Even if this sex-forward comedy-drama is slightly miscast, directorially, and always slightly favoring the male gaze, the actors are excellent.

It’s a hearty stew of influences and rewards and, yes, some gristle.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

What good is a movie that can’t stop moving, or screaming, long enough to pace itself?

All the Old Knives settles for all the old tropes.

No one seems particularly good at their jobs, but that’s beside the point. They’re silly and self-absorbed — mildly obnoxious more than anything — but rarely is their desperation funny.

True to the egalitarian allure of the restaurant chain itself, Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat is both a touching farewell and a fond hello-again for those old enough to remember the salisbury steak, creamed spinach and peach pie behind those little windows of nickel-fed discovery.

In every design detail, the physical production and realization of You Won’t Be Alone really does take you somewhere. However unsettling, it’s a film that knows what it’s doing.

In “Morbius” the actor’s willful disinterest in figuring out the rhythm of a scene, what’s important in it and how to bounce off his scene partners — well, it’s acting in a vacuum. What he needs is a director who can steer him away from his favorite scene partner, i.e., Jared Leto, long enough to activate the material at hand, even if it’s just a third-tier Marvel franchise hopeful.

This one rolls right over any doubters, powered by Bullock and Tatum, in a film that lets them play to their strengths.

The movie has a good shot at a huge streaming audience. But does it have the creative instincts of a good movie? An OK one, yes. It’s too bad The Adam Project is only that, since the cast isn’t dogging the assignment for a second.

Turning Red is pure Pixar in its imaginative clash of genres and impulses. Yet it’s something new, too, its own cultural- and gender-specific creation. I’m eager to see what Shi does next, metaphorically and every other way.

There are moments in the second half of After Yang when some of the narrative beats get a little confusing or vague. Kogonada’s steady, often still, but never static compositions may not be enough for some viewers. Whatever. Clearly, actors respond to what he’s after.

The relationship at the film’s center remains a combustible mystery.

There’s real filmmaking here in The Batman. Matt Reeves, the director and co-writer, has a serious interest in the tantalizing Batman/Catwoman dynamic. His script, in collaboration with co-writer Peter Craig, parcels out the action sequences carefully, and when they arrive, they’re both visually lucid and excitingly reckless.

The movie expresses so much, so delicately, about precarious young hearts, the storm clouds of nationalist politics and, most of all, the possibility and necessity of artistic freedom.

I like this film for many reasons. Its sensibility is truly a gentle one. The screenplay may not cohere in ways designed to please the dream-logic-averse, but its wit is neatly matched by the wit of the visual landscapes.

Typically, movies about dogs are unrelenting tear-jerkers, but Tatum and Reid resist sentimentality, resulting in a film that’s refreshingly frank and surprising when the emotional moments do hit (and do they ever).

I don’t know if this was due to the budget or COVID, but Marry Me feels small in ways that a big commercial rom-com frequently doesn’t and maybe that’s why you can’t fully shake the feeling that this Universal Pictures project is really just a marketing scheme cooked up to highlight Lopez’s real-life music career and some NBCUniversal properties, including the frequent cutaways to a decidedly unfunny Jimmy Fallon, which may be, ironically, the movie at its most honest.

Director Jason Orley (”Big Time Adolescence”) handles it all well enough. It’s Day and Slate who make the very best of it.

I liked Death on the Nile a fair bit more than Branagh’s previous Christie film, partly because it’s a less predictable and schematic narrative to begin with, and partly because Branagh the actor has a way of outfoxing his own pedestrian direction.

First hour: pretty lousy and not much fun. Second hour: pretty lousy but more fun, and the movie has the benefit of getting stranger and stranger as it gyrates.

It’s tough-minded and tender-hearted in equal measure. It’s also slyly insightful on the theme of chance elements in solo travel, and unexpected, emotionally tricky connections along the way.

This is one of those poetical nonfiction eyefuls determined to make its primary subjects seem like they were alone with their thoughts, their camera equipment and their expectant yearning.

Even when it’s outlining its own ideas more through rhetoric than character, France keeps us on our toes regarding what’s around the corner. Seydoux’s the chief but hardly the only reason to find out.

