For much of its first half, Chef Flynn feels like an after-school special with a difference — a big, big difference.

At its best moments, Creed II manages a feat nearly as striking as anything that Michael B. Jordan’s Rocky Balboa protégé pulls off in the boxing ring: It doesn’t play all that much like a sequel.

The imaginative, touching, and dizzyingly animated Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sequel with a rich, broad vision that addresses all of these issues faster than you can say Fix-It Felix.

Some of the film is slow. Some of it is silly.

Schnabel tries to re-create van Gogh’s inner workings during the intense last two years of his life — his point of view and his way of looking at the world that resulted in the masterpieces that have since become invaluable investment commodities.

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.

All movies are phony. What, you think beautiful people doing ugly things on a screen is real? Some movies are phonier than others. Widows is one of those. The always thin line between a twisty plot and a silly one gets crossed about an hour in.

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.

It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.

Burning, from South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, is a beautifully cryptic slow burner that lingers long in the senses. It’s the kind of film where you obsess over what it means, the better to avoid thinking about how it makes you feel.

So it’s a sort of grace note that Julien Faurat’s unusual and absorbing documentary, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, includes a snippet from the soundtrack of “Raging Bull,” probably the greatest and certainly the fiercest and most aestheticized of boxing movies.

The particulars are often fascinating, but all the solemnity does work against a more rousing finish. The Netflix-distributed feature might equal “Braveheart” (1995) in its gritty authenticity, but that standard-setter’s memorably transportive quality was ultimately a far battle cry from this.

The result is a reworking that feels both unnecessary and uninspired, even if it’s too genial and visually captivating to be flat-out off-putting.

A reporter is never the story — the story is the story. But if looking at the reporter helps you see the story, and the human beings the story is about, then the effort may be worth it. A Private War is worth it.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Boy Erased is strongest when it simply focuses on Jared as he copes with the trauma of coming out in a repressed society. This includes, in the film’s most shocking scene, a sequence of collegiate gay rape that leaves the boy with PTSD, which goes unnoticed and untreated by parents, authorities, and, to some extent, the film itself.

The stone-faced silent comedian’s influence on every possible aspect of physical comedy is wide and deep, attested to in this movie by entertainers old (Bill Irwin, Paul Dooley, Richard Lewis), ancient (Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner), youngish (Bill Hader, Quentin Tarantino), and random (Cybill Shepherd, Werner Herzog).

All in all, the movie’s a muddled and overlong experience, one that every so often drifts into dull, unintentional camp.

What starts as a modest, agreeable riff on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale — and, more relevantly, Tchaikovsky’s ballet — eventually veers into stultifying action, rote twists, and other badly forced contemporary tweaks.

When art-minded film directors stoop to genre-minded filmmaking, it’s generally a good idea to duck. Despite sequences that may lodge in your memory forever, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is no exception to this rule.

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

It’s as if Hill took his familiar sly humor and sneaked it into a segment from Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.”

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

The documentary is good on the gay aspect of 54, and disco generally. Schrager became highly successful as an impresario of boutique hotels. Still, when he talks about Studio 54 there’s a touch of wonder in the tough-guy growl.

It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.

As franchise reboots go, the new Halloween is top shelf. Jamie Lee Curtis returns with a vengeance to the role of Laurie Strode.

He (Barinholtz) works hard to creatively lampoon a nation divided, and his first-timer’s ambition and thematic investment are admirable. Disappointingly, though, he lacks storytelling chops, aiming for wildly provocative satire but instead churning out a technically spotty screed.

Everett draws effectively from Wilde’s own writings and witticisms.

A line gets crossed. It isn’t the one between California and Nevada. It’s the one from “Bad” to worse.

First Man plays a different and arguably more rewarding game, one that looks for the man behind the hero. It’s a movie that shows how the most personal moments can coexist within and alongside the most momentous events. It’s a film that insists history is made from private lives.

Mostly, though, the movie succeeds because of the actress at its center.

Each of these dames of the realm gets to play the choicest of roles: herself.

Go figure that the year’s most outrageously harrowing action movie turns out to be an arthouse doc from National Geographic.

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

Director David Lowery (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints,” “A Ghost Story”) did the adaptation of David Grann’s New Yorker magazine article. His direction is winningly relaxed, and his script has real flavor.

On the basis of The Sisters Brothers, we’d all be better off handing our westerns to Frenchmen. Especially if the results do right by John C. Reilly. That fine, ursine character actor — our generation’s Wallace Beery, as I live and breathe — is one of the four corners of the movie’s acting pleasures, the other three being Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed (HBO’s “The Night Of”).

