At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.

While a little dark and a little unsteady—and boxed in a bit by the limitations of its genre—Flora & Ulysses still hits most of the right beats and manages to find some resonant, intelligent things to say about some pretty grown-up topics.

Even as it endeavors to ultimately subvert a few Archie Comics tropes and deepen a few of its initial teen-movie stereotypes, The Archies feels reluctant to instigate lasting change in its characters, like a TV series preparing for a long run. Here’s the thing, though: I’d happily spend another two and a half hours with The Archies, so long as it kept the music going.

Good Grief is not a dramedy (even though it is marketed as one), but rather a somber film about the messiness of grief and its often unforgiving, even destructive, grip.

Anybody could direct this kind of story, and many already have. But There’s Something Wrong with the Children is right in Benjamin’s wheelhouse, and her skill with this familiar set-up is a major boon.

Brilliant landscape photography and two pairs of poignant performances elevate the drama to an enjoyable distance above sea level.

In the end, does a live-action The Little Mermaid feel vital? No. It gives fans of the animated original pretty much the same movie, beat for beat, with some slight adjustments that score on the positive side.

It’s pleasant summer-evening entertainment like something out of 1995, and only occasionally gets too puffed up about what should be modest aims. That’s the advantage of pastiche: It’s hard to do it quite so self-seriously.

The Commuter isn’t a tough puzzle to solve, and it veers closely to being obvious at times. But easy, unsubtle, unabashedly masculine action films don’t need nuance as long as they’re this much of a goofy pleasure to watch.

Adapted from Find a Way, Nyad’s book about her experience, Nyad is an inspiring tale of perseverance and refusing to give up on yourself. However, much like Free Solo, it’s also an exploration of the kind of person it takes to do what Nyad did at her age—and it’s often not a positive picture.

An intimate drama about a family disbanded by abuse, Montana Story is superbly acted, but lacks a formidable narrative capable of carrying its protagonists.

Raising Bertie is a moving chronicle, and a potent treatise on institutional failings that knows to demonstrate said problems instead of merely preaching them.

The Third Murder may not be Kore-eda’s best work, but the film proves a satisfying challenge, a complex exploration of sin and righteousness in an amoral world.

Day Shift’s gory, cheesy, vampire-hunting comedy-action film starring Jamie Foxx and Dave Franco is exactly what you expect, and that’s a good thing.

Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together.

Bissell creates a unique horror-comedy that isn’t just interested in laughs and scares, but also in looking at the humanity of her characters that truly believe they are trying their best.

The film acts as a giallo thriller, a modern update to Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames and the latest entry in Brazil’s anti-Bolsonaro fantasy canon. Yet for all of these fascinating themes and well-executed nods, Medusa still feels narratively slight.

Cohn’s film is ultimately a genuinely inspiring one, noteworthy in the way it achieves its uplift honestly and without sentimentality.

Admirably high-concept, endearingly silly, but also not quite ambidextrous enough, Rumours marks a wobbly transition from the avant-garde to the mainstream for its directors, who’ve never made a work this “accessible” before.

You can feel The Flash wishing it could steal a glimpse into the audience and revise itself on the fly accordingly; no wonder early screenings apparently hedged on an ending until the last possible minute.

At face value, Lady Chatterley’s Lover works well enough as a love story: It’s sweet, moderately sexy and sticks pretty religiously to Lawrence’s compelling story. But for a film based on a book that scandalized thousands, it will undoubtedly leave its viewer wanting more.

It’s light on the satire, and heavy on the fairy tale rules and aesthetics. There’s still plenty of charm to go around, and it’s ultimately a fun experience, but it undeniably avoids the original movie’s strongest aspects in favor of sincerity.

Nanny seeps into your pores, stings like salt in a throbbing wound and doesn’t require what some horror fans might—conversely—wish appeared.

It’s not a great film by any means (I’m mixed-positive on Farrelly comedies, generally), but Ricky Stanicky does succeed in fashioning a fairly consistent number of gags that got a rise out of me even if the narrative, especially as it careens into the third act, feels like a one-note joke that’s getting stretched a little too far.

Though Green may alienate some audiences with choices nowhere near as terrifying as William Friedkin’s original, something about the film’s heart endears beyond another exorcism retread satisfied to follow the same blasphemous beats.

The performances themselves are the film’s biggest highlight, the songs having been given entirely new arrangements for the occasion.

Posley balances Bitch Ass’ moral dilemma with clever, exuberant filmmaking.

It’s to the film’s credit that its writer-director resists pretty much every one of those conventional impulses, steering his breezy but meandering story in unexpected directions, letting it simply develop into a character portrait of two emotionally polarized individuals.