At every turn, the movie casts a haunting spell.

Splitting the difference between “Terms of Endearment” and David Cronenberg’s “Crash” in a way that’s often sweet and surreal (but never sinister), Wittock essentially takes an ultra-familiar premise and coats it with the candied shell of something you’ve never seen before. It’s enchanting stuff, at least until that colorful layer of hard sugar melts away and you’re left to chew on the beige core inside.

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.

Once more for the people in the back, treating anyone’s identity like a costume is offensive and dangerous to an already-marginalized group. If the filmmakers wanted the movie to have a real impact, they should have cast a transgender actress. Instead, Anything is just a yellow lily-livered mess.

You don’t need to watch the other movies in the “Saw” series to enjoy this one, but it will help. With some Avengers-style phone calls in Act One and a mid-credits kicker, this is “Saw” in the superhero age. It’s a flick for the die-hard fans that rewards those who keep asking for more. After a decade as Halloween’s most hyped-up annual release in the aughts, “Saw” is finally back this October to tell Taylor Swift she’s not the only one doing vigilante shit. Congrats, Tobin. You deserve this one.

When it keeps its aims small and its attention narrow, The Other Half lands on a simple love story that speaks outside its familiar boundaries.

Its characters might be preoccupied with trying to find the most outlandish subcultures on planet earth, but Magic Farm persuasively argues that the daily mundanities of being human are more than absurd enough on their own.

A peevish and self-satisfied procedural that unravels the Dreyfus Affair with all the journalistic doggedness of “Spotlight,” but none of the same integrity.

Even if nobody was asking for “Den of Thieves 2,” it might be time to start crossing our fingers for “Den of Thieves 3.” Frankly, I’m even more excited for “Den of Thieves 7.”

Beatty’s long-gestating project is a modestly enjoyable, well-acted nostalgia piece with just a touch of edge.

While the contradiction of punk rock parenthood may not have a solution, The Other F Word successfully has fun with the mystery.

Caveat exists in a liminal space between genres, which is fitting for a film about the skeletons that might hide inside the walls of an old house. However, Mc Carthy’s mix-and-match approach reveals the story’s need for a more solid foundation.

All of this is about connecting the dots in the case and raising awareness of something that was forgotten all too quickly in the Republicans’ haste to get him confirmed.

Binoche gives a predictably excellent performance, embodying Marianne with just the right amount of elite obliviousness without ever turning her into a caricature. It’s touching to see her become more empathetic as the story progresses, even if eventually snapping back to her old ways was the only possible outcome.

It’s a fascinating role in an uneven but frequently insightful movie riddled with amusing asides and enigmatic developments, partly because Huppert doesn’t undergo a radical transformation. Instead, she subtly finds herself at war with her inner confidence, and it’s often hard to tell which side has the upper hand.

The Power is built on subtle elements, but the director’s more ambitious jumps are just as electrifying.

Huang will never forgive Smith for killing the golden goose, and Smith will probably never take responsibility for it (to judge by the Instagram message with him that Huang shares in the film), but that’s not really what this raw and well-relished documentary is all about.

In terms of its pure laughter quotient, They Came Together constantly delivers.

The movie’s topple into melodramatic excess is fitting for a film set in the 1960s, a time dominated by melodramas. And also like the cinema of the 1960s, there’s a grit and urgency to To the Stars, of something bigger and darker coming along with the changing times.

Every trope, twist, and trick of the genre is up for skewering in the comedy, but the film keeps things light and smart, never dipping into darkness or crass jokes. It’s funny because it’s clever, but it’s also never cruel.

Van Aart and Windhorst make brief forays into interrogating the morality of what Femke is doing; they are fascinating and layered, and in too short supply. Hebers bridges many gaps with a fluid performance that moves between zippy joy and stone-faced sociopathy.

With tightly controlled performances and uniquely eccentric events, The Beaver is mainly undone by the lack of a satisfying outcome.

