The dread in Mitchell’s film never cuts to the bone, because we never really care about his characters.

Much of the horror in Midsommar unfolds in bright sunlight; it’s the star who really takes us into the dark.

Spider-Man: Far from Home isn’t really a superhero movie. It’s a wholesome teen comedy disguised as a superhero movie.

What sinks the movie (rather than the character) are the tortured melodramatics of its backstage plot and dialogue that aims for clever — and sometimes is — but that generally approximates Shakespeare for, like, beginners.

Magid has made a film that’s cool, assured, and understated. Someone should sign her up to direct a techno-thriller. In which case, she should collaborate again with T. Griffin, whose stripped-down score never calls attention to itself even as it propels and enhances what we watch.

It’s content to keep things light and predictable, with the result that one of the richest song catalogs known to man is here to prop up an increasingly formulaic and far-fetched love story. Yesterday makes less sense the longer it lasts, albeit with some good bits along the way.

Argott and Joyce subordinate these more pressing political questions to a mirror-box exploration of the nature of truth and the unfathomable secrets of the soul. As such it is thoughtful, sometimes ingenious, but you can’t help thinking that they missed the real story.

Early in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

The movie is congenial, self-effacing, and reasonably dull, and since it promises an inside look at 30 years of being a Rolling Stone, that has to be considered a disappointment. On the other hand, Oliver Murray’s film about the life and times of Bill Wyman offers proof that even average blokes can be rock stars, and maybe more of them than we think.

A hugely entertaining and emotionally resonant pleasure for audiences of all ages.

The movie is daring and unconventional. It’s daring in feeling so static, with a distinctive, unhurried rhythm. It’s unconventional in letting evocation drive plot more than events do. It can feel a bit dreamlike that way. A melancholy lyricism defines the movie.

Demonstrating a mastery of euphemism and understatement, Ringo recalls how the Byrds “introduced us to a hallucinogenic situation, and we had a really good time.” Consistently amiable, if a bit wandery, Echo in the Canyon provides a good time, too.

Haggis and Krauss’s desire to use the ward as a vehicle to tell a much larger and more complex story makes sense. Yet it ultimately takes away from the truly remarkable story they have to tell, a story that may actually be more complex than matters of government policy and public opinion.

Although Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson aren’t at all bad together, neither do they strike sparks. That’s unfortunate, since the movie flirts, and that is the word, with the idea of a romance between them.

Don’t be surprised if you come out wishing that there actually were a late-night comedy show starring Emma Thompson instead of just a movie about one.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

The documentary has a pleasing offhandedness. The same cannot be said of its subject. Christo, who turns 84 on June 13, is precise and highly directed.

Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.

For a series supposedly dedicated to the pleasure of superhero movies, Dark Phoenix somehow ends up illustrating their limits.

The best part of Ron Howard’s long-winded and fitfully moving Pavarotti occurs at the beginning with footage from 1995 of the world-famous tenor — who died in 2007, at 71 — visiting an opera house built in the middle of the Amazon jungle. The legend has it that Enrico Caruso had performed there 100 years before.

This time, the over-the-top craziness that Spencer slyly serves up fills more than just a pie plate.

As long as Rocketman is charting the jet-propelled rise of Elton John in the early 1970s, it is an absolute gas. As soon as it plunges into the burnout years — addictions, betrayals, diva fits — it plays like every other rags-to-rock-to-riches saga you’ve ever seen. Especially “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

You’ll just have to look to your own effects-jazzed inner child to find a kid who’s relatable here.

Their (Danner/Lithgow) being together feels more like a device — there’d be no movie without their relationship — than it does a romance. There’s a lack of chemistry that makes for a listlessness of narrative.

It’s an understatement to say that Tcheng is drawn to this material. He revels in it. Yet he’s too clear-eyed to turn Halston’s story into a morality tale.

Several talking heads appear, including George Shultz, James Baker, and Lech Walesa. Tellingly, none of the interviewees is Russian. A running theme is that many Russians consider Gorbachev a traitor. “A tragic figure” Herzog calls him.

Booksmart registers as an instant classic that doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as refurbish it from within, and it matters very much that the writers, director, and stars are all women. Also that they’re having a hell of a good time.

Here’s the thing about Disney’s “live-action” remakes of its animated classics: The new versions may be bigger, louder, and more lavish, but they’ll never be original. The thrill of first impact is gone.