With emerging rebel leader Rey (Daisy Ridley) providing a sturdy emotional foundation, and billions of Disney dollars fueling an obviously stunning array of special effects, Rise of Skywalker doesn’t squander every opportunity to dial up the thrilling nature of the epic at hand, but all that razzle-dazzle can’t obscure a hollow core.

While the beats are familiar and even a film about animated pigeons can’t quite break out of the tropes that have long defined the spy film genre, it’s the kind of sweetly demented late-December diversion that should entertain plenty of holiday-weary families.

Using the hyper-gendered spaces of college Greek life as a fertile palette, Takal and her co-writer April Wolfe skewer toxic masculinity, the white male literary canon, rape culture, patriarchy, and white male rage — all wrapped up with a bow in the stylishly entertaining package of a studio-backed holiday horror.

The explosions might not be as big on the streaming screen, but they’re as bonkers as ever.

"The Next Level” attempts to find a balance between winking jokes about video gameplay and the price of immortality (no, really), settling back into the charm of the film it’s tasked with following up. It’s not the most original kind of magic, but there’s potency there, more than enough to keep audiences hanging around for at least one more round.

Bombshell is a lurid, cartoonish romp, marred by rough and sometimes overbearing flourishes, but not without a tragicomic soul. That alone makes it a genuine movie of the moment.

The film really hits hard when it leans more into the emotion of it all.

This is a study of power, and what power will do to survive; a study of how morality is more historically significant as a condition, and not a cause. The rich won’t save us — that’s what makes them rich. The fascinating Citizen K will leave you to determine the value in one of them saving themselves.

The Cat Returns is an excellent companion to Spirited Away, as they are both Alice-in-Wonderland-like excursions into bizarre worlds with their own rules and logic. Both have female leads who, unlike dear Alice, experience definite arcs of character and capability. The Cat Returns is a lighter film overall, delivering belly laughs.

The clock is always ticking in 1917, and even as MacKay is offering a heartbreaking study in restrained emotion, he’s still at least moving towards the end goal of his terrible task. There’s no time to pause, even for great beauty, a lesson that even 1917 is often loathe to honor.

Gerwig’s adaptation looks at the eponymous little women through ambitious storytelling techniques that modernize the book’s timeless story in unexpected ways.

Not even a fun premise and a talking parrot sidekick can save the movie from its low budget, general lethargy, and abject lack of craft.

As a cinematic achievement, “Bikram” is fairly tame; as a mass-media call to action, it’s an essential movie of the moment.

Bothersome as it can be that we barely get to know the people in Corbijn’s doc, the experience of watching it dovetails with that of going to a live show and being surrounded by thousands of strangers who share your same love: Everyone is on their own trip, but they’re all traveling together.

The film’s low-key approach to a tragic media scandal feels at once timely and old-fashioned — a character study from another era designed to comment on our own.

None of the characters in Klaus are as delightful as they are well-drawn, and Pablos’ film never earns the holiday spirit it tries to manufacture down the home stretch. But there’s no denying that the future of “traditional” animation looks a little brighter than it did yesterday, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.

Little of 21 Bridges ends up being that shocking — it’s tough going when the face a character makes after accepting a phone call can so easily tip off that something’s amiss — but Boseman and Miller make a solid team and creative plotting keep things moving right along.

While too muddled and morose to hold together as a psychosexual thriller, Wash Westmoreland’s Earthquake Bird can be compelling for how it both explores and subverts the idea that everyone gets a little bit lost in translation.

Anyone who’s willing to meet this movie on its own terms and roll with the dream logic it requires will be rewarded with a resonantly cathartic saga about the struggle to find beauty in a world that forces us to leave parts of ourselves behind.

Matsoukas’ fast and furious filmmaking doesn’t always click, but it always crackles with purpose, refashioning the lovers-on-the-lam trope into an emotional black-lives-matter lament, and it deserves to be met on those terms.

Mickey and the Bear only accomplishes so much in its modest 82 minutes (like most films of its kind, it builds to nothing more than a nudge in the right direction), but Attanasio makes you believe in the reality of these characters and the place that binds them together.

No sequel is essential, but Frozen 2 makes the argument that, even in the fairy tale land of Disney, they can still be important.

As a platform for Bilot’s efforts and why they deserve a national profile, the movie has a sincere sense of purpose. It’s a 20-year-old drama that extends into the present, and as environmental concerns continue to escalate, it couldn’t feel more contemporary.

