It’s quite a ride even when the tempo drops ever so slightly towards the end; the kind of stuff fun summer entertainment should be made of.

Luck truly is best suited for small children with low standards. Older kids will be bored. Adults will find it especially dreary, even though there’s actually a relevant message in here about the merits of failure and the perils of lawnmower parenting, buried somewhere beneath all the sparkles and desperation.

One of the many problems is that Logan can’t find the tone, making something campy in one beat and deadly serious in another. The whole film falls in the valley in between, unable to find any identity at all.

Mija weaves a more nuanced emotional tapestry than is typically seen in immigration stories like this one. Yes, sadness and fear are present. But gratitude, resentment, guilt, stress, hope, and excitement are also essential to Doris’ story, her family’s story, and the Mexican-American community at large.

The entire cast is excellent, including a surprise Filipino guest star. It's a pleasure to see their jubilance in bringing their culture to screen, which shines even in the script’s weakest moments.

Bullet Train is at its best when it's a comedy about self-styled badasses who think they're free agents but are really all just passengers on a train rocketing from one station to another, oblivious to the desires of any individual riding on it. The abstractness and "it's all a lark" humor ultimately undo any aspect that might otherwise sink its roots into the viewer's mind.

It’s a scary and fun amusement park ride that also elicits a surprisingly tender emotional response.

The family trauma is so clotted-thick, a faster pace and tightened-up editing might have eradicated the slow-motion underwater feel of the whole.

A jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond.

Ron Howard’s latest directorial effort is a tedious, mediocre retelling of the June, 2018 incident where 12 Thai adolescents and their soccer coach were trapped in a flooded cave for 18 days.

A high-concept animated film about animals with superpowers is brought to vibrant, endearing life by the superpowers behind the scenes: lively voice talent from an all-star cast, a script that is smart, exciting, and very funny, and, above all, the ability to tap into one of humanity’s deepest emotions, our love for our pets and theirs for us.

Dunham unearths a refreshing amount of humor, honesty, and sincerity through Sarah Jo’s misadventures with Josh between bedsheets, at once challenging her complex (though not entirely unwarranted) reputation of being a tone-deaf and privileged one-trick pony, with her second-only feature.

Ultimately, it’s an entertaining dramedy with strong performances from Deutch and the quickly-rising-star Mia Isaac (also excellent in the recent “Don’t Make Me Go”), but is too often willing to poke fun at easy targets instead of really asking why people lie for popularity or how we turn survivors of extreme violence into celebrities.

A Love Song is a companionable movie to sit through. It’s well-photographed, unobtrusively edited, full of wondrous sights, and acted by a couple of masters of warm underplaying.

Eliciting powerful performances from her two leads and striking visuals from cinematographer João Atala, “Medusa” casts its gaze at the hypocritical and violent world of purity culture with unflinching honesty that will leave the audience spellbound long after the credits roll.

When a movie doesn’t quite come together, it’s often tempting to say that something essential is missing. I’m not so sure that that’s true of “Hypochondriac,” a rather good psychodrama about repressed childhood trauma that’s also an underwhelming horror movie about mental illness.

In its understated way, the movie is a celebration of the miracle of connection.

If you squint you can nearly see the kind of movie Gutto might be aiming for.

The artful parallels that director Chan Tze Woon draws between contemporary and now middle-aged pro-democratic Hong Kong protesters often seem insubstantial given the movie’s thinly drawn narrative of historic events.

Written and directed by Andrew Semans, Resurrection is a diabolically intense psychological thriller, with two riveting central performances from Hall and Tim Roth, neither of whom shy away from the dark nutty territory they are required to enter.

Though it ignores the many situations that could go wrong in the ever-evolving universe of virtual reality, this fascinating ode to touchless connection proves beyond doubt that the intense emotions born in the skin of their avatars transcend into their flesh-and-blood hearts.

Porter’s delightful debut is perhaps most groundbreaking exactly because of this familiarity, one that grants a black, high-school-aged trans girl—a character we rarely see in cinema, if at all—a recognizable youthful tale not defined by bigoted adversity. At least not solely. In other words, what “Anything’s Possible” says is, “Here is a mix of teen romances and comedies you know, but featuring characters you might not have seen before.”

There's a little Magic Mike XXL in the mix of How to Please a Woman, with its merry band of eager-to-please strippers, although How to Please a Woman also hearkens back to The Full Monty in its surprisingly profound look at pleasure.

Without a single arthouse touch, this ultimately charming trifle could well be an American rom-com were it not quite so, well, promiscuous. In that French way.

My Old School straddles that middle-ground as well, speculating as to the inner workings of a troubled mind but more often settling for the familiar, picaresque pleasures of a great yarn colorfully retold.

Luke and the other actors do their best, especially Zosia Mamet as June’s friend and Melissa Leo as Charlie’s mother, but the dialogue never creates vivid, specific, consistent characters.

With the screams and roars of the crowd, the energy of the games, and the bullish presence of the legendary Nolan Ryan, director Jackson makes you truly understand what it is like to be a fan.

It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title.