Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is as feverishly inventive in its visual presentation as it is slapdash and anemic in its storytelling.

While this may be yet another potentially disposable action movie, it’s still worth seeing on the big screen at full volume if you can. The action is big and the stars give it their all, even if the dialogue leaves something to be desired.

I found Contagion both flawed and fascinating, but it's not an entertainment.

For the first time, Scream seems at risk of becoming just another horror perennial, one that fans go see because there’s a new installment, not because it has anything new to say.

Has moments of heart-pounding suspense and brief glimmers of greatness, thanks to fine performances by Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams, but overall feels uneven, sprawling and strangely incomplete.

I found Howl a fascinating and imaginative evocation of mid-20th-century liberation, a mere and merciful 90 minutes long.

Eight for Silver howls the arrival of a new and exciting take on the old werewolf story, with an inventive mythology and a memorable xenomorph-inspired scene that will nest in your nightmares. Sadly, the good parts of the film are trapped within the monstrous body of an overly long and average feature film.

Historians are already calling Anonymous preposterous humbug, but I found it a complex cornucopia of ideas and panache. You go away sated.

Perkins’ take on the short story The Monkey certainly shows that he’s a filmmaker with a unique eye for horror (and comedy), though his attempts at grounding the story are less assured.

You feel the late genius through the way Day carries her body, so lissome yet creaking with the weight of both her talent and addiction. The Rise Up singer not only matches our imagination’s version of Holiday, but somehow beats it: she seems so present yet ethereally sozzled in a manner that suggests she may be operating on another plane.

It’s a late-life coming-of-age story, and it’s not great. But she gives it all she’s got, and she’s never been sunnier or funnier.

Despite the work of a first-rate cast, it doesn’t feel real to me.

The film, written by Jason Fuchs and based on a novel Elly Conway (who fans have, perhaps incorrectly, suspected is a pen name for Taylor Swift), boasts strong performances and creatively memorable sequences, but sometimes loses itself in a roller coaster of plot twists that many will see coming.

Maybe this is just a whimsical trip with quirky characters and little depth. Maybe we’re never supposed to really understand or care about anyone’s motivation or background. There are great moments and a great idea here. Without that connective substance, though, the car gets stuck in neutral.

It’s filled with powerful ideas about the many ways that violence—of the body, of the state and of the soul—manifests in men, and the generational ripple effects therein, even if it doesn’t cohere enough to be consistently engaging.

It oscillates between moving and manufactured, but the movie’s honest portrayal of life on a tribal reservation and a powerful performance by Lily Gladstone keep things grounded.

Heart of Stone is happy to take its cues from predecessors in the spy genre—which isn’t a problem in and of itself. The formula does still work, but the sum of the movie’s parts doesn’t quite add up the same.

The Grandmaster offers welcome relief from a moviegoing summer spent in sensory overload.

The film ends up getting stuck in a no man’s land between fiction and documentary, never quite coming together as a complete narrative.

In its best moments, The King’s Man feels like you and your friends have just dumped out your great grandfather’s dusty crate of tin soldiers to create a game that has no rules whatsoever beyond doing something ridiculous. But the movie’s politics? Ugh. They are the cinematic equivalent of your British uncle complaining about cabbies with foreign accents or claiming that Brexit didn’t go nearly far enough.

The film works because of Mr. Harrelson's magnetism.

Is Wonder Woman 1984 entertaining? Sure, it’s fun, hits all the right superhero marks, and visually, the 1980-something world is a technicolor throwback to behold. But if our heroine is supposed to represent the good and hope for all humanity, one has to wonder who specifically this humanity is reserved for.

The film itself plays like an extended riff on the famous scene where the Frankenstein monster befriends a little girl.

But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”

This is a movie about action, not acting, and although, under the circumstances, the cast does yeoman work in roles that can only be called generic, in the long haul they can’t save the script and direction from being sometimes boring and always predictable.

A Teacher is more in the vein of Michael Haneke’s brooding 2001 film, "The Piano Teacher."

Amidst this dull rendering of a genuinely great true story, García Bernal shines. The actor is nothing if not charismatic, and his lasting screen presence brings much to Cassandro—both the film and the Lucha Libre wrestler.

Despite its protagonist, voiced by British actor Stephen Fry, the film feels oddly disjointed, as if there’s not enough story to sustain 90 minutes of beautifully-made stop-motion and hand-drawn animation.