Cooper is very much a real director, with a genuine facility with filming musical numbers. We believe in the characters’ talents, and spend time soaking them up without a lot of nervous, overcompensating editing. Between songs, he and Gaga make even the bluntest cliches about love and career and misery minty-fresh, all over again.

The marriage on view here, a little ridiculous, a little galling but full of interesting sharp edges, presents Knightley and West with a full array of emotions to explore. The tone remains deceptively light, but it feels both true and in period.

Amid this conundrum of a movie, the actors provide what the facile screenplay cannot: a human pulse, shrewdly underscored by composer Alexandre Desplat’s time-traveling musical landscape.

This Little Women adaptation is faithful to a fault, which results in a very strange world where this group of five present-day women depends on men for their social lives and careers — basically anything that gets them out of their cozy house of feminine fantasy.

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

The actors aren’t the problem with Night School; the material is.

Life Itself is an emotional mugging, not a movie.

The documentary Love, Gilda works different ways for different viewers. For older fans, it’s a welcome excuse to reminisce. For newcomers it’s an entertaining primer on Radner’s life, times, demons and famous inventions.

Despite all the rich elements — the fantastic cast, the wonderfully detailed production and costume design, an oddball family story of black sheep finding each other — there's something missing from The House with a Clock in Its Walls. It's weightless, hop-skipping over necessary story-building, glossing over Lewis' warlock training as well as the personal histories of his guardians.

An emotional and intellectual roller coaster. Moore swings for the fences, as he usually does. But the film, done in Moore's traditionalist maximalist style, is overblown and overstuffed with editorial indulgences. It's clear that stylistically and structurally, less should be more for Moore.

Hunt gives it as all as the tortured Louis, but Patterson is the heart and soul of the film, giving a far more interesting performance as his long-suffering wife.

The consciously campy A Simple Favor is as bright and bracing as an ice cold gin martini with a lemon twist, and just as satisfying.

Director Yann Demange's film White Boy Rick balances these details, both outlandish and intimate, carefully.

The dialogue they deliver is crisp, witty and occasionally biting. Levin's script has the style and rhythms of the kind of romantic comedies of the '40s and '50s when actors like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn used verbal banter like boxing gloves.

While it's fun to watch Garner return to her action roots, the brute force haymaker that is Peppermint is a far cry from the sophisticated thrills of "Alias."

The surface may be ominous, richly textured and morbidly fascinating, but storywise, it remains shallow.

It's just a devastatingly sad and terrible story about two brothers who make bad choices, suffer the consequences and lose the last shreds of family they have left. No amount of 11th hour twists, reveals or bigger ideas can shake that inescapable feeling of dread and sorrow.

The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find.

Minding the Gap is an exceptionally reflective examination of the 29-year-old filmmaker’s life, and surroundings, and it works because the movie concerns so much more.

Unfortunately, Operation Finale feels a bit behind the ball when it comes to the dramatic true story.

An unusually good adaptation of an unusually good novel.

Hunnam’s reliably charismatic in suffering and in joy, but with most of the political and wartime context shaved off the story, once again, we’re left with the basics.

The perfect bait-and-switch of a film. Its light, sweetly frisky exterior and easygoing pace camouflages what a subtle and brilliant piece of bracing social commentary it is; a deft portrait of sisterhood existing under the thumb of capitalistic patriarchy.

The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke. The year may cough up a worse film, but probably not a more joyless, witless one, raunchy or otherwise.

Freed from the respectful restraints of non-fiction, Berg goes completely hog-wild, cinematically, and it doesn't exactly work. The film is a riot of nearly incomprehensible editing, a violent melee of intertwining scenes, shots, characters, formats and timelines, straining the limits of coherence and cogency.

It's sweet, really, to imagine the kind of devotion Alpha might inspire, a film that's very simple, kind of strange, but will melt any dog-lover's heart.

Birke's script is plainly straightforward, a simple supernatural chase story. It doesn't plumb the depths of what might make Slender Man scary, so Slender Man isn't scary at all.

Dog Days is in some ways a very strange movie, in the way it straddles the worlds of weirdo comedy and family-friendly fare. But ultimately, it's the pooches who steal the show.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.

Much of Puzzle feels schematic and, in the convenient solution to the family’s financial problems, a bit lazy. Yet Macdonald is so good, on her own or with a scene partner, director Marc Turtletaub’s movie refuses to fall apart.

McKinnon’s apparent improvisations and inventions create a second, better movie in the margins.

The core human/bear connection is treated with respect. Pooh’s wisdom and kindness cannot be denied. The same impulses worked for the two “Paddington” movies, God knows. Christopher Robin isn’t quite in their league, but it’s affecting nonetheless.

Eighth Grade works you over, audience wincing followed by audience gratification, narrative tension followed by release, crises leading to just-in-time catharsis.

