Throw out any expectations you might have of coherent narrative structure or directorial control, and you might have a pretty good time.

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.

Upgrade, Whannell’s second outing behind the camera, is yet another top-notch repair job, this time a kinetic sci-fi riff fashioned from scrap metal and human entrails, nervily updating Cronenbergian body horror for the iOS era.

Veteran London theater director Dominic Cooke (the BBC’s “The Hollow Crown”) and acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan adapt the fractured-narrative feature from McEwan’s book, enhancing the elegant prose with additional bits of rich characterization and handsomely shot scenery.

The film casts Annette Bening as the vain, aging stage actress Irina Arkadina, Saoirse Ronan as the naive country beauty Nina, and Elisabeth Moss as bitter Masha, dressed in black “in mourning for my life.” Those are three excellent reasons to see the movie, and the filmmaking fights them almost every step of the way.

Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word is an essay in radical humility capable of moving a viewer regardless of his or her religious persuasions, or lack thereof.

Holding it all together is his voice-over narration: always intelligent and thoughtful, sometimes wistful, occasionally navel-gazing annoying. Even when annoying, the narration sounds great, thanks to the murmury musicality of Salles’s Portuguese.

Deadpool 2 is very good at what it does, which is flattering the audience into feeling like it’s in on the joke. If you’re a doubter, though, you may wonder if the joke’s on us.

Subpar stuff with a few multiplex-worthy bits: a gonzo opening chase with the US Border Patrol, some wisecracking narration, and grungy location atmosphere. [15 July 2012, p.N10]

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.

Sadly, it’s not quite as fun as that sounds. If you’re up for something deeply and unsettlingly strange, though, Bruno Dumont’s portrait of the saint as a young zealot has genuine oddball pleasures amid stretches of real tedium.

Thoroughly vanilla comedy, a movie jammed with well-meaning girl power messages but surprisingly little edge.

Perhaps that is Roskam’s ultimate point: volition and individuality are illusory; only love and death matter. That truth comes through with somber clarity in the film’s eloquent coda, which almost makes up for the silliness that precedes it.

Plays a little like “Sex and the City” as reconceived by a Minimalist composer. That makes the movie sound like a threat, when actually it’s a dry, lightly sad, and very French comedy of romantic neurosis, brought to us by two great artists, director Claire Denis (“Chocolat,” “Beau Travail,” “White Material”) and star Juliette Binoche.

It’s an inane, absurd, fitfully amusing time-waster that ranks low on the believability scale and somewhere in the middle as mindless entertainment.

A documentary love letter to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it assumes you love her too.

Theron is so good that when Tully climaxes by revealing whole new depths to her character, an audience can’t help but feel cheated. Maybe the rosy, complacent final scenes can fool the filmmakers, but not us, and certainly, one senses, not Theron. The movie’s over, but it feels like the star’s just getting started.

Keener’s performance keeps the film grounded even as blunt scenes of the opposing camp’s machinations flirt with soap opera villainy.

Ronit’s ebullient spirit spreads vivacity, discontent, and resentment. She offers the possibility of choice — between secular independence or religious tradition. But Lelio opts for an insipid neutrality that does a disservice to both.

Picking up where Joss Whedon, director of the first two “Avengers” films, left off, sibling filmmakers Anthony and Joe Russo have so many pairings and sparrings to work through that the movie is essentially a mixed martial arts extravaganza with a severely overcrowded undercard.

Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.

This is challenging, almost cerebral horror, infrequently indulging obvious scares when deeper-set ones lurk below.

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal.

The pervasive, absorbing bitterness and hurt falter only when the story eases off its characters’ cynical insistence that people don’t change. Sudeikis knows how to play jarringly nasty — see “Colossal,” for one — but choked-up can be a reach here.

Perhaps Fiennes’s intent is to draw the viewer into the solipsistic intensity of what it is to be Grace Jones. It is a bracing experience, because she is hedonistic, exultant, funny, and fierce.

The movie’s a mixture of good intentions, a wobbly tone, and a plastic script, and it debuts a somewhat kinder, softer Schumer than the in-your-face comic trainwreck of “Trainwreck” (2015). I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

You’ll be in the mood for it or you won’t. 24 Frames is slow cinema at its slowest, and as meaningful as you want to make it. Above all, it breathes with the sensibility of an artist who saw beauty in people and places where most of us never thought to look.

It is violent, sad, tender, and alive, and it is as assured a piece of moviemaking as you’ll ever see.

Sarnet elevates his Rabelaisian folktale into a tragedy illustrated by haunting, metaphorical imagery.

By the end of The Peacemaker, you feel you’re watching a Samuel Beckett character furiously trying to improvise himself out of the play. In the process, he’s bringing the rest of us along.

The engaging dynamic between our hero and his gargantuan, computer-generated pal is the movie’s best surprise, with silly and straight bits both working mostly as intended for director Brad Peyton (Johnson’s “Journey 2” and “San Andreas”).

