy world that has enough structure to be believable. But the key here is that we don’t get bogged down in details over which race or land is which. We don’t care nor need to know all the details of this world. We just go along for the ride.

It makes for an entertaining movie, one you can tell is glossing over some details and minutiae. That's probably a good thing overall, but that, and an inability to nail down a consistent tone, leaves it feeling a little incomplete.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is not a great piece of cinema, exactly, but it delivers on what it promises, time and again.

Moving On, a dark comedy written and directed by Paul Weitz, isn’t a great movie by any means, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s also a relief to see Fonda and Tomlin play women whose age is not discounted, but is also not disqualifying.

Without an actor like Dafoe at its center (and margins and everywhere else), it would be unwatchable torture. With him, it’s more like watchable torture, easier to admire than enjoy.

Scream VI is a decent film with a transitional feel, a signal that you can take the show on the road and it still works. But it doesn’t leave you screaming for more.

It's all very relatable. The film allows audiences to see that we are all human beings trying to make sense of the world and live our lives.

Creed III is definitely a people movie. And Jordan has trained his lens on the right subjects. He’s once again convincing as a man trying to fight his way through internal conflict, not just opponents in the ring.

Director Jamie Payne keeps things moving, certainly, and the action is appropriately gruesome. But you can see where a little more time to tell the story would have helped.

It’s stupid by design, but it’s not stupid enough. … It plays like an idea in search of a film. Desperately in search of, and never quite finding it.

In Return to Seoul, 25-year-old Parisian Frédérique Benoît (Park Ji-Min), aka Freddie, copes with learning about her Korean heritage during a spontaneous trip to South Korea. And the journey to finding herself and accepting her background is anything but linear.

The storytelling in Linoleum isn’t simple, but the joys of its discoveries are. It’ll make you think, and ultimately it will make you smile.

To be fair, both Anton and Green do a fair job of giving Kol and Adam believability. But do we really need another tragic period gay love story? How about yes, but do it better.

You’d think a move about the potential for the destruction of universes would feel pretty high stakes, but this one doesn’t. Nor does it connect on the family drawn together through adversity front.

Billed as a musical comedy, Magic Mike’s Last Dance should be a lighthearted Valentine’s Day/Super Bowl weekend watch. Unfortunately, it’s not funny in the ways it expects to be.

To pretend that the film’s pleasures are more than modest is just that — pretending.

The themes in One Fine Morning are familiar: love, loss, loneliness. Hansen-Løve treats them with dignity, allowing the audience to experience Sandra’s emotions fully. Even so, the film as a whole doesn’t pack the punch it could have.

The film is a mad whirl of influencer phoniness, paranoia, imposter syndrome and parenting nightmares.

There are a few examples that illustrate what makes “Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” such an exciting documentary. Yes, seriously, exciting.

It’s not just that the jokes aren’t funny, or that they’re given to genius comic actors like Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to deliver — which has to be some kind of pop-culture crime — the bigger issue is that there's not a single instance of recognizable human behavior in the entire film.

It’s too bad that these maternal figures aren’t given much more to do except worry about their progeny in “The Son.”

I was only able to figure out the answer to about a third of the mysteries. But the rest left a thrilling impression that made “Missing” a genuinely fun ride.

There’s a lot going on here, not much of it all that interesting. Although you do get to see Rob Lowe clomp around in the woods. And that's something.

If Sick isn’t a great COVID-inspired horror film, at least it’s a start.

If you’re a student of history or a Wikipedia devotee, some aspects of the film, particularly its conclusion, might bother you. But they shouldn’t. Watch a documentary if you want straight facts. Watch what Kreutzer and Krieps have come up with here for something more.

Despite the specificity of the setting and the performances, there is a universality to the story.

Most of all I enjoyed watching Bale and Melling together. Poe wants to impress Landor, who after all is a famous detective, but he just can’t help himself.

It’s not the best movie you’ll see this year, but it’s the most movie by a long shot.