People change, some more than others, but 63 Up is so beautiful and bittersweet for how it finds them becoming who they are. Hopefully many of them live to enjoy it, and this series continues for a couple more decades to come.

While the decision to digitally move the dogs’ snouts when they speak English to each other is almost off-putting enough to negate the effect altogether, fur-and-blood puppies aren’t the only pleasantly old-fashioned thing about this “Lady and the Tramp.”

Nobody really asked for another “Charlie’s Angels” reboot, but this one will leave you eager for more. It seems these women might still have the element of surprise on their side, after all.

Noelle is the sort of film destined to be discarded, a cheap holiday tchotchke with no staying power.

Pleasant and preposterous in almost precisely equal measure, the film never offers anything less than two all-time British actors having the time of their lives, which makes it hard to get frustrated that it seldom offers anything more.

If the film’s story is steered by a hard-nosed focus on the large and small of what actually happened, the way Emmerich tells it feels more informed by WWII movies than it does by the war itself.

Little about Last Christmas is that surprising, but as Hollywood continues to grapple with the idea that the rom-com still has legs and audiences are hungry for comfort food entertainment, it’s a welcome addition to a rebounding genre.

The Current War forces viewers to spend so much time wading through its aesthetic that it becomes easy to lose track of its ideas, or grow too bored of them to bother following along.

With muted characters and a conventional structure, the movie struggles to find the fun or the spirit, humming between high notes and low notes to fall flat in the middle. While its heart is in the right place, Gay Chorus Deep South just doesn’t sing.

Perhaps writer Demos-Brown and director Kenny Leon hope to tap into our collective consciences, but it’s difficult to be moved by such hackneyed, all-too convenient storytelling and overwrought sentimentality.

Doctor Sleep shows considerable effort to ingratiate itself to discerning cinephiles, from the moody Newton Brothers score to cinematographer Michael Fimognari’s dark blue nighttime palette; as a whole, the movie conjures an eerie and wondrous atmosphere that blends abject terror with a somber, mournful quality unique to Flanagan’s oeuvre. But his pandering to dueling source material results in a jagged puzzle beneath both of their standards.

Equal parts reverent and narcissistic, humble and grandiose, this Nick Knight-directed curio is both a tribute to the Lord and a testament to West’s unparalleled ability to get in his own damn way.

For all of the film’s strange omissions, and its struggles to thread the needle between appealing to children and trying to show them how wild our world really is, this passionate and beautifully shot film is worth celebrating for how clearly it conveys the raw truth of that idea.

It’s hard to imagine a more crystalline look at the suppleness of someone’s self-identity (and the moral dilemma of someone else choosing to overwrite it) than Ed Perkins’ Tell Me Who I Am, a documentary so harrowing and horrific that it can only bear to scratch at the surface of its remarkable story.

As lucid and intense as it is underwritten, his second crack at the Maywan District murders might be much less nuanced than his first, but this riveting thriller still manages to amplify its subject much louder than Krauss has been able to before.

Paradise Hills posits that its entire world is a shell game built on outdated ideas and a resistance to originality, but it’s the film itself that’s most woefully unable to ever go anywhere new.

The movie arrives at an eye-roll inducing final twist, and hints at an inevitable sequel. But this app isn't exactly begging for an upgrade.

“Dark Fate” might close the door on the “Terminator” franchise, but every dull frame of it suggests that we’ll be trapped in that vicious back-and-forth ’til kingdom come. The good news is that you can forget about everything that’s happened since the summer of 1991.

A satire of sequels, remakes, and (of course) reboots that always happens to be all three of those things, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is both a flippant look at how the nerd industry is eating itself alive, and a more sincere — if still very stupid — tale about making room for the next generation.

Despite the good vibes and amiable callbacks to the previous film, “Zombieland: Double Tap” is only ever amusing when it’s breaking new ground. That just doesn’t happen nearly enough.

DeBoer and Luebbe have further expanded their nutty vision of suburban ennui and the painful consequences of keeping up with the status quo into an unsettling and amusing send-up of human behavior.

An overlong blend of kid-friendly “Game of Thrones” warfare and standard-issue metaphors of intolerance, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds plenty of ways to build on the original premise, but few that resonate any better than the last flamboyant ride.