That’s Blindspotting all over: an exuberant, brightly colored, zigzagging portrait of a city, an uneasy transformation and a friendship.

McKay has worked mostly in episodic television in recent years, and “On the Seventh Day” marks his confident, neatly ordered but freshly observed return to feature filmmaking. He’s working with nonactors here, in a fruitful halfway point between documentary and conventional fictional narrative.

The movie sidesteps the conventional breadth of a documentary subject’s resume. We learn nothing about Sakamoto’s early years, and little about his private life. Yet simply by lingering with his pensive, compelling subject at the keyboard, or engaging Sakamoto (discreetly) in his thoughts on his life and his music, Schible casts a spell and captures the spirit of a uniquely gifted composer.

It's Hill who proves once again he's much more than his comedic origins, crafting a compelling portrayal of the elusive Donnie that just about steals the whole movie.

The Equalizer 2 just doesn't deliver the thrills.

Perhaps it's no fun because it's just too real. There's never a moment of wondering what is going on.

Some of it’s pleasingly old school in its reliance on formidable stunt work. Enough of it, though, gets a digital effects assist for the amazements to scale the heights of plausibility and then leap, like a gazelle, to the adjacent mountain of sublime ridiculousness.

Much like its predecessor, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is escapist fluff of the highest order — joyful, filled with beloved pop songs and incredibly bizarre. Go ahead and treat yourself to this raucous seaside summer confection, you deserve it.

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is a visual splendor, from the fun way the creatures are portrayed to the pacing. Keeping Tartakovsky as director of all three films creates a fluid sense of comedy and look.

Skyscraper — a sort of reverse "Die Hard," where a family man breaks into an imposing structure to save his family — scoots by on the thinnest of premises, and an even thinner script.

It’s a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.

The latest “Purge” is an erratic, fairly absorbing and righteously angry prequel.

At its mean, snakelike best, it’s also a brutally assured commercial action picture, unburdened by the moral qualms or unnerving ambiguity of its predecessor.

It’s fun to hang out with these people for a while.

Wasikowska struggles to activate a vague notion of female disenfranchisement and victimhood, triumphant. She and Pattinson fill in as many blanks as they can, where they can.

Visually here’s the crucial thing with Ant-Man and the Wasp, and it sounds like a small thing, but really it’s a big thing: The sequel has upped the instances and exploits of the rapidly changing superheroes, and every time the movie cuts to a shot of the heroes’ miniaturized car, scooting around the streets of San Francisco, it’s good for a laugh.

The actors do most of their best work in between the lines. Krieps, especially, provides a subtle symphony of feeling, even as her role confines her to a prescribed range of narrative support. Director Peck’s work is handsome; what it lacks is a true sense of danger, a feeling of history roiling in the present tense.

I like the new “Jurassic World” movie better than the 2015 edition. Bayona’s direction is considerably more stylish and actively mobile than Colin Trevorrow’s was.

As Assayas himself has pointed out, the passing years have magically transformed a movie made in 1994 into a seeming product of post-1968 cultural turbulence and unresolved matters of the heart. It feels honest, in other words.

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

If you can forget about the movie’s general moral vacuousness, the extremely uneven digital photography and the slavish devotion to designer assault weapons...the screenplay by “Watchmen” scribe Alex Tse keeps the shifting alliances and power plays in clever circulation.

Bird’s rather strenuous sequel lands more in the camp of “Cars 2” and “Monsters University,” mistaking calamity and mayhem for real excitement and wit.

Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.

Tangling reality and fiction into one impossible knot is at the core of this story, and the form follows that function.

It’s essentially the Hotel Earle from “Barton Fink,” augmented by the latest in robotic surgical techniques for bullet extraction.

It’s smooth, and far from inept. But it isn’t much fun. That’s all you want from a certain kind of heist picture, isn’t it? Fun?

Above all, there’s Collette, who sometimes can overdeliver a dramatic moment or an aghast reaction, but in this storytelling context she’s fabulous. It’s a fierce performance with a human pulse, racing one minute, dead still the next.

Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality. I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them.

They never quite got the script right, but director Kormakur toggles well enough. And Woodley sees it through.

The ending is very different from the novella, and I was surprised at its shameless, ruthless emotional effectiveness.

An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.

This movie is either in your wheelhouse or it's not, but for those looking forward to Book Club, it delivers. For what it is — a breezy bit of Nancy Meyers-like fantasy, featuring four beloved actresses talking about sex, baby — it's exceedingly enjoyable.

When it works it’s enjoyable; when it doesn’t, it falls into a generic sort of bustle, missing the darker, more troubling layers underneath.

Alden Ehrenreich resembles a young, somewhat graver Robert Wagner, though he’s a better actor than the young Robert Wagner was. Ehrenreich’s contained, methodical brand of swagger matches up pretty well with the Han Solo we know from the ’77-’83 Harrison Ford edition.

