On its own terms, thanks to two fine, committed performances and a coastline made for this tall tale, The Lighthouse works its own stubborn form of black magic, pulling ideas and dynamics from silent and early sound cinema, from early Harold Pinter plays such as "The Dumb Waiter,” and from the recesses of the Eggers brothers’ fertile imagination.

What worked about the first “Maleficent” was Jolie herself, trying on something softer, even funny, her face, enhanced with prosthetics, half of the visual spectacle. But “Mistress of Evil” crowds Jolie. Maleficent fades to the background, eclipsed by full-camp Pfeiffer as the evil, Trumpian dictator queen.

Working with the legends of his long career to operationalize his past, Almodóvar crafts a singularly unique and medium-specific autobiography in which cinema is inextricably linked to his own story, to his heart, soul and body.

The appeal of this The Addams Family, which doesn’t break the mold, is simply to spend some more time in this gently spooky world, which is a gateway for budding creepsters and goths. It’s refreshing that it doesn’t try to overreach the limitations of its story, but it’s so slight, it merely whets the appetite for more Addams fare, rather than providing anything truly satisfying.

Gemini Man isn’t bad, but two Will Smiths — when one of them’s computer-animated — somehow feels like 66-75 percent of a real movie.

At its best, director Brewer’s film lounges alongside such movies about moviemaking as “Ed Wood” (written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote this picture, too) and the more recent but very thin “The Disaster Artist,” about the making of the less interestingly terrible cult item “The Room."

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

The stage version, the one recorded for posterity here, succeeds primarily as a performance showcase for Waller-Bridge. She’s a fabulous actor and a true stage animal, with a wonderfully expressive voice.

Soderbergh and Burns remain exceptionally well-matched collaborators. They’re after just enough human interest to make us care, and just enough socioeconomic outrage to make us seethe — some of us, anyway.

The jokes, mostly bitter, deadpan asides in a depiction of U.S. anti-terrorist activity as its own form of domestic terrorism, arrive just in time. The pacing’s both swift and, in proud, sour comic tradition, Swiftian.

It can be a rare occurrence to find a kid-friendly animated film these days that actually surprises and delights. Dreamworks' Abominable, written and co-directed by Jill Culton, does indeed surprise and delight, all while following a familiar hero's journey tale that borrows from favorite friendly creature films.

Zellweger’s film — and it is hers — creates an intimate illusion that feels authentic, witty and affecting.

Rambo lumbers to the finish line in the flaccid fifth installment, which is a Frankenstein’s monster of badly photocopied references to the previous movies, limply strung together with the laziest of screenplays.

A dreadlocks-wearing Moises Arias renders a career-best work, and his first in a Spanish-language feature, in the soiled shoes of Bigfoot, who appoints himself dictator when the chance arises to go rogue in the jungle. The Colombian American actor nails the demanding part procuring the larger-than-life persona of a deranged leader confident beyond his size: a toned Napoleon in briefs and black paint.

At heart, though, odd as it sounds, Gray has created a pocket-sized version of “Apocalypse Now.” Ad Astra bends the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam-era extravagance, about the rogue commander, Kurtz, and the errand boy, Willard, into its own thing. Like Coppola’s film, and the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart of Darkness," the new film examines the limits of colonialist hubris. It’s also, and primarily, a father/son parable of betrayal, confrontation and forgiveness.

It’s not a movie, really. It’s a commemorative “Downton Abbey” throw pillow.

The film strongly asserts Ronstadt’s rock ’n’ roll bona fides as a trailblazing and wildly successful solo female artist in the man’s world of late ’60s and early ’70s country rock.

The film’s half-real, half-fantasy treatment of a fact-based story is almost really good. But “good enough” is good enough, thanks mostly to Jennifer Lopez dining out on her best role in years. She’s terrific.

The Goldfinch is both too long and too short; dull to watch but scanty on the details about logistics, character, and just how anything of note actually occurs. The mystery of the film is something to be endured, rather than solved. But the real mystery is our leading man. We never know who Theo is as an adult, or if we’re on his side, or why we should care.

It’s a charming and quirky New York tale, if a bit disorganized, finding its voice when it quiets down to just listen to the three women at the center of the story.

