Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill), returns in this cheeky, breezy sequel that's better than the original. The character has a better sense of who she is, and the movie spends less time on explaining, more time on action. The mystery at its center is inspired by a real-life event that is genuinely inspiring.

Here, the effects are purposely on the cheap (they will make you giggle) and the acting is deliberately over the top. Once you accept these quirks, there's some blood-spattered pleasure to be had with Slaxx and its amusing twist on a survive-the-night slasher.

Gaia does not feel like homework. It's a thought-provoking and disturbing experience rather than a lecture.

What is unusual about the film is that it is a frankly admiring portrait of a monarch. The king here is the tale’s hero, and the choice he makes regarding the Nazi invasion undergird a drama that is proudly and unequivocally patriotic.

It works as a genre film; it's thrilling and suspenseful, with enough twists to keep you guessing, but the pointed commentary is impossible to ignore.

The cake part of the story feels imposed, a problem since it is the film's organizing principle. It is a tribute to the two young actresses and the supporting cast that this caring friendship survives the artificial cakebarring.

It's sensitive, subtle, and restrained, and asks more of the audience than it's typically willing to give.

Just as Flannigan gives it his all, on the off-chance he may never have this opportunity again, so does Pitt. And that's what makes "Day of the Fight" a sight to see.

So why does Captain Marvel feel like a bit of a disappointment? It’s fine and often quite funny. It fits securely within the MCU but also functions sufficiently as a stand-alone entity. But the character, and the tremendous actress playing her in Oscar-winner Brie Larson, deserved more than fine.

I doubt How to Survive a Pandemic will alter anyone’s opinion regarding the necessity of vaccines, yet it does pay admirable tribute to the scientists fighting to save the world, including those stubborn earthlings who have no interest in being saved.

Director Haroula Rose, who co-wrote the film with Coburn Goss, gives it a leisurely, lived-in feeling. The actors, especially Baker, bring layers to the characters that hold our interest, earn our affection, and make us reconsider Tolstoy—there is more than one way to be a happy family.

“Rental Family” is unabashedly sentimental, almost Frank Capra-esque at times. It’s also a thoughtful and insightful presentation of this unique and admittedly strange business of renting humans to help other humans. And it’s a knowing character study of a gaijin in Japan who knows he could live there forever and never fully grasp and understand the culture, but will never stop trying.

Anthony is as good at upending expectations as he is at upending opponents on the mat. If this movie would rather meet our expectations, it does so with sincerity that makes it a slim win on points.

Some will argue that all of the themes of “undertone” don’t connect, but that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a film that doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. Nightmares rarely do.

While Westwood is certainly a remarkable personal and cultural figure in many senses, it’s too bad she’s not more willing to discuss the genesis of punk, since it’s likely to remain the primary thing she’s known for.

It’s fun to watch a character like Fletch escape hot water, but it’s never even lukewarm here, and so every time that the movie gets back to its plotting, it just sags like a bad episode of a cable TV mystery-of-the-week show.

While neither particularly profound nor earth-shatteringly scary, Suitable Flesh is better than passable grisly horror fun in a very specific tradition.

I didn’t laugh a whole lot while watching Adam, but I was never less than wholly engaged, and by the end, I felt grateful for having seen it.

The storyline is so rote that the idiosyncrasies of the scene don’t register with any power.

Bonjour Tristesse works best as a sustained mood, as an evocation of long summer days that might not actually exist outside Eric Rohmer films and fashion magazine photo shoots.

Threaded through with interesting thoughts about matriarchy, climate change and generational trauma, Fast Color tries to do a little too much, and there are maybe one too many things shoehorned in, but Hart wisely keeps the focus intimate, staying close to the characters.

Meet Me in the Bathroom is an impressionistic blur, more about what it felt like to be at the head of a scene than the actual scene’s character or identity.

It is then unfortunate that this tempting package by Khan, a creative and producing force behind ABC’s “Fresh off the Boat,” is so bland, feeling less like a movie and more like the output of an assembly line.

