It’s colorful and madcap and zany, and while that might not make it suitable for all audiences, it will delight the very one it is made for. That’s fine for now, but if this franchise wants to survive, the next entry will have to take on a much tougher mission: stay silly, but get a whole lot smarter.

Clara Sola is fleshed with the feeling that love and repression are braided together. It’s bound by the sense that we smother the things most precious to us in order to keep them from getting away.

Dosunmu’s airless directing and Waithe’s thin script only amount to loud allegory that never goes anywhere and drowns out any compelling ideas that might be worth singing.

Enlivened by elegant handheld cinematography and a galvanizing breakout performance from Phillip Lewitski, Wildhood is a beautiful testament to the power of authentic storytelling.

Despite a fun premise and a well-structured first act, “The Man from Toronto” tries to do too many things at once and devolves into a strange bouillabaisse of studio comedy tropes.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe doesn’t fully capitalize on a wealth of possible plots, send-ups, and diversions, but it makes a case for the dynamically dumb duo to return for still more inane wackiness (hehehehe, “wack”).

As seen through the eyes of her former lovers (merely a few of many), Highsmith’s life is brought sharply into focus, revealing as much about her humanity as her work.

Jones and Allain’s vision of how we might reinterpret this sort of story for the big screen — including assembling a cast of people who are charming to watch, full stop — is both vital and delightful, and if it has some kinks to it, perhaps that’s just the price of trying something new.

Alone Together has the momentum of a reclamation of sorts, but the plot tries to do too much, say too much, when it really should just be about love. Who cares if it’s formulaic or not? In the middle of this pandemic, maybe being something we can rely on is a good thing.

It’s a shame that Brian and Charles plays things safe, as Archer’s naturally irreverent debut only becomes easier to invest in during its more outlandish moments.

The film seems destined to live on as in-flight entertainment on nursing home-sponsored trips to Vegas, but a good cast and some well-placed sentimentality elevate it into something almost watchable.

Quivoron’s feature debut is so singular, so thrilling, that it will hopefully escape without being sucked into the remake machine.

Even when the jokes miss the mark or the central mystery seems too easily solved, Vengeance is sustained by the question of what its characters mean to each other; a question asked sweetly but shrouded by an ever-growing darkness that allows the film to wander into dangerous territory by the end.

While many of the film’s beats are familiar, director Gary Alazraki’s version of this classic family comedy often misses one essential ingredient: real humor.

Don’t Make Me Go is a sweet, charming, and eventually daring dramedy with tons of heart.

Lightyear is the first movie that Pixar has released in theaters since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal that would probably feel more exciting if Lightyear wasn’t also the first Pixar movie since the start of the pandemic that feels like it only belongs on Disney Plus.

While Poser works up to a somewhat predictable ending, the details and ideas that get us there are fascinating and unique.

For a movie so preoccupied with the choices that people can make, Spiderhead invariably makes the least interesting ones available to it, which is a serious problem for a movie streaming on a platform whose subscribers are never far removed from the choice to be watching something else instead.

Micheli’s film is less than artful, scattered with limited talking heads (mostly Lopez’s business partners and her mother, briefly), random flashbacks, occasional archival footage, and a series of short sequences that could frame their own films (particularly quick-cut segments about Lopez’s early years, her treatment by the press, the obsession with her body, the constant tabloid attention), but none of that is the draw: it’s Lopez.

With little tension or humor to speak of, there’s nothing keeping Jurassic World: Dominion afloat, beyond the naïve hope that recognizing the familiar will be enough for some viewers. Maybe it will be, but it’s proof positive that we’re in one of the dullest, most artless periods of Hollywood blockbusters yet — “Top Gun: Maverick” notwithstanding — and we could be stuck here for some time.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

Hustle may not be the greatest redemption story ever told about second chances, third careers, and the hard work of triumphing over your worst tendencies, but the film holds fast enough to the courage of its convictions to feel like it’s got skin in the game.

Grounding the lightness and frivolity with real heart, Booster’s laugh out loud script and Ahn’s artistic corralling of the energetic ensemble is a match made in heaven — or gay paradise.

