The fleeting good moments in Operation Finale come from a few of the actors.

Cuarón never seeks a tidy resolution for their loving, lopsided, complicated relationship. But it’s one of the reasons why Roma leaves such a deep and lasting impression.

Levin’s dialogue is relentless. Every line and retort is a punch line, and every punch line more or less amounts to Lindsey and Frank telling each other how much they stink.

The Happytime Murders turns out to be a stupefyingly sh—y puppet movie.

Crime + Punishment makes you angry and scared in equal measure. What it doesn’t do is illuminate the sources of this evil. What about the majority of cops who know the 12 are right but shun them anyway? Would you trust them if they stopped you on the street?

The skateboarding and camaraderie are contrapuntal notes, liberating flurries of motion in a powerful saga of kids who were — and in some cases still are — miserably stuck in place.

It never gets tiring to watch the girls coast down the Manhattan streets, cocky and breezy and effortless, turning the heads of younger girls who gaze at them, starstruck. But it’s also featherlight, not meant to endure much longer than those brief airborne moments Camille and her friends live for.

So there you have it. A Prayer Before Dawn: Fine entertainment. Fine teaching tool.

That’s what’s great about The Wife: Joe is no saint, and his philandering appears to be an open secret in the literary community, but it doesn’t mean Joan doesn’t love him. If she didn’t, none of this would be half as wrenching.

Blaze’s best scene features Kris Kristofferson as Foley’s once-abusive, now near-senile father and Alynda Segarra as his sister, who escaped the old man’s malevolent influence by finding Jesus.

Condor is a ready-made star, and Centineo rises to meet her, the adoring, throaty lunk any introverted teen dreams of coming around and melting away her shyness. Theirs is a teenage romance I can believe in, despite its ridiculously convoluted circumstances.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters when it could be spending it with, you know, the giant shark.

Luckily, Crazy Rich Asians is, at its heart, a fish-out-of-water story, and it has a lot more going for it than its literal money shots.

BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn’t take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he. As much as BlacKkKlansman plays with the mechanics of blaxploitation fantasy, it doesn’t leave one with any question about what’s real.

Thrillingly confounding.

The Darkest Minds is just too foggy to make out much of anything in.

Though slow, it’s intense, and you’re hooked from its first scene — Angel’s final meeting with the detention authorities — to its last, wrenching image. Spiro is a real filmmaker.

It is one of the more sadistic family films I have ever seen, a picture of the residents of a neglected childhood reckoning with the abandonment of their beloved, now grown-up human leader.

It’s tough to sustain a story line this thin for two hours, and the movie runs down at the two-thirds mark.

Cameron Post is the kind of film that openly courts falling into the cinematic limitations of an “issues film.” Akhavan’s sense of place and ensemble do a lot to counter that, but that specificity ends with the main character.

You don’t have to be a moralist to see the tragedy of Scotty Bowers’s life. You only have to have an eye for things that don’t fit comfortably. Tyrnauer has that, as well as the compassion not to probe too deeply. What’s onscreen is enough to make you conclude that you can’t make people truly happy without fixing the world.

There’s raw power in Chomko’s writing, but so much scrupulousness and craft that you feel safe when the time comes to weep.

Like its protagonist, Puzzle finds itself as it goes along, and Agnes becomes a truly interesting person to root for.

As it cliff dives, unprompted, into reheated cocaine-nightmare territory done better by any number of 1990s ’70s nostalgia films before it, it not only ceases to be fun, but stops pretending it has any vision for where its lead characters should go.

It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element.

His sixth Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, isn’t the best of the bunch (that would be number four, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol), but it’s easily the second-best and certainly the Cruise-iest, meaning it’s nearly as entertaining as it is strenuous. Which is a mighty high bar!

It’s quite a mix: Far From the Tree throws so much at you that you’ll want to pick up the book and read (or reread) it. You might be surprised that one of Solomon’s subjects is the accomplished composer Nico Muhly, who’s on the spectrum. Muhly (along with Yo La Tengo) composed the movie’s music, which, like the film and book, doesn’t settle for easy harmonies.

In Dark Web, the threat is wholly of this world, which makes the sequel feel as though it comes from another universe entirely. It is scary, but it isn’t much fun.

The film starts to feel like it’s more invested in selling the idea of the series rather than a film in and of itself.

Here We Go Again ties up these two wackadoo films’ hijinks in a very sincere bow. After all, Mamma Mia is a mom movie, in every way imaginable.

Ultimately, Hotel Transylvania 3 is for very young children, and God love it for that.

Although the script is based on Gauguin’s own writing, the film presents him as such a gloomy Gus that he might have swapped souls with his onetime pal Van Gogh.

The problem isn’t Reiner taking dramatic liberties with the facts, it’s that his toolbox for doing so hasn’t changed since the mid-’90s.

Skyscraper is one of the stupidest movies I’ve seen since San Andreas, but I enjoyed it a great deal — more than San Andreas, certainly, as well as Rampage and Baywatch and most other Dwayne Johnson pictures.

