The movie itself is great fun before it curdles intentionally into nastiness and drift.

Tom Volf’s distinctive and affecting documentary makes plain how much the persona also owed to appearance and intelligence and life history.

For much of its first half, Chef Flynn feels like an after-school special with a difference — a big, big difference.

At its best moments, Creed II manages a feat nearly as striking as anything that Michael B. Jordan’s Rocky Balboa protégé pulls off in the boxing ring: It doesn’t play all that much like a sequel.

The imaginative, touching, and dizzyingly animated Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sequel with a rich, broad vision that addresses all of these issues faster than you can say Fix-It Felix.

Some of the film is slow. Some of it is silly.

Schnabel tries to re-create van Gogh’s inner workings during the intense last two years of his life — his point of view and his way of looking at the world that resulted in the masterpieces that have since become invaluable investment commodities.

By far the best part of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland is that we get to see her face and hear her words.

All movies are phony. What, you think beautiful people doing ugly things on a screen is real? Some movies are phonier than others. Widows is one of those. The always thin line between a twisty plot and a silly one gets crossed about an hour in.

The movie’s dramatically uneven, as anthology movies tend to be, but is it worth watching on the big screen? If the idea of Monument Valley peopled with classic Coen misfits hits your sweet spot, by all means go.

It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.

Burning, from South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, is a beautifully cryptic slow burner that lingers long in the senses. It’s the kind of film where you obsess over what it means, the better to avoid thinking about how it makes you feel.

So it’s a sort of grace note that Julien Faurat’s unusual and absorbing documentary, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, includes a snippet from the soundtrack of “Raging Bull,” probably the greatest and certainly the fiercest and most aestheticized of boxing movies.

The particulars are often fascinating, but all the solemnity does work against a more rousing finish. The Netflix-distributed feature might equal “Braveheart” (1995) in its gritty authenticity, but that standard-setter’s memorably transportive quality was ultimately a far battle cry from this.

The result is a reworking that feels both unnecessary and uninspired, even if it’s too genial and visually captivating to be flat-out off-putting.

A reporter is never the story — the story is the story. But if looking at the reporter helps you see the story, and the human beings the story is about, then the effort may be worth it. A Private War is worth it.

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Boy Erased is strongest when it simply focuses on Jared as he copes with the trauma of coming out in a repressed society. This includes, in the film’s most shocking scene, a sequence of collegiate gay rape that leaves the boy with PTSD, which goes unnoticed and untreated by parents, authorities, and, to some extent, the film itself.

The stone-faced silent comedian’s influence on every possible aspect of physical comedy is wide and deep, attested to in this movie by entertainers old (Bill Irwin, Paul Dooley, Richard Lewis), ancient (Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner), youngish (Bill Hader, Quentin Tarantino), and random (Cybill Shepherd, Werner Herzog).

All in all, the movie’s a muddled and overlong experience, one that every so often drifts into dull, unintentional camp.

What starts as a modest, agreeable riff on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale — and, more relevantly, Tchaikovsky’s ballet — eventually veers into stultifying action, rote twists, and other badly forced contemporary tweaks.

When art-minded film directors stoop to genre-minded filmmaking, it’s generally a good idea to duck. Despite sequences that may lodge in your memory forever, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is no exception to this rule.

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

It’s as if Hill took his familiar sly humor and sneaked it into a segment from Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.”

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

The documentary is good on the gay aspect of 54, and disco generally. Schrager became highly successful as an impresario of boutique hotels. Still, when he talks about Studio 54 there’s a touch of wonder in the tough-guy growl.

It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.