When The Dead Don’t Die sputters, you fear that Jarmusch’s political angst may have paralyzed him. But then there is the bleak, sardonic beauty of the climactic scene.

The film shouldn’t be snidely dismissed, despite its faults. With Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars limps to a close, but there’s still good in it.

Considering the limited material, what we get from Washington and Zendaya is doubly impressive. There’s not enough in the text for them to form full characters, but wow do they nail individual moments, shifting from tenderness to cruelty to scorn to reluctant introspection (in this way the film comes across as a series of successful auditions).

Not the worst of Adam Sandler’s Netflix vehicles, but not any good either.

Fly Me to the Moon, a breezily farcical variation on Apollo 11 history in which the truth prevails, is a time-capsule curiosity—marking a movie landscape that’s slowly fading, alongside our ability to tell fact from fiction in media of all kinds.

Murphy is committed, bringing back the same low-key charm he showcased in the original, while also undercutting Akeem by showing how he has come to represent the repressive Zamundan traditions he once rebelled against.

Hitchcock diluted by De Palma diluted by mid-tier M. Night Shyamalan leaves you with, well, bottom-tier Shyamalan.

At its best, this is galaxy-brain, comic-book stuff rooted in a tactile sense of place. Unfortunately, Eternals runs nearly three hours and is bloated with elements that have served other MCU installments well, but fall flat here.

Day has a startling combination of confidence and corruptibility as the legendary jazz singer, but the film itself is a jumble of barely established characters, over-stylized techniques, and didactic dialogue.

Plemons amuses as the arrogant billionaire, dripping with disdain for his captor, but both he and Collins are saddled with speeches explaining the essences of their characters, as if they weren’t trusted to do so in their performances.

The undercurrent of economic insecurity is gone, replaced by a generic, “get-the-band-back-together” plot, but this sequel to Magic Mike still shines as a movie musical.

The fact that Columbia Pictures produced this is hugely significant. It’s not only that School Daze is written and directed by an African-American filmmaker; it’s that it offers a black perspective outside of genre (blaxploitation) or historical fiction.

By the time Streisand takes over the entire movie with the title number, in which the massive waitstaff of an upscale restaurant gathers to sing and dance her praises, I couldn’t help but wonder what all the fuss was about.

There are at least four movies stuffed into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and about a third of one of them isn’t half bad. I don’t think that math adds up to a decent film, but if all you need is a roaring dinosaur every 15 minutes or so, it might not matter.

Partly an impale-the-rich horror comedy, partly a fantasy monster movie, and partly a father-daughter trauma drama, Death of a Unicorn tackles more tones and ideas than a firmly established filmmaker could probably manage, so it’s no surprise that writer-director Alex Scharfman, making his feature debut, struggles to rein this in. But you have to admire the ambition and bonkers vision.

I suppose if you wanted to be really generous to the film, you could argue that this Dumbo takes a subversive swipe at Disney, its own corporate overseer.

Ford dials up the smarm of Han Solo and the hubris of Indiana Jones to portray a man who’s just smart, capable, and charming enough to be dangerous—to himself, his family, and the villagers.

Ungainly in many ways (inconsistent in tone, unconvincing in locale, contrived in its plotting), Where’d You Go, Bernadette manages two stellar sequences that are raw and truthful enough to salvage the movie.

The extensive dialogue sequences literalize the sort of things Wong usually captures via woozy imagery; moments that have powerful emotional weight in his other features here feel like silly gestures.

Malignant isn’t much of a horror movie—the scares are standard, the dialogue is awful, the performances are incongruous—but as a horror idea, it’s a whopper.

Not nearly as uproarious as I remember it being upon its release, when I would have seen it around the age of 10 or 11, Mr. Mom nevertheless has an endearing time-capsule quality as a slapstick consideration of gender roles in the early 1980s.

In some ways this is as metaphysical as something like Close Encounters, it’s just lacking the tonal control of Spielberg at his best.

As for the werewolf effects, I appreciate that they appear to mostly rely on practical elements, but the end result still leaves you wanting: this wolf man is less rabid animal than angry burn victim.

Thanks to Larson, Parris, and Vellani, The Marvels feels like a breath of fresh air.

The songs don’t offer much distraction from the silly story.

Tell me that you have an expedition movie with clear objectives and unlikely odds, anchored by a compelling cast of characters, and you have my attention. Add dinosaurs and you have my money. Make it all work—especially within the context of the Jurassic franchise—and you have a miracle.

This is a middling Ferrell project that has its moments but mostly brings to mind better, music-themed comedies (A Mighty Wind in particular).

While they’re enjoyable together, even Roberts on her own makes Ticket to Paradise worth watching; the movies have missed her ease on-screen, which is always tempered—just when it risks being flighty—with a quiet seriousness.