There’s more deliciously creepy anticipation in “Chapter Two,” but once again, Muschietti buttresses up the spook factor with too many computer-generated monsters that inevitably become banal. Through it all, Hader cracks wise, Ransone worries, Chastain emotes, McAvoy broods and monsters jump, but we lose the most important thing of all: the Losers themselves.

This peek into a famous love story makes the audience a participant in the affair, inspiring questions of perspective and truth in love and art, where the only truth worth anything is one deeply felt.

It’s a pretty interesting nature documentary as far as it goes. But given its globe-trotting scope and the risky location work involved for the filmmakers, it’s a tiny bit strange Aquarela goes only so far.

The movie is very hard on its protagonist, and not all the obstacles, humiliations and setbacks escape the realm of cheap pathos. Bell and company keep it honest, though.

Gottsagen is not disabled. He has Down syndrome. He is also as able-bodied and innately appealing a screen performer as we’ve seen in 2019. Nilson and Schwartz made good on their promise to Gottsagen, and now he has returned the favor.

At the heart of the “Has Fallen” franchise is the affection between men, and Butler has always shared the best chemistry with his male co-stars. That spark in “Angel” comes from Butler’s scenes with Nick Nolte, as his father, Clay, a veteran living off the grid.

Its pace is oddly arrhythmic and the tone is every which way but assured.

It’s a morose sort of screwball comedy with heart, and right there that’s three elements going in related but separate directions.

In a very full and riveting 85 minutes, One Child Nation assembles a huge story together from many small, crucial pieces.

Director Stupnitsky lacks finesse and an eye for framing at this stage of his directorial career. He is, however, well-attuned to catching moments on the fly.

With “The Babadook” and now The Nightingale, Kent joins the ranks of a few dozen precious filmmakers able to transport us somewhere awful and beautiful, challenging us every step of the way.

It’s a colorful, cuckoo-crazy, sometimes funny, often bewildering experience, to which you slowly become numb with every incongruous shot of Leonard the pig’s round, green butt. Come to think of it, it’s the kind of entertainment that could only be enhanced with a little green.

The action in this live-action adaptation is sanded down and decidedly safe. Bobin loses the geographical thread in the film’s climax in and around Parapata, but it’s never about the visual thrills, it’s about the girl at the center of it all.

The movie’s good even when it goes in too many directions at once, because it gets the kids right.

This material, though, is damn thin. Like so many films derived from the pictures and words of a graphic novel, The Kitchen feels perfunctory and sterile and under-detailed.

Not everything here is perfect; the musical score, by Norwegian composer John Erik Kaada, favors ambient sonic wanderings that smooth over the conflicts on screen. But by the end, you feel as though you’ve truly gotten to know a full range of Kabul residents through their daily routines, joys, recreational diversions (kite-flying, slingshots, the international language of soccer) and bone-deep skepticism about the future.

Brian Banks proceeds non-chronologically, toggling between high school years and Banks’ post-prison life. This helps keep the audience on its toes. But it’s the actors who complicate things most fruitfully.

Vanessa Kirby of “The Crown” and “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is the primary reason “Hobbs & Shaw” rises above pure formula and borderline-contemptible familiarity.

Writer-director Tilman Singer casts a trancelike swirl incorporating elements of hypnosis, demonic transference, memories of sexual abuse and one of the furthest-out, least by-the-book police procedurals put on film.

A determinedly easygoing comedy about the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Tel Aviv on Fire gets by on the low-keyed assurance of its cast and its medium-grade amusements.

The results? More evocative than provocative. But evocative is not nothing.

It’s his own words, and confronting them now, having lost many of his friends to spats and fights, brings Crosby to his most vulnerable place.

Stearns grapples with notions of gender, violence and identity. But in this mannered, ironic take, his punches don't land hard enough to leave a mark.

A glass three-fifths full, writer-director Lynn Shelton’s affable comedy Sword of Trust gets by on the improvisational wiles of its cast.

With impeccable craft, Wang has created a funny, heartfelt and bittersweet film that will ring riotously true for anyone who knows the joys and agonies of a large, complicated family, regardless of culture, ethnicity or nationality.

