The more engaging question is where Bernadette disappeared to for the two decades before the movie begins. It may not be much of a mystery, but where Bernadette went is far more believable and broadly real a story than where she ends up. It’s a story that’s too complicated for Linklater to tell here.

Plaza steals the show with her killer instincts and comedic timing. If she can keep an operation this overstuffed afloat, there’s nothing she cannot do.

If Stanleyville initially assumes the posture of an Off-Off-Broadway adaptation of “Dogtooth” — one happy to revel in half-baked ideas and hand-me-down humor — its commitment to entropy randomness gradually coheres into an identity of its own.

While “Otto” may reach fresh audiences who’d otherwise balk at subtitles, this sluggish rendition is unlikely to inspire anyone to seek out the original.

Me Before You is such a wonderfully uncynical movie that it almost doesn’t matter that it isn’t very good.

Commingling an overwrought spin on something like “The Babadook” with the kind of bland nonsense genre fans should expect from a Blumhouse flick in March, The Woman in the Yard is effectively a cinematic garage sale peddling parts from better movies.

The film’s threadbare story runs parallel to some compelling ideas about masculine insecurity, internalized pain, and the price of genetic privilege, but Anvari’s well-calibrated jump-scare machine is too preoccupied with gross effects, unmotivated jolts, and that strange rash that’s growing in Hammer’s left armpit to engage with any of them.

In tying its story to the saga of Daniel LaRusso, Karate Kid: Legends resorts to repeating his journey entirely, leading to a martial arts film that has limited new moves compared to what audiences have seen 40 years ago.

An electric lead performance and a growing sense of self make it worth your while to see that Izzy gets where she’s going.

The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step.

While “Jason Bourne meets Temple Grandin” might sound like an interesting idea for a studio write-off, “James Bond meets Michael Clayton meets Rain Man meets all of their friends and enemies” is a dull movie that’s too full of distractions to pay out any dividends.

Rather than forge a believable relationship between Grace and Del that stokes our interest in the future, this uneasy two-hander strings us along by raising dull questions about the past.

It’s a stupid movie with deep ambitions, energized by that trippy neon palette, and the occasional hot beat.

The movie is a visual investigation into the roots of sexual liberation in societies steeped in repression. Watching it from start to finish is a means of engaging with the inquiry at its center.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

From beginning to end, The Six Triple Eight never trusts its audience to actually engage with the material beyond its inspiring surface, evidenced by a lengthy coda featuring title cards that literally restate the film’s plot over archival footage of the 6888th Battalion. Unsung heroes deserve better.

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.

Visually unexceptional when it’s not plain squalid, shameless in its bid for a sequel, The Gentlemen is the film Britain deserves as it staggers backwards into the New Year under the questionable influence of an unabashedly populist leader.

The problem with At Midnight isn’t the gorgeous scenery or the casual believability of the sparks between Boneta and Barbaro. It’s the production quality — mostly that there is none. Episodes of “Bachelor in Paradise” have better cinematography than this Paramount+ feature, making the streamer seem incapable of competently funding anything that isn’t produced by Taylor Sheridan.

Like the poster, Meet Monica Velour is engaging to a point, but leaves much to be desired.

For every scene of dazzling wonder, there’s another of outsized horror; for every big cat who looks ready to jump off the screen, there’s a wolf that appears bizarrely unfinished. There is little middle ground.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates may not be the first Apatow-era comedy about twentysomethings coming to grips with the fact that they won’t live forever (and it’s certainly not the deepest, as it lingers in your memory for about as long as a Snapchat), but it might just be one of the funniest.

Shana Feste’s initially grounded “Run Sweetheart Run” takes the concept of a “bad date” and runs with it to wild extremes, unfurling a white-hot, blood-soaked yowl of feminine rage in a tidy horror package that can barely contain all its biggest ideas.

Happy New Year provides a rare glimpse into the darker ramifications of war that rarely take center stage in the national dialogue. This struggle has nothing to do with political motives or tactical movements, but rather the battle to retain sanity against impossible odds.

A humorless melodrama about a woman haunted by her past, Malignant sits somewhere between a slasher, a ghost story, and a possession flick, never fully embracing either. The result is a confusing melange of genre archetypes that lacks a clear point of view, even a surface-level stylistic one.

Yeon eventually just throws his hands up and surrenders to the cheesy spectacle of it all with a frenzied third act that finds the entire cast in a death race to the border. It’s here — in an amusingly unmoored but ultimately exhausting sequence that looks like someone trying to recreate “Fury Road” on a Nintendo 64 — that Yeon stops being able to afford his own ambition, and the film’s budget suddenly feels like a rubber band stretched over a hula-hoop.

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.

Just as the frequent cutaways from sexual activity tone down the titillation, Lovelace never garners the energy to construct a fully involving melodrama, rarely rising above Lifetime movie standards. Given the material, the irony here is that the filmmakers play it too safe.