The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.

It’s not just the action and the magic that flop. Even the film’s more intimate moments fall flat.

It plays like a movie-length bout of aversion therapy aimed at our instinctive fondness for motor-mouthed strivers with Mikey’s every small victory creating more dread.

With previous films like the Oscar-winning Great Beauty and the politically charged biopics Il Divo and Loro, Sorrentino indulged his fondness for boisterous, bunga-bunga stylization. He is contemporary cinema’s mad poet of unchecked hedonism. But he holds himself back this time around. The Hand of God isn’t realistic or gritty (or, God forbid, subtle), but it is more subdued.

Whether this new picture is a masterpiece, or a masterful reimagining of a troublesome original, will have to remain in the eye of the beholder.

In some ways, it encapsulates the director’s best and worst instincts. It might be his most personal film, a genuine effort to understand the connection between two of his key obsessions, spiritual faith and human impulse. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that the film wants to outrage us into a response, but its supposed transgressions often feel tired and pro forma.

Licorice Pizza — a movie as exasperating as it is delightful — could be described as an exploration of the unstable ground where Alana’s arrested development and Gary’s precociousness meet.

The film finds a raw beauty in the wonders and heartbreaks of everyday life. It’s a humble portrait of a family’s deepening connections supported by a number of cinematic pleasures — expert sound design and cinematography; touching performances by Norman and Hoffman; and a tremendous showing from Joaquin Phoenix, operating at a register he’s rarely found before. It’s a career best for him — lovely, empathetic, humane.

Gaga is wildly watchable in the role, broad but unwinking, an absolute scream, and the movie only really makes sense when it’s about her.

It’s a movie that sings, poignantly, from many times at once.

When King Richard works, it sings.

Branagh wisely gives the movie the quality of a childhood memory, of stolen moments and eavesdropped conversations.

Despite the ticking clock of Finch’s rapidly progressing illness, the movie doesn’t build up much urgency or excitement. The script is pretty thin, almost all premise and little incident. But director Miguel Sapochnik has the eye to make this world compellingly hostile and bleak, and that counts for something.

The picture may not fully cohere, but it has an infectious energy all its own. The Harder They Fall is a mess, but it’s a fun mess.

With Eternals, Marvel proves itself to be nothing more than a staid, lumbering black hole.

There’s a sealed-off quality to The Souvenir Part II that the first installment doesn’t have, a sense of surrendering to the idea that it’s possible to authentically portray only oneself — which may be true and may be a creative dead end. But even that turns out to be by design, something both the film and its protagonist can acknowledge and then escape.

In restoring Cousteau’s human side, Becoming Cousteau shows us both his brilliance and his shortcomings, and it suggests that these extremes were fundamentally connected. He was soft-spoken and modest on the surface yet consumed by an ambition that was driven as much by his remorse as by his vision.

Whatever its occasional stumbles, Last Night in Soho is a mostly intoxicating affair.

It’s a romp, full of touches that go by almost too quickly to pick up on — I was partial to the strongman who plays a small but key role — but the lingering mood is unmistakably sad.

In its glimpse into the lives of partnered-up fictional directors, Bergman Island invites its viewer to guess how much it’s a reflection of Hansen-Løve’s actual relationship, while also acknowledging the gap between the art someone makes and the person they are.

You have to admire the effort — even as you survey, mouth agape, the calamitous results.

The Last Duel is full of incident and historical detail, and its universe is a complicated one — but it seems the script, by its very nature, has ingeniously done all the necessary underlining for us. Even as it pretends to add complexity and context, it simplifies and focuses.

By the time the final act rolls around, Lamb approaches the idea that there’s a price that must be paid with a shrugging diffidence rather than impending doom. It’s such an underwhelming conclusion to a film with such a compelling start.

In its subtext, this movie tells us that nothing is as good as you might hope. That’s true of the era that Tony would later, wrongly, glorify. And it’s true of a movie that is fascinating to study and consider, but not nearly as good as the television series that made us wish for this movie to exist.

It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can.

The result is a piece that’s more personal, but also not as rigorous and objective.

Washington manages the near-impossible feat of delivering his lines as though he’s putting the words together in the moment, speaking some of the most famous sentences in the English language as though they’re actually being dredged up out of Macbeth’s roiling consciousness.

That magnetic, musical pull toward Evan is at work in Chbosky’s movie version. But now the pull is coupled with a powerful push — in other words, repulsion — that keeps us from being seduced.