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

Maiden is a grand adventure, the likes of which we don’t always see too often anymore.

The new music helps, a little. But the movie is a karaoke act, re-creating the original movie’s story beats beat-by-beat-by-beat.

There is absolutely no reason to catch a ride with the nasty, brutish and shrill "Stuber," a horror movie about our current American nightmare of late capitalist economics and unchecked law enforcement masquerading as an "action comedy."

Ridley is at her best in scenes with Watts, as both their characters are strong but must deal with romantic blindness. The film also takes some liberties with Gertrude’s story, adding a level that fits a modern telling.

It’s good. It’s fun. It goes out of its way to salute the visual effects armies that have made the MCU what it is today, for better or worse.

Everything in the film is high: high concept, high pressure, high stakes and it often feels bizarrely forced. Nothing makes any sense and is never explained.

Despite all the limitations on her life, Rose-Lynn is one of the most free-spirited creatures to ever be put on film.

Pugh excels throughout. The movie works best, I think, as a black-comic treatise on what can befall a garden-variety passive-aggressive mixed blessing of a boyfriend if he’s not careful.

Set in 1973, amid a forest of shag carpeting, Annabelle Comes Home is a nice little summer surprise, and quite unexpectedly the freshest of the three “Annabelle” movies spun off from the larger “Conjuring” galaxy of horror films.

This is a brutally violent reset on the '80s franchise that ultimately became a punchline, but while it goes big on gore and atmosphere, Child's Play doesn't muster up any actual scares.

The stars, it must be said, are slightly more interesting than the characters, which is another way of saying Rogowski and Huller amplify what’s there on the page.

How did an apparently sincere tribute turn into such a weirdly clueless vanity project?

While we all, as moviegoers, experience franchise and sequel fatigue on our own unpredictable timetables, this film brightens the summer without simply going through the motions.

Cool New York City detective John Shaft is back again in, you guessed it, Shaft, with a modern update that goes completely sideways in all the wrong ways. This Shaft is a bad mother all right, and it'd be better if he just shut his mouth.

The musical score by Emile Mosseri of the band The Dig, is very fine stuff, supple and surprising in its blend of classical, jazz and pop strains. It adds to the otherworldly quality established and sustained so well by Talbot, and by the actors.

Men in Black: International isn’t bad; it’s an improvement over “Men in Black II” (2002) and “Men in Black 3” (2012), sequels that even its makers may have forgotten.

Amiable if frustrating picture.

Though jarringly violent at times, the film becomes a wash of low-keyed comic attitudes thrown into the works of a crime story.

We want to watch pets behave exactly as we expect them to, and sometimes in a completely incongruous manner. Like the original, “Pets 2” delivers just that, nothing more.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

It moves with confidence; it’s vivid; it pulls off a riskier, full-on musical fantasy version of one pop superstar’s story.

In every good way, thanks primarily to Wong and Park and their chemistry, Always Be My Maybe is pure commercial product, yet it feels authentically alive where it counts.

Known for her lovable roles in "The Help" and "Hidden Figures," Spencer goes dark and sadistic with an enthusiastic glee, her signature smile (and those bangs!), and she creates one of the most memorable horror villains in recent history. She makes "Ma" worth it.

The script’s quippy streak could’ve used better jokes. But this is one franchise that doesn’t feel fished out or exhausted or exhausting.The monsters, Toho studio classics redesigned but faithfully so, are pretty swell and monumentally destructive.

It plays as a comedy in its structure, and a drama in the margins, on the sidelines. Minor, clever, wonderfully acted, Non-Fiction makes room for jokes about “Star Wars,” Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and, at one point, Binoche herself. It’s funny that way.

Mainly, Booksmart works because Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are so magically right together.

As stand-alones, some of these work better than others. Director Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book” came off as a real movie unto itself, as did Kenneth Branagh’s sincere, well-acted “Cinderella” (I was in the minority on that one). Aladdin, though, feels pointless. It’s cinematic karaoke. It’s an ice show without the ice.

The whole schtick of these movies is the treat-motivated, not-quite-getting-it doggie voice-over, performed by Josh Gad, and it lightens the film. But going dark and emotional makes the film work better than the prior two.

