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.

Thanks to the director, what they do makes for painless “avoidance viewing” — something to kill 100 minutes or so while you’re avoiding something else, delivered in an impersonal but not unskillful manner.