It’s a reminder of how good the director of “United 93” and “Captain Philips” can be at transporting us to unimaginable circumstances, and it plays like a truly phenomenal disaster movie that happens to be true, one of those flicks you almost always watch the last hour of if you catch it on cable.

Bathed in darkness and warm tones, “The New Boy” feels like a classic melodrama with modern sensibilities.

The Queen of My Dreams is a well-intentioned but tonally all-over-the-place look at how frustrating things can get when you’re a queer Muslim trying to live your best life.

The story is so stripped down it feels like minimalist theater.

As wonderful as The Other Lamb appears on screen and its cast embodies the story’s tension, it feels as if there is missing something from the final picture. The movie is slight in its exploration of dark subjects like cults, inter-generational dynamics and abuse, without coming to any kind of conclusion or closure.

Plays like an extended tribute to the torture scene in "Reservoir Dogs," a description that alone should tell readers whether they'll find it appealing or not.

Like the DisneyNature films, it’s strikingly pretty, not just in its gorgeous views of the Austrian countryside, but also in the interiors populated by talking heads and delectable foodstuffs. It’s also startlingly tame, as if its subject, famous celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, was a commodity whose brand needed to be protected.

Eventually, though, the whole effort feels chaotic, crammed as it is with uninspired pop culture references and way, way too many fart jokes, even for a movie aimed at kids.

It’s all weighty, serious material with huge stakes — emotionally, culturally and financially. But Roach, working from a script by Charles Randolph, finds a tricky balance of portraying these events with a sprightly tone while crafting a steadily building tension. Bombshell is both light on its feet and a punch in the gut.

The movie is intelligently written and well-acted, but it doesn’t sit all that comfortably between the two stools of Austenesque Romance and Socially Conscious Drama.

Suspiria is as striking and severe as the director’s “Call Me by Your Name,” the best film of 2017, was warm and welcoming.

In telling this story and exploring its meanings, Harris’ well-crafted film uses interviews with a number of historians and black photographers. But its greatest asset is the trove of photographs it marshals.

From the start, Pizza Movie erupts with the type of confidence you can’t help but admire even if its wavelength might not be for everyone.

The Daniels have made a film that's at once a labor of love and a work of sheer arrogant nerve, one that is as likely to be described as a classic, an ambitious misfire, and one of the worst films ever made by any three people who see it together. How many movies can you say that about?

She is an engaging guide, humorous and honest, cynical and wise, with that same sense of innocent joy in her own fame that translated into in photos.

XX feels unusually frustrating in its inconsistency, given its inspired premise.

For all that goes into making a movie—the prolific Dupieux wrote, directed, shot, and edited this one as with his previous films—the impulsive, scattered storytelling here almost feels like an unrewarding and contrarian statement to such hard labor.

The film is charismatic and thrilling enough to bypass its shortcomings.

Aat some point, every character in Youth falls out of love with the way of seeing the world. That kind of anti-epiphany is major—not on a universal, but rather a personal scale.

This is pretty much the opposite of a contemporary American comedy: rather than broad, The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq is an exemplary example of narrow.

Writer/director Sebastián Silva doesn't cheat in terms of storytelling, though. Throughout the film, he sets up these characters, and us, for what happens.

The film isn't perfect, and in a lot of ways it doesn't accomplish what it set out to do, but if you're going to tell a story about Chet Baker you need to understand what it means to "get inside every note." Born To Be Blue does.

It's an unsettling, and sometimes high-concept doodle, but it's awfully hard to resist a film that marries Atomic Age paranoia and optimism with Kurosawa's signature post-modern, atmosphere-intensive style.

The film feels like a first draft. But then there is the music to celebrate.

The movie is most naturally a showcase for Efira, whose work as an unusual 17th-century nun in “Benedetta” demonstrated she could play dazzling and tormented with equal facility and who gets to work a similar range here.

Elvis certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions.