It is hard and empathetic and bleak and often beautiful — not far off from a prairie “400 Blows.”

Four writers are credited with the script, and their combined efforts yield just one scene with genuine verve.

After watching David Douglas and Drew Fellman’s visually spectacular, technically amazing, and occasionally cutesy documentary, Pandas, you’d think that IMAX 3-D was invented solely for close-ups of adorable panda cubs, their giant doleful, domino faces peering out with cuddly curiosity.

As nifty as any of it is a witty, touching story thread about Adlon’s trepidatious geek wrestling with her sexual orientation even as she wrestles with peer pressure to hop into bed. And guess what? She and the movie make the smart call.

The clichéd dialogue, stereotypical characters (except for Toby Jones, who distinguishes himself as the wryly incompetent company cook), and the constrained setting (it takes place almost entirely in the officers’ dugout) deadens the suspense and diminishes the mood of dread endured by those awaiting their doom.

Tucci can be so focused on Giacometti’s artistic process that he gives short shrift to the art itself.

The film is arriving on these shores in the wake of such successful foodie nonfictions as “Jiro Dreams of Shushi,” a 2012 art-house hit about an 85-year-old master of raw fish. Like that film, Ramen Heads reaches for the lyrical with slow-motion shots of roiling broth and soaring classical music on the soundtrack. Unlike the earlier movie, it goes so far overboard in ladling out praise that viewers might wonder if they’re being sold a bill of goods.

The smarter, scarier horror movies know it’s not how much you show an audience but how little. A Quiet Place takes that maxim in a surprising direction: The tension in this movie — and it’s nearly unbearable at times — comes from how little we hear.

An entertainingly brutal portrait of feckless privilege and buried tragedy, hewing reasonably close to those points we know to be true and juicily provocative about what happened in rooms you and I weren’t privy to.

At a time when financial regulations have been gutted, stock market indexes reel, and trade wars threaten, Jed Rothstein’s slick and revealing documentary The China Hustle should only add to the anxiety and gloom.

Isle of Dogs is a fascinating (and furry) place to visit, but visit is all it does. It’s a good boy. But it’s not a great one.

Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.

It overuses ’80s nostalgia as shorthand for genuine emotional involvement, and it presents us with a rapturous digital wonderworld only to sternly lecture us that reality is the better value.

If anything, Chernick’s film shows a life that may be too perfect. In addition to his triumphant career, Perlman has a seemingly ideal marriage — to Toby, a woman who is his match in ebullience, wit, and passion for art and music. It has lasted for more than 50 years.

A deft, disturbing piece of work, as cold around the heart as the Kubrick film, if infinitely more dismissible. It gets in, it messes with your mind, and it vanishes, leaving only an unsettling aftertaste of unresolved narrative. It’s an exercise, but some exercise leaves you gasping.

Still, not to put too fine — or juvenile — a point on it, a bigger problem is that there’s nothing but ’bot-on-’bot mayhem until the climax, when familiar ugly heads are reared over Tokyo.

The film is quite the showcase for Zoey Deutch (“Before I Fall”), giving her loose-scripted freedom to play brazen, breezy, even soulfully vulnerable. Still, her selectively promiscuous hellion is so off-putting so much of the time — as are most of those around her, and their lurid plots and predicaments — it’s hard to see the point of it all.

After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.

It’s not exactly like the novel, but it captures the best parts of it.

Buscemi is magnificent, but all the players rise to the occasion; you may especially cherish Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) as Stalin’s demented alcoholic son Vasily and Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) as pianist Maria Yudina, the film’s elegant and only note of genuine conscience.

The Leisure Seeker is slack and episodic in a way that only a committee could love. The sense of energy and surprise that one expects from a road movie is nowhere to be found. The pleasure of Mirren and Sutherland’s company is considerable, but not that considerable.

As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

It’s a twisty dark comedy in the action-suspense vein, piled high with talented actors playing cretinous fools and featuring enough betrayals, mistaken identities, and narrative switchbacks to keep you pleasurably befuddled.

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

A story steeped in emotional remoteness manages to command our attention in Thoroughbreds, first-time filmmaker Cory Finley’s darkly satirical portrait of the young and disconnected in old-money Connecticut.

The message is clear, if not original: stray from the herd and you’re dead. What makes Hirayanagi’s iteration of this familiar theme appealing are the quirky characters, the nuanced performances, and the curious cultural topography of Tokyo.

So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.

A hard-R espionage thriller heavy on themes of sexual degradation and graphic, sometimes sadistic violence.

The penultimate moments of “Bombshell” are moving, re-creating the lost Vienna of Kiesler’s childhood and overlaying the voice of the aging Lamarr, interviewed by an Austrian news team in 1970, as she speaks of never being understood in America. Adrift in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, she spent a lifetime being looked at and never once being seen.

