A strained but strangely affecting turducken of a movie.

The surprise isn’t that it deviates from the groundrules set out in the film before it, or even the scores of horror films from in and around the decade in which it’s set. It’s that when Fear Street: 1978 is given the opportunity to fulfill the promises it’s made for itself, it does so unreservedly, with a clear sense of purpose.

Sure, the carnivalesque twist of the final hour is a touch heavy-handed, and it’s not the only one. Yet as the movie settles into a quiet, somber finale, life and performance collapse into a single contorted mass and Annette becomes a metaphor for its own bumpy ride. Hovering on the brink of collapse, it’s a delicate dance between genius and fiasco, much like Henry himself.

Questlove and editor Joshua L. Pearson lace together footage of stage performances with history lessons (Motown, gospel music, the evolution of Black style, the concept of a common struggle among Black people worldwide), tying it all together with endearing recollections of the single day in 1969 by those who were there. The result fans the flames of Black consciousness.

It’s enough to make you long for the days when blockbusters of this scale weren’t afraid to make strong choices, especially the ones about how we’re all going to die if we don’t.

The more that America: The Motion Picture relies on straight parody, the sparser those laughs feel.

The violence, while pervasive, does not feel gratuitous. Each kill is quick and to the point, and the camera never lingers too long on the flesh-torn wreckage.

If the Day-Glo antics of Fear Street Part 1: 1994 are as tonally insecure as its teenage characters and a bit too broad to get under your skin, rest assured that this overstuffed slasher cuts much deeper when it’s contextualized as the latest chapter of an American horror story that’s been in the telling for more than 300 years.

Flashier stuff isn’t up to task, from awkward character design (the adults are, let’s just say, crafted with less care than the kiddos) to shoehorned callbacks and an over-reliance on exposition to push story points that could stand a more artful approach. The mind-bending nature of this series doesn’t help matters. (

Like Jason Bourne, Natasha and Yelena were trained killers who defected, and the movie follows a similar kind of rapid-fire approach to the espionage genre as they pick up the pieces of their broken past and squabble through awkward family dynamics. The first MCU superhero movie to return to the blockbuster arena since the pandemic put the whole endeavor in jeopardy gets the job done; it’s also, by MCU standards, downright quaint.

If this mildly refreshing mid-June spectacle is as thin and straightforward as the terrain that it covers — forgettable in a way that makes you feel like it’s melting while you watch it, and never as slick an action vehicle as its premise might suggest — it still manages to offer a few mild twists before the journey is over.

The resulting documentary is a nuanced, humane, and more naturally uplifting portrait of three young people trying to keep pace with their dreams in a relay race that’s never offered them the inside lane.

Good on Paper can’t quite find its footing, offering insight and sparkle in only fits and starts.

This light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages to draw a comprehensive map of what the Cold War relic has come to represent — and what freedom means to the people of a nation that’s been defined by its pursuit.

As a personal portrait, “Ailey” is lacking for charming anecdotes or nuggets of wisdom from the artist himself. But a true artist speaks through his work, and it’s appropriate that the revelations in “Ailey” arrive via the dance scenes.

It’s Furhman, steadily building Alex from the inside out, even as she’s crumbling around her, that adds the most tension and intensity to the film, offering a fully realized performance in a story all about the pain of realizing how much further you have to go.

Even as the movie devolves into an ineffectual shaggy-dog story shoehorned into a baffling and abrupt real-life backdrop, it remains a slick and enjoyable pastiche about messy outlaws adrift in a world designed to screw them over.

Despite — or perhaps because of — how evocative Reis’ performance can be, Catch the Fair One asks her to fill in too many of its blanks.

While the raw material for something twisted and operatic exists here, Leblanc is too committed to putting meters of space between herself and the material to fully absorb the viewer. The motivations for that choice, however arty, are uncertain.

For a film ostensibly about sex, Mark, Mary & Some Other People doesn’t seem to be much about actual desire; its compulsions are rooted in the pressures, expectations, and general idiocy of youth. That, at least, feels real.

This is a film about an artist who forgets herself, made by an artist trying to do the same, and with the help of an actress looking for an anchor of truth to hold onto right when the tides of stardom are threatening to pull her out to sea.

Trapped in some bizarre movie genre hinterland, wholly resistant to veering too far in any direction, this aimless film isn’t dark enough to be scary, funny enough to be a comedy, or smart enough to say anything about the many topics it seems to want to tackle.

It’s rarely a good sign when a movie leaves you thinking: “The Renny Harlin who made ‘The Adventures of Ford Fairlane’ would never have stood for this lazy, mean-spirited crap.”

What this quaint little “Hot Fuzz” homage lacks in scale, it nearly makes up for with a stacked cast of delightful comic actors who all deliver the goods.

This charming documentary is more than an IMDb-scroll come to life, avoiding the usual pitfalls of generic biopics thanks in no small part to Moreno’s surprising candor and vulnerability.

It may not be the best Pixar movie, or the riskiest — it sure as hell isn’t the most ambitious — but Luca is also one of the precious few that feels like it isn’t afraid to be something else.

There are many times in Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya, an anxiety-filled potboiler of a documentary about the fight to rescue enslaved girls from ISIS, where one might wonder how they pulled it off. That feeling is quickly followed by relief that they did.

With its dense assemblage of archival materials and candid talking heads, “Roadrunner” gets the job done, yielding a tough, infuriating tribute to Bourdain’s ineffable genius and the tragic inclinations that came out of it.