What we’re left with is a benign, artless, nothing of a movie that feels cobbled together with the same app-driven, gig-economy mentality that Phil is trying to disavow. Entire characters are ordered à la carte and forgotten about as soon as they leave our sight, as “Jexi” races across its story with the listlessness of someone blankly scrolling through their social media feeds.

A(nother) disposable Netflix thriller that fails to do anything with its potentially clever premise, Brad Anderson’s Fractured isn’t the first modern riff on “The Lady Vanishes” — not even close — but it’s one of the few that finds a compelling new backdrop for that Agatha Christie-esque tale of conspiracy and gaslighting.

That this film can stand on its own, all while paying tribute to the show that helped birth it, is maybe the most impressive escape act of them all.

Mister America is the kind of comedy that can pivot from lethargic to legendary on the turn of a dime (if only for a minute or two).

Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon’s animated The Addams Family introduces the Addams gang to a new generation by way of a retrofitted origin story that shakily attempts to hold fast to its original charms while cramming it inside decidedly modern trappings.

While the film’s first half boasts universally strong performances (even babyAisha gets some screen time), it’s Chopra Jonas who emerges as the film’s driving force.

The action that clutters the last hour of this movie is never compelling enough to feel like anything more than a bloody distraction, but the characters vibe together so well on their own terms that the walking dead only need to provide an existential threat.

Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared “Alien” into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own.

It’s a project that was made to restore a certain way of seeing; to punch a hole through the screen that separates people from the reality of what’s happening in their world. But in trying to get so close to the truth without touching it, Hassan almost fell into the same gap that he was trying to bridge.

As a book, Zeroville was a profound and intoxicating testament to the mythic power of images. As a movie, Zeroville is a compelling reminder to spend more time reading.

What this potent micro-dose of a movie lacks in showmanship, it makes up for in purity and resourcefulness and a rugged performance from Kiersey Clemons that might feel revelatory if the “Hearts Beat Loud” actress weren’t always this commanding.

In the Tall Grass is just a few minutes old before the emptiness beneath its Escherisms creeps up into the soil, and the movie only grows more enervating with each new wrinkle Natali introduces.

If Low Tide recedes all too fast, it still leaves behind a clear sense that life doesn’t always happen on schedule, and that the hardest part of growing up is figuring out what to share with people along the way.

"Making Waves” is smartly articulated and arranged, with Costin breaking the film down into the various disciplines of sound design in order to illustrate just how much thought goes into every decibel.

The Irishman is alive with Scorsese’s trademark style.

Once Lee establishes what he can do with technology in Gemini Man – and it’s a lot – it becomes difficult to refocus emotion onto anything more human. By multiplying life, Gemini Man too often merely dilutes it.

While Olive’s apparent desire to layer together Lacy’s tragic story with historical stories of lynching and the way they impact current culture is understandable (and admirable), the trio of stories that make up Always in Season never fit together.

For all its stodgy touches, the film itself is like a cast-in-amber relic of the not-so-distant past.

On the surface, Last Blood may be a mess of B-movie contrivances, but like its world-weary namesake, it’s also a timely window into the vanity of violent solutions, and why brutality is only viable when fighting for a lost cause.

More than a cock-eyed peek back at an unprecedented culture clash, the film provides a bittersweet glimpse at a small, stained-glass window of time when anything seemed possible, and the concept of change was rich with promise.

The Kingmaker clarifies the harrowing situation facing the future of the Philippines, but more than that, it’s a warning sign for the entire world.

For a movie about the sky, “Weathering with You” is ironically one of Shinkai’s most grounded films — immediately more warm and engaging than “Your Name,” if not at all capable of delivering the same emotional payoff.

Fascinating ... Delpy’s ability to believe in both her audience and her wild story remains compelling throughout the film, even as it careens through tropes and tricks and genres with increasingly off-kilter speed.

Springsteen’s natural charisma shines through at every turn, and while Bruce neophytes might not totally buy his particular brand of profundity, old admirers will appreciate his usual tricks. As ever, Bruce means what he says.

A slender but unholy cross between “First Reformed” and “The Exorcist."

A gritty romance that only translates some of the source material’s poetic bent to the big screen.

An honest but insistently scattershot true-life tearjerker ... Most of the fault lies with the fragmented, nonlinear structure “The Friend” uses to approximate the flowing nature of the Esquire piece.