In The Sun is Also a Star, Russo-Young swirls together sun-dappled selfies, luscious skin, urban grittiness and hip-hop beats, the aesthetics perfectly matched to emotion. She creates a heady, knee-buckling mood that nearly conceals the weaknesses in story and performances.

The movie’s sleekly assaultive aesthetic owes everything to the gaming world, but the amalgamation of practical, physical effects and digital flourishes, most evident in a motorcycle chase on the Verrazzano Bridge, take the movie out of an earthly realm entirely.

Schwartzman’s film is a strong, cogent examination of outrage, coolly and carefully documented, one text, tweet and reckoning at a time.

Bi, not yet 30, has made a movie that feels like a visual sigh and, yes, a dream. It’s a reminder of just how expansive the cinema’s boundaries remain.

Well, it’s a dud. Nothing quite clicks.

While the world and the characters of "Detective Pikachu" are incredibly fun, the story within that world suffers. Most of the exposition is provided in flashback-style holographic recreations, and the action sequences are so inane, chaotic and incomprehensible that you may find your mind wandering to grocery lists rather than the film's stakes.

Too often Tolkien lumbers up to its big moments, such as the preposterous climax involving the title character scrambling around the western front, calling out his schoolmate’s name. Fact or fiction isn’t the issue. Either way it plays like hokum.

The musical score, and some of director Lane’s editing strategies, have a way of playing into the more comic aspects. Yet it’s not a mean-spirited affair. In fact, it’s a sly primer in homegrown grassroots activism.

It's "Veep," but less absurdly acid-tongued, and a lot more swoony. Still, the incisive cultural and political commentary cuts deep, and Theron and Rogen turn out to be a winning pair.

For a film about outlandishly kooky dolls, the film sure is flat, listless and narratively bland.

It’s the time travel conceit that keeps “Endgame” hopping, and the trial-and-error sequences recall some of the best parts of the first “Iron Man” 11 years back.

In the spirit of previous Disneynature film voiceover artists John C. Reilly and Tina Fey, Helms contributes a winning inner-monologue voice for Steve, while also delivering the alternately threatening and comforting narration.

The Curse of La Llorona is middling B-movie schlock that goes for the low-hanging fruit: sequences you know will end with some kind of jump, bump or scream, and jokes that cut the tension and indicate everyone here knows what's up.

Hart and Horowitz's script connects the dots on the meaning and messages of the film, which is thrilling in its radicalism. But the execution is heavy-handed, sapping the joy of discovery from the film packed with so much originality, brilliance and beauty to be discovered.

It's one of the more authentically moving entries in the genre, powered by a gripping lead performance from "This Is Us" star Chrissy Metz.

It’s harder than it should be to describe Kent Jones’ Diane in a way that makes it sound distinctive or special, which it is.

With this noisy, fast, chaotic "Hellboy," Marshall is at his most cheeky and most unhinged. It's certainly… a lot.

The message itself is poignant, and never gets lost in the antics or humor.

Transfixing? A bore? I cannot answer for you. If think Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is as far out as you go with this sort of setting, this is not your thing. Undeniably, though, High Life is an organic achievement.

Bannon may think he's constantly manipulating the media, but in this film, Klayman uses the tools of documentary filmmaking to reveal his inherent emptiness.

Pet Sematary finesses some of the bumpy narrative moments from the original, but where it forges its own path is in rewriting Ellie's story. This is initially intriguing, but it ultimately reveals itself to be the less original choice, relying on horror archetypes and tropes we've seen before.

It’s a surprise and a small wonder, then, when The Best of Enemies starts getting good and pretty much stays that way to the end. This may be an apples/oranges comparison, but: For a true-ish story of racial animus, bone-deep prejudice and the American South in the civil rights era, it’s a better, more nuanced and more interesting feel-good movie than a certain, recent, less interesting Best Picture Academy Award winner we could mention.

This is one of Zhangke’s peak achievements: pure cinema, and a story of the underworld unlike anything you’ve seen before.

The best of the movie lies in its hangout factor, when Levi and Grazer are discovering what Billy can do with electricity, or when the young actors playing Billy’s step-siblings — Grace Fulton, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand and Faithe Herman —get a chance to establish a rapport.