Above all else, Clemency is a supreme actors’ showcase, backed by a director of fine-tuned emotional intelligence and a cinematographer who understands the depth and beauty of black skin tones.

There’s a touch of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” to Weathering With You that makes the direction it ultimately veers off into both surprisingly abrupt and darkly pragmatic. It’s also, in its own way, optimistic. Maybe, the film suggests, before anyone can think about saving the world, they have to figure out how to live in it.

Dolittle is a calamity for the ages.

This is, indeed, a somewhat kinder, gentler Bad Boys: less proudly offensive, less extravagant, but still basically the same collection of stylish clichés made palatable by a duo of likable stars with good chemistry.

It’s a gloriously hand-animated existential fable that manages to be both genuinely sweet and thoroughly twisted.

It’s hard to guess whether the story was mangled by studio reedits or just didn’t have much to say to begin with — both seem possible. The bigger question is why so many strong actors signed on for this misfire.

The primary pleasure of Underwater is the spectacle of everything going wrong, all at once.

Jordan has a great face for doubt and inner conflict. There’s a quizzical, nervous quality to him — which is also why when he does action movies, he’s so wonderfully unpredictable — and you can sense his devotion to justice clashing with his genuine fear.

It feels, exhilaratingly, like the throwing down of a gauntlet. Gerwig’s Little Women demands its viewers reconsider these familiar characters and what we’ve always assumed they stood for. It doesn’t just brim with life, it brims with ideas about happiness, economic realities, and what it means to push against or to hew to the expectations laid out for one’s gender.

The artifice of the aesthetic premise overwhelms any of the film’s other intentions.

There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent. It doesn’t need to be timely to be an artifact of its time — a movie about nothing but song and dance and, most important of all, about cats.

Under J.J. Abrams, The Rise of Skywalker hits its marks and bashes ahead, so speedy that no emotion sinks in too deeply.

If the righteous retelling ever feels heavy-handed, it’s Poots’s command of her role and the cast’s electric chemistry that make this a reckoning fit for our fantasies.

Howard is the summation of the Safdies’ culture, in which the drive for life collides head-on with the drive for death, and the upshot is cinema.

We shouldn’t be so smug as to assume that we would always know the right thing to do, or even be brave enough to do it, Malick seems to say. A true act of resistance should crack our universe open.

I think Eastwood’s audience is going to eat this movie up, and maybe even turn it into a rallying cry. The legacy of the bombing of Olympic Centennial Park might end up suiting the bomber just fine.

You can occasionally see flashes of the better, sharper movie Bombshell could have been, and while there aren’t many of those moments, there are enough that it can’t be written off entirely.

Jumanji: The Next Level, represents the version we might have dreaded, the tired and only modestly funny one that just coasts on its proved, no-longer-novel premise.

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

Queen & Slim does a disservice to both the themes of love and anger by never giving the latter the depth it deserves, leaving the film a beautiful object to behold but a hollow narrative to consider.

The Two Popes may be a fantasy about a closed institution flinging its doors open, but it’s also a compelling actor’s showcase. The combination is surprisingly potent.

A production designed to within an inch of its life, Knives Out always seems on the brink of being cleverer than it is, never quite shaking off its cobwebs and entering the present tense.

It’s awkward and weird, and yet all that awkwardness and weirdness give it personality and charm and a freewheeling, nonsensical quality that feels refreshing.

The bad guys have all the money but at least we have indie filmmakers and movie stars like Ruffalo (who vigorously and successfully campaigned to keep the frackers out of New York that caused havoc across the Delaware from him in Pennsylvania). Dark Waters is hardly a cure, but it keeps the issue aboveground.

It’s easier to think about Frozen II as a product than as a film because a (sometimes stunning-looking) product is all that it feels like.

I actually liked about two-thirds of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; I got impatient when Mister Rogers receded into the background and the film turned full-time to solving the problems of Lloyd Vogel, who’s based on the magazine writer Tom Junod.

They don’t feel like black characters grafted onto roles that were initially conceived of as white, but they don’t always feel entirely formed either, an impression that’s not helped by the choice to keep the siblings in largely separated narratives.

