The poorly wrapped The Christmas Chronicles 2 feels like a last-minute gift that someone bought at a gas station on December 24. By the time a bunch of Pikmin-like elves get sloshed on spiked cocoa and start singing “Who Let the Dogs Out,” it’s clear that children will only remember Columbus’ latest out of resentment at how soulless Christmas movies have become, if they remember it at all.

Faster than you can say, “Alexa, show me a piece of streaming content that crystallizes the grim future of feature-length comedies that have to satisfy an algorithm but not a theatrical audience,” you’re watching a lifeless, laugh-free slab of nothing like Superintelligence, which starts with “what if Skynet, but with jokes?” and then just gasps for air for the next 105 minutes.

Gunda may be a meditational slow-burn, but as it unfurls its immersive audiovisual tapestry it hovers between non-fiction observation and lyrical insight, and to that end feels like an advancement of the nature documentary form.

Sewell’s book has always been a better fit for piecemeal storytelling — the book itself is divided up by Beauty’s owners — and while Avis’ script does keep the relationship between Beauty and Jo at its center, that lends an uneven treatment to many of Beauty’s later adventures.

The Croods: A New Age ultimately spins that off into a wacky adventure that somehow involves aforementioned punch monkeys (cute, but very punchy indeed), a revelation that the “Croods” franchise might intersect with the world of “Mad Max,” and a generous dash of female empowerment (plus awesome fake heavy-metal music to go with it). It’s a little silly, very colorful, and entertaining enough to deliver some good-hearted ideas that aren’t beholden to any period in time. Worth nearly a decade of push-pull to get here? Probably not, but on its own merits it’s a charming throwback — not necessarily a “new age,” but the remnants of a classic one.

If the overlong and often tedious brawls were at least believable and well-choreographed, maybe there would be something commendable and entertaining to be derived from the experience of watching the film.

An actor’s showcase for Viola Davis as the show-stopping singer and the late Chadwick Boseman as the scheming trumpeter angling to steal her spotlight, director George C. Wolfe’s reverential adaptation livens up the material with sizzling color and vivid closeups. Save for a few digressions, however, Wolfe and screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson have put the play into the movie, rather than vice versa.

From its opening moments to the devastating finale, Collective plays like a gripping real-time thriller, merging the reportorial intensity of “Spotlight” with the paranoid uncertainty of “The Manchurian Candidate” as it explores the national fallout of a tragedy that won’t let up.

Entering boldly into this bunch is Happiest Season, a shiny holiday comedy which is by all accounts indistinguishable from the rest save for one little detail: It’s gay! Unfortunately, this tiny tweak isn’t enough to make a lasting impression on the genre, especially with a lackluster script that offers little in the way of surprise or delight.

While there’s a certain “muchness” to Rankin’s style, and it goes without saying this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, the filmmaker’s refusal to temper his vision serves him well in the long run, as his feature debut eventually achieves an operatic wackiness that carries it over the finish line.

Dower, like so many of the obsessives he interviews here, grows too enthralled by the “who” of it all to stay on mission and meaningfully explore why it still resonates.

The pop icon’s stardom is so etched in concrete at this point that he could tell his fans just about anything and they would never stop listening. So it’s a pity that the documentary vehicle that surrounds him isn’t more forthcoming about the man beneath the wife beaters and airtight skinny jeans who sends so many swooning, but surely must, at times, feel lonely late at night like the rest of us.

Always engaging in broad strokes thanks to the remarkable biography of its subject, A Cops and Robbers Story is at its best in the brief moments when it drills down on the particulars of Pegues’ experience on either side of the law.

The film’s predictable plotting is delivered via a nearly lethal combination of obvious twists and a series of face-offs that would be compelling, if not for the exposition-heavy conversations that take place in between the physical brutality.

The documentary works because of its expansive timeline and creative casting choices. While Liese herself is not trans, and it shows, she approaches her subjects with utmost respect and sensitivity, placing the kids firmly in charge of their own stories.

While the premise of Chick Fight may be featherweight, it’s the film’s phony feminist execution that turns it into a real loser.

This is a gentle and joyous film not to be slept on, even as its low-key aura lulls you into a soothed state of mind.

For all of the favors that Howard does to the subject of his biopic, the director can only do so much to disguise the self-serving nature of a story that was always less about where Vance came from than it was about where he wanted to go.

By depicting an environment where rape culture has been normalized due to oppressive assumptions related gender and sexuality, director Kunle Afolayan delivers an unflinching wakeup call that extends well beyond Nigeria’s borders.

This bland stab at seasonal entertainment is too enamored by its own edgy revisionism to deliver on that promise, and after the 2020 that we’ve been having, everyone — young, old, Christian, and not — deserves something better in their stocking this year.