It’s not like the first film was some sort of idiot-comedy version of “Citizen Kane” or something. But that film played like a good buzz. The Binge 2: It’s a Wonderful Binge plays more like the hangover that comes after.

It’s still more of a spectacle than a movie. But as spectacles go, it’s a big one. And with more elements of an actual film creeping in here and there, who knows? By the time we get to the fifth one, we might have some actual cinema on our hands.

Emancipation, Antoine Fuqua’s well-meaning and graphic depiction of an enslaved man who escapes in search of Lincoln’s army and freedom for himself and his family, is a mostly affecting, no-holds-barred look at degradation, inhumanity and, ultimately, inspiration. But at times — too many times — Emancipation also plays like an action-adventure movie.

To say Violent Night isn’t for everyone overstates the obvious. But if you’re looking for a bracing antidote to Hallmark Christmas movie treacle overload, it’s a holiday treat.

The Eternal Daughter doesn’t scare you in the traditional sense as much as it moves you, and that’s every bit as powerful an achievement.

If nothing else it’ll dazzle your senses, even on a small screen.

The enormously appealing thing about Glass Onion is watching the cast have an obviously good time with their characters and with each other.

The film is cute and funny, but it’s also action-packed and much more thrilling than you might expect from a Disney movie, with the same heartwarming lessons you would expect. It's a gem in Disney's new catalog.

It lags in a few places, but She Said gives you a journalism story to cheer for.

Exceptionally well made, tougher than you'd think in its depictions of a troubled marriage and full of deep performances — it's outstanding.

Mylod, working from a script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, goes all in on the social commentary. Some of it is funny, some of it appalling, none of it as engaging as when Mylod uses food to make statements.

Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.

Wakanda Forever misses Boseman greatly — the entire film is about missing him — but it moves the story forward in a way that seems logical and fitting.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is like eating ice cream for breakfast. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, and for a while it actually is. But eventually it starts to feel like too much.

Armageddon Time is above all what it sets out to be: a story about growing up, and all the joy and pain that entails.

The way Park composes each frame is masterful. Sometimes the set-ups are intended to throw you off the scent of what’s happening, but wow, who cares when a film looks like this?

It's visually stunning, well written and the acting is top-notch. But without context, the plot falls flat, leaving behind an unsettling and bizarre film.

It is a fascinating document of making a comeback record — sorry, Tanya — while balancing the hard work and the gentle coaxing and cheerleading required when working with a complex talent like Tucker.

My Policeman weaves a compelling tale of star-crossed love through different perspectives and timelines.

Yes, it’s graphic. But that’s the point. The discrimination and racism that fueled Emmett Till's murder and sparked the civil rights movement are still omnipresent.

If this is the end — and who are we kidding, the film’s box-office returns will determine that, not its plot — it’s a disappointing one. But it’s long past time to let it die.

The star wattage is blinding, but the film fizzles out.

Blanchett navigates this journey with ferocious power — even as Lydia is losing her own. It sounds like a cliche, but her performance is so believable, so natural, which at times means so disturbing, that it doesn’t seem like she’s acting. She’s just being.

The film . . . is good, not great; it never quite marries the skewering of New York elites with the true-crime feel of its grittier elements. But the performances keep it mostly on track.

There aren’t enough scares to keep you on edge in Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, but there’s enough else going on to keep you interested.

Too often the jokes don’t land. Neither does the physical comedy. The story doesn’t really hold. It’s clear that Schneider and his daughter love each other, and this film is a way to express that. But it’s a lot to ask of the rest of us to watch it.

Some new elements do work . . . But Hocus Pocus 2’s best parts are familiar and beloved to fans of the original movie.

What Finn’s film lacks in originality it makes up for in technical prowess, and he has the courage of his convictions. The colors, even the ones that should be bright, are muted. Everything is just a touch off, until it’s a lot off. Smile isn’t a great horror film, but there’s plenty here to make you … well, you know.

Bros is a truly funny, smart and well-written romantic comedy about love in all its forms, and that's something we can all use more of in our lives.