Benediction has at least three things in common with its immediate predecessor, “A Quiet Passion” (2016). Both are biographies of poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Emily Dickinson, respectively. Both are suffused with great feeling. And despite having much to recommend them, both don’t really work.

Crimes of the Future works better as sort-of treatise than sort-of thriller. It’s a paradoxical thing to say about a filmmaker as intensely visual as Cronenberg, but his ideas are even more shocking than his images.

At 102 minutes, The Bob’s Burgers Movie feels more like five continuous episodes stitched together than something new that’s been abstracted from its origins. The one place it dares to outshine the show is in its emotional moments, where it allows the heart that has always been beating under its surface to grow three sizes bigger.

There are many twists and turns to the story, and the documentary is consistently surprising.

What a waste of a superb actress. Buckley almost makes Men worth sitting through. Almost.

The series’ many diehard fans will still, and should, flock to their beloved Downton and its denizens. But, as a standalone film, the fatigued period drama goes in one era and out the other with little to add.

The editing of the action sequences — and let’s face it, they’re the heart of the movie — is terrifically effective. Speed is one thing. Clarity is another. Top Gun: Maverick has both.

Hurwitz takes a terrific subject and treats it with undisguised, and justified, affection.

A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.

Strange’s superpowers are many. So are Cumberbatch’s, and one of them is making sneering seem practically jolly.

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

The Bad Guys takes the cute kid with a fishing pole in the DreamWorks logo and replaces him with a rather raffish-looking wolf who sneaks his way up onto that crescent moon. Right off the bat, we’re being told to expect irreverence and inventiveness. Those expectations will be met.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

Nicolas Cage has had one of the stranger careers in Hollywood history. Considering Hollywood history, that’s saying something. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, with its splendidly winking title, trades on that strangeness.

It’s a happy task to report that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a marked improvement on “Crimes.”

Ultimately, Father Stu is a movie about faith, but some kinds of faith have limits. So does casting. Wahlberg as a seminarian is one kind of stretch.

The movie is what it is: relentless, shameless, and purely as an exercise in technique almost dementedly skilled. A Bay explosion explodes, a Bay collision collides, and Ambulance has both in abundance. For some viewers, the result will be 2 hours and 16 minutes of movie heaven. It might make others want to call for an ambulance.

The filmmaking is stylish yet impersonal — or can true style be impersonal? Maybe that’s why proficiency is a better word. A general slickness obtains.

In his last movie, The King of Staten Island (2020), Apatow was stretching, both emotionally and tonally, and it largely worked. Here he isn’t, and it doesn’t.

This is movie as inundation. It’s daring, dashing, often delirious — except that the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels, as they like to bill themselves) keeps the delirium under just enough control.

Even at 104 minutes, practically a short by superhero-movie standards, Morbius feels draggy.

As in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), about the last day of school and first night of summer vacation in a Texas town in 1976, Apollo 10½ maintains a wondrous balance between Lone Star specific and anywhere-in-America general.

Sometimes it works — let’s say 12 percent of the time — and The Lost City can actually be deft and imaginative. Unfortunately, that leaves 88 percent which doesn’t.

Not to get all Aristotelian about it, but for a plot to be more than just a succession of incidents, it needs some kind of mindful opposition to the protagonist’s efforts. This “Infinite Storm” lacks.

The Outfit would be a splendid thing if limited to Rylance’s voiceover and long lingering shots of him working with fabrics.

Open-endedness in a narrative can be a good and challenging thing; or it can be a sign of having gotten in too deep and not being able to figure out how to get out. “Get Out” knew how to get out. “Master” doesn’t.

For a stylish thriller to work, it needs to be at least a little bit stylish and offer an occasional thrill. Deep Water does neither.

From the texture of red panda fur to the detailing of a Toronto streetcar, “Turning Red” is a feast for the eyes. But the plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards.

The movie has an unhurried rhythm, not slow, but unpressured. It’s a visual equivalent of the clacking of the railroad tracks.

With so much going on, that means a lot of balls need to be kept in the air. Some of them drop. Of course they do: The Adam Project is entertaining but no masterpiece. What’s unusual, and impressive, is that the dropped balls often keep bouncing. That’s a tribute to the movie’s wit, energy, and imaginativeness.

Overall “Lucy and Desi” is very much a valentine.

The situation provides a framework for the writer-director, Kogonada (“Columbus,” 2017), to dwell on the workings of memory and the various meanings of mortality and family. This is rich and challenging material. “After Yang,” while pleasant enough and certainly distinctive, isn’t altogether up to the challenge.

The Batman doesn’t plod, but it sure lacks a spring in its cinematic step.

With its overly solemn, by-the-numbers approach, “Cyrano’' doesn’t make a strong enough case for another go at the story.

Uncharted is big on isn’t-badness. Quite competently done (Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland, is the director), it’s mostly diverting, but not especially inspired.

Strawberry Mansion is a very strange movie. It’s at times beguiling, at other times so wackadoo inscrutable you want to groan. Either way, it’s always inventive. It’s very much its own thing, and in this movie day and age that is no small accomplishment.