In a country that insists everyone gets a title shot when most of them aren’t even allowed in the ring, Winkler rope-a-dopes us into a strange and rewarding story about three people who dare to punch above their weight class no matter what kind of beating they have to take for that temerity.

Though forged in a meticulous 1930s backdrop that merges historical detail with the style and tone of that era, “Mank” is hardly a playful throwback. Fincher has made a cerebral psychodrama that rewards the engaged cinephile audience in its crosshairs, but even when cold to the touch, the movie delivers a complex and insightful look at American power structures and the potential for a creative spark to rankle their foundations.

The drama ramps up to a satisfying final act, and while Winocour and Green don’t splash out on surprises, the emotional value of Proxima soars high above the fray.

Freaky has enough snappy fun to keep it ticking along to the inevitable “shock” ending, forcing together two delightful powerhouses in a battle royale that seems primed to kickstart another new franchise for Landon.

Despite a strong start, Bertino’s grim and gruesome The Dark and the Wicked never coalesces into anything more than a collection of chilling images and a paper-thin logic.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

The imagery and impact of Kindred is impressive, and while it may not stick the landing, the path there is well worth flying.

Here is a tanned hide of a movie about the violence that results from conflicting ideas of what this country should be, and while the writer/director of “The Family Stone” lacks the chops to tell this story with the suspense it demands (or the hard-nosed focus required to mine something new from the myth it deconstructs), he fully understands the symbolic power of seeing these actors lose something they can never get back.

Rugged, elemental, and restrained to a degree that suggests its director finds poetry in even the simplest things (his camera lingers on rolling fog or the face of a farm animal with a reverence that might prove trying for those not on his wavelength), “Fire Will Come” is a slight but evocative meditation on making peace with something that isn’t possible to understand nor extinguish.

Director Martin Krejcí’s first feature has the fairy-tale surrealism and penchant for oddball outsiders that distinguished Burton’s work, as well as a similar lighthearted quirkiness that balances the undercurrents of gothic dread.

Snyder casts her net too wide to paint a meaningful portrait of the kids, and follows them too closely to provide much lasting insight into the context of their campaign. And yet, the spirit of their mission shines through.

Most of the movie is spent on overfamiliar ominousness that does little to advance the plot, which is all the more frustrating because Chase has clearly assembled the ingredients for a richer horror experience than the cheap gruel he ends up serving here.

The Life Ahead is compelling enough to make the by-the-numbers narrative worth telling, if only because with such fine-tuned performances at its center, it deserves to be told.

Predictability doesn’t have to be a sin when it comes to the often paint-by-the-numbers world of romantic comedy, but this awkward combination of expectation and disdain for it make for a film only fleetingly worthy of celebration.

It’s a welcome return to form for a filmmaker whose form is all about the slippery search for truth.

Dornan and Mackie are adrift through most of this movie, but the heartfelt thrum of their final scene together is a testament to the intrinsic humanity of their performances — and to the grace of a visionary filmmaking team that’s capable of creating the most beautiful moments, even if they often lose sight of the most effective way of reaching them.

While the narrative hardly goes into the fully unhinged direction it teases, it’s pleasantly askew and always marching to its own strange and, slightly off, beat.

For all of its clumsiness and rookie missteps (which continue through the film’s gut-punch of a coda), His House is an urgent and spine-tingling ghost story about what it means to begin anew in a home that may not want you to live in it.

While gripping from start to finish, there isn’t a minute of “Time” that feels engineered for our entertainment. And though Bradley’s grounded footage can seem at odds with Fox’s home videos — like ice floes dropped into a rushing spring — they ultimately melt together into the film’s most profound moments of enduring love.

The result is an entertaining and insightful mashup of tropes, both respectful of what came before and willing to try new tricks. Being a weirdo, it seems, has never gone out of fashion, but now it has a different kind of future to conjure up.

Chiseled as a haiku, director Wayne Wang’s Coming Home Again opens a window onto dying days in all their ugliness, but also onto their possibility of redemption for a mother and son.

This searing brand of humor has never felt more essential. Blending activism with entertainment, Baron Cohen’s best movie to date gives us new reasons to be afraid of the world, but also permission to laugh at it.

Rich in its execution and careful in its approach, The Sounding resonates.

American Selfie is an urgent look at a fractured country and culture.

Lombroso has made the scariest documentary of the year without telling us anything new.

Zemeckis has made some unsuccessful films over the last 20 years, but The Witches is the most frustrating of them all because it feels like it could’ve been made by somebody else. Anybody else.

