Housekeeping for Beginners will not tell you much about keeping order amidst domestic chaos, per se. It is a primer, however, for turning a house into a home.

The actor has muted his usual um-ah-YES speech tics and other telltale Goldblumian gestures to a large degree, which works nicely against Sheridan’s revelatory performance. Their existential despair among the mental healthcare white-coat crowd plays and feeds off each other — it’s like discovering a "Waiting for Godot" production nestled in the middle of "Titicut Follies."

It’s not Blitz’s sensory-overload sturm und drang that leaves you gasping for breath. It’s the sneak attack.

It's Bettany's portrait of the monster as a young man that rivets attention. So remember the name, or don't. Just watch Bettany strut his stuff. You'll know a star when you see one.

The art that The Kindergarten Teacher is scanning can be found in Gyllenhaal’s eyes, hungry for a life of the mind and one starved of meaning. Jimmy is not the only one who has something to say. For the filmmaker and her star, this movie is their poem.

It’s an irresistible romantic romp that turns the familiar into something sweet, sassy and laugh-out-loud funny.

Come for the class warfare and the occasional shots-fired zingers about the rich being different than you and me. Stay for Keoghan twirling in circles, with nothing but shafts of late afternoon light and the entirety of what God gave him expressing the bliss of going from pretender to predator.

Old master Eric Rohmer, 82, uses new tricks in the form of painted backdrops inserted digitally to create a virtual reality. Rohmer goes Lucas - who could have guessed?

There are movies that were never going to be good, no matter the effort, and then there are movies that decide upfront to be bad and have a much easier time asking us to go with it. Cocaine Bear is the latter. It gives us what we’re asking for. Turns out, that isn’t much.

What you ultimately get out this chronicle of people trying to get in the family way, and who end up experiencing their own sense of parenthood via their young guest/partner-in-crime, is enough to sustain you through the rougher patches.

The Outfit is a crime thriller made to order, and one that takes pride in how it looks, how things fit on it, the shape it cuts when it moves.

A striking film that frustratingly never coheres but still holds you in thrall.

Smoking Causes Coughing may or may not be designed as a straight parody of Power Rangers-style adventures and the sugar highs of such kid-friendly sci-fi/superhero entertainment. It most definitely is the sort of high-concept goof that, taken to such go-for-broke extremes, blurs the line between giggle-inducing absurdity and absolutely brilliant ridiculousness.

A feast of a film done on a low budget with a menu featuring top-grade acting, writing and direction.

It’s a perfectly good rockumentary. It may be an even better group therapy session, led by one person’s unfiltered experience down in a hole yet resonating as deeply for anyone else still struggling to lift themselves up. Welcome to the club.

If Untouchable does nothing else, it demonstrates how patterns of intimidation and the power to destroy lives flourish in systems that allow for the turning of blind eyes. It was just the cost of doing business with Harvey, until thankfully, it wasn’t.

There is no all-caps ACTING here. Instead, Lawrence dials in to an uncomfortable numbness that tamps everything about Lynsey down, and thus keeps the performance at a recognizably human, rather than headline-friendly social-drama level.

What starts off as a tribute turns into an autopsy of a long marriage as seen by the kids who witnessed the best and worst of it, done with humor, anger, hindsight, and empathy. Then it makes a hard left and examines the way that legacies, even ones with the best intentions, have a way of shaping us and sometimes setting us back and always, always leaving us with lessons to repeat or refute.

Baldwin is a marvel in a casting surprise that pays off.

Whether audiences are pleased or vexed, very vexed, by A.I., any movie buff worth his salt will want to sift through this fascinating wreck of a movie.

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment.

To watch Sorry We Missed You is to realize that, despite its dedication to showing how people live and love and work (and work, and work, and work) in everyday Britain, this is a story that goes far beyond the United Kingdom.

You’ll still spend close to two hours wondering whether Splitsville wants you to walk away thinking that you’ve seen something semi-sweet or almost irredeemably sour. The key is recognizing how satisfying things feel when they somehow manage to split the difference.

Citizen K, Alex Gibney’s surprisingly strong documentary on the rise and fall and rebranding of Khodorkovsky, does a good job of charting the contours of this controversial figure’s story; that the filmmaker was able to get the subject himself to tell so much of it in his own words feels like a coup.

The impression is that you’ve just seen a great New York movie, with a great star turn at the core of it, and yet still feels like something’s missing. It’s ultimately an excuse to watch Washington go HAM.

The Fight may be cursed with a generic name. But it’s a 100-percent accurate one.

Crowe's tantalizing film sticks with you.

There’s a certain quality of watchfulness and wiles-using Williams brings to this damaged, possibly deranged protagonist that suggests instability hiding behind her shiny hair and perfect teeth.

The sheer hilariousness of a number of individual bits here are enough to get you past slow spots and a few D.O.A. duds, and you come out of Bad Trip with a serious appreciation for this trio’s chops and ability to go with the flow.