A modern comedy-drama in the Woody Allen-Noah Baumbach mold — urban intellectuals talking their lives in circles — but what keeps it from being a live-action New Yorker cartoon is the heart beating away in the script and the performances. At over two hours, it’s long but it’s true.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

Most refreshingly, Science Fair illustrates the many different kinds of STEM students out there.

Broad as the side of a city bus and about as lumbering, Night School is a better-than-average Kevin Hart comedy — meaning that it’s an average comedy overall. It’s silly and rather sweet, and it’s blessed with an ensemble that makes the most of the dopey cartoon script patched together by Hart and five other writers.

Westmoreland’s narrative is cluttered with undeveloped subplots and loose ends. He compensates by evoking the era with images drawing from painters like Gustave Caillebotte and Toulouse-Lautrec and soundtrack music that ranges from Strauss-like waltzes to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”

Everyone from Channing Tatum to Danny DeVito to Hollywood transplant LeBron James is here voicing the movie’s winsomely rendered snow creatures, but it’s the creative story more than the routine-if-likable characters that makes this one so engaging.

Hal is a soft-edged memorial that should direct you, or re-direct you, to some terrific and tough-edged films.

Fogelman is familiar with the genre, having created the Emmy-nominated “This Is Us,” which has been deft enough in its treatment of loss to make it one of NBC’s most-watched shows. Life Itself fails to elicit the same sniffles, instead drowning its cast in a sticky, soggy script.

Moore shows newsreel footage of Hitler delivering a speech. Only it’s not Hitler’s voice we hear. It’s Trump’s. Get it? Sure you do, and as you do the documentary slips the surly bonds of sanity — even of agitprop — to enter a realm of its own polemical making. Words cannot do justice to such an editorial decision. Well, maybe five can: intellectually null and morally contemptible.

The movie is Hawke’s fourth and best feature as a director; it’s immensely touching, and only deceptively shapeless.

Tricky territory to navigate, but it ultimately lends some genuine poignancy to the story’s familiar accidental-family themes. If there’s someplace Roth makes a mark, it’s here.

The resulting movie is atmospheric and compelling, and it makes an empathetic case for Borden as an intelligent, passionate woman so stifled by her father and the suffocating society he represented that she lashed out (and then some).

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

The Children Act isn’t all that interesting a movie, despite the many talented people involved and the generally high level of work they do. The most interesting thing about it is how it presents a case study in the very different way style can determine what works on the screen vs. what works on the page.

Kendrick’s interplay with Lively crackles, whether they’re going for laughs or something darker. Both are big selling points — as is their director, even if it’s not as advertised.

In a way I’ve never before seen done onscreen, Madeline’s Madeline fuses triumph and tragedy until the two feel strong and indistinguishable.

So the big surprise about White Boy Rick is how well the movie works. It’s one thing to know a story is based on nonfiction. Being made to believe its plausibility is something else. White Boy Rick you believe.

“Pick” often feels like a project that has been overly groomed. Will you still be moved to tears? Most likely.

Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?

The Captain pretends to be a serious movie about the banality of evil; sometimes, despite itself, it is.

There is a fair share of such Betty White-ish feistiness on display, but the pathos creeps in unexpectedly.

Wilson gives a performance that in its own way is as striking as Gleeson’s.

What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.

The cast — Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, comic sad sack Chris O’Dowd (“Bridesmaids,” “The Sapphires”) — is in a higher weight class than the material and, rather than be dragged down into formula, they raise the movie up to the nearly scintillating.

This adaptation feels like a soap opera made by someone who has seen too much late-stage Woody Allen and flounders with the self-importance of a director unable to read either text or city.

So, yeah, Kin is a bit of a biker movie, too. More important, it’s also a family drama. In their first-time feature-directing effort, twin brothers Jonathan and Josh Baker — speaking of kin — turn Cain and Abel inside out and upside down. Why be east of Eden when you end up that far west of Motown?

Notoriously remembered as a mastermind of the Final Solution, Eichmann was also infamous for the just-following-orders dispassion he maintained all the way through his trial, a banality that Kingsley channels expertly.

Herein lies the quiet magic of Support the Girls — the reason to see it, the reason that keeps it coming back from the recesses of a reviewer’s psyche: Lisa is kind. That’s the secret, the reason the film is a little diamond.

Some of this smutty irreverence is undeniably hilarious, goosed along by Melissa McCarthy’s game presence as Phil’s estranged LAPD partner and human foil. (In other felt-free casting, Maya Rudolph is equally entertaining as Phil’s trusty secretary, even if Elizabeth Banks and Joel McHale go to waste.)

