"Songbirds and Snakes” takes its job SUPERseriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement.

I’d place Thanksgiving halfway between “fair” and “good.” Inevitably, Roth can’t keep his baser storytelling and filmmaking instincts at bay forever.

Yes, May December exists in an uncomfortable realm. Haynes isn’t afraid of that, and American movies are better for it.

While there are plenty of influences afoot, ranging from Jenkins to Terrence Malick to Toni Morrison, “All Dirt Roads” is guided, fragment by fragment, by a new director’s way of seeing and listening to a woman’s life — in all its puzzle pieces.

Too often the movie’s franchise mechanics and green-screen overload have a way of dragging “The Marvels” into generic sequeldom. But the stars give us something to hang onto, even if Larson — so good in so many films — has yet to master the useful trick of looking neutral yet invested in her many, many reaction shots.

Like a dream, you’re left with thoughts and impressions to mull over for a long time. These sticky images and profound ideas lodge themselves in place, even if you’re not quite sure they all fit together.

Priscilla, the movie, exists in a state of hushed wonderment, magical one minute, bittersweet the next.

A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

What Happens Later is so deeply heartfelt, and so beautifully performed, that it stirs something within — a hope, not necessarily for an airport rendezvous, but for a moment of healing, the kind that everyone desires and everyone deserves.

This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.

Green has made two very different, extraordinarily efficient and compact movies in a row. That, too, may look easy but is anything but — unless you’re a filmmaker and writer of her particular gifts.

It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions.

Scorsese has rendered a tragic, forlorn piece of American history, indebted equally to classical Hollywood craftsmanship and the director’s own obsessions with honor, guilt, family, criminal codes and America’s centuries of greedy bloodshed.

Even if Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour represents a triumph of novel distribution more than a triumph of the concert-movie form, its impact will be fascinating to chart.

In the end, both Dahl’s stories and Anderson’s movies require a few common but difficult skill sets of the actors. Wit. Technical precision. Verbal facility. Adroit timing. And some fun, even if it’s tightly prescribed and carefully confined to a certain place in a fastidiously arranged, ever-shifting picture frame.

The Exorcist: Believer has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff. And the filmmaker in charge has to show us something new; there’s more to life, and moviegoing, than coasting on cherished memories of projectile vomiting and head-swiveling.

I’m not sure the story’s resolution entirely serves what comes before it; it’s not predictable, exactly, and it avoids turning into a different sort of genre just for thrills, yet Domont’s writing and direction are both skillful enough to make me want a few extra minutes in the final round.

Even with its story hiccups — and by the end, they’re practically contagious — The Creator creates images of the future you have not seen before, at least not quite this way. The movie is messy and knotty but co-writer and director Gareth Edwards has yet to make an uninteresting piece of science fiction.

If there’s anything rarer than a film about money that truly makes us think, it’s a film about politics that makes us feel like there’s something to it beyond money, and luck.

The action is messy, the geography indiscernible, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer.

Branagh’s portrayal of a somewhat older and wearier Poirot, muted but carefully calibrated, remains two steps ahead of Branagh’s direction.

The way My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 has been staged, filmed and edited, every new scene and each exchange has a way of being undermined by the filmmaking choices.

Though Sitting in Bars with Cake goes in a clearly charted direction, there’s enough going on between the plot points to make it feel like there’s something real at stake between these women.

The strongest minutes in The Good Mother belongs to Chicago-trained Karen Aldridge. She takes care of business so well in her monologue about her character’s grief and loss, her exit from the narrative becomes just one more oh-well factor in an indifferent Albany noir.

Fuqua goes for operatic style and pulp poetics, strung together with a strangely paced and structured plot that’s about as floppy as a spaghetti noodle (the script is once again by Richard Wenk). But the film is not unenjoyable on a purely impressionistic level, as Fuqua and Washington bring the audience along on their Euro trip and ask us simply to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride that is Robert McCall inflicting terror and mayhem on very bad people.

There’s a dreamy and poetic side to the visual texture in The Unknown Country, as photographed, often gorgeously, by Andrew Hajek. The Badlands, the snakelike highways, the rippling sunsets step right up and strike their poses, but unselfconsciously.

In the best possible way, Reeder has returned throughout her career to stories and characters rooted in trauma, while expanding the fantasy/reality boundaries of her narratives. This is her best realized work so far.

In the end, all these young women want is a foothold on life, a little less humiliation and some physical intimacy. If that makes Bottoms snarky on the outside but conventionally heartfelt on the inside, well, that’s fine, actually.