Amsterdam is one of those movies that reminds you how hard it is to make a good movie. You can have a strong idea, a talented cast, and a director with an impressive track record and still wind up with something that trips all over itself on the screen and lands in theaters with a thud.

I wouldn’t call Little a showcase for Issa Rae, who gets one of her first significant big-screen roles, but anyone who can bring this much life and intelligence to such tired material certainly deserves praise.

The audience is never fully let in on either character’s interior life, as we skip from incident to incident. This is despite Streep and Nicholson working overtime—a strange sight for two effortless actors.

Much of The Instigators feels a little lost somewhere between Ocean’s Eleven and The Town, but the movie—starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as desperate strangers who get paired up for an ill-fated heist in Boston—has enough camaraderie between the leads, as well as a sharply comic supporting turn from Hong Chau, to make for a breezy crime farce.

Holbrook—a Garrett Hedlund-Charlie Hunnam hybrid—at least delivers the tough-guy one-liners Black specializes in with the right combination of sincerity and bemusement (even better is Sterling K. Brown as a government agent). But in the mouths of pretty much everyone else in the cast—including Trevante Rhodes, Thomas Jane, and Keegan-Michael Key—the dialogue falls flat.

The clarity and imagination of the world-building carried me through, as well as the fountain of charm that is Paul Rudd.

A stylish, saucy entry in the “stepford wife” subgenre, Don’t Worry Darling treads familiar ground while wearing a killer pair of pumps. The movie won’t surprise you (although I found its “reveal” to be timely and perhaps even prescient), but it sure looks great while not doing it.

At it best, I Feel Pretty works as shameless fierce send-up of contemporary beauty standards.

There are moments when Godzilla: King of the Monsters resembles a fantasy version of a National Geographic documentary—except those tend to deliver far more stunning visuals without any special effects whatsoever.

It’s become a crutch for critics to say that this or that movie is so generic that it must have been generated by AI. I’ve resisted, but I’m finally going to play that card in regard to Wish. Thanks to a banal familiarity mixed with a dose of inhuman idiosyncrasy, the movie feels as if someone fed the opening Disney logo sequence — of fireworks bursting over a fairytale castle — to an AI program and asked it to spit out a 95-minute animated musical in the mode of the studio’s classics.

Penetrating as it is, Irresistible exists not to score political points, but to call for a renewal of the American political process.

Kong brings the personality, Godzilla brings the power, and we get to have the fun.

Unfortunately, Folie à Deux fails to take full advantage of the musical format. Returning director Todd Phillips—who showed a surprising command of cinematic language in the first film—fails to bring a coherent formal strategy to this new genre.

So familiarity is certainly part of my outsized affection for this 1989 Joe Dante satire of suburban America. But I also think the movie has wider significance in the way it presents suburban expansion as a cheerier version of manifest destiny—an unstoppable force that gobbles up land and then quickly sets about circling the wagons.

Antebellum—if you stick with it—reveals itself to be a sharp consideration of the lasting legacy of American slavery, right down to the present day.

Just about every line of dialogue written for a child or teenager is painful (the movie must have been dated a week after release), though I suppose that helps Hocus Pocus work as a time capsule. Far more charm can be found in the largely practical effects and sets.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey won’t work for everyone, but hearts of a certain shape may treasure it.

I’ve liked certain Marvel films better than any of these three, but no MCU installment (by no fault of its own) can offer what Glass does: the experience of opening a comic book for the first time.

Other than these visual delights, Moonfall isn’t much fun.

Watching Dune is a bit like trying to dig your way out of a sandstorm. Wave after wave of lore and nomenclature pile up around you until you finally succumb, and are buried. At which point you’re best off giving up on the movie as any sort of coherent, compelling piece of science-fiction and simply embrace it as camp.

The original Miss Bala was a slyly feminist take on what could have easily been an exploitation flick. Guess what? This Miss Bala weirdly sexualizes things to undermine everything the original was interested in and become, yep, an exploitation flick.

It’s too bad that The Week Of isn’t the odd-couple routine it was marketed as, because Adam Sandler and Chris Rock have a handful of funny moments as fathers of the bride and groom, respectively, who don’t have much in common.

There’s a beating heart to the film, but it’s faint.

Potential abounds in As Above, So Below—a sort of “Indiana Jones and the Haunted Catacombs”—though the many ideas at play never fully come together.

Pinocchio manages enough charm, inventiveness, and—yes—technical innovation to be worth the effort.

Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters.

The result is a convoluted, overstuffed narrative that operates like two parallel movies until they converge for an extended climax.

Not controlled or competent enough to work as a spoof, a serious action flick, or anything in between.