Hodge sells it, just as he sells the rest of an otherwise chintzy film, a Lifetime movie-like drama that falls short of engaging with the many thorny issues it dramatizes.

After a slow-burn first hour, Poulton and Savage unfurl a climax that unexpectedly brings together all of the pieces fighting for Mara. It’s nerve-jangling and raw, and the filmmakers earn their tension and the gruesome harm that comes with it. (There are plenty of snakes.) All that goodwill comes close to collapse, however, as Poulton and Savage charge toward the finale.

A winsome and delicate farce about a (fictional) Palestinian soap opera that people are able to enjoy on both sides of the West Bank, Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire might be the film we need right now if it didn’t have so much fun taking the piss out of the notion that there could ever be a “film that we need right now.”

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.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is a dull and derivative film that’s too in love with its heroes to bother with its victims.

For Sama isn’t a nightmare with pockets of joy so much as it’s a collective dream that’s playing out under a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

Longley’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “Iraq in Fragments” finds a way to negotiate between empathy and condescension.

As much as the suspense remains in play, its main threat has a certain robotic quality, and the humorless tone doesn’t help.

The film, like Billingham’s photography, is all the more powerful for its refusal to tidy up, explain itself, or try to glom some kind of retroactive grace onto an impoverished existence that was defined by boredom and neglect.

It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. The Lion King feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

No matter what form it takes, The Great Hack exists as a giant contradiction sure to evoke strong responses from anyone impacted by its drama, which is basically everyone.

This silly trifle might not stand the test of time, or even be remembered by the time you get home, but it gets you where you’re going with a smile on your face.

As a feat of masochism, Phil is an impressive trick. As a movie, it’s a ghastly mess.

“Words of Love” struggles to thread the needle between a conventional bio doc and a more specific portrait of two souls who found some kind of refuge in each other.

Fans might be appeased by a successful bunt in a long summer of disgraceful strike-outs, but this is still a maddening failure when compared to the remarkable artistry of “Into the Spider-Verse” or the raw pathos of Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2.”

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

While Maiden is satisfying on its own, it’s tailor-made for a remake that can dive deeper into a story that has so much life left in it.

By the time it’s finally over, the only person more exposed than its star is her director.

No matter how contrived or hackneyed things get, Buckley’s voice always breaks through the clouds like some kind of divine revelation. And that voice only gets more powerful when Wild Rose finally gives it something to say.

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.

This is yet another instance where the film’s short runtime seems to have shortchanged the depth of reporting.

At what point does a story about one failing democracy become a story about all failing democracies? Perhaps there’s no way of knowing until it’s already too late.

This is the kind of mad science filmmaking worth rooting for: Aster refashions “The Wicker Man” as a perverse breakup movie, douses Swedish mythology in Bergmanesque despair, and sets the epic collage ablaze. He may not land every big swing, but the underlying vision is hard to shake even when it falters.

Murder Mystery is the kind of lazy and uninspired trash that can only be made by someone who knows that it doesn’t matter; bad movies are made all the time, but precious few pieces of content are so content to breathe in their own foul stink.

A familiar but arrestingly visceral crime story with a coming-of-age twist, Claudio Giovannesi’s Piranhas has an unusual relationship with its own predictability.

Even as the film’s scenes begin stacking into an unstable Jenga tower of contrivances, the turbulent father-son dynamic continues to hold strong.

Raw, empathetic, and so insistently humane that it plays like a fun 82-minute “fuck you” to the power structures of a country that wants to squeeze the life out of its poorest black environments, This One’s for the Ladies is at its best when it slows down and keys in to a small pocket of the culture where strippers and customers really can have co-equal standing in the community that brings them together.

To talk about Toy Story 4 is to talk about Forky. This is a movie that doesn’t initially appear to have any compelling reason to exist — the forced but satisfying third installment of Pixar’s signature franchise seemed to wrap things up when it came out almost a full decade ago — and yet Forky alone is enough to elevate this potential cash-grab into the beautiful and hilarious coda that its long-running series needed to be truly complete. Forky is the hero we need in 2019.