Visually, it’s the experience of falling in love turned inside out. “The Worst Person in the World” is showing how it looks to feel like the only couple in the world.

Okonedo and Bening fare best among the surprisingly lackluster cast.

There are moments watching it when you can’t help but think of “Don’t Look Up” (comet, moon, whatever). Honestly, though, “Moonfall” is more fun, even if far less substantial and nowhere near as much talent went into making it.

With inconsistency, [Collins Jr.] articulates the murkier and subtler aspects of a thinly written character through his physicality, revealing flashes of brilliance. But this feels undermined by directorial choices that don’t embrace or take full advantage of the potential primal nature of the performance.

If it weren’t such a good and distinctive film, “Flee” would still have a strong claim on the attention of moviegoers, since it’s that powerful a rendering of the refugee experience. But it is that good and definitely that distinctive.

Tight close-ups, jittery hand-held camera — lots and lots of jittery hand-held camera. The idea, presumably, is to impart urgency, immediacy, dynamism. Instead it causes visual exhaustion.

Over the course of just under three hours, Hamaguchi reworks and expands a Haruki Murakami short story (it first ran in The New Yorker) into an intimate epic.

The heroine of a woman’s picture is almost always a victim, a practitioner of redemption through suffering. Janis is no victim, and Cruz’s performance makes that very plain. In revisiting the genre, Almodóvar, with Cruz’s help, is also subverting it.

Farhadi’s artistry is what makes the details so important, both his selection of them and their handling. In much of “A Hero,” one simply has a sense of watching lives being lived.

The dialogue is as pedestrian as the plotting is far-fetched.

The things in Licorice Pizza that are so good, like the performances from Haim and Hoffman and Cooper and the period fidelity, make you wish that the entire movie was just as good.

It’s no surprise that [Rex] gives Mikey everything he’s got. What is a surprise is how much he’s got to give. The performance is riveting until, like the movie, it just becomes too much.

It’s amiable and unpretentious, if also slack and diffuse.

Journal is Canedy’s story, but it’s Michael B. Jordan’s movie. Stalwart, quietly forceful, he seems positively . . . Denzelian.

Anyone much over the age of 15 who saw the earlier movies knew they were silly. That didn’t matter. What mattered is that they didn’t feel silly. “Resurrections” does.

There’s an intimacy to this Macbeth that’s transfixing. Largely filling the frame with the actors doesn’t do just them a great service. It also does Shakespeare’s language a great service, making it that much easier for the viewer to attend to it.

History is just one big playpen for The King’s Man, but some games are less fun than others. Maybe using a glimpse of Hitler for a cheap thrill wouldn’t seem quite so grotesque in a movie that were more entertaining, but The King’s Man isn’t so it does.

These characters are so vibrant and the episodes so richly imagined that it’s easy to overlook how shapeless The Hand of God is. The film has the vividness of memory, but also the structure of memory, which is to say no real structure at all. Visually, though, the movie is of a piece; it’s Sorrentino’s eye that holds it together.

[Gyllenhaal’s] direction is unemphatic without ever being tentative, and she’s made a film with a relaxed, easy rhythm — but not too easy.

Nightmare Alley doesn’t lack for action. It’s just that the action feels mechanical, a going through the motions. It’s a sincere going through the motions. It’s a committed going through the motions. But it’s still a going through the motions. Worse than a dream that’s a nightmare is a dream that’s a form of sleepwalking.

No Way Home is overlong and its various temporal loop-the-loops start to wear out their welcome...All that said, there’s an imaginativeness to No Way Home, along with a ton of energy, that makes the viewer cut it a lot of slack.

Like the title characters and the performances that go with them, Being the Ricardos has real zip. It’s a virtue of Sorkin’s tendency to glibness. His writing can be irritatingly slick, but never boring.

Flat-footed and far too broad, it’s a reminder why “Saturday Night Live” skits don’t run two hours and 18 minutes.

There have been countless iterations of this masterwork (it was revived again on Broadway as recently as last year), but Spielberg and Kushner enable us to see it with new eyes.

Anyone who’s been a parent will find C’mon C’mon memorable, even transporting. Anyone who’s ever thought about being a parent might find it even more so.

Karam uses lingering closeups, off-kilter camera angles, and half-heard conversations from other rooms to heighten the film’s aura of free-floating dread.

Surely it’s no coincidence that Encanto is set in the homeland of the literary master of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. That’s what Encanto is, magical realism brought to the screen by way of the Magic Kingdom.

House of Gucci is pretty much can’t-miss. Except that it does.

Julia, a brisk documentary survey of Julia Child’s life, is warmly admiring. This makes sense, as there’s lots to admire.

When coupled with the itchy urgency of Garfield’s outstanding performance as Jon, the brio with which Miranda infuses tick, tick … BOOM! helps to camouflage the fundamentally clichéd nature of the dilemma faced by the protagonist.

