This Bob Ross doc isn’t just messy, it one that paints a mixed portrait that’s hard to decipher.

“Shang-Chi” may be built on familiar lines, but in the moments when it’s allowed to be its own film, it’s a vastly different (and vastly superior) film compared to its predecessors.

Sweet Girl is dumb in all the ways you expect, and yet with Isabella Merced things feel understandable. It’s just frustrating that the twist undermines her, outside of being utterly weird. That being said, if they wanted to greenlight a “Sweet Girl 2” and give Merced her due, I’ll be waiting.

Before the movie came along, the show had an ardent critic in Liam Kennedy, a criminology professor who believes “PAW Patrol” “encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” While it’s doubtful the humorless dirge of a movie will make enough of an impression to mold young minds in any lasting way, the critique of “PAW Patrol” is useful as an amalgamation of certain favorite Hollywood themes that ought to be retired.

Zeros and Ones isn’t much of an entertaining sit — watching it feels like dusting off a cryptic artifact from a bygone civilization, its pleasures more archaeological than anything else — but every frame of this weird soup is suffused with the restless creative spirit of someone who’s been waiting for a new world order, and recognizes that we only get so many chances to make it happen.

The Meaning of Hitler doesn’t have to make sense of this decade’s chaos to clarify just how much it remains vulnerable to the same complaisant attitudes exploited by the German leader decades ago. The movie isn’t just another cautionary tale; it’s a jagged intellectual wakeup call that cuts deep, and America can’t hear it enough.

The Protégé never even begins to cohere as a story about paying for old sins (the ending is a “huh” of the highest order), and its ostensible villain is almost a complete non-entity, but watching Q repel down the inside of a high-rise or seduce Keaton from behind the barrel of a gun makes it obvious that she knows more about selling action on screen than most Hollywood actors could ever hope to learn.

It’s an absolute slog to watch Jackman row this way and that in search of something to justify this movie’s labored metaphors.

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time brings the long-delayed, highly anticipated tetralogy to a close with a bold, messy, uplifting, audacious, and emotional film that expands, complements, and comments upon what came before, while giving fans a fitting close not only to the movie series, but the entirety of “Evangelion.”

The 80 minutes of the movie that are set in flesh-and-blood reality can’t help but seem flat by comparison, as the thrust of the film’s story is so functionally reverse-engineered from its central gimmick that Demonic winds up feeling like a glorified proof-of-concept video that should have been exorcised of any grander ambitions.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff often feels like inside baseball for film buffs, but if you’re of that group you’ll be charmed by it. The loss of theaters feels particularly acute at the moment and that too should also make this loving documentary feel even more poignant.

There may be fewer truly gory moments in Don’t Breathe 2 than in typical slasher fare, but they are just twisted enough to stick in the mind like a festering wound.

Days becomes such a resonant addition to Tsai’s exhumed body of work because the filmmaker recognizes and embraces that uncharacteristically sentimental undertow; the last 30 minutes of this (relatively short) movie reward viewers who’ve spent the previous 90 minutes searching — reaching — for a souvenir they might be able to take away from it.

If this arresting documentary is too agog at its own story to intricately reckon with how 21st century geopolitics and technology have further perverted the relationship between art and commerce — if it stops short of a post-credits scene where Samuel L. Jackson shows up to threaten us with the imminent rise of NFTs — the film nevertheless makes a strong case that some art is truly timeless.

In the face of icky writing, limp directing, awful pacing, horrific green screen, and terrible jokes, star Joey King spent three film adaptations of Beth Reeckles’ YA novels injecting heart and humor into her Elle Evans. Still, King’s charm isn’t enough to save the series, but it’s sure as hell the lone silver lining of a franchise that finally, blessedly, is coming to an end.

So much of Respect is about Aretha wanting more — and so desiring to work for it — and it’s disheartening that this well-meaning exploration of her legacy seems doomed to inspire that same hunger in its audience.

Materna has some good ideas, but the surrounding landscape feels generic.

Free Guy is nothing if not a movie that wins you over in spite of your better judgment and best defenses, but its “be the change you wish to see in the world” energy feels like a micro-transactional smokescreen for a corporate monoculture that only values creativity so far as it can be used to fool us into paying for things we already own.

Thin and politically disengaged as this diverting Euro-thriller can be, it never forgets how even the most desperate of people can be left to suffer in plain sight — nothing but figures in a landscape.

Naked Singularity is the work of an untested filmmaker who knows how to streamline but lacks the chutzpah to swing for the fences.

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

Some movies try to entertain you; this one holds your attention like a bite that you can’t stop yourself from scratching even though you know it’s only going to make things worse. It’s hostile and off-putting to the extreme, but also too aggravating to ignore or stop watching.

The most fun and least depressing superhero movie in a very long time, Gunn’s deliriously ultra-violent “The Suicide Squad” wears the yoke of its genre with a lightness that allows it to slip loose of the usual restraints, if not quite shake them off altogether.

Disney’s latest attraction just isn’t rousing enough to sustain the fun of a 20-minute ride for more than two hours, and the rewards are few and far between for a movie that taps so many resources to reach them.

Lamb takes a low-key minimalist approach to its premise that invites a certain shock-and-awe reaction before doubling back to give it purpose.

Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is.

This is the role that he’s been rehearsing for his entire life, and Val is far more rewarding if you think about it not as an autobiographical documentary, but rather as a film about an actor finding a way to express more through his characters than his characters were ever able to express through him.

Setting aside its subjects’ lack of diversity, “Woodstock 99” is a must-watch documentary that reminds us, yet again, about history’s inevitable ability to repeat itself.