Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.

This is not the most promising dramatic material — legal and actuarial material, yes, dramatic, no. Yet Worth manages to combine process and emotion in a way that works.

Poitras includes screenshots, Zoom sessions, surveillance footage, even voice mails. The overall effect is both hypnotic and deeply unsettling, like watching a real-life William Gibson novel.

Acute and skillfully made, Candyman is also pointedly political.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

Visually as well as emotionally, there’s more energy here than in some action movies.

Really, The Lost Leonardo is a detective story. Like any good detective story, it’s also a morality tale. Or maybe immorality tale better describes these goings on.

Well, even on automatic pilot, as he is here, Jackson is always good company. Maggie Q’s blend of grace and gravity translates into a quiet authority. Keaton completes the trio. He’s quite droll here. No one’s better at playing a low-key wiseass. The pleasure of such company isn’t enough to compensate for watching a succession of scenes that are like recruitment ads for abattoir work.

Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original.

Ruby is an underdog worth rooting for, and Jones (the Netflix series Locke & Key) is terrific. She’s like a cross between the young Winona Ryder and the young Kate Winslet. The comparison flatters all three.

Sometimes Free Guy expands on its predecessors, just as often it doesn’t. In such an uninspired movie summer, derivativeness may not be as much of a problem, and the movie does have its moments.

The turbulence of the life and the wondrousness of the talent are an irresistible combination. Striking a balance between the two isn’t easy, but at its conclusion Respect finds a way to bring together woman and artist in a way that does justice to both.

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

Last year’s biggest animated feature was Pixar’s Soul. The best thing about it was a rare feeling for music, an ability to express jazz visually and rhythmically. At times, Vivo does the same even better for Latin music.

Maybe the most inexplicable thing among the movie’s many inexplicabilities is the near-complete waste it makes of an actress as gifted as Cotillard.

With Johnson’s arrival, “Jungle Cruise” enters “Raiders of the Lost Ark” territory. It’s not just the cascading action adventure in an exotic setting. It’s also James Howard Newton’s score sounding so much like John Williams that Williams should get royalties.

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

The quality of the acting makes it easy to overlook how increasingly leaden Stillwater becomes — but not easy enough.

Old is a fiendish idea only partially realized.

The movie’s heart is completely in the right place, which, frankly, can make it a bit of a chore to watch. Moral righteousness makes the world a better place, but filmic it’s not.

The movies have a long history of “kids putting on a show.” Summertime belongs to that tradition even as it expands its boundaries into the heartsore world offscreen.

Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.

If you miss Anthony Bourdain — and for many, the celebrity chef’s death in 2018 felt like the loss of a close and troubled friend — Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a salve.

It’s fiery. It’s big. It’s deafening. It’s dull.

Summer of 85, the latest from the prolific director of Swimming Pool (2002) and By the Grace of God (2018), looks like a sunny, sybaritic gay coming-of-age story along the lines of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), but it turns out to be something darker and more ambiguous, less about sexuality than self.

The best thing in the movie is Pratt. Firmly established in not one but two franchises — Guardians of the Galaxy and the Jurassic Park reboot — he’s come a long way from Parks and Recreation. He alternates here between charming wise guy and sensitive family man: Peter Quill domesticated.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

Summer of Soul captures a moment of the past that was launching itself into the future in a way that feels wholly relevant and inspirational to the present. The movie is a gift.