If Animal Crackers never quite matches the mania of “Meet the Robinsons,” nor the comic wit of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meetballs,” it still moves so fast that less generic animation might have seemed like a waste.

Braun and Yanagimoto’s film is frustratingly shortsighted about the societal conditions that allowed Aum to thrive in public for so long. Plenty of fingers are pointed, but most of them only in passing.

There’s enough potential with the balloon’s feats to justify an entire feature-length experience set within its basket, but The Aeronauts constantly interrupts the journey to shoehorn random tangents on the ground, and busies up the drama with underdeveloped side characters.

The film runs on an engine at the altar of memory, itself a facile idea since prolific writers who produce feted work don’t wholly rely on retroactive synthesis. The film is then only memorable in some sequences. Magical, it is not.

There’s a fine line between resilience and false hope, and All Day and a Night walks it with purpose even when it’s tripping over itself.

Handsomely made but tediously plotted, Kirby is more than deserving of this kind of meaty, she’s-in-every-frame role, but Night Always Comes sunsets long before we get there.

It’s fascinating to watch Mitchell grasp for a bigger picture with the wild ambition of his scruffy protagonist.

I’m not quite sure how this group of actors came together or how any of the ideas coalesce into something that a) makes sense or b) is meant to make us feel anything. It’s impenetrable with no intellect: a true curio in the worst way.

Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid Dracula proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.

It’s certainly proof that even dumb movies can endeavor to enlighten the masses, and gels nicely with the broader message: If Hobbs and Shaw can learn to get along, there may be hope for all of us.

Evans and Grace are exceedingly appealing together, and their charming chemistry keeps the film afloat even when it doesn’t seem to know which direction to move in.

Lone Survivor is a grotesque action movie at times impressively directed by Peter Berg that combines the brute masculinity with the ugliness of the battlefield and viscerally unsettling shock value. But it's less a depiction of courage than a brutish magnification of anger and pain, both of which it conveys a lot better than the high ground that it reaches for.

Smallfoot really flounders with its obligatory message-mongering: a hodgepodge of didacticism about the importance of celebrating differences, asking questions, never fearing the unknown, or judging someone because they look different. Plenty of sound lessons in there, to be sure, but without a singular focus, they all blend into one.

Locked in a heated conversation with its own campiness from the moment it starts, 'House of Gucci' leverages that underlying conflict into an operatic portrait of the tension between wealth and value.

While the filmmaker’s affection for full circle moments can be charming, within the context of “Being the Ricardos,” it all feels like a cheat. The film might not opt to get as obvious as Lucy muttering to herself, “Yes, I do love Lucy!,” but it gets damn well close, and that’s sillier than anything Ball ever dreamed up.

Although it often stumbles in service to delivering yet another foul-mouthed joke, its heart remains firmly in the right place.

Ultimately, throwing the same people in the same place with little to do and even less time to do it is emblematic of the sins of far worse, much less worthy sequels. Without Streep there to tie it altogether, well, it just doesn’t sing.

It's a showcase of proficient storytelling that's eager to entertain.

The script is tight and witty with sparks of sophistication. This is a film that, while never quite given the rightful place in the Disney canon it deserved, had a positive influence on many lives over the decades, including that of this writer.

The problem is that, while Johnson crafted a good script that balances multiple tones, his directing isn’t as confident in that tightrope.

The austere minimalism of Rust Creek works to the movie’s advantage.

The whole thing is a step above studio romantic comedies, but that's not saying much.

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.

Bercot's solidly engaging if fairly routine social-realist drama mainly stands out as an actor's showcase.

Despite the film’s gripping final chapter, its heroic Czechoslovakian characters are completely disconnected from the rest of the country, much like their struggle has been omitted from the cinematic legacy of the war they helped to win.

Though imperfect, if it were the Peaky Blinders’ last hurrah, it’s certainly a spectacular way to go.

It's not a terrible film, and succeeds in giving us a play by play of an alleged dynamic between two individuals, but as a whole feels like a missed opportunity.