As a portfolio of visionary images of surreal landscapes and hallucinatory flora and fauna, the movie sometimes dazzles. But as a metaphorical narrative, it often fizzles.

Mirrors loom large in this movie, and Marina reflects back an image that too much of society refuses to see, to the point where she herself starts to doubt her own reflection. Yet the film’s most potent and lasting image involves a hand mirror and a steady gaze, and it serves as a breathtaking poetic metaphor about gender, identity, love, and the human soul. All you have to do, says Lelio, is look and see.

The film can be naggingly vague and patchily written where precision seems called for, but the familiar procession keenly digging into the wistful material does hold interest.

The new film is a lightly poisoned amuse-bouche that’s made with tasty high-end ingredients, but at 71 minutes it leaves you hungry for more.

For all the energy that Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, and their castmates pour into their gimmicky comedy, there’s too often a feeling that they’re straining to pump up flat material.

The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.

Honestly, the chilly dog days of February are crying out for a good, smart, silly stop-motion family film, the kind you can fully enjoy under the pretext of spending an afternoon at the movies with your kids.

No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.

Fifty Shades Freed is as boring as . . . well . . . Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. It’s a trilogy climax that should be fun, but it’s monotonous — maybe because we’ve seen it all before.

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

If the freneticism gets repetitious, the target audience won’t mind, at least not judging by a preview crowd’s delirious reaction to a recurring electrified-doorknob gag.

The movie’s a social history, a love story, and a call to arms. It’s very sad and it’s very good.

Worth seeing as further proof that Annette Bening can do anything and for a touchingly flummoxed performance by Jamie Bell, once the kid of “Billy Elliot” and now a strapping romantic lead. But if it sends audiences back to explore the filmography of Gloria Grahame, the movie will have truly provided a public service.

Where we hoped for a narrative rebound, we get instead another pedestrian, overlong post-apocalyptic entry that fails to capitalize on some decent character dynamics.

A moody, mannered, and lingering coming-of-age story with a Stephen King-like twist.

A by-the-numbers B flick with a preposterous script and a good cast trying their best.

The film’s chief flaw is that it’s in the room but never really in the room — the key figures talk about passionate interoffice policy arguments, but we never actually see them. Still, The Final Year takes in setbacks, breakthroughs, gaffes, and a steady drumbeat of talking-head criticism from televised outsiders, heard on the film’s soundtrack but not seen.

Danish photojournalist-turned-director Nicolai Fuglsig channels his experience into a credibly stark snapshot of war, one that helps audiences further grasp why the region has been so hellishly problematic for American troops.

Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, an effortless display of poise from its camerawork and costumes to the characters and the things they say.

Neeson’s financially strapped character might vent even more convincingly if he didn’t somehow still have a BMW parked back at the depot, but we’re on board with him all the same.

As a movie, The Post is engrossing and enjoyable, if falling slightly short of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” As a period piece, it couldn’t feel more eerily of the moment.

Despite the film’s length and aspirations, its anthropological correctness and historically accurate gore, Bale’s transformation from stone killer to empathetic ally is unconvincing.

It’s tempting to think of Molly’s Game in poker terms: Sorkin’s holding a queen, a king, and at least a couple of aces, but the tell is that he talks too much, and in the end you realize he’s bluffing.

A better title might have been “All the Movies in the World.” We get a thriller, of sorts, and a crime movie, of sorts (Romain Duris, as a kidnapper, gives the most appealing performance). It’s also a morality tale crossed with family melodrama.

A richly detailed sexual and emotional coming of age story, the movie’s based on a novel and it unfolds novelistically, through glances and asides and slowly accreting observations.

The film’s ultimate message — help other people, basically — is, while useful and necessary, dramatically rather slack, and you notice with a shock that the film’s central conceit has almost entirely dropped off the table by the final third. Payne’s microcosm is so like our macrocosm that after a while he simply forgets to make the distinction.

The numbers just aren’t as dynamic as we might have hoped for from director Trish Sie, whose credits include alt-rock act OK Go’s “treadmill video” and other addictively innovative shorts.

One of the year’s surprises, a defiant, funny, and multi-layered saga of talent and class resentment, marred only by some technical oddities and a certain smug awareness of everything the moviemakers are daring themselves to do right.

There is nothing especially wrong with it other than that for some of us it represents 105 minutes in hell.

The group’s thematically, comedically broad inversion of the source material is consistently entertaining, and squeezes in some nicely played character growth to boot.

The good news is that while the movie is susceptible to some pandering, it also takes the story’s charming core elements and gives them a contemporary luster.

In a subtle but wily performance, Strang never loses sight of his character’s innate sense of resistance. By drawing his way out of the closet, Tom of Finland drew a door for others to come out as well.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it may be a great one.

More than an hour passes before Khaled and Wikström’s stories intersect, and though it would be an exaggeration to say each redeems the other, in this film the other side of hope is not despair, but decency.