It’s a dry, arm’s-length movie that seeps into your blood as it seeps into Jones’s.

Where the last two Charlie’s Angels installments were sold on their trio of stars, this soft reboot has leads at various levels of recognizability, and they all seem to be acting in their own movie.

The movie is an old-fashioned rouser with a lot of new-fashioned virtuosity.

Baumbach’s main characters are written and acted straight as befits their personal integrity, but the rest of Marriage Story is done in a satirist’s broad strokes — a penetrating, often inspired satirist.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself be a sucker for the obvious — whether it’s for a holiday movie, a ridiculous romance, or an awkwardly grafted-on but very timely theme.

A score by the Newton Brothers thumps like an errant heartbeat. The actors sparkle with chemistry. At times, its aesthetic and thematic pursuits click into place and the film sings at a mournful register as it charts the generational trauma and addiction of Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor). But Doctor Sleep proves stronger in parts than as a whole.

Apart from those nutty camera angles and lenses, which throw you out of the action, The Current War is absorbing.... It never quite snaps into focus, though.

Harriet only highlights how this genre can fail despite the so-called important nature of the picture and a talented black director at the helm.

It’s a carefully crafted world of hyperfemininity intended to be as ominously smothering as it is pretty, and if the story that Paradise Hills, the directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, told were as sharp as its visuals, it’d have a guaranteed future as a cult classic. Instead, it’s a disappointingly half-baked riff on The Stepford Wives whose brand of feminism feels more 1970s than 2010s.

That’s part of the beauty of this film: It games out very real, very human impulses to their surreal breaking points, only to uncover even greater truths.

Nothing about the film is especially coherent, including its simultaneous status as a piece of art, a gesture of religious conviction, and a shameless act of commerce. It feels like notes from an artist who’s not sure if he wants to express himself as a worshiper or an object of worship — but who’s prepared to give it a try anyhow, on the biggest screen possible.

Frankie is a messy movie that spreads itself too thin over this sprawling cast of characters.

These are Doritos movies, indeed: a lot of crunching, a lot of empty calories.

The Lighthouse is such an effective exercise in projecting claustrophobia, in both a physical and psychological sense, that it’d be unbearable to watch if it weren’t so funny. Thankfully, it’s a scream.

Let me add something in the movie’s favor. Although I don’t love Jojo Rabbit, I love that it exists.

The sequel is a string of callbacks and remember-this moments that ask an awful lot of something whose charms and cultural impact were modest at best — a feature-length effort at congratulating the audience for having shown up for the original film a decade ago.

But a star — even a great star — can only do so much when the film around her is a haphazard mess on nearly every level, only able to work in fits and starts.

Rarely have I seen a horror-comedy as joyless as Little Monsters. Which feels like a weird (and sad) thing to say, because rarely have I seen a horror-comedy that is also so insistent in its humor, so determined to try and entertain me, as Little Monsters. It’s fast, loud, and impossibly shrill — except when it quiets down, which is when it briefly, belatedly comes to life.

At its core is a scenario in which someone’s given the chance to confront their younger self and call out their worst choices — one that feels like it has more to do with therapy than with all the unconvincing action in which it’s unfortunately packaged.

Beyond its brash confidence as a piece of filmmaking and its homages to the Western (including the use of a wider frame than was used on the show), El Camino is fan service executed at a very high level — an attempt to answer the perennial child’s bedtime-story question, “And then what happened?” after the words “The End” have already been pronounced and the parent has reached for the light switch.

The King has enough in its coffers to keep you moderately engaged.

Audiences aren’t as malleable as our most overprotective impulses might lead us to believe, which is why kids can both adore Wrinkles and shriek at Wrinkles and why the kids are all right.

Pain and Glory is at once the gentlest and most emotionally naked movie Pedro Almodóvar has ever made.

Dolemite Is My Name has the glee of a John Waters movie in which it’s freaks-versus-squares, with freakishness the only healthy design for living.

I have to tip my cap to such a bold attempt to induce in the audience his heroine’s inner flux and fragmentation. The double-entendre title tells you to expect a trip, and you get one.