It has its moments, most of them owing to a quite-phenomenal Mckenna Grace,as a 12-year-old techno wiz, and Paul Rudd, as an easygoing science teacher, but they don’t make up for a general flat-footedness and tendency to wobble.

Campion’s best-known films (the remarkable The Piano, 1993; The Portrait of a Lady, 1996) are not just set in the past but summon it up with a rare capacity to make viewers feel a sort of displacement from the present. She does that here, too.

King Richard is a movie, not a miniseries; and part of what makes Baylin’s screenplay so effective is his knowing what to leave out as well as what to put in.

This is a double debut for Hall, as director and screenwriter both. She’s long been known as one of our most gifted actors. So the quality of the performances she’s gotten from her cast is little surprise.

The first hour or so is lively, a bit crude, and more fun than it has any right to be. Expect double crosses, switcheroos, serious spoiler-level plot twists. Most are ridiculous, but that’s OK. The excitement starts to feel mechanical, even stale, during the second hour.

Lyrical and episodic, Belfast is often affecting, if far too sentimental.

Fortunately, both Souvenir films have two signal virtues: Hogg’s style and their star.

About a third or so of Spencer doesn’t work: flashbacks to Diana’s childhood, hallucinations involving Anne Boleyn, a secret visit to her old house, a Boxing Day pheasant shoot that turns into a battle of wills between Diana and Charles (Jack Farthing). But Stewart’s performance makes those things immaterial and the rest of the movie seem all the finer.

It would be wrong to call El Planeta a comedy, or drama, or even that wretched if useful term dramedy. It’s a slice of life, the life belonging to Gijon.

The movie is mostly grim, largely nasty, and gloatingly violent. (It is never a good idea to start a film with a child subjected to violence.) Really, what Harder is is glorified, post-Tarantino violence punctuated by exposition.

The movie emphasizes personal relationships as other Marvel movies haven’t, and it has a vaguely religioso quality.

Finch pretty quickly settles into a buddy picture. It’s a dog picture, too, of course, Goodyear, a mutt, being so good at mugging for the camera. The whole thing is as sentimental as it is implausible, and it’s very implausible.

Notwithstanding its irresistible rhinestone array of mid-’60s popular culture, Last Night in Soho is an exercise in nostalgia only in passing. What it is is a horror movie, released just in time for Halloween.

From Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Strange, Cumberbatch has excelled at playing oddball heroes. Wain extends that line. As noted, though, things darken once oddball behavior becomes something more than that, and this darkening makes the second half of the movie feel slightly stilted and increasingly grim.

Everything is leaden, solemn, portentous. When the writing’s not wooden, it’s clumsily demotic.

It’s easily the most mannered movie Anderson has made, which is really saying something. It’s so mannered at times as to be almost unmoored — speaking of ships — but the many marvels it contains make that an acceptable price to pay.

Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.

The best thing about The Last Duel is its very handsome look, courtesy of Scott’s go-to cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski.

What makes a rock band worth attending to a half century after its breakup isn’t its personalities or backstory or context, interesting as those can be, and here they’re all highly interesting. It’s the music.

With this fifth and final go-round, it’s clear who the best Bond is. It’s Craig, Daniel Craig.

Like a surly teen pilot, you, too, might find yourself bored and muttering, “Honestly, maybe the fate of humanity and the world isn’t important to me, either.’’

As biography, Diana is shallow and reductive, checking the boxes of an extremely well-known story with numbing predictability. As musical theater, Diana is a forgettable farrago of painfully on-the-nose lyrics and clashing song styles that ventures perilously close to camp.

Andy Serkis directed. Serkis, who’s given so many memorable acting performances (Gollum! Caesar the chimpanzee!), doesn’t elicit any here. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the movie, which makes its lack of visual texture all the more dispiriting.

Titane is deeply unpleasant, and its narrative borders on the inexplicable — not just the sex and pregnancy — but Ducournau knows what’s she’s doing, even if the audience doesn’t know why she’s doing it.

As a Goodfellas-ish crime drama that vividly evokes time and place, Saints is rendered with enough bare-knuckled verve, unpredictability, and darkly glinting wit to make it work.

Director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wonder) and screenwriter Steven Levenson work the levers of emotional manipulation so vigorously, and with so little finesse, that it’s hard to get truly invested in either Evan’s pain or his self-created dilemma.

The Guilty gets less and less plausible, not least of all in how neatly it ties together various plot elements. For its first 40 minutes or so, the movie shows how much Gyllenhaal and Fuqua can do with little. Confinement becomes a dramatic launching pad. Then melodrama kicks in, and what had been a gripping offbeat thriller becomes a morality tale (including a truly shameless plot twist).

When the film keeps things simple, it’s at its best: uncluttered and assured.

Old Clint is still Clint, but he definitely looks a little stooped and more than a little frail. There’s an unexpected benefit to that frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.

It treats the Bakkers as something between grotesques and simpletons, which does rather limit the biopic angle. Satirizing televangelism is such low-hanging fruit it’s windfall. As for camp, it’s hard to avoid in a movie with Tammy Faye as its title character.