Much like Po himself, Kung Fu Panda 4 just wants to vibe out, riding the wave of previous successes. For little kids, it will be a fun diversion, but for anyone expecting the excellence of the previous films, this dumpling is a little too light on the filling.

The film is pleasantly reminiscent of ’90s neo-noirs in both style and storytelling, but with a narrative fearlessness and visual imagination that makes it totally fresh.

If kids can grow out of their pretend pals, so too can horror audiences of cynical snoozes like this.

In charting that road from disorienting fragility to determined independence, Ebrahimi serves up a memorably nuanced performance.

If I call the movie a love story, don’t laugh. Torres has made it with love in his heart.

The story that Kiss the Future tells — culminating in U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo, two years after the Dayton Peace Agreement — offers an admirably potent blend of darkness and light. Specifically, the light that can emerge from darkness.

Swank is appealing and amusing, decked out in fringe and affecting a twang, but it in no way feels real; it’s more of a fun character performance. Ritchson, on the other hand, demonstrates a softer, more expansive side to the tough guy persona he’s perfected on “Reacher.”

You can get the facts about these migrants anywhere, but Garrone knows the tool of cinema is more effective. By presenting these adolescents in all their fragility and strength, he comes as close as is possible to getting us to feel how they felt. Io Capitano is as unflinching as it is robust with empathy.

The effortlessly orchestrated dialogue scenes are riveting, but what’s remarkable is that, no matter how talkative Samet and his cohorts are, they often don’t say what they mean. The characters argue politics, worldviews or how to handle the disturbing accusations leveled against Samet and Kenan at school, but their rhetorical jousting masks unspoken resentments and disappointments.

The slight and scanty Drive-Away Dolls could dissipate with a gust of wind, but it beats a hasty getaway before that becomes a problem. While its story fails to justify its own existence, it delivers what it says on the tin: dumb, randy fun, even if that feels retrograde in more ways than one.

Villeneuve has made good on one of the great Hollywood gambles in recent memory, delivering a two-part epic of literary nuance, timely significance and maybe even the promise of another film or two.

Though the movie promises to tell a culturally and politically specific story, what could have been daring is ultimately trite, relying on familiar music biopic tropes.

Is Madame Web a good movie? No. Is it hilariously delightful? Often.

The result is a tough, harrowing work of self-portraiture in which it’s Ito’s own journalistic tenacity, as much as her personal determination and outrage, that leads her to go public with her story, despite enormous pressure to do the opposite.

Out of Darkness is effective enough — and gory — to function as a thriller of the loud-noise-springing variety. But a last-act grasp at profundity in Ruth Greenberg’s screenplay feels unearned.

At a time when extremes in discourse always seem loudest, the modest pleasures of The Monk and the Gun are appealingly reasonable. Brandishing new ways doesn’t have to mean holstering old ones.

This film beams and buzzes inside its closed loop with the hard-won wisdom of acceptance. And it does so while staying in awe of what can never be understood, only appreciated — and if we’re lucky, enjoyed.

There’s enough verve in the concept and performances — and in debuting feature-maker Williams’ exuberant direction — to carry Lisa Frankenstein through.

The extraordinarily perceptive How to Have Sex pulls off many feats of daring: Nicolas Canniccioni’s alcopop-hangover photography, James Jacobs’ chemical club-anthem score, Mia McKenna-Bruce’s star-making central turn. But the most impressive is first-time writer-director Molly Manning Walker getting us not just to forgive her central triad their brash and brainless bravado, but to grieve for it when it’s gone.

Argylle has bone-deep structural issues on a fundamental level, but it is also a failure of directorial execution from top to bottom, resulting in what has to be one of the most expensive worst movies ever made. It’s honestly fascinating — something that should be studied in a lab.

This is the finest work of Arcel’s collaboration with longtime cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk. They craft this Nordic western epic with an eerie beauty and an eye toward the kind of startling violence that can erupt unexpectedly in lawless frontiers.

It takes a confident storyteller to avoid the trap of overexplanation, to give us only a partial glimpse of her characters’ lives, and these narrative elisions have the effect of deepening rather than undercutting the story’s realism.

[A] tender, harrowing and beautifully modulated coming-of-age drama.

There’s also a fascinating dive into the inequalities that bedevil Boys State and Girls State themselves, reminding us how organizations often embody, at a structural level, some of the very problems they’re ostensibly trying to rectify.

It diverts for a while, only to dissipate almost immediately upon conclusion.

It’s bracing to watch a movie whose very flow communicates how to experience it, which can also be said of Zhou’s captivating turn as a young woman committed to being elusive as a ward against what being still and reflective might bring up.

The movie strikes that wild, so-bad-it’s-entertaining chord vigorously. I can’t recommend Miller’s Girl but I also can’t recommend it enough.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell reminds us that confusion is often a necessary first step toward enlightenment, and that bafflement and beauty often go hand in hand. This is a lesson that Thiên must learn as well. The gift of this movie is that it invites us to learn it alongside him.