The downside to the performance is the downside to the movie: It’s one note played louder and louder.

For Scorsese, the slowing-down in The Irishman is radical, and it pays off in the long series of final scenes in which the characters are too old to move as they once did. They can’t hide inside motion, and so Scorsese doesn’t — and the upshot is one of his most satisfying films in decades.

It’s hard not to gather up these move complicated moments and wish for more of them — to think about how much better it would have been if she had gotten to play Garland as a flesh-and-blood person and not as the saint of suffering for showbiz.

A broad agitprop comedy written by Scott Z. Burns that’s labored in parts but is, as a whole, sensationally valuable.

Quick as it is, though, you have time to wonder how these Mexican assassins can watch their comrades getting skewered, dismembered, and eviscerated by Rambo’s traps and not think, Maybe we should pull out and rethink this assault.

James Gray’s space opera Ad Astra is so eerily, transfixingly beautiful that I want to purge from my mind its resolution.

It’s a half-assed premise, given a half-assed treatment that makes Wayne’s World look like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The performances are loose and self-aware, the filmmaking strictly at the level of sketch comedy, the jokes amiably predictable, and the story a mess.

Loro itself becomes somewhat Berlusconian, though associating that pseudo-fascist slimeball with anything this visually resplendent should be some sort of crime.

But days later, I keep coming back to Jennifer Lopez’s performance. With a wave of her hand or a dip in her hips, light seems to change and move with her. Lopez has always been charming — even great — in films like "Out of Sight" (1998). But here she’s doing the best work of her career, weaponizing an undeniable charisma and turning it into something hard, pointed, righteous, even angry.

The Goldfinch is too artful to deserve that kind of rejection, but too arty to keep you from saying, “What did I just see?”

How pleasurable to once again escape to this thoroughly ridiculous, richly rendered place and live there, if only for a couple of hours until the credits roll.

It Chapter Two moves with an almost too swift purpose, never feeling the weight of its nearly three-hour runtime; although it is long, the film feels frustratingly thin. Meanwhile, the film is aggressively sentimental, and moments of emotional catharsis or terror don’t often hit the way they need to. When they do, it is because of the dedication of the acting.

Bloody hell, the Brits do low-key, paranoid procedural dramas like Official Secrets well, with a pervading chill and no flash: The crispness cuts like a knife.

Don’t Let Go is a slog. I wish it loosened up, better balanced the potential fear, joy, wonder, and delight spooling out of its premise to yield a more adventurous result. Instead, it carries itself with dread and stilted seriousness, alleviated only by noteworthy performances from Reid and Oyelowo.

On balance, I admire the hell out of Collaizo for choosing to tell a more emotionally convoluted story, even if it sometimes kills the momentum.

It’s a great, expansive, deeply humanist work, angry but empathetic to its core. It gestures toward the end of the working world we know — and to the rise of the machines.

At its best, the movie is a vicious, richly funny, and artfully brutal tale that places Weaving’s performance as its gravitational center. She lends Grace a scrappy, sharp energy that beguiles.

He’s a deceptively crafty director (he fakes naturalism beautifully in movies like "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise," and "Boyhood"), but he can’t find a suitable form for Maria Semple’s patchwork best seller about a misanthropic, malcontented ex-architect named Bernadette.

None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.

Some might want to leave the theater and file a lawsuit. I stayed and laughed. It’s funny because it’s abominable.

The Kitchen is one of the most frustrating films in recent memory owing to how it squanders the mammoth potential baked into its dramatic genre — and its cast.

If, like so many conspiracy-mongers, Brügger is in this to make his name, whatever the social consequences, his comeuppance should be swift. But I want to believe that this isn’t a stunt and that his first-person meta nonsense — his desire to call attention to his floundering — is a sign of honesty, not obscurantism.

It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

There is absolutely nothing original in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which just goes to show that you don’t need originality to be effective.

In the end, you’re left with a movie that doesn’t quite jell but expands in the mind. It’s an excellent Book Club movie — it demands to be discussed, debated, embraced, or (perhaps) rejected.