A nice enough time that never really aspires to be anything more, “Military Wives” isn’t just the kind of movie that ends with Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” it’s the kind of movie that ends with the entire cast singing along.

It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.

Mesmeric but frustrating ... An explosive third act shootout may be the most remarkable sequence that Lou has ever shot, but all of the hard-boiled fireworks in the world can’t diminish the feeling that he can’t identify his muse on a canvas this big.

[A] mesmerizing debut ... Sound of Metal injects visceral, edgy circumstances with remarkable sensitivity.

As narrow as the universe is wide, this dull, sanitized dramatization of history’s tawdriest astronaut scandal has absolutely no idea how touching the heavens might transform a person — it only knows that it does.

A serrated but superficial portrait of how capitalism distances the rich from its consequences, Michael Winterbottom’s damning sendup is often right on the money, but its broadside attacks on the ultra-rich are too obvious to draw any blood or raise our hackles.

A smart twist on the coming-of-age comedy.

Harriet doesn’t reinvent the biopic formula, but Erivo’s performance injects a palpable urgency to the material that makes up for missed time.

The movie hovers in a curious paradox, coming across as both operatic tribute and horrific condemnation, but it’s never less than a nasty crime drama with plenty of grimy characters to keep the stakes compelling throughout.

It’s a frantic, unnerving window into Syria’s collapse, and a nerve-wracking thriller that alternates between acts of courage and utter despair; through that paradox, it captures the struggles on the ground in intimate detail.

As directed by Marjane Satrapi, this discursive biopic struggles whenever it cuts away from her drama to explore the bigger picture — with peculiar flash-forwards to a nuclear future — but Pike helps fuse it together.

There’s much to be appreciated about the movie’s energetic pace, and the casting never fails to convince. But Iannucci’s restless scene transitions — rising curtains reveal new scenes, projected images provide in-scene flashbacks, and so on — confuse empty gimmicks for innovative narrative trickery.

Despite some pacing troubles and myriad undeveloped characters, Motherless Brooklyn functions well enough as a throwback to the intelligent, atmospheric studio private investigator dramas to which it tips a velvety fedora, and shows evidence that this dormant genre still has legs.

A riveting but utterly ridiculous melodrama about the burden of guilt and the value of bunny shit, Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour” layers one absurd turn on top of another with the confidence of a veteran architect, and yet — even at its most perversely entertaining — this very unpredictable movie only feels as if it’s working in spite of itself.

Daphne shouldn’t be this captivating, but with Woodley’s vulnerability and full-scale charm backing her up, Endings, Beginnings is able to capitalize on a seemingly thin premise.

However disappointing it might be that Bad Education is too delicate (and true) to really go wild and let Finley indulge in the flamboyance that made “Thoroughbreds” such a wicked treat, this is a young director who can see the whole chess game 20 moves in advance.

It’s a return to form, and its all-encompassing storyline plays much like a shinier, more magnificent Christmas special.

Babyteeth is the kind of soft-hearted tearjerker that does everything in its power to rescue beauty from pain.

The least funny and most tender movie that Andersson has made since building his own studio with the profits he’d saved from decades of enormously successful commercial work, About Endlessness adopts the same qualities of life itself: it’s both short and infinite.

The winning, warm nature of this China-set family film can’t be denied, and for all its predictable elements, Abominable is still well worth the trip.

Ema doesn’t always dance to a clear or recognizable beat, but anybody willing to get on its wavelength will be rewarded with one of the year’s most dynamic and electrifying films.

Yes, Waititi’s sugary fantasy unearths an endearing quality in the most unlikely places. But in the process, it buries the awful truth.

The big problem with The Goldfinch — a lifeless film that doesn’t consist of scenes so much as it does an awkward jumble of other, smaller problems stacked on top of each other like kids inside a trench coat — is that it mistakes its source material for a great work of art.

Unfolding like a slaphappy cross between “Baadasssss!” and “Bowfinger,” “Dolemite Is My Name” may not be quite as spirited or hilarious as any of its most obvious reference points, but its big-hearted buoyancy keeps it afloat, and the movie doesn’t slow down long enough for you to really care that it’s following a timeless formula.

While the movie runs too long and the message grows thin, it’s a sturdy window into the corruption of the judicial process that can send an innocent black man to death row.

"Blackbird" may be a tearjerker, but it’s also a reminder that there’s more to tears than tragedy, even in the midst of personal loss.