More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies.

Mothers’ Instinct is, indeed, pretty terrible, and not in the so-bad-it’s-good sense, and yet there’s something strangely moving about it. It’s a poignant example of how what looks like rich material to actors can turn out to be lousy material for audiences.

It recreates the sensation of drowning in your own hormone-churned emotions so vividly that the film would be difficult to watch if its very existence didn’t serve as a kind of pressure valve. And it provides reassurance that while things may get worse before they get better, this period of life does pass, and eventually you get enough distance to look back on it from the outside as well as from within.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a particularly good movie — I’m not even sure it is a movie — but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it.

Their story seems genuine, but the filmmaking can make it all feel premeditated, in part because directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina are determined to hit every plot turn at the most obvious points.

That compulsion to reverse engineer serious stakes for a fundamentally frivolous story is Twisters’ most contemporary quality and its most irritating.

Not quite a history lesson and not quite a rom-com and certainly not an epic, the movie is a mild but pleasant mishmash of genres held together by the sheer charisma of Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, two actors who seem unexpectedly well suited to each other’s energies.

Sing Sing may be an awkward chimera of a film, combining vibrant source material with synthetic attempts to serve as a star vehicle, but its insistence on the healing capacity of art is enough to soften the hardest of hearts.

Longlegs is terrifying for much of its running time, and it should satisfy most genre fiends. But the greatness that earlier seemed well within its grasp eludes it by the end.

What made the first two so successful — Beverly Hills Cop III is not canon in my world — is that they also functioned as delivery systems for Murphy’s charms as a total ham willing to freak out or speak in a parade of goofy voices for the sake of getting a laugh. Axel F does that too, but more than anything, it’s a reminder of how fun it can be to watch a Beverly Hills Cop movie.

Alongside Gladstone’s expressive performance, Fancy Dance’s ability to choreograph that criticism gives the film a singular grace.

A family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie.

The don’t-speak values of the series, faithfully preserved by Sarnoski and beautifully expressed by Nyong’o, are still welcome in a Hollywood landscape that would prefer to drown audiences in sound. But if you repeat it enough, a bold new approach to multiplex thrills becomes just more noise.

Daddio is a classic two-hander, focusing entirely on the seesawing power dynamic between two very different individuals. As such, it’s at times theatrical and precious, a bit too on the nose with its metaphors and symbols and running themes. But boy, can it be fun to watch these two go at it.

The film lands somewhere between hand-holding fan service and brutal portrait of chronic illness.

As the crowning touch on West’s horror-movie mille-feuille, MaXXXine demonstrates that the trilogy never really had all that much going on, depth-wise, despite its sprawl. But Goth does her own synthesis of the characters she’s played across the titles, and the result is alternately disturbing, touching, and downright triumphant.

By replicating the process of dehumanization, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green Border is unforgettable, in all senses of the word.

When I came back to the film months later, the intricacy of its emotional undercurrents bowled me over, as though I just needed to know what was coming to fully appreciate what Baker was up to.

The film wallows in a particular brand of Americana — denim and leather, cornfields and Harley-Davidsons, crumpled packs of cigarettes and boilermakers on the bar at a dive — without being comfortable laying claim to it.

The Devil’s Bath is a deeply fucked-up picture. I say that with admiration.

Ultraman: Rising’s canniest trick is the way it sustains narrative momentum while staying true to the realities of new parenthood.

There’s a lot jam-packed into this movie, but it’s in such a rush to get through it all and to not bore us that it … well, it bores us. We’re lost, and we’re clearly not supposed to be.

Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now.

New characters and elements get added, the metaphor becomes overextended, and the idea that this world is meant to be a reflection of one person’s psyche gets lost in a sea.

Not every figure in films like this one needs to be rendered with full psychological complexity, but when a horror movie rushes past a promising start in order to wallow in clichés, it feels as though it’s squandering a premise.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die serves as passable entertainment. But one does miss the gonzo action spectacles of yore, which this franchise once embodied.

The off-kilter, absurdist vibe of the picture is enchanting, but it’s rooted in deep horror: The whole movie is about the ways that cruelty and injustice become codified. Sometimes, the only way to preserve your sanity is to go a little insane yourself.

Watching Robot Dreams, we find ourselves reflecting on how our own lives have changed as we’ve grown: the friends we’ve left behind but haven’t forgotten, the cities that have transformed around us, the wisdom we’ve accrued, and all the ways in which we’re still slightly damaged from all that living.