Bosworth is a star in the making, but even she can't outshine the surfing footage, which is flat-out spectacular.

It takes seriously the challenge of adapting a seemingly unadaptable novel, and keeping all its big-picture implications in full view. It earns its distinction as a faithful adaptation — and proves a satisfying movie, too.

I imagine that, for some, the movie’s structure will play unevenly, seem a little weird in its jumping and drifting. But the contours of this story, and the tinges of genuine melancholy thrown into our path along the way, are very much to the point. They make it all work, and make it worth it.

Robert Machoian’s debut feature, The Killing of Two Lovers, has a tough psychological knot braided right through its center, one that it doesn’t quite satisfyingly untangle — not that it exactly means to.

The skate-rink action, which culminates in an apocalyptic death match, remains rabble-rousingly brutal.

It’s all at the service of the Clooney-Pitt Show, and credit Wolfs for reminding you how fun the sight of these two guys running around while shooting guns, looking late-middle-aged cool and cracking wise, remains. This used to be a typical Friday night at the movies, and now it’s a rarity.

Carlota Pereda's debut feature, Piggy, takes horror’s revenge trope and twists it just so. It isn’t so simple as a much-abused underdog getting a freakish chance to get her payback and painting the landscape with her enemies’ dispatched blood and guts, though in this case, as in many cases, you might forgive her if she did.

With Brando around, The Freshman has a snappy madness that’s hard to resist.

Abbasi isn’t a subtle filmmaker, and his need to provoke sometimes undermines his points; his previous movie, the serial-killer thriller Holy Spider (2022), was a commentary on social misogyny that inadvertently courted the very thing it was trying to criticize. Here, the blunt force works in his film’s favor.

The film’s most powerful asset is Thompson (Sorry to Bother You, Thor: Ragnarok) in a performance that cuts through the script’s cliches to find the heart of a character that reflects the plight of a woman alone in a man’s world.

The universal rule of sequels dictates that you give viewers another helping of the same thing yet somehow make it different, the sort of koan that only makes sense to lifelong Zen masters and studio suits. Yet, against the odds, the creators of this continuation have managed to do more than just produce a carbon copy with a new number after the title.

Carnage is for the most part, in ways that count, another dirtbag delight. It’s a lesser movie than Venom, but one that scratches many of the same itches and then some.

Is the movie any good? At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when art is defined by commerce, this question is beside the point.

Is this moving-picture love letter overly sentimental, sloppy to a fault, and slightly more affectionate toward its posthumous subject than a basket of puppies high on laughing gas? Yes. Does that mean that, in its own way, it perfectly mirrors Candy’s own tendency to overdo it and still make you like him, really, really like him? Also yes.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web, directed with gun-to-the-head urgency by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe), settles for being a tension-packed, go-go-go thriller that will pump adrenaline into your nervous system for nearly all of its suspenseful if implausible 117 minutes.

Owen Kline’s script is boisterous, funny, and very much committed to the bit. This is a movie about junior independence, after all, about a slightly full-of-himself young talent who’s journeying out on his own for the first time. So Kline makes sure the journey is memorable.

Director Paolo Sorrentino’s gorgeously gaudy, chalice-runneth-over satire, is really about one person: Silvio Berlusconi.

It’s a delightful throwback to an age when a comic mystery fueled by someone with a screen-friendly persona and even screen-friendlier good looks weren’t an anomaly, and a perfect vehicle for Hamm. It’s right in the breezy, funny, irreverent sweet spot in which a filmmaker poised between journeyman and auteur like Greg Mottola works best.

It's Vincent D'Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, a drug lord who's snorted so much meth his nose had to be replaced by a plastic one, who kicks ass.

Vengeance exercises [Novak's] knack for making unappetizing social qualities watchable, maybe because he’s playing a character whose self-confidence you don’t really believe in, or maybe because you already know that the movie will make him the butt of some of its rudest jokes.

If nothing else, Damon and Affleck’s Beacon Street Wild Ride reminds you that movie stars plus car crashes, divided by gunshots and laughs, was part of a regular, balanced American-cinema breakfast.

Dragged Across Concrete is apt to send crime-film fanatics, especially ones who prefer their pulp nasty, brutish and incredibly long, into frothing fits of glee. For other folks, the title will double as an apt description experience of watching it.

So much of what makes Catherine Called Birdy sing comes down to Dunham and Ramsey working in conjunction to give you a portrait of a 13th-century teenager woman that feels thoroughly modern without being winky-nudgey, spiky and tender, oddly family-friendly while still being defiant.

The promise of Shang-Chi, which is as much martial-arts movie as it is standard superhero origin fare, is that a lot of people will get their asses kicked: sometimes gracefully, even beautifully, and other times with the battering-ram power you can expect of a movie advertising 10 rings at play.

It works far better as a free-floating vibe than a movie, which can be read as a backhanded compliment or a sign of surrender.

