The film’s excess of energy almost never burns out, pummeling you with the bacchanal brewing inside its lead.

In some ways, Dream Team feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. By leaning into its low effort, too-cool-to-care aesthetic, it subliminally tells audiences that anyone offering substantial criticisms is just a square who didn’t get it.

Unlike Baron Cohen’s work, André seems to invite his targets to crack up with him, and they’re more than happy to oblige. Bad Trip is an extension of that all-inclusive approach: It’s a blunt instrument of absurdity, but that’s also what makes it so much fun.

Strong performances by both Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor, plus compelling production design from Clem Price Thomas (the pods and the wider world around them are instantly credible) recommend the feature, even if some of Barthes’ biggest ideas (she also wrote the film’s script) sometimes feel under-explored by the time the film reaches its conclusion.

It’s a girl-powered, earnestly feminist superhero movie with big, implausible action sequences and outsized personalities, and while it never quite reaches that potential, it does begin to map out a fresh path to the world-worn arena of superhero narratives. It may not be the promised total emancipation (at least not yet), but it is fantabulous in its own way.

Purcell, as star, stays resolute to the last, but as filmmaker, her sharp ideas are dulled into something that barely leaves a mark.

The movie works so well — and remains so light on its feet — because it eschews the life-or-death weight of Woo’s original in favor of focusing on the unbridled joys of resurrection.

Forget in-jokes or fan service, this is a movie so long on cos-play (much of it brilliant) and short on character development (none of it interesting) that it requires a casual knowledge of the show’s lore to understand, let alone to enjoy.

This is a widescreen ode to the beauty of absolution, told with such constant sincerity that you can’t help but want to forgive its flaws.

The Good Son is Mancini’s mea culpa memoir; a grand act of self-vindication that succeeds because the boxer is sympathetic and asks respectfully for forgiveness and absolution.

Clark’s latest is more candy-tart than saccharine-sweet — but for those unfamiliar with his out-there style, this electric portrait of doomsday-defying love serves as a ready-made soft spot for the indie filmmaker.

Bad Hair has plenty to say — about the plight of black women in particular and blackness in popular culture in general — but his movie can’t settle on laughing off the conflict or regarding it with dread. Instead, it settles on lingering in the knotted chaos, hoping that the message still burns.

A well-intentioned but wearisome jolt of prefab holiday cheer.

Mockler transforms the material into a solid thriller with an edgy vision of millennial lunacy, sketching out a psychopath unique to the viral video age.

Things get harried in a hurry, and while Duffield doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to the various “Home Alone”-like battles that pit Alien vs. Dever, the “Spontaneous” director stages them with rare aplomb and an unerring respect for the fact that Brynn’s house represents her entire universe.

Halverson is too far on the deep end to provide us with digestible storytelling, and Cowperthwaite, who spends the movie jumping in nonlinear fashion from one year to the next, is in no rush to make the larger picture easier to see.

Dragged Across Concrete may be a hard movie to love, but it’s a much harder one not to respect and even admire.

The Lost City might not be as majestic or breathtaking as its loftier influences, but it is the swooning stuff that great romance novels are made of.

Quincy is refreshingly devoid of talking-head interviews, relying instead on the measured ruminations of the man himself and the extensive archives Jones and Hicks had the difficult job of paring down. The result is a jaunty stroll through the last half-century of music history, and a fitting tribute to a living legend.

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.

Within his means and interests, Posley continues the legacy explored at length in the must-see 2019 documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror,” while still experimenting with original elements that expand its possibilities.

At the very least, it seems safe to assume that Doda wouldn’t mind how this documentary casts her as a quasi-deliberate revolutionary, but McKenzie and Parker lack the intel to see any deeper into Doda’s bimbo savviness, just as they lack the ambition to explore whether intentionality even matters when it comes to changing the world.

A potent but emotionally diffuse coming-of-age drama in which everything — even faith, even love — has the potential to be as exploitative as the deforestation that continues to eat away at the soul of the Amazon.

That Christmas may be holiday-centric, but its messages about community, doing good, and kindness are timeless and universal.

While the new Ghostbusters successfully empowers female movie stars, that’s not the movie’s selling point. However, it’s the only justification for its existence.

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.

Leave it to Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan to crack the code as to what makes a good legacyquel, which they’ve done quite handily with their long-gestating Freaky Friday sequel, Nisha Ganatra’s charming and quite fun Freakier Friday. The secret? Fittingly enough, it harkens back to exactly what Curtis and Lohan brought to Mark Waters’ 2003 Freaky Friday: actual verve, obvious joy, and performances that are about three times better than they need to be.

Hiding behind a shaggy beard and a stoner grin, Paul Rudd plays an amusingly oblivious shlub in Our Idiot Brother, but the movie can't keep up with his comic inspiration.