So, really, what does happen when a kid detective grows up? In Morgan’s hands, something curious, laced with pitch black comedy and a major dose of tragedy, a winking sense of genre, and a stellar performance from Brody.

While it might be legally accurate to say that Love and Monsters isn’t based on pre-existing material, it couldn’t be more obvious that it was conceived by someone who saw “Zombieland” on TV one night and thought to themselves: “I could do it better. And with bugs.” Lucky for us, they were right — or at least right enough that it’s a blast to watch them try.

It’s no surprise that Hertzfeldt distills the tragicomic absurdity of being alive in 2020 better than any other filmmaker has thus far (after all, he’s been doing it for the last two decades).

From its title on down, Letter to You is a testament to the power of communion.

I’m Your Woman owes much to Brosnahan’s evolving performance as she goes from terrified housewife to trenchant survivalist over the course movie, and the movie consolidates the strengths of Hart’s previous work.

Despite its title, this Rebecca is decidedly modeled after the second Mrs. de Winter instead of the first. Soapy where Hitchcock’s interpretation was stiff, the film is beautiful and hurried and eager to be liked by everyone in a way that will only lead to trouble. It dutifully respects Manderley’s past, while at the same time revitalizing that drafty mausoleum with an Instagram-ready sheen.

It’s always fun to sit through a clip reel when the talent quotient is this high, but Belushi doesn’t sugarcoat the sadness at the core of the actor’s legacy.

Clouds keeps its focus squarely on the ground from start to finish, and it soars that much higher for it.

Little of it will surprise the group’s long-time fans (or, as popular parlance now deems them, “stans”) and it will likely spark interested newbies to seek out further information, but Blackpink: Light Up the Sky does a stellar job of introducing Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa as individuals.

The result is an anodyne if increasingly tender little film that would have been lost in its own lineage if not for the strength of its cast.

The script is half-baked and rushed, too much of a collage of other, better movies, and too coy to embrace its trashiness or ever go beyond PG-13 levels of horror.

Evil Eye packs plenty of compelling cultural specificity inside its frames, it never attempts to dig any deeper into the wider world of that stuff that would scare anyone.

Like some of the best jazz compositions, it uses a traditional framework to veer off in many unexpected directions, so that even the inevitable end point feels just right.

There’s enough go-for-broke and whiplash-inducing shifts in tone on display to suggest this filmmaking duo has a future, even when their characters don’t seem to have a past.

If Over the Moon launches into orbit on the strength of its specificity, much of the film is frustratingly generic for a fable so rooted in a particular sense of place, the unique traditions that come with it, and the way they help a certain little girl learn to appreciate the enduring light of her late mother’s love.

The War With Grandpa is a sluggish hodgepodge of slapstick humor that barely holds together its illogically motivated plot.

Paragas’ film finds fresh ground to explore the price and the power of the American dream, bolstered by country crooning and heartbreaking (and very real) legal worries. It’s a concept that might sound played out, but deft directing and a number of strong performances recommend it, a down-home answer to the similarly charming 2018 drama “Wild Rose.”

I Carry You With Me succeeds in distilling a very engrossing and moving narrative from this real life drama. Ewing’s visual choices are at once sweeping and precise.

Our planet is a finite place, and our lives on it are finite, too. The twilight of Attenborough’s time here speaks to that truth so beautifully that you wish this documentary had more to say about it.

The movie assembles a whirlwind of whistleblowers and disease experts to break down each step of the timeline, lacing it together with smooth editing and ironic music cues that makes the overall experience both absorbing and frustrating, though not surprising in the least.

Hubie Halloween gets by on the strength of its cameos and sight gags.

Black Box won’t galvanize audiences like “Get Out” into rethinking the way society interacts with itself. But it’s just shrewd enough to question how we interact with ourselves.

Sud’s film is a master class in bad decision-making, improbable choices, and overwrought acting.

McQueen’s gripping true-life drama compensates for some of its more heavy-handed beats thanks to Boyega’s staggering, career-best performance and the fiery tone that surrounds it at every turn. The movie is both a ferocious indictment and a call to action that embodies Logan’s cause, even if it’s doomed from the start.

Bolstered by a creative storytelling set-up, Ruben and his very game co-star Aya Cash skewr horror tropes as well as cultural obsessions ranging from TV talent shows to the Bechdel Test. The result is a winking horror comedy with a lot on its mind — perhaps too much.

In Beginning, the borders of the frame aren’t just the iron bars of a jail cell, they’re also the garden walls of Eden, the tempting hiss of the snake, and the angel of the lord who interrupted Abraham from killing his son.

True stories about brave, everyday people fighting evil powers never go out of fashion, and “A Call to Spy” joins their ranks with ease.

