Despite the return of director Steven Soderbergh (who also serves, as usual, as editor and cinematographer), writer Reid Carolin, and star Channing Tatum, this installment pales in comparison to its superior predecessors. Dare I say, it lacks — magic?

Knock at the Cabin unfolds like a good beach novel, one you can’t put down.

Not even John Toll, who won two Oscars for cinematography, can make this movie look good. Stay home and watch the real Super Bowl instead.

Director Kenya Barris, who also co-wrote the script with Jonah Hill, intended to make an edgy, race-based cringe comedy; the result is afraid of its own shadow. This Netflix release commits an even bigger sin by wasting the considerable comedic talents of former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Director Jason Moore and writer Mark Hammer have fashioned an action movie/romantic comedy hybrid that’s too violent for comedy fans and not thrilling enough for thrill seekers. It’s not romantic at all, despite the best efforts of Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel.

The Son is so concerned with trying to get an emotional rise out of the audience, to choke us with its pathos, that it fails to create believable three-dimensional characters.

Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is commendable for not only being entertaining but for also shining a light on a crucial process we don’t hear much about outside of certain professions.

Living acknowledges the bitter irony of impending death bringing a man back to life. Nighy makes it look effortless; he gives an Oscar-worthy performance that made me cry almost as much as Takashi Shimura did in Kurosawa’s classic.

Despite the film’s tendency to drag, Vicky Krieps remains compulsively watchable, as always. She almost saves the movie.

Women Talking is full of phenomenal acting by a group of actors at the top of their game. There are a lot of characters here, but even the most minor are given moments to shine.

The filmmakers clearly intended this to be a goofy rollercoaster ride, so M3GAN is a success.

As with so many foreign films that get the Americanized treatment, A Man Called Otto is completely defanged, eliminating the dark humor that made the original successful enough to command a remake.

The majesty of this film comes from how the director and his team use an often surreal mix of music, editing, sound, and image to allow the viewer to experience the world as we assume EO does.

Babylon is a labor of love that never feels laborious. But as the allusions and inside jokes pile up, they become distracting. Or they do if you care about old movies.

It’s refreshing that Lemmons focuses on the highs rather than the lows, even if it feels like buffing off the edges of her complex protagonist. But that won’t matter to Houston fans: They’ll get so emotional, baby.

The script by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow is very silly, to be sure, but everything works. The animation is well done, the music has a lovely Spanish flair, and the cast does an excellent job bringing the characters to life.

The Whale is being hailed as the comeback vehicle for Fraser. The actor has been through a lot, and he deserves roles that showcase his numerous talents. But he fails to bring humanity to this character who lives in a state of constant apology. The role feels like a cynical grab for an Oscar, which he’ll probably win as the Academy loves masochistic malarkey.

Cameron’s staging of action sequences remains unparalleled, and that buys some goodwill, but by the end of the movie, I was left with Peggy’s Lee’s immortal question: “Is that all there is?”

Director Sam Mendes tries his hand at writing an original screenplay solo, and the results are far from magical. Instead, Empire of Light strands its poorly defined characters in a nostalgia piece filtered through the director’s love of the movies. (For a better film on the same theme, watch “The Fabelmans.”)

Just in time for the holidays, director Michael Showalter has gifted viewers with a good old-fashioned tearjerker, one that earns its tears without resorting to a brute force assault on your heartstrings. Spoiler Alert operates with a lot of humor and more than a little grace.

Had “Emancipation” shaken off its Oscar-baiting “slave movie” shackles and instead gone full-tilt into a vengeance-laden “freedom movie,” it might have worked.

Unfortunately, a screenwriter’s fealty to the source material is often the kiss of death. Some things are just not translatable from a reader’s mind to a more objective and visual medium like film.

Though it hits all the expected beats, it’s the attention to the little details that makes Devotion take flight.

Clearly, Strange World is a movie about saving the environment. It is also about the bond between father and son, and how parents must let their kids forge their own paths. Hall and Nguyen deliver these messages with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, but the excellent voice-over work plus the score by Henry Jackman make the preachiness palatable and the film fun.

How much you enjoy yourself depends on whether you’re a fan of the original, or of Amy Adams.

Bratton’s unique perspective is so much more interesting when you hear him talk about The Inspection that you often wonder where it is when you’re watching it.

Craig may be the main character, but “Glass Onion” belongs to Monáe. Johnson has scripted one hell of a role for her, and she plays it with such a wide range of emotions and tones while modeling a stunning array of power suits that she drops the audience’s jaws. Monae’s performance turns on a dime with whiplash precision, so when the film folds in on itself, we grab hold of her hand for dear life. She pulls us along with such glee that it makes one giddy.

This is Spielberg’s most personal film, and it’s intriguing to watch him pay homage to the directors who made up his group of friends in the early 1970s.