Deadpool 2 is just like “Deadpool” only more so. It’s actually a fair bit better — funnier, more inventive than the 2016 smash...and more consistent in its chosen tone and style: ultraviolent screwball comedy.

The film itself isn’t dorky in the least. It’s an elegant and witty rumination on one woman’s quest for romantic fire.

The movie’s not as slapstick-dependent as advertised. It’s a less coarse and more heartfelt project than McCarthy’s disappointing headliner gigs, such as “Tammy” and “The Boss.” (The Paul Feig-directed comedies “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” are far better.) The new movie renders matters of directorial finesse and comic technique essentially irrelevant.

Strange is a word that pops up frequently in Claire’s Camera, a lovely doodle and the latest from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo. The strangeness extends to and suffuses most of the human interactions, which never go entirely smoothly.

Disobedience sometimes wants for rougher edges, and a fuller characterization for Weisz to play. But there’s real satisfaction in watching her, McAdams and Nivola inhabit a fraught and complicated relationship.

At its spiky, intermittent best, Tully is the best work Cody has done in the conventional feature format since “Juno.” And yet I’m all over the place on it.

Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year.

The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction.

It’s just not funny or fresh enough, and that has everything to do with the material and how it’s handled visually, and nothing to do with the people on the screen.

Zama is a patient, delicately strange film chronicling an increasingly impatient man and a destiny beyond his control.

In the best way, this is a tough movie to shake, and while it believes in the kindness of strangers, Lean on Pete never forgets every other human failing, impulse and circumstance.

The story lurches forward in spasms. We’re fully in the head space of a messed-up, hollowed-out psyche. Backed by Jonny Greenwood’s sinister wash of a musical score, You Were Never Really Here feels like a waking nightmare.

Rampage is a drag.

A little of Barinholtz goes a pretty good distance for me, but sharing scenes with Mann (who has the timing of a wizard) and blocklike Cena (funny just standing there, with his “cop haircut” and perpetually aghast reactions), he’s what the movie needs: a relaxed wildcard.

Chappaquiddick misses that target. But it’s a fairly intriguing mixture of strengths and weaknesses, a case of a sharp cast and a careful director toning up a script best described as “a good try.”

My favorite moment, an encounter between Regan and one of the monsters in a cornfield, plays with sound and image and tension, creatively. Other bits are more shameless.

Stylistically, Acrimony has moments of genius — slow camera movements that push in on Melinda, emphasizing Henson’s performance and the building pressure — but it’s also hilariously cheesy, and slightly chintzy, which adds to its schmaltzy charm.

Stone had the right instincts about the part — she inhabits Senna beautifully, and her performance anchors the light-as-air All I Wish. It's the perfect role for her to sink her teeth into, sexy and fun, but she brings a sense of real intelligence and soulfulness to the character. That's true star power.

Some of the dialogue is on the clunky side; much of it comes straight (or nearly) from Lord’s memoir; and Hammer has yet to find a fully easy-breathing way of behaving naturally on screen. Rush, by contrast, has so much fun with Giacometti’s tetchy, restless qualities, you don’t always buy the “tortured” part.Yet Rush is such a formidable technician, he creates a Giacometti of substance both real and theatrical.

What’s frustrating about this worthwhile movie is pretty simple: All Anderson needed to do, really, was to let more of the characters, dog and human, female and male, have a say in how the story gets told.

Spielberg’s control of pacing, rhythm, action dynamics and tonal juggling is so astute that the story of Wade never quite gets lost in all the fly-by jokes and references. Sheridan’s highly skillful, as is Cooke.

The overall picture doesn't have the kind of true wow factor that would make this one stand out from the rest of the pack.

Despite the ever-present layer of cheesiness, every now and again, some of those emotions are just big enough to land a somewhat effective blow right to the heart.

This is the second feature from Maoz; his first, the superb “Lebanon” (2009), is one of the essential war pictures of the young century. Foxtrot qualifies as a war film as well, and as in all such pictures made by, and for, grown-ups, the psychic battles are no less intense than the literal carnage.

It’s a grubby, fairly intriguing genre exercise given a weird, did-it-myself-in-a-hurry visual quality.

Pacific Rim: Uprising may be not be much, but in the spirit of the film itself, let’s be realistic. It’s better than any of the “Transformers” movies, and shorter.

Mordant in the extreme, and often hilarious, The Death of Stalin somehow manages to acknowledge the murderous depths of Josef Stalin’s regime while rising to the level of incisive, even invigorating political satire.

An honorable, evenhanded but curiously flat interpretation of events.

The Lara Croft reboot Tomb Raider isn’t half bad for an hour. Then there’s another hour. That hour is quite bad.

Everything about Gringo, from the storytelling to the comedy to the cinematography is incredibly lackluster. The film is dark and dim, like everything's covered in a layer of dust. Oyelowo is quite endearing and funny as Harold, but he's given very little to work with.