Holy Hell should have dug a lot deeper and told its story with a lot more finesse. What happened? Maybe, after all these years, Allen was still too close to his subject?

An uplifting, sometimes bittersweet journey captured over a two-year period. You will certainly submit to the film’s disarmingly gush-out-loud moments and perhaps even embarrass yourself with a few involuntary squeaks.

It’s lucky that Klapisch has an actor as disarming as Duris playing Xavier, or else the character would be completely insufferable, never mind just intermittently so.

Coming Home in the Dark settles into the memory as a mesmerizing missed opportunity at worst, a promise of future classics at best.

Say what you will about Scott’s most divisive movies—they’re usually big swings with big ideas. What’s so disheartening about “Napoleon” is how small it ultimately feels.

The true measure of a good tale is in the telling, and writer-director Noah Buschel spins his yarn in an unexpected, ultimately satisfying fashion.

Alexander Payne's Downsizing starts with an intriguing "What if?...", the launch-pad of all good sci-fi stories, and very quickly devolves into a bland story about a nondescript khaki-wearing guy who learns to care about the less-fortunate.

Comedy being what it is, your mileage may vary, but for me the pure candy-colored exuberant silliness of Barb and Star didn't just make me laugh. It provided solace, too.

That heartfelt element translates into the benevolence of the adults in this film—Perlman is especially big-hearted, no surprise there—not to mention Tsang’s obvious affection for her troubled protagonist. Together, they imbue “Marvelous and the Black Hole” with enough warmth to overcome its practical limitations. Talk about a sleight of hand trick.

The Lost King gets sidetracked. Still, it's a great story!

Basically, Cam is one of the most entertainingly inappropriate guardians for impressionable youths since Auntie Mame.

The film doesn't burden pinball machines with more meaning than they can stand. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game is strictly low stakes. This is part of its knowing charm.

Miles Ahead is a film of ugly, bold bravado.

It doesn't take long to realize that writer-director David Ayer has spent more time adding flesh to his battlefield sequence than he has in fleshing out the screenplay. The end result, while technically impressive, is a dramatically bloodless affair, despite the gallons of gore on display.

To the Bone isn't all that interested in the actual treatment of the condition, even though the majority of the film takes place in a treatment program. The film also gets hugely distracted by a romantic sub-plot, a sub-plot that is pushy and awkward from the jump.

Though it’s still not entirely successful, I’m glad this version exists. Coppola’s restoration has turned a hot mess into a noble failure.

The film is not so much tone-deaf as old-fashioned, emerging from a more innocent time (say, three weeks ago) when "politics as usual" actually had some meaning.

Vivarium isn’t a fun watch, and not just because it’s generally claustrophobic and insistently bleak.

Coming Through the Rye may be the closest we’ll ever get cinematically to the novel. And in being so far away from it, it’s close enough.

A film that keeps changing direction so often that it's almost a miracle the filmmakers don't give us tonal and narrative whiplash.

Marks’ “Turtles All the Way Down” shines with John Green’s trademark whimsy. It’s a charming, delightful YA romance that doesn’t bind itself to the sole enjoyment of its target market.

This is Everett's first film as a director, and there are times when it shows. But what he brings to the table - as a director, writer, and actor - is his intuitive "take" on Oscar Wilde and the performance alone makes this riveting and revelatory viewing.

It’s delightful and almost miraculous the way this movie manages to work as a comic heist picture on a huge scale, and with a comic science-fiction picture blended into it…while managing to cohere to the whole, you know, Marvel thing.

Cora Bora, written by Rhianon Jones and directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, is designed to showcase Stalter's signature brand of absurd irony.

The problem is, for all its surface intelligence, "Mockingjay, Part 1" has little depth, and that sometimes makes it much more frustrating than a more knowingly shallow and silly movie might have been.

In my view, it’s one of the most genuinely, and valuably, patriotic films any American has ever made.