Voyeur is framed as the story of one observer trying to clarify another, but Kane and Koury lose sight of their own film, which is really a story about two men so desperate to hear the sound of their own voices that they deluded themselves into thinking they had something to say. Voyeur falls right into their trap.

The entertainment value of The Humbling comes largely from Pacino's performance.

See for Me wastes no frame in its brisk 92 minute running time, it’s a tightly-wound thriller propelled by enough turns that you won’t want to miss a beat.

In Yann Demange’s bland retelling, the kid’s downward spiral has been reduced to a series of crude, unremarkable encounters and the very thing this true story shouldn’t be: poverty porn. Nevertheless, Demange manages to stitch together a number of involving scenes that track Ricky’s harsh upbringing and the events that precipitated his downfall.

Even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.

This film is not the best representation of Burnett’s works, which toed the line between the magical and the painful — but in the moments when it succeeds, The Secret Garden blossoms into something beautiful.

The film would have benefitted from either committing to Carter’s growth or taking the comedy in a much darker direction, but the middle path it trods is ultimately unsatisfying. Lousy Carter might be a reminder that middle age is filled with monotony and unsolvable problems, but that doesn’t mean our movies have to be.

More than the fervid cartoon violence and Cage’s rococo line readings, the film’s greatest asset lies in its simple, cold-blooded premise.

Jolie keeps the narrative afloat thanks to first-rate craftsmanship, a few well-honed moments of bonafide suspense, and a terrifically restrained Jack O'Connell in the lead role. While it only hints at the sweeping epic that never fully materializes, Unbroken offers further proof that Jolie's directorial instincts pass muster alongside her other talents.

Page and Wood navigate this difficult, often half-formed material with great tenderness and surgical precision — together, through thick and thin, they convey a feeling of great personal growth, revealing new wrinkles to their roles long after Rozema’s camera has stopped looking for them.

Even with a ridiculously fun premise and more than a few twists, the film never fully regains its initial suspense after the bomb explodes relatively early in the film.

Collet-Serra ensures that we feel the risk of every stroke between his heroine and her safety. The action is visceral and immediate, but crucially contextualized by a helpful array of wide shots and bird’s-eye views.

This is a film about an artist who forgets herself, made by an artist trying to do the same, and with the help of an actress looking for an anchor of truth to hold onto right when the tides of stardom are threatening to pull her out to sea.

The craft on display is often as undeniable as the cast that Mackenzie has assembled to bring it all to life, but “Outlaw King” is a moribund piece of storytelling. It’s too big to be an intimate portrait of a reluctant leader, and not big enough to effectively contextualize that leader’s role in the war he was born to fight.

Biosphere is tons of fun as a character study, but its ideas will leave you gazing out of its geodesic windows, wishing there was something more out there.

A Land Imagined is a film that’s intent on losing its own sense of self, a goal that Yeo fulfills by never allowing it to have one in the first place; he digs a rabbit-hole, and then falls right into it. It’s fascinating to watch Yeo tumble down into the depths, but eventually it starts to feel as though he’ll never hit the bottom.

Enhanced by a number of notable comedic actors entering uncharted terrain, it’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh and flinch in equal measures, and despite some messier twists, never ceases to move in surprising directions.

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.

Sarah's need to save her brother provides the initial raison d'être, but with the mystery is resolved early on Sarah's Key turns into a flimsy meditation on grief.

It’s a shame that telling the Gibbons’ true story is a task too difficult for The Silent Twins, because there are real signs of promise.

The result is a portrait that’s equally sullen and playful, clever and confused; for all its pleasures, All Is True never amounts to the sum of all the many parts that Shakespeare may have played in his time or thereafter.

For all of its low-key revisionism and post-modern flourish (most explicit during a kung-fu style training montage set to Leonard Cohen and a funny “Gladiator” reference that lands at a pivotal moment), Foulkes’ confident and kooky feature debut is less interested in subverting its source material than in continuing the puppet show’s long tradition of keeping with the times.

