It’s a lot to take in, but it’s joyously and creatively rendered, a fantasy epic brought to life in vivid color and with all the visual creativity a fantasy fan could want.

Fear Street: 1666 is a campy, grisly offering, and it’s also a satisfying conclusion to Deena and Sam’s arc, even though it alludes to the possibility of future explorations of Shadyside and Sunnyvale.

James Gunn’s real superpower is his ability to wear this comic-book nonsense lightly — to take it seriously within the world of the movie without feeling like he’s assigning homework.

Each half of the movie represents a different aspect of Spy x Family’s appeal, and each half is quite good for what it’s supposed to be. They just don’t gel together at feature length.

The movie gets livelier every time Stewart appears, as if on a contact high from her intoxication. Crimes of the Future needs those extra jolts of weirded-out star power. In spite of its arresting imagery, it’s sometimes more engaging to think about than to actually watch.

The film works like gangbusters, and it’s a terrific vehicle for Cage, but not for the reasons people might expect.

While Black Widow’s director and writers try valiantly to make the film a fitting swan song for Natasha and an impressive action vehicle for Johansson, tying up the Avenger’s disparate character beats across seven other movies in an action movie that out-fights her male peers, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s circling around a cul-de-sac.

The film deftly balances a crowded narrative that includes a father-son reconciliation and a depiction of the dangers of running the streets.

Cameron leans all the way into manic mayhem, smash-cutting from one outrageous image to the next. The final act of this movie shows off a freeing attitude he’s never fully embraced before.

The Blackening is a strange movie, and often a very silly one. But the creators can at least boast that they’ve put something on screen that horror fans don’t see often, and won’t be expecting.

It’s unclear yet whether this attempt at the MCU-nification of young-adult horror will come together in a satisfying way, but at the very least, Fear Street: 1994 lays a solid foundation. It’s a spooky, pulse-pounding horror romp with likable characters and terrific scares.

By the end of Fresh, the film hasn’t done anything more than restating what it made clear at the start: Dating is hell, and women deserve more than to be treated like pieces of meat.

Whatever its intentions, Annette is remarkable. It’s an exhilarating collision of cinema, live concerts, stage shows, and celebrity culture, shaken up and let loose with abandon. Its message might be lost, but the emotions still hit hard, particularly in a finale that strips away the flash and artifice to concentrate on something pure, painful, and unforgettable.

As in his stand-up comedy and his appearances on “Weekend Update,” Davidson’s take on himself is self-deprecating without sacrificing emotional honesty. With Apatow and Sirus’ help, he’s created a self-portrait that feels genuine, and perfectly captures both his appeal and his potential as a movie star.

If you already have an investment in the franchise’s volleyball teams and characters, this movie hits. And boy does it capture the epic highs of the show. It’s likely to fully reignite the fandom once again.

The film’s experimental nature makes it tougher to swallow than a conventional biopic, but also more interesting and rewarding to engage with. Great performances help keep the whole enterprise anchored — Hawke and MacLachlan are wonderful as men caught in conflict with each other — and the anachronisms provide food for thought long after the film has ended.

Freaky boasts such energetic performances from the thoroughly game Kathryn Newton and Vince Vaughn that the horror-comedy breezes by in a pleasant, amusing way, no matter how reductive its central conceit gets.

It’s highly competent throughout, and outright brilliant at times, but it lacks the necessary level of connection with the real world. And by the end, it’s lost track even of its own hard-earned but fragile sense of emotion.

There are moments in Wakanda Forever where it feels as though the film itself might buckle under the weight of not only the expectations heaped onto it, but of the loss that animates its core premise. When it manages not only to meet the verve and creativity of 2018’s Black Panther, but ultimately to tell its own successful story, it feels no less astonishing than a man with wings on his ankles soaring through the air.

In spite of a few nail-biting sequences, Run is more of a slog than a sprint.

Smile 2 is bigger, scarier, funnier, smarter, darker, and undeniably better than its predecessor.

The goal isn’t to find a killer, so much as it is to emphasize the ways women’s stories are often dismissed, and how people who aren’t well-off aren’t offered the same institutional consideration and care as the rich. It’s a compelling point to make, but one almost lost in the movie’s murky execution.

The film moves so fast that you don’t have to dwell on its missteps for long. For every moment that feels a bit too weird, there’s a scene that’s absolutely hilarious or heartbreakingly sincere. This fairy tale is particularly twisted, but that just makes its happily-ever-after ending feel all the more earned.

It might be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to draw out a moral from the entire situation. But it leaves the story feeling more like a quirky, isolated human-interest story than a watershed moment in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television.

Its statements about gender, violence, trauma, and entitlement are blaring and blatant, with little room for ambiguity or interpretation. And that absolutely seems to be the movie’s primary point.

Richardson’s task is to play off everyone else’s broadness, and his ease in doing so smooths over the rougher patches of Werewolves Within.

The warmth and tenderness with which the film explores the relationship between Brian and his creation are real.

The Imaginary isn’t as visually or narratively rich as Mary and the Witch’s Flower, or as transcendent as Miyazaki projects like The Boy and the Heron. But it does feel like a move in the right direction for Ponoc, an effort at finding its own voice and its own footing.