12 Hour Shift doesn’t allow for quite the same kind of bravura showcase that Bettis gave us in “May” — Grant’s film, while plenty deranged in its own right, is nevertheless grounded in reality — but it still depends on the actor’s genius for being loathsome and lovable at the same time.

It’s a sharp if slightly caricatured portrait of despair and loneliness — and, indeed, madness and melancholy.

An impeccably produced look at a heinous crime, Popplewell’s documentary meticulously weaves together a wealth of information . . . that it almost feels too readymade for the film treatment. Almost.

Watching Ottolenghi’s achievement from the other side of a screen only serves to reaffirm his point that looking at the world isn’t the same as feeling it on your tastebuds. A more nuanced documentary — one that didn’t just feel like evidence of an event that happened at a museum, but a work of art unto itself — might have made a meal out of such ideas, rather than just offering them for dessert.

Mangrove is a taut and thrilling judicial drama that transcends the genre even while acknowledging its barriers.

While Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe’s script works hard to give all of its players dimension, such an overstuffed narrative tends to do the opposite, limping through sub-subplots and continually introducing new characters, leaving its main attractions to twist in the wind.

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

A listless, half-baked, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller about a Romani Holocaust survivor.

aced at the speed of personal growth — it falls somewhere between slow cinema and visual ASMR — The Calming is true to its title in a way that may limit the size of its audience, but the extent to which Song confronts the anti-commerciality of her work (so much as this gentle movie “confronts” anything) provides a meta-textual tension unto itself. From its opening moments to its final shot, The Calming echoes Lin’s uncertainty about how to look at the world, and also see herself reflected in it.

Guided by El-Masry’s tender, understated performance and a tone that hovers between playful and sincere, Limbo manages to turn its downbeat scenario into a sweet and touching rumination on the quest to belong in an empty world.

It’s hard to tell if it’s deliberately targeting a certain demographic or just too sloppy and unsophisticated to work on anyone who’s learned to tell the difference in quality between “Cars” and “Planes.”

While platitudes about how this is really just about love — not money or industry or good old-fashioned greed — are far too simplistic, at least the movie attempts to make its issues feel personal enough to make people care. Sure, it’s cheesy idea, but that doesn’t mean that the bedrock truth isn’t real. The same logic applies to the film.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is exactly as advertised — a giant, giddy burst of earnest theatricality, loaded with a formidable ensemble that chews on every inch of the scenery, that overall makes a passionate case for the resilience of its formula more than using it as an excuse.

The Last Shift is told with a light touch that allows the film to sneak up on you, and even its most painful moments are softened by heartrending solidarity.

As the film explores San Sebastian — with its marvelous architecture and sprawling beaches — it starts to feel like Rifkin’s Festival is content to get lost with its anti-hero rather than trying to find a substantial narrative to support his existence.

It’s the first Sofia Coppola movie that feels — if only during its flattest stretches — as if it could have been made by somebody else, and yet at the same time it also plays like the loose and tipsy self-portrait of a maturing filmmaker being visited by the ghost of her greatest success.

Part creature feature, part war-is-hell nightmare, and entirely dedicated to cutting down the misogynist jerks who populate it, there’s enough giddy fun to power Shadow in the Cloud through just about anything.

While formulaic on its face, Green’s film resists the sort of obvious cinematic catharsis expected of such a story, resulting in a final product that earns its emotional beats.

Fireball splinters into so many scattered pieces as it hurtles into our atmosphere that it almost seems as if the movie is trying to ignore any of the harder truths that might hold it together.

City Hall doesn’t just deserve an audience; it deserves a conversation. Even as Wiseman celebrates the sophistication of American ideals in practice, his movie illustrates just how hard they are to grasp.

Shaggy and slapped together as it may be, “76 Days” is an urgent act of witnessing for a world that only tends to see itself clearly in hindsight; the film’s value to future generations is self-evident, but it has just as much to show us in the here and now about the history we’re making alone and together.

It’s like the most depressing speed-dating night ever organized.

Far and away the best animated film of the year so far (one worthy of such hosannas no matter how limited the competition has been), this heartfelt tale of love and loss is the most visually enchanting feature its studio has made thus far, as well as the most poignant.

Even if Lovers Rock hovers somewhere between episode and movie on paper, it’s undoubtedly cinematic art, working small wonders with a sophisticated blend of minor-key storytelling and vibrant choreography that transforms the entire experience into a free-form musical.

While Souza and his life and work are more than interesting enough topics for a documentary, what The Way I See It is really about — what it really wants to be about — is not the man who took the photographs, but the man who was the subject of those photographs.