It boasts the filmmaker’s usual high level of unassuming craft; a superb cast; and a couple of limitations, though not flaws, worth noting.

I wish this movie offered a little less running commentary and a little more running — anything, really, to get itself off the treadmill of self-critique and self-congratulation and actually going somewhere new.

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

Now and then The 355 sticks a landing.

Gyllenhaal’s work with her actors is quietly spectacular, and she takes the best of Ferrante’s fearlessness while letting Colman and Buckley unfold the character’s secrets through action and reaction.

Stripping “Macbeth” for parts, keeping the focus on the main narrative lines of political assassination and what Macbeth himself refers to as “supernatural soliciting,” Coen turns out to be ideally suited to a straight-ahead, let’s-get-on-with-it rendition.

The first hour is terrific; the second one, disappointingly, grows weaker and more conventional.

The film operates on a peculiar, somewhat languid rhythm, and there are times when the story’s needs take a back seat to the visual detail. But “Nightmare Alley” has nerve and relentless, fantastic style.

Holland provides the glue and the webbing for the latest Spidey outing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He’s physically nimble — he’s soon to play Fred Astaire in a biopic — quick-witted with his darting comic timing and an all-around easygoing presence. When the movie treats the mayhem and brutality for real, he’s there with the right degree of anguish.

Sorkin’s approach is to focus on the things that are happening rather than to inquire as to the contours of Lucy or Desi’s internal monologues, and so they remain unknowable, moving through a biopic that offers little more than an exercise in re-enactment.

For a century and more, film directors have explored crosscurrents between art and life, and how one informs the other. Hamaguchi makes that exploration a fully humanized one. His actors, one and all, are so good, you’re simply grateful for their screen company.

Whatever this new adaptation’s popular reception, it’s five times the movie the ‘61 movie was. Spielberg has never made a musical before, but this one looks and feels like the work of an Old Hollywood master of the form — someone who knows when, where and why to move a camera capturing bodies in rhythmic motion.

It’s a beautiful film to soak up as a visual and musical memory of a place that remains, and a time long gone.

It’s somewhat challenging and methodical in its pacing, but if you respond to it — as I did — this ghost from Iran’s 1970s New Wave is a reason to give thanks.

Single All the Way cannot sustain itself on Urie’s considerable charms alone, but he’s been so underused since the days of “Ugly Betty” that it’s thrilling to see him in a starring role. If only it was a better one.

Amid so many earnest, forgettable COVID-era and COVID-acknowledging movies around the world, here’s one that truly goes for it.

This is not a raucous family takedown; nor is Karam’s tale a matter of artificial family conflicts, tidily resolved. The Humans gets a lot done in a short amount of time, in a single, two-level setting, plus a few fraught intimations of what’s down the hall or around the corner.

This is a droll and extremely well-acted tale of a family in crisis, and in progress.

We often take a talent like Scott’s for granted. He’s truly gifted in the realm of period pictures, all kinds; next up is a Napoleon epic starring Joaquin Phoenix. In House of Gucci, he sees the material as a cautionary, globe-trotting tale of greed, no less, no more. The movie does the job without diving too far beneath any of its lovely surfaces.

Even the verifiably true material in King Richard has a way of coming off like a Hollywood movie in the most “Hollywood movie” sense of those words.

For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time, because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly.

A lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned Passing into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional.

Though not originally produced with streaming in mind, Finch absolutely feels like it was designed by algorithm.

Die-hard devotees of “The Crown” likely won’t like the taste of ashes swirling around in all that’s served here. But there’s more than one way to dramatize the public/private schisms of celebrity, and this way feels right for this director, this actress and this movie.

This movie is more risk-prone than the majority of Marvel titles. Yet it frustrates, even beyond a screenplay full of self-competing interests. And as far as MCU fatigue goes — well, at this point, it goes pretty far.

You could also say The Harder They Fall consists on a diet of flourishes.

In his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting.

It’s a lot for everyone to process and I was was drawn in by the conflicting feelings colliding at all once: Mutual grief and joy, but also confusion.

