While Mantzoukas and Revolori charm – consider them your new, unexpected go-to buddy comedy duo – The Long Dumb Road soon runs out of gas, chugging through a series of increasingly unbelievable contrivances.

Inessential and inoffensive, frequently adorable and fun for the whole family, Jon Favreau’s film feels like three good-enough TV episodes smushed together. If that sounds pleasing to you as a movie-goer and a “Star Wars” fan, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” will satisfy. But if you’re hoping for something a bit more ambitious, the film’s generic soul will likely just keep chipping away at the franchise’s up-and-down goodwill.

In between the meandering exchanges lies an unquestionably thoughtful interrogation of a broken system.

Child’s Play at once repudiates Mancini’s franchise by attempting to make it bigger and bolder while falling back on ingredients we’ve seen before, and seen better. While it sets out to skewer the algorithms that could destroy the world, the remake hews to a mechanical formula — and winds up a product of the same tendencies it’s trying to indict.

Ultimately, The French Italian has far more to say about navigating the mundanities of a stable and pleasant relationship in your thirties than about theatre, revenge, or noisy neighbors.

Watching Turner learn to accept his weakness is ultimately satisfying, even if this gentle documentary loses a lot of texture with every shuffle.

A movie that’s scary enough to get under your skin, but not scary enough to stay there.

It’s both way too much and also somehow not enough, but even the most exhausting stretches of this bloated import blockbuster are fearless enough to make you wish that American films would follow suit.

While depicting a landmark moment in humanity’s efforts to understand our place in the universe, Good Night Oppy renders the rovers’ journeys with such oppressive sentimentality terms that it can be hard to feel the full weight of the awe and wonder the movie drops into your lap.

A supremely dense coming-of-age drama steeped in weighty blather at the expense of emotional validity.

“Blood and Honey” feels like a throwback to a simpler era of filmmaking. Not an era where movies were better — because it’s not particularly good — but a time when a film could be produced, marketed, and turn a profit just by promising audiences an image they hadn’t seen before.

Even when the storytelling falls short, Pedro Páramo never fails to offer up ideas worth pondering.

The mystical allure of this long-awaited "lesbian werewolf movie" turns out to have more value than the real thing.

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.

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.

This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest.

Though it falls short of its goals, Tallulah is an ambitious first film for Heder. A valiant effort, but ultimately, like its characters’ lives, a missed opportunity.

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.

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.

Ver Linden’s film may play out mostly in a straight-forward chronology, but that choice doesn’t do “Alice” (or Alice) any favors, expecting major revelations and revolutions to happen in the exact minimum of time.

Seance doesn’t just grow more mysterious, gory, and spiky as it goes on, it also grows more convoluted. Yes, many things can be true at once, but “Seance” might benefit from being pared to a more streamlined story.

Schloss compellingly combines the rangy wildness of hormonal teenagehood with Sadie’s more terrifying instincts, toeing the line between pissed-off teen and possible psychopath with ease. Her Sadie is both brutally dead-eyed and weirdly charismatic; you simply can’t turn away from her, even when you really, really want to.

Ellen Barkin puts on a bold, candid performance in Cam Archer's Shit Year, but the enigmatic movie is composed of too many fragments to sustain her efforts.

Broken Tower feels stationary, repeating the same motifs and attitudes ad infinitum until the credits finally roll.

It’s a little bit of a slog even if you’re already a fan.

Scarlet amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story.

Another smirking and vaguely satirical psycho-thriller that wants to have its cake, eat it too, and then soil the plate for good measure, Fennell’s immaculately crafted follow-up to “Promising Young Woman” might have a lot more fun pushing your buttons if it had any clue how to get under your skin.

This muscular and often brutal depiction is chiseled with authenticity, but it’s too psychologically schematic to make much in the way of an emotional impact.