Hollywood Stargirl, for all its charm, doesn’t quite hang together as a complete story. It feels like an episode, a vignette, a tiny slice of Stargirl’s remarkable life suddenly turned into a filmmaking parable she’d likely balk at.

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

Despite the apparent care and respect that went into Keough and Gammell’s film, “War Pony” also makes clear how very far there is still left to go when telling “authentic” stories.

This is Aileen’s story and when “God’s Creatures” makes the odd choice to turn away from her just as things are reaching a fever pitch, it dilutes the power of both her performance and the film itself. She’s gone mad, but God’s Creatures isn’t willing to follow her there, perhaps the craziest choice of all.

“Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” is an amiable and easy watch that doesn’t explore too many of the singer’s more unseemly aspects and, by design, cannot.

Death rarely fades from view in Borgli’s increasingly bleak comedy, which does somewhat of a disservice to the narrative trajectory — not because it flirts with oblivion but because its path is so stratospheric and dogged in the direction it’s going that it can be pretty hard to hold on for your life and not get left behind.

With trademark stoicism and inscrutable poise, Krieps gives a performance that never tries to extract easy pity from the viewer or reach for low-hanging fruit.

Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate.

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, Showing Up is transformed by its finishing touches.

Beautiful as Dhont’s eye for detail can be, and vital as his willingness to explore the unbearably tender pockets of adolescence often proves here, Close still finds its sensitive — if sometimes borderline sadistic — young filmmaker defaulting to universal pain whenever he fears that more personal feelings may be too poignantly ethereal to see on camera.

It’s one of the master’s most transparent and — when it comes to confrontations about what parents, and specifically women, can or should do for themselves and for the babies they are forever bound to — brave films of his career.

An energetic yet hopelessly convoluted espionage thriller that doesn’t tell a story so much as it chronically bumps into one. ... Lee’s debut is little more than a chattering Pez dispenser full of plot twists.

An autobiographical portrait that somehow leaves you knowing less about the subject at hand, and a study of actors, warts and all, that offers little insight into the artistic process.

As the two men circle each other in the film’s second half, it shifts from contemplative drama to full-blown suspenseful thriller. It is in the latter mode that Mantone shines best as a filmmaker and Pierfrancesco Favino does as an actor.

If the first half of the film shies away from the cheap thrills of its serial killer story, the pointed banality of its final chapters proves as horrifying this genre ever gets.

Denis, Andrew Litvack, and Léa Mysius’ dialogue is only strengthened by its occasional awkwardness, as it subsumes Trish and Daniel into the same disordered humidity that swamps the film around them. The frequent sex scenes become a dialogue of their own — the lovers feeling each other out in search of something they can actually trust.

In Bresson’s version, it’s the humans around the donkey who are the true center of the story. Not so in EO. This is Donkeyvision, and we’re better off for it.

It’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

As much as Jenkin’s film is hypnotic and strikingly realized, in the final half hour it runs out of tricks up its sleeve.

Boy From Heaven wants to offer up a character study of a young Muslim man who ends up in hell and keeps going. Sadly, a deep and meaningful portrait of Adam is forgotten as the film — like the state officials it depicts — prioritizes functionality above all else.

The Eight Mountains lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial.

Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her

More sensory experience than straightforward recounting, the documentary by Brett Morgen (“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor.

Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.

It’s a charmer — let’s just put a bit more spice on the next one.

Pulling harder and harder at the tension between complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire, R.M.N. masterfully spins an all too familiar migration narrative into an atavistic passion play about the antagonistic effects of globalization on the European Union.

Although Corsage makes a worthy attempt to recast Elisabeth as independent of her constraints, its final note leaves it feeling a little too much like its own sort of requiem.

Brother and Sister seems more like a retread (and a retreat) than anything that’s come prior, marking a new step forward for the lauded director by taking a disappointing step back.

Hansen-Løve has traced her own paternal grief into an illuminatingly honest sketch about how loss is necessary for rebirth, guilt inextricable from self-fulfillment, and the present worth savoring for its role in bringing the past and the future together — rather than as a buffer for keeping them apart.

The only thing Östlund’s po-faced characters can’t afford is to recognize the absurdity inherent to their lives, and so the movie keeps our response muted to a low chuckle, as if anything louder might reach the people on screen and cause the whole charade to fall apart.

