Mufasa has hidden charms that are arguably best described as Jenkins released straight to VHS.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

Alas, the special effects in “Kraven the Hunter” are bad enough to completely undercut the only decent setpiece — a chase through the streets and rivers of London — in an action movie that doesn’t take advantage of its R rating until the final shootout, as the CGI devolves from “adorably cartoonish” to “done as cheaply as possible by a studio trying to cut its losses” so fast that it comes dangerously close to “Scorpion King” territory by the end (which doesn’t stop Chandor from burdening the effects with selling his story’s most pivotal moments).

Like “I’m Not There” before it, “A Complete Unknown” would rather celebrate Dylan’s mystery than attempt to explain it (each of their titles emphasizes his elusiveness as a defining factor), but where Haynes’ solution was to make Dylan infinite, Mangold’s is to make him as small as possible.

At least it aspires to mine a fresh experience from the all too familiar tedium of watching Hollywood pick a franchise dry, even if it ultimately falls well short of that goal.

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.

Get Away works better on paper than as a visceral entertainment experience, as its raison d’etre of subverting folk horror expectations sometimes feels more like a screenwriting class exercise than a fully immersive world.

Without any omniscient narration to speak of, the music becomes a character in of itself, connecting all the various media and many different perspectives into one cohesive whole.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

It’s way too much and a bunch of nothing at the same time, and even agents of chaos who take wicked delight in witnessing this type of pandemonium may find themselves worn out before the film’s predictably hyperbolic conclusion.

The central premise of the friends’ dropping their high school relationships never takes off when the film has so little interest in fleshing those connections out even slightly, but it’s easy to root for the two of them to find happiness.

The film is both masterfully unadorned and wholly original, steering forward confidently under Kandari’s guidance. It’s a movie best viewed with absolutely no primer, a delicious little adventure with a humorous — and human — heart.

There’s fun to be had here, at least so long as audiences know what they’re getting — and what they’re not.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

It’s always a tough ask to improve upon an original, but “Moana 2” is a sprightly addition to this sea-faring legacy. It does something nearly impossible in our sequel-glutted world: made me want further adventures. “Moana 3,” ahoy?

The film serves as a tribute to a certain brand of journalism that can only be achieved by venturing out into the great unknown and putting one’s self in harm’s way. But more than anything, it tells a human story about someone who understood herself well enough to live the exact life she wanted while accepting every consequence that came with it.

What comes through most by the time Bread & Roses wraps up is that our responsibility now is not to ourselves, but to future generations, to ready them to face down their aggressors instead of merely accepting their will.

Stories that are “timely” or “prescient” may be the norm these days, but Spellbound works a little magic to ensure that such messaging, as important as it may be, doesn’t get in the way of a good time for the entire family. That’s another thing we need now, more than ever.

Cole clearly deserves as many posthumous tributes as the culture can afford, especially since he received so little in his lifetime, but reverence, particularly as a way of combatting decades of indifference, isn’t necessarily the best solution

As is so often the case for Hong, his latest is a gentle, hypnotically watchable film that breezes by as Iris does herself, dallying around Seoul in a loose summer dress and her striking bright-green cardigan.

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

A Photographic Memory is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search.

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.

At least superficially, Hello, Love, Again offers something for everyone: stirring romance, politically-tinged drama, and shots of Calgary that resemble a regional tourist board’s wet dream. In execution, however, the film exhibits something of a split personality by awkwardly moving between cutesy soap operatic romance and an unsparing, oft-devastating portrait of the myriad hurdles facing foreign workers.

As a holiday rom-com, however, The Merry Gentlemen is sorely lacking the sparkle and comfort that is found in so many other recent holiday movies like it.

Musicals are meant to be big, expansive, overstuffed, emotionally rich, so consuming that the concept of singing and dancing about it make all the sense in the world. Just as “Wicked” starts hitting its highest notes, it’s over. For now. For another year. And not for good.

Neither the deficiencies of Thorne’s script nor the made-for-TV feeling of Taylor’s direction ever fully obscure the enduringly relevant principle they exist to serve: Science will always keep inching forward, but it’s society’s job to ensure that bringing life into this world is a happiness worth the heartache of living in it.

With a generous scope and ease of tone, Sankey never fails to let her most vulnerable material breathe even as the subject’s enormity threatens to suffocate.