What does all of this add up to? Damned if I know. But it's fun to see a film that plays by its own rules to such a degree that any comparison to anything else falls apart.

Even when Big Time Adolescence starts to become ordinary, it always has a freshness from its on-screen talent, and from the promise of Orley’s directorial eye.

I started longing for a relationship comedy/drama with some real bite and observation to it, and fondly remembering the 2009 German film "Everyone Else," directed by Maren Ade.

Watching his Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 is to see a director who knows how to balance corporate need with personal blockbuster filmmaking. Mostly.

We can never quite settle into the connection to the couple because while it makes it indisputably clear, despite some claims of Photoshopping, that they really do scale the tallest and most iconic structures in the world, there is a discomfiting artificiality to the storytelling.

It feels a wee bit padded even at a brisk 96 minutes (it’s tough to do “deadpan” in a comedy and not have it come off as merely slow) and has trouble staying on the right side of too-cutesy. But it sustains an innocent storybook tone throughout, thanks mainly to strong performances from its lead actors, Elijah Wood and Nell Fisher, and lush images of the New Zealand countryside.

Stanfield is a true movie star, radiating decency even as the character's shell hardens.

Thankfully, there's a considerable nasty streak that runs throughout Furies, and it isn't limited to the movie's antagonists.

Cold Storage strikes a nifty balance between the sardonic and the stressful and throws a lot of gnarly gore and gook into the scenario, as a bargain.

Whoever advances to each respective next round, you want to root for these kids, and cherish the way they advocate for intellect at such a young age.

Like the limited legislative change that has occurred due to the underappreciated efforts of these valiant activists, I wish Snyder’s Us Kids resulted in more.

Thankfully, Studio 4°C’s sumptuous animation and sound design still make “All You Need is Kill” a vivid and worthwhile do-over.

In less deft hands, the film could have been a clichéd affair, featuring Amanda delivering an impassioned courtroom speech that brings the judge to tears and the onlookers to a burst of applause. “Tow”’s distinct tone avoids these clichés—the film is often quite funny—turning the expected into the unexpected.

Frustrating but engrossing, and impossible to critique in-depth without spoilers because it's driven by regular plot twists, I Am Mother adds another memorable creation to an already packed gallery of intelligent science fiction robots that are as complex as most humans.

If you’re someone who treasures the music of Led Zeppelin more than you’re interested in the legend—or the gossip, or the dirt, or whatever you want to call it—of Led Zeppelin, this movie is absolutely for you. I’m one of those people, and I ate it up.

Nobody Knows I’m Here wants to make a statement about the harsh price of fame and the awful, hurtful machinations that settle the bill. It just takes too long to get these ideas into the plot thanks to the clichéd handling of its protagonist’s dark past.

After a slightly rocky first act that succumbs to thin generational differences, Brown allows his slow burn to catch fire and doesn’t look back. You may be regretting not being able to visit the beach this summer. Maybe it’s for the best.

A figure as unusual and distinctive as Fields certainly deserves a commemoration. The bad news here is that he deserves better than what Danny Says serves up.

Considering that the entire movie is about pushing boundaries — for art, profit or both — it’s disappointing that director Danny Wolf tells the story in such a tediously prosaic way — though this, too, might be a crafty strategic move, as the many copyright owners being shrugged at here might have gotten a lot angrier had “Skin” been an exciting, innovative work, as opposed to a merely informative one.

St. Vincent is a piece of very well-made cheese, a movie in which one can feel its manipulations and heart-string pulling, but the talented ensemble makes those critical talking points easy to dismiss.

Body Brokers was clearly made with good intentions, but while it might still fill you with anger towards the predatory aspects of the rehabilitation industry, you'll also be upset that the script is not nearly as great as it could have been.

Queen of the Ring isn’t a film I’ll watch more than once, but it’s a story that resonates with me. The nostalgia lands, but the inspiration sticks.

In many ways, Zhang’s latest is the coldest film that he’s made in a while, though it might also be his most alluring.