Berg and Wahlberg deliver a relentlessly paced, addictively slick paramilitary thriller actively catering to fans of gonzo brutality and turbocharged machismo.

The stylishly crafted film mostly succeeds in its engaging (and tagline-ready) ambition to chronicle “how mankind discovered man’s best friend,” even if its naturalistic strengths are swapped out for an exaggeratedly epic tone in the later going.

Telling all is not necessarily the same thing as telling the truth, even if Bowers’s memory seems as clear as the glint in his bright blue eyes. Maybe it’s his ego that’s not clear — or too much so.

A coming-of-age story set on four wheels, has the distinct charm of a film assured of its voice, even as its central character strives to find her own.

Maybe the key is how nicely self-aware the move is. On the soundtrack, for example, we hear both “Material Girl” and “Money (That’s What I Want)” sung in Mandarin. Everything’s so over the top it’s a bit weightless, which in this context is a compliment.

In its tactful, observant way, the film is unrelenting in assessing the damage that blind faith can wreak on its children and heartening in showing how those damaged find strength in each other.

It’s Dyrholm’s film, though, and Nicchiarelli’s, and between them the two women do honor to their subject in all her contradictions.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

A ferocious mix of prankishness and cold fury that is one of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years.

Reed follows the proceedings as they happen and builds the suspense of a top-notch courtroom drama.

It’s surprising to see how straight McGregor plays it for director Marc Forster (the J.M. Barrie portrait “Finding Neverland”), allowing the CG-animated Pooh and friends to endearingly steal the show.

Brisk and deeply engrossing.

It’s essentially “Romy and Michelle’s Mission Impossible” or “Lucy and Ethel Live and Let Die,” and it’s an easy, awfully disposable two hours that scatters some off-kilter belly laughs among a lot of labored gags and efficiently-shot action movie setpieces.

Bonhôte and Ettedgui leave viewers winded from the pace of the ascent. But much the way we know that there was a rise, we also know a fall is imminent. This is where McQueen wobbles.

The best parts are the breezes of real, observed life that breathe through many of the scenes — the street corners, the storefronts, the rough camaraderie of guys hanging out, the wary warmth of women.

As for Drucker and Ménochet, they vividly embody the roles of abuser and victim but have little else to work with.

Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.

Save for a couple of crisp standalone segments incorporated as tone-setters, Washington’s first-ever sequel is a narratively and visually muddled disappointment, one that regularly confuses numbing brutality with vicariously thrilling righteous vengeance.

The Green Fog is a cinephile’s mash note — and a glimpse of the beautiful film library of Babel that lives in Guy Maddin’s head.

All in all, Beaton could have been a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel — both belonged to the Bright Young Things, in ’20s London — except that he and Waugh detested each other.

“Don’t Worry” is not a conventional biopic. That makes sense — Callahan sure isn’t a conventional biopic subject — but that unconventionality can present problems. Sometimes the movie is sentimental. More often, it’s scabrous. Maybe if the movie didn’t feel overlong (trim and tight it’s not), those qualities might seem better balanced.

At times, Eighth Grade plays like a nature documentary about life and death on the savannas of suburbia.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.

You’ve seen almost all of this before, with more wit and a better villain.

As a general survey of Williams’s life, as a collection of precious backstage outtakes, and as a nostalgic trip back into his comedy stylings, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind does the trick. It’s a sad, but satisfying, visit with a special man.

The idea behind Eugene Jarecki’s nonfiction film The King — you can’t really call it a documentary — is crazy-good inspired.

There are a lot of reasons to be thankful for Sorry to Bother You — one being that it represents the return of the inspired/demented midnight-movie satire — but the rise of Lakeith Stanfield to leading man status is probably the most satisfying.

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

A family affair, a family failure. The life of Whitney Houston seems like a cage match between competing egotists who call one another relatives. No doubt a certain pall hangs over the film, perhaps inevitable with the subject, and aided by the cathartic candor of most interviewees.

It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s superficial, it’s full of likable stars and scientific mumbo-jumbo, and, above all, it taps into the human urge to see big things become little and little things get big. It’s as close to lizard-brain entertainment as superhero blockbusters get, and as the mercury pushes toward 100, I’ll take it.

One of the more entertaining yet profoundly disturbing documentaries of this or any year.

Character quirks know no limits in the indie dramedy Boundaries, a multi-generational road-trip movie that gives both Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer richly drawn roles to play.