Humane doesn’t want to be a hard-hitting drama about moral equity in an unequal world that nobody escapes alive, it wants to be a satirical — and increasingly basic — thriller about the evils of financially incentivized health policies in a world where nobody deserves to die, and it’s hard for it to succeed on those terms without caring about which of its characters ends up in Bob’s other body bag.

That someone as successful as Jacobs is so beset by a lack of confidence is a compelling conceit — it also speaks to Coppola’s own interest in the subject, admirable indeed — but in Marc by Sofia, we really believe him. He really is just that worried, always that worried.

In the end, though, it’s all about the battles, and Wingard’s film offers some of the franchise’s best.

Go For Sisters, like the filmmaker's previous features "Amigo" and "Honeydripper," sustains a feeble premise with richly defined characters and strong performances, yielding an underwhelming but nonetheless sustainable viewing experience.

While there are moments of committed physical comedy and a few good line deliveries, the circumstances are neither believable nor outrageous enough to add up.

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.

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.

How you view her and her lies is meant to say something about you. What it says about Dolezal is left more open to interpretation, as Brownson spends so much time close to her subject that it’s nearly impossible for the filmmaker and her work to not humanize her.

It pitches a tone between comedy and tragedy that holds unique appeal.

“Mektoub, My Love” is never about anything more than its own style.

A tight script, stellar ensemble cast, and plenty of easy-on-the-eyes shots of California wine country make for a delightful time at the movies. Rich people might live in a world without consequences, but Pretty Problems reminds us that it can be pretty damn fun to join them for a couple hours.

Sing is the Platonic ideal of an Illumination movie. It’s a profoundly soulless piece of work that shines a light on the mediocrity they foist upon the children of the world.

Repetition grinds Lizzie to a halt, and the film lacks anything resembling energy, cycling through the same beats until something happens only because it has to.

Cooper’s film wants to be the “Nebraska” of rock biopics, but it lacks the finesse to retain the essence of that sound when transferring it into the body of a commercial biopic. In that sense at least, it all too perfectly articulates how difficult it can be too move forward when something is holding you back.

If nothing else, it joins “Trap” in an expanding canon of mid-career Josh Hartnett movies that are memorable for their utter ridiculousness. And perhaps we all ought to be grateful that a film that promised us fighting or flight had the generosity to deliver on both.

Michael Showalter’s follow-up to “The Big Sick” is as flat and algorithmic as his last rom-com was poignant and alive. The only thing the two films really have in common is a winning performance from Kumail Nanjiani.

On the Basis of Sex plays like a sunny fantasy from a more optimistic age.

Once again excelling, Zellweger has much to do with the safe transition of this new Bridget, maintaining all the old quirks and sweetness, but in a believably more mature shell.

Told with the gravitas of a comedy sketch and the edginess of the funny pages, Elvis & Nixon at least has the good sense to appreciate that its namesakes were larger than life, each walled off from the world in their own way.

They mix like Fireball and water, but the odd couple nonetheless shares a sensational chemistry, building on the base amusement of seeing Oh let her extension-laden hair down and Awkwafina crimp the straight-man character into weird new shapes.

A straightforward tale of overcoming personal and professional challenges with no fancy dressing, Grigris goes down easy but offers nothing remotely fresh.

Considering that it’s a second sequel in a less-than-revered franchise, it’s a minor miracle that Cars 3 hits the finish line with a fresh sense of purpose.

A sensitive but almost fatally self-absorbed death drama that has much to say and little to feel.

"Absolutely Fabulous” captures the irreverent fun of the series using an appropriately absurd plot device and does not read like a tired excuse to put the characters back in a room together.

Stone's uneven direction veers from near-amateurish genre antics to an enjoyable awareness of those same standards.

Shlesinger’s leading performance has the stuff of a star-making turn, though the film isn’t distinctive enough from its peers and predecessors to match the actor’s obvious onscreen charisma.

Together may not be the best pandemic movie about a poison-tongued couple stuck in lockdown together, but it’s the first to recognize that rage is a necessary part of grieving what the pandemic has taken from us.