If you’re at all interested in what a reliably compelling, stubbornly solemn commercial filmmaker can do with money, imagination and no little nerve, Dune is epic enough — even if there’s a wee hole in the middle, where a more compelling protagonist belongs.

Green has made so many interesting movies, from “George Washington” to “Snow Angels” to the best bits in “Pineapple Express” and more recent genre exercises. Halloween Kills settles for the reductive, distressingly anonymous hackwork of its title.

In what is essentially a three-human story (they’re outnumbered by their animal co-stars), Rapace brings the heart and soul to every close-up.

As bittersweet farewells go, this one’s quite good.

It’s tolerable, I suppose, if you don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately it’s a musical so you have to listen to it.

As with the series, the best scenes here remain slightly off-plot yet wholly on-target and devoted to the characters as well as matters of corrupted, corrosive character.

Carr made her long-gestating Netflix documentary with journalist Jenny Eliscu and the pair never comes across as anything less than serious-minded. But their efforts feel limp and plodding by comparison, and sometimes confusing.

McCarthy’s open-faced performance is reason enough to give it your time, even if nearly everything surrounding her feels unworthy.

Mainly, the movie we have here reminds us that what works on a stage, within the non-realistic world and performance momentum of stage musicals, lessens a lot of story problems that movies tend to heighten.

Cry Macho may be fond and foolish in equal measure, but it has a few grace notes to remember, in addition to a fine gallery of images of Eastwood in silhouette, at dusk, against a big sky, alone with his thoughts.

As a sort-of-true-crime comedy, spinning a yarn of middle-class larceny and extreme, deeply unlawful couponing, it’s likely to offend no one but the most grimly law-abiding consumers among us. But like the people it’s about, you want more.

As the title character — a professional gambler with a lot behind him, and not much impulse to dredge it up — Oscar Isaac makes for a magnetic sphinx indeed. His is not the only good performance. But it’s the crucial one.

With all the songs, gowns and corny jokes, kids under 10 will likely love it, and frankly, that’s who this is for, not the millennials or Gen Z kids who grew up with Brandy or Hillary Duff.

Director/co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton’s film accomplishes something akin to what “Black Panther” accomplished in better times. It broadens the scope of superhero representation and storytelling. It offers an adversary, and a father figure, of teasing ambiguity and complicated rooting interests.

The documentary is strongest when it simply lets Steve — who resembles his father, minus the poof of hair — sift through his memories. There’s a lot of regret and melancholy there. Admiration too. And legitimate anger at how the Ross name itself is no longer his own. It’s a messy and complicated story.

Many will find DaCosta’s take on the story didactic, I suppose, or low on genre payoffs. I’m eager to see it a second time, flaws and all. It’s alive and awake to where we are now.

In The Night House, narratively faulty but full of insinuating shivers, Hall once again expands her range. She intensifies what could’ve been just another woman with a flashlight in a haunted house movie, peering into the beyond.

This one is strictly a welding job, grabbing parts of “Blade Runner,” a bolt and a nut or two from “Vertigo” (though not as much as “Phoenix” did) and notions of commercially desired fantasies of pasts real and imagined, straight from “Westworld.”

What’s missing are unexpected beats, some rougher edges, a few plot-undependent moments that bring us closer to the way these characters live, breathe and feel.

Respect runs into trouble when its own respect toward Aretha Franklin, the woman who gave us the voice of a century, settles for garden-variety adoration. But longtime stage director Liesl Tommy’s debut feature, working from a screenplay by dramatist and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson, offers plenty of compensations amid its biopic conventions.

Yes, the Frenchman Carax’s first film in English isn’t life-affirming so much as it is art-affirming. But it’s a weirdly compelling experience in blunt, arguably misogynist, harshly beautiful cinema.

The movie proceeds in quiet, reflective tones, subtly energized by a fully realized visual environment and a clever variety of editing rhythms. Nine Days transcends the potential limitation and occasional strain of its premise.

This one’s good! Also supergory, merrily heartless in its body count and its methods of slaughter. And funny.