At its best, Hobbs & Shaw offers a refreshing antidote to the bloat. I’d rather watch another one of these than sit through one more Vin Diesel speech about family.

It’s constructed like a meathead melodrama — though with odd, last-act dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.

That drifting, elegiac quality (which at times may recall his once-neglected, now-classic Jackie Brown) is the film’s great strength. There are several major set-pieces — some hilarious, some creepy, one absurdly violent — that will get people talking, but perhaps the most powerful is a lengthy, seemingly aimless one that comes smack dab in the middle.

Ultimately, Skin — despite its artful compositions and meditative editing choices — devolves into a reductive redemption fable that doesn’t fully wrestle with the racism or politics governing Babs’s decisions.

For Sama doesn’t feel like raw footage — it has been carefully shaped, with a bit of movie-­ish suspense during the final hours, when the last of the families in East Aleppo were told they could surrender to the regime but were fired on anyway. The ending is a little fancy for my taste — a montage of the good times and an overhead shot of Waad and her baby walking through the rubble.

If Luz had been a play, I’d probably have walked out halfway through, but as a film I found it eerie enough to stay rooted.

The only surprise is the level of violence — not just beyond "The Karate Kid" but beyond "Fight Club." The problem with that strategy is that unless you’re knocked out, you’re just grossed out and eager to go. You practice the art of self-defense against the movie.

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

I laughed way too hard at too many points in Stuber to entirely dismiss it, even if, as a movie, it doesn’t really hold together.

Crawl is a great example of a simple story exceedingly well-told. It’s a bloody adventure full of teeth-gnawing turns of fortune, mordant wit, vicious gator kills, and surprising tenderness — that clocks in at a blessedly fleet 87 minutes. It’s a perfect horror film for the summer, as much an ode to the cataclysmic, humbling aspects of Mother Nature as it is a love letter to father-daughter relationships.

It doesn’t help that the characters in some cases have been rendered with such realism that they have lost all human expression on their faces. Maybe that’s the idea — to not anthropomorphize them too much and to stay grounded in zoological authenticity. But they’re still talking, and singing, only now their faces are inexpressive; it’s a weird disconnect.

Beyond being tiresome, Intermezzo is just plain ugly, with seemingly little care given to the image — odd, perhaps, given that the film is so clearly and confrontationally about its own director’s gaze.

My ideal Leonard Cohen documentary would contain another hour’s worth of concert footage and be screened outdoors on the island of Hydra. Otherwise, this is as full a filmed portrait of the man and his muse as you could ever hope to see.

The second half of Spider-Man: Far from Home is a single, scary, brilliantly sustained climax in which what’s real seems just as improbable as what isn’t.

Curtis isn’t the director of Yesterday; Danny Boyle has been brought in to lend his shallow virtuosity. But fluid transitions don’t make the movie less clunky. Patel has an appealing presence and a lovely, McCartney-­like tenor, but the musical numbers leave an odd taste.

The final sequence dodges (or elides) many of the movie’s central logistical dilemmas, but the song (“Glasgow,” written by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith, and Kate York) and the performance are so rousing it almost doesn’t matter. Like the best country music, the movie finds its own kind of truth.

Unfortunately, Child’s Play is undone by a lack of tension even its best performances can’t conjure, and a familiar story that only skips lightly along the surface of gnarly ideas.

The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean nightmares, and Aster is very ambitious and very blurry.

It’s so aggressively puerile and phallocentric (big swinging dicks, big guns) it could be taken as a parody of a puerile, phallocentric action comedy — a hotfoot to feminists and girly-men. That’s a distinction without a difference, though, since either way it stinks to heaven.

The film never quite lets us know what to feel. It’s an unnerving little movie, one that at any given moment might deliver a burst of feeling, or a big laugh, or a jump scare. It whipsaws you this way and that, and this sense of disorientation is new for a company whose work usually feels so carefully calibrated, so perfectly put-together.

What makes Late Night — otherwise a largely predictable story in a familiar mold — really pop is Kaling’s script, which is at the blunter and frankly more exciting spectrum of what Kaling has proven herself to be capable of in her writing career thus far.