It reaffirms the ways the bootstrapping narrative can never be wholly possible in a broken capitalist environment. It connects the RobinHood boom with the rise of cryptocurrency. And it makes one say: it’s time to burn it all down.

In fact, the two stars are so sweet and searching together — their characters’ respective power and mutual solitude pulling them together with practical magic — that some of the film’s more spectacular detours seem flimsy by contrast.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make another movie about 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that’s as febrile and virtuosic as Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” but dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov ... has risen to the challenge with his usual aplomb, orchestrating a historical melodrama that’s almost as feverish as last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.”

This Italian post-apocalyptic film from director Alessandro Celli angles for child soldier depravity without any of the heart.

It’s a story about the invisible fault lines of inequality, the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream, and the very practical ways in which remembering the past can be the only legitimate defense against the social forces that keep trying to repackage it as a vision of the future.

Slack and shambling ... Often hectic and sometimes heartfelt but very seldom funny, “Final Cut” is disappointing because it lacks the boldness of the original, yet even more so because it abjectly foregoes the kind of “fuck it, we’ll do it live!” creative mania that it’s meant to embody. Some of the movie’s jokes are just too well-constructed to fail, but too few of them land hard enough for the movie itself to succeed.

It makes for a creative, clever watch, though one that seems exclusively imagined to cater to the series’ older fans and otherwise mature audiences.

Director Keith Thomas and writer Scott Teems found a way to turn the fun source material into a lethargic parenting drama that’s completely devoid of warmth.

When Operation Mincemeat slows down enough to see into those shadows — when the film slows down enough to leverage the fictions its characters invent for the Nazis against the ones they invent for themselves — it finds a hidden war that’s worth fighting to the end.

Little in Senior Year will surprise, and the film chugs through its predictable beats with good humor, but there’s not much else to recommend it. Wilson makes for a fun heroine who’s worth rooting for, bawdy, and down for whatever, but the film isn’t willing to let those tendencies run wild.

The Innocents is a film about childhood as much as it is about murder, sharing as much DNA with “Boyhood” as it does “The Bad Seed.” Specifically, it’s a film about contemporary childhood and, in a dangerous world that forces kids to grow up faster and faster, whether innocence is even still possible

Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe. But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that.

For all of its singularly bizarre thrills, all of which reaffirm Garland as a vital interpreter for a world that’s coming apart at the seems, Men is the first of his films that makes life feel simpler than it really is.

Its genuine, gentle charm holds far more appeal than the icky “Kissing Booth” series.

In a Netflix movie that’s so breezy and enjoyable because of its complete lack of stakes, Leterrier’s approach gets the job done. In the penultimate installment of a gazillion-dollar franchise whose fans have come to expect vehicular mayhem on an interstellar scale, it probably won’t be enough to avert a slow-motion car crash.

As Angie feels caught between many worlds, so does her story. A little bit teen sex romp, a little bit female friendship plug, a little bit Asian American immigrant story, Inbetween Girl has no shortage of things to say. It just needed to trim out the noise so we could hear them.

Raimi succeeds with “Multiverse of Madness” because he fights the battles he can win, and he does so in a way that feels instructional for his characters — all of whom are struggling to make peace with what they’ve lost.

Trocker’s second feature (following 2016’s “The Eremites”) never quite manages to make good on its gamesmanship and only allows itself to have any fun once it’s sure that nobody else is.

Crush is, for better or worse, just like every other teen rom-com, extraordinary in its ordinariness. It succeeds at what it sets out to do: Give queer kids a totally enjoyable, and often quite funny, mainstream love story with a happy ending.

Prior and Zagorodnii are both so watchable, and their chemistry so electric, that it’s easy to get swept away in their romance. Historical accuracy be damned.

Anaïs isn’t so different in the wonderfully surprising last shot than she is in the first, but at last we can see that she’s having the time of her life.

The result is a searing look into a little-known moment in history with profound repercussions for how we understand policing today.

Like “Pather Panchali” in the age of AirBnb and TikTok, Fire in the Mountains empathetically dramatizes the struggles that locals face in a place where tourists come to play.

Everyone in Campbell’s movie — from the director all the way down to his supporting cast — deserves better than this.