Burnham made his name as a stand-up comedian, and if you can manage to look at Eighth Grade objectively — which isn’t easy, given the wallop it packs — you’ll see that it’s pretty slick.... But the slickness is dispelled whenever Elsie Fisher is onscreen, which is practically always.

The First Purge is pretty good if you’re not averse to caricatures, predictable twists, and lots of familiar B-movie tropes.

The movie’s most exciting moment comes when Weldon realizes that she has been played — that in helping turn the tribes against the Dawes Act, she has won the battle and lost the war, since the U.S. would now have cause to attack. That’s the moment when Woman Walks Ahead should get really good but turns, instead, into a weeper.

With a light touch but deep reserves of respect for fans both old and new Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is an extremely fitting portrait of the influential composer. There’s an air of patience that presides over director Stephen Schible’s footage, even during a period that presents a lot of tumultuous questions for his seemingly unflappable subject.

The director, Tim Wardle, has shaped the film as a detective story in which the more pieces of the puzzle are filled in, the more disgusted and infuriated we become.

It’s busy, harmless fun. Very, very busy.

When Day of the Soldado truly wallows in violence, it does so exquisitely, with the kind of hopelessness that film violence, especially around this subject matter, should convey. But it also destabilizes any marketable attempts at heroism or character investment.

I know I’ve been rather harsh on an indie film that deserves points for its ambitions, so let me end on a brighter note. If Papierniak took that scene with Stanfield and started over with it, he might have a hell of a good rom-com. He needs to learn to separate the gold from the f*cking shit.

The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.

Boundaries is earnest in way that partly makes up for the overbroad characters and stale setup.

The doubt about what is real and what isn’t has permeated so much of the film that when things take a turn for the serious in the final act, we the audience can’t even quite believe what we’re seeing, until the credits roll and you shrug to yourself, “Huh, I guess it was for real.” That’s a weirdly muted note to end such an otherwise over-the-top — conceptually and physically — comedy.

Ultimately, in all its artifice and haphazard but enthusiastic invention, Hotel Artemis makes me a bit nostalgic for French ’90s genre fare of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro and, of course, Luc Besson, embracing their daffiness and dreaminess with an somewhat counterintuitive, almost naïve lack of vanity.

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 is, much like its predecessor, delightful as an animated feature but really, really delightful as a superhero picture. It’s proof that someone (not anyone, mainly Bird) can make a Marvel-type movie that’s fleet and shapely, with action sequences rich in style rather than tumult.

McKay does no editorializing in En el Séptimo Día. He’s a simple, graceful storyteller — so graceful that we don’t notice all the technique he brings to the task of making us see the world through José’s eyes.

Nancy is a grim piece of work, but Choe’s empathy for her protagonist gives the film its distinctive texture — woebegone, with flickers of both hope and dread.

Alex Strangelove is a little stylistically unambitious, nor is it terribly compelling as a romance — who Alex ends up with is ultimately beside the point.

A wonderful breather from reality, from which you come back more conscious of — and dismayed by — the hate that more than ever runs the world.

The movie plays like a strenuous imitation of Steven Spielberg instead of the real deal.

I left Ocean’s 8 more convinced than ever that no amount of fierce, fantastic female ensembles can overcome the mediocrity of a dull male director.

The experience of watching it, especially given its dreamlike unreality and head-scratching punnery (this is a deeply unfunny movie) is like listening to a doddering old man for whom every story — about art, politics, local goings on — ends up being about how every woman is an evil witch that can’t be trusted.

Every scene adds another onion-skinlike layer, adding density and mass so slowly that you hardly notice the emotional weight of it all until it is suddenly overwhelming.

Just as the “French Extreme” film Martyrs set a new standard for garish sadism, Hereditary raises the bar on emotional agony. If you want to see things you can never un-see and feel pain you can never un-feel, here’s the ultimate test.

Adrift is enough of a boilerplate piece of survival drama that you know to expect those beats more or less coming on schedule, but Woodley makes it more emotionally satisfying than it would be otherwise.

The agreeable looseness edges into a less agreeable limpness.

A great and grimy little screw-turner of sci-fi schlock, the kind that they truly don’t make anymore, the kind that would make Carpenter and Cameron proud.

It’s remarkable how engaging and light on its feet the director and cast are able to keep this subject matter, how much permission he gives them to f*ck up and try again.

The bigger problem is that stupidity just isn’t a very interesting subject.

It feels like the self-admittedly emotionally bottled Talley is ready to talk about all of it. It’s too bad his biographer is less so.

It’s the 48- and 13-year-old Jenny sitting side by side, spent, against the wall of a women’s restroom, together in their helplessness, with little to show for their pain except this extraordinary movie.

Ibiza doesn’t have the strength of wit and character to suffice as a hangout vacation movie, and it has zero idea how to be a romantic comedy, either. It’s not a movie, it’s Netflix.

Two biographical documentaries in, and it still feels like we’re in need of a Houston film that digs into her music first, and the hows and whys of its enduring power.

