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.

The Menu might make you crave a hamburger or think twice before boarding a ferry to a private island with no cell service. But once the loose ends are tied up and the credits roll, it leaves you less than satisfied.

She Said is successful where it matters most: It shows just how easy it is for predatory men in power to be kept there by an equally corrupt system of people who either look the other way or protect them.

GdTP starts out pretty slow and doesn’t speed up for far too long — it’s the rare movie that might accurately be described as more imaginative than good — but the occasional bit of inspiration like the tree-branch proboscis encourages the viewer to hang on. It’s a nose job like no other.

Black Enough is smart, lively, and sprawling.

Coogler and his returning company of actors and behind-the-camera craftspeople work overtime to achieve a balance of quiet empathy with the big thrills audiences have come to see.

Any metaphoric meaning is left up to the viewer, who will be too busy basking in the fine performances to give it much thought.

Enola doesn’t just break the fourth wall. She tickles it, winks at it, and tugs at its sleeve. With another actress, this would be annoying. With Brown, it’s charming.

The self-congratulatory, back-patting nature of this film is what makes it so insulting.

Jenkins has given the documentary a structure that’s largely chronological but primarily thematic. The shifting around makes for a nice flow. The film moves along crisply without ever feeling hectic or rushed.

Fans of “Key & Peele” will love their latest duet. Much of their dialogue sounds improvised, and the pair work off each other like the pros they are.

Lemmons’s film is an exercise in memory disguised as Southern gothic.

Banshees is like a short story trying to be a novel. The extra pages get filled with the postcard views. There are bits of wit — again, this is Martin McDonagh we’re talking about — but overall “Banshees” is lugubrious and slow.

The Good Nurse is at its best as a medical police procedural. It helps that Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha, playing the cops, give solid, understated performances.

This one has a tang and texture and rare sense of everyday epiphany. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you find out you’ve figured wrong.

Till avoids all flash. That makes it a bit didactic at times, but didacticism is a form of commitment: not so much political, though there’s certainly that, but also to emotional truth and simple human decency.

All kinds of stuff happens. Much of it is loud, confusing, and badly paced. From a superhero-movie perspective, it’s the last one of those three that’s most problematic. Leaden and flaccid are a bad combination.

Ticket is automatic-pilot smooth and formulaic familiar. It’s a romantic comedy, yes, and a star vehicle. But the category it most belongs to is airline movie — as in, a pleasure to watch in flight but less so on the ground.

Decision has real velocity without in any way feeling hectic or rushed.

School is endlessly talky, with dialogue that has the consistency of melted licorice (red or black, your choice). The one thing to be said for Theodore Shapiro’s muscularly egregious score is that the music makes it marginally easier to miss what the characters are saying.