No, most audiences who tune into 365 Days: This Day are likely not seeking out female empowerment tales or coherent plots, but the disdain with which the film treats both its viewers and its star can’t help but grate.

Cooper’s film does no independent research of its own, and therefore can’t possibly offer any tidbits that weren’t first reported in the pages of “Goddess.”

"A New Era” doesn’t feel like a cash-grab, but a true continuation. Lush settings, well-appointed sets, and an eye-popping wardrobe only add to the magic, and good luck not happily sinking into two hours of confectionary entertainment. (The endless jokes about the film industry somehow only add to the zip of it all.)

It’s an earnest look at the collateral damage surrounding addiction, and the movie is at its strongest when it homes in on the experiences of Ethan and Derek. But as the main characters of the movie learn, compassion alone isn’t always enough.

Ludicrous and dramatically unsatisfying as Pompo the Cinephile might be, its kid-friendly portrait of life on a movie set captures the same electric crackle that make far better films like “Day for Night” and “Irma Vep” such irresistible ads for joining the circus.

Anyone expecting a three-course meal as rich and nuanced as Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” (or even a single dish as sumptuous as Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo”) might find themselves disappointed by a quick and dirty film that only aspires to offer the satisfaction of a light dessert, but Yoshida’s giddy fetishism makes for its own simple fun.

If Stanleyville initially assumes the posture of an Off-Off-Broadway adaptation of “Dogtooth” — one happy to revel in half-baked ideas and hand-me-down humor — its commitment to entropy randomness gradually coheres into an identity of its own.

Choose or Die is a perfect entry point into genre for younger viewers, one that will also satisfy old school diehards even as it takes some pointed (perhaps deserved?) jabs at them.

Cathartic and outrageous as it can be to hear the juicy — but wildly unsurprising — details of how Abercrombie operated behind the scenes, Klayman’s film doesn’t ground them in any greater sociopolitical context.

Metal Lords may never find the rhythm a movie like this needs in order to stay in the sweet spot between goofy and charming, but there’s a stubborn kernel of truth to how casually its young characters learn to hear themselves by listening to Judas Priest.

As a critic who’s professionally obligated to reckon with the latest trends in Christian cinema, I have to admit that Wahlberg’s R-rated conception of godly entertainment seems almost divine when compared to the culture war militance of “God’s Not Dead” or the Sunday school hokeyness of “I Still Believe.”

It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is.

Surprisingly funny, well-acted, and a little offbeat, Aline is as delightfully kooky as its monumental subject.

The film’s scattershot focus — in stark contrast to the breathless immediacy of “The Rescue” — and advertorial tone diminish the sheer thrill of watching the company land an orbital class rocket for the first time.

Come for the espionage thrills, stay for the wrenching dissection of what it means to really love someone. That’s what really cuts deep.

With a little sleight of hand and a well-executed metaphor, horror can encompass both the fun and the artifice of filmmaking. Night’s End may not be perfect, but it’s perfectly flawed.

The series’ third outing, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, falls into precisely the same traps as its predecessor, offering up an unwieldy, mostly unsettling mash-up of adult themes and childish whimsy, made still more inscrutable by too many subplots, too many characters, and a tone that veers wildly off-course at every possible turn.

It’s visual soup where nothing pops or stands out. Almost nothing anyone does or says feels rooted in recognizable character traits, and despite Marsden’s most sincere efforts, he finds himself once again unable to meet Sonic’s eye-line (a production kerfuffle that would be funny, were it not also another reminder of VFX crunch).

Nothing about this moodily lit, dinner-party-from-hell film can compete with the real-life drama that unfolded in the middle of the Academy Awards. Or with any other home invasion thriller, for that matter.

Apatow gets a lot of shit for making scattershot comedies that run the length of David Lean epics, but the patchwork of scenes that comprise his latest have less in common with “Funny People” than they do “Movie 43,” and might just be aimless enough to make the director’s critics appreciate the flow of his earlier work.

At heart, it’s a story you’ve seen countless times before — often told on a much larger scale. And yet it’s amazing how far you can go on the strength of some evocative production design, a few clever dashes of sci-fi world-building, and a goofy script that isn’t afraid to err closer to “Pillow Talk” than to “Before Sunrise.”