Its lead protagonists and their endless reserve of raw, bittersweet chemistry are Kahiu’s greatest asset.

Unfortunately McEwan, adapting his own work, and first-time director Dominic Cooke, have a hard time rendering the touchy, interior subject matter cinematic; a potentially promising story of an emotional and physical impasse is flattened so much as to be offensive.

There is so much fascinating, underplayed tension running through Burning.... I was a little let down, then, when Burning lost its steam in its second half.

As it turns out, Book Club is only tangentially “about” the Fifty Shades trilogy, and that’s what makes it so smart.

Like any conspiracy theorist, you sense that landing on an actually airtight unified theory would almost spoil the fun for Mitchell.

The film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art.

First Reformed is rigorously austere (as befits the author of Transcendental Style in Film), but every frame suggests a longing for a world elsewhere. It could be argued that it gets away from Schrader, who probably had to wrest the script from his own hands to begin shooting.

Solo: A Star Wars Story hits all its marks except the one it needed to hit most: accounting for one of pop culture’s most cantankerous charismatics.

We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.

By the end, the transformation of China is more compelling than Qiao’s love for Bin, but watching both unfold over time is continually thought-provoking, given the ephemerality of whole cities, much less love affairs.

I was shocked to discover that I was actually … touched. Climax is a small miracle, and if this is Noé going soft (for him, of course), that might actually be a very good thing for the movies.

Pawlikowski understands the mythic, destructive pull such narratives have on us — as audience members and those swept up ourselves.

Revenge inverts the gutbucket revenge genre without transcending it. That said, why should men have all the fun? The movie is like Ladies’ Night at a sleaze-o bar.

What’s Terminal about? It’s about 90 minutes. That’s a cheap shot, but since the film doesn’t establish a baseline of reality, it’s hard to pick out a premise. It’s a series of playlets stitched together with the seams hanging out.

Lu Over the Wall...is every bit as imaginative as the rest of his body of work, but whereas previous Yuasa works would veer from ominous to outrageous to sweet to explicit to metaphysical, Lu is perfectly happy to stop at sweet. And so am I, quite frankly: Yuasa can be really good at sweet, something that’s often overshadowed by his more mile-a-minute tendencies.

The mystery becomes popcorn-chompingly compelling, each new piece of information adding shading and dimension to the true shape of the family. Nobody is above suspicion or below empathy.

Both the film and the “notorious” figure at its center are the best imaginable retaliation to mansplaining.

By shifting its perspective and updating its anxieties, Overboard is a decent-to-great model for a rom-com renaissance, the kind of film that sends one out on a high note great enough to blur many of the blemishes that have come before.

Most Likely to Murder, a perfectly fine and forgettable story about a man who still has some growing up to do coming back to his childhood home, is not the worst or the best, merely the latest.

Cream-puff light, but is deceptively rigorous, and about so much more than one woman’s quest to find the One.

Early in The Rachel Divide, a commentator describes Dolezal as a Rorschach blot, and the movie is one, too. Some people think it’s a hatchet job, others that it gives its subject’s commitment to social justice too much credence. I found it pretty much down the middle.

Despite a few scenes that are too on the nose, The Seagull... turns out to be very fine. Above all, it’s a platform for a handful of definitive performances.

A brutal, meandering depiction of a quarter-life crisis, Gillan’s script is staunchly resistant of silver linings or “it gets better” messaging.

Thanks to a beautifully lush, moody score by Michael Nyman and great sound editing, even a fan who has pored over these archives obsessively will see them in a new light. What McQueen reminds those obsessives and laypeople alike is that fashion is an incredibly emotional art form, and McQueen’s work was some of the most moving there was or ever will be.

Cold Water has the kind of emotional purity that puts it in a class by itself. Its blue fog envelops you.

Duck Butter is a lot — I felt dizzy upon leaving the theater, like I myself had just gone through that same wired 24 hours the protagonists did. For that, I have to give Arteta and Shawkat props — and as the writing debut for the latter, it isn’t shabby at all

Disobedience isn’t packed with surprises, but that’s not why you go to a movie like this. You go to watch humans with wayward emotions labor to make peace with (or opt to war against) a formal, ritualized way of life.

Flagrantly, bombastically extravagant, it plays its audience like a hundred million fiddles.

This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

The title character in Tully, the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, doesn’t make her entrance until well into the film, after it’s established that the protagonist, Marlo (Charlize Theron), is moving from postpartum depression to postpartum desperation — and that’s when the movie enters uncharted territory and comes to life.

The plot-engine joke — that Schumer’s character Renee hits her head and wakes up convinced she’s gorgeous — is nothing if not well-intentioned, but veers into cheap and easy enough times to be misinterpreted. When it’s good, though, and when Schumer’s fully locked into her take-no-prisoners charm assault, it’s pretty undeniably delightful stuff.

During the many scenes back home in Jamaica, blessed with the lively Jones clan as subjects, the director doesn’t have any idea what to do with her camera.

I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.