Blunt’s derring-do has its stray moments, and her comic wiles are most welcome. But this is blockbustering from a talented director whose talent has been pounded flat by the dictates of a script in the quality range of Disney’s “Lone Ranger.”

Stillwater feels like a movie filmed in a slightly blurry state of mind, then reshaped in the editing stage into a whole new blur. You don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a plus. Yet director and co-writer Tom McCarthy’s drama is as uncertain as his good movies, “Spotlight” highest among them, are quietly confident in going about their business.

Lowery creates a spiritual cousin to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, torn between taverns and common folk and his highborn destiny. There’s a lot here, either on the surface or bubbling beneath it. In its Christianity vs. paganism square-off, The Green Knight lands on a note (and an event) very different from the poem’s.

There’s a good movie in the story of Joe Bell and Jadin Bell. The good one struggles to emerge from the good try we have here.

Is the central hook in “Old” enough? For many, I suspect, the answer will be not quite. The film, well-crafted when the characters quit reiterating the previous what’s-going-on-here? reiteration, could use a little more nerve and a little less plot machinery, designed to provide audiences with a happier ending than the graphic novel’s, and a lot of scientific folderol.

Director Carlos López Estrada’s Summertime creates a mosaic of pre-COVID Los Angeles (it was filmed in 2019) through words, action, dance and music. The usual movie musical building blocks, in other words. But not in the usual way.

On the whole, I’d go with the 2018 basketball comedy “Uncle Drew” over either “Jams.” One-joke movies, all three. But it helps when the gags don’t stop at the reference point and dribble in place while the clock runs out.

On the whole I’d rather watch a few more episodes of “Loki.” But Black Widow is pretty good Marvel, with an excellent cast, the usual generic third-act destruction and a bonus plot twist.

While I wish the story and the banter had some snap (Groot had better dialogue, speaking of Vin Diesel movies), and while I wish the electromagnet-derived mayhem in F9 led to a truly magnetic movie, sometimes good enough is enough.

There is, however, just enough atmospheric detail and, in the final lap, enough genuine feeling in the thorny friendships to make it worth seeing.

Some may enjoy the cacophonous, raunchy, lowest-common-denominator dreck that The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard has to offer. To those I say, godspeed. But it’s undeniable that the actors, the audiences and the filmmakers all deserve better.

Censor is a bold artistic statement, inspired by the history of its own genre, though it’s not an uncritical assertion, posing complicated questions about media effects without offering easy answers.

Like the modest but wholly winning precursor to “Hamilton” it is, In the Heights works as an essentially apolitical embrace of the American possibility and the American roadblocks to that possibility, in a canny variety of musical styles, from hip hop to salsa

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

Johnson-McGoldrick’s facility with both the tropes of the "Conjuring" films, and the Warren’s relationship, keeps the film swift and emotionally resonant, while Chaves pushes the cinematic aesthetic to the max.

Spirit Untamed is a sweet film with a moving message about embracing family, heritage and most importantly, yourself, just the way you are, even if that means bravery and recklessness often go hand in hand.

What’s so maddening about A Quiet Place Part II is the unused potential. Krasinski opens up the world and timeline of the film, but doesn’t utilize it in any meaningful way, introducing new ideas but then jettisoning the opportunity. Again and again he falls back on more of the same old tricks from “A Quiet Place,” which was a bore to begin with.

What we have here is a smoothly crafted error in judgment.

At times, it can feel a bit like “Clue” with so many plausible characters and motives swirling around and around, but Bana keeps it grounded, as a professional trying to do his job the best he can, while caught up in memory and trauma.

There’s enough good humor and just a dash of vinegar to temper the tone from becoming too treacly or sentimental, though the triumphant moments are incredibly effective and moving.

It’s a lovely sort of chemistry that develops in fits and starts over the course of the film, with both Helms and Harrison giving carefully modulated performances that are full of delightfully specific verbal tics and terrific comedic timing.

It’s hard to pick apart a film that is as well-intentioned as Here Today, which earnestly wants to celebrate life, and every beautiful, tragic, poignant and surprising moment. But for a film that seeks to be so humanist, there’s only one truly human character in it. As likable as he is, that oversight is impossible to ignore.