The one true amazement in “Dark Fate”? That’s easy: the magical transference of biceps from Hamilton to Mackenzie Davis’s tank-topped, genetically enhanced soldier of the future. In a heavily digitized enterprise, they’re the most conspicuous human camera subject.

Black and Blue feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.

So, yes, it’s an epic of sorts. But many years have passed since a Scorsese movie found so much life in such small moments: at a bowling alley, around a dinner table, at a telephone in the room next to the dining room, where a killer stumbles through a sympathy call to the wife of Jimmy Hoffa, missing presumed dead.

The film favors more subtly melancholy strains and, at its best, a poetic touch.

I never saw the earlier version. This one remains a bit of a mess but a pretty interesting one, as well as one of the few films this year deserving (in both admirable and dissatisfying ways) of the adjective “instructive.”

At the end of Jojo Rabbit, you’re just left wondering what the point of it all was.

Like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” Bong’s Parasite expresses consequential ideas that matter to the filmmaker about the way we live today, and the prejudice and malice we create for ourselves and others. The best social satires, like this one, dwell in the underworld where the sinister, the sobering and the bitterly funny swirl in the same stream of consciousness.

Everyone on screen is good enough to do this sort of thing in their sleep, which isn’t to say Harrelson, Eisenberg, Stone, Breslin and Deutch laze through the assignment. The first “Zombieland” remains director Fleischer’s best movie by a mile; this one acknowledges, brazenly, the familiarity of it all.

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.