Yes, it’s grim and gloomy — and like Lil Peep’s music, there’s also a sense of catharsis in all of this. More than anything, Jones and Silyan seem to be fashioning a postmortem that plays like his greatest hits, in which wounded wooziness somehow gives way to exhilaration and a warped sense of uplift.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a threadbare high-concept story given the high-thread-count treatment — a lovely piece of luxury pulp. It’s also the creepiest and classiest bit of late-summer counterprogramming you’re likely to find, which may say more about our current landscape of cinematic pleasures than the movie itself.

It’s the sort of movie that likes its volume dial to be permanently stuck at 11, its references to be hidden in plain sight and/or deafeningly trumpeted and its freak flag flying very, very high.

You can’t say that Gyllenhaal hasn’t gone for broke with The Bride!, and the more you watch the actors give life to the central idea of a meeting of scarred bodies and equal minds, the more you feel like you’re watching something not just perversely over-the-top but personal.

What Soto and company have done with the saga of Jaime Reyes, however, suggests a formula that may save this whole genre from simply going down, down, and away

Frances O’Connor’s Emily, her directorial debut, takes a familiar literary biography and garnishes it with the right kind of creative liberties — the vibrant, suggestive kind.

The movie may ping between social drama and IRL courtroom saga. Whenever Foxx struts and frets — and bellows, coos, rages, and waltzes — his two hours upon this stage, you realize that it may simply work best as a star vehicle.

Like the young women who we spend nearly two hours with, we also emerge feeling both tinges of empowerment and a palpable sense of deflation.

Yesterday has its heart firmly in the right place. It’s the challenge to take it to the next level that’s missing.

It’s a documentary that starts as a nonfiction portrait and ends as a horror movie.

The filmmakers want to jolt folks, for sure. But they also want to bring you to a place where the emotional after effects of that juddering linger long after the jump scares have faded away.

It’s comically postmodern to the point of feeling almost retro, which also describes Everything Everywhere’s sense of action, its enriched sense of comedy colliding violence, practical materials (like fanny packs) taking their ranks amid the physically superhuman feats of choreography — a mix many of us rightly associate with Jackie Chan.

In short, this is a genre mash-up has no agenda except providing escapist fun. Mission accomplished.

Welcome to Chechnya is a horror movie, but it’s also a collective profile in courage. You can’t say that “such people” are not here. They are, and they’re not just heroes, the movie suggests. They’re the last thing standing between survival and a purge.

It's a dumb summer movie done with smarts.

The movie makes you wish you were there. Lights darkened, dots and rays and Reed flickering before us, we nearly are.

Everett, whose scenes with Firth are a droll delight, nails every sly laugh. And Witherspoon adds her own legally blond American sparkle to this British party.

It’s not exactly the second coming of Walk Hard, though it’s the best Weird Al movie since UHF [cue laugh track and maybe a Whoppee Cushion sound effect] — and like Al himself, it still hits each beat with an infectiously goofy exuberance.

While no one could accuse Ticket to Paradise of being a “great” movie, or even a “very good” one, there’s something about watching Clooney and Roberts butt up against each other in front of a screen-saver background that scratches a long-dormant itch.

One Night in Miami is an act of imagination. It does not reinvent the wheel. It polishes and clarifies the spokes — all while moving and entertaining us in the process.

The film belongs to Blanchett -- this hellcat Virgin Queen is something to see.

Mostly, it’s a testament to a storied legacy that may be gone, but deserves never to be forgotten.

Miller's wake-up call is meant to be ours. Too little and too late? Maybe. But even in this Bourne Zone, Damon and Greengrass haven't shirked their duty to enlighten and entertain.

Susan Minot’s resplendent novel of a dying woman…stumbles on its way to the screen.

Headland can write zingers that would make the cruelest bridezilla blush. And Caplan's treatise on the art of the blow job is time-capsule worthy. Sadly, Bachelorette is a comic cocktail that goes heavy on the bitters. That's no way to end a wedding.

At best diverting, at worst drearily conventional, The Rum Diary is pre-gonzo Thompson, before the fusion of fact and trippy fantasy that flowered into a brilliant delirium.

Tom Cruise starring in the fact-based story of a plot to kill Hitler by Nazi Col. Claus von Stauffenberg sounds like Oscar bait. It isn't. And the sooner you accept it, the more fun you'll have at this satisfying B movie.

Rozema's minimalist approach pays dividends until a final third hobbled by overdone effects and a thrashing musical score. Too bad. The story being told on the faces of Page and Wood had eloquence and power enough to hold us rapt.

Just when you're ready to puke, the old Bill Conti theme ("Gonna Fly Now") kicks in -- are you feeling it? -- Stallone steps in the ring and every day is Christmas. All together now: Rock-ee! Rock-ee!

The film is most riveting in its early scenes, when Soderbergh's digital cameras locate germs everywhere – don't touch those peanuts!

Allen, who stays behind the camera, brings too little wit and too much contrivance to material that quickly dissolves into warmed-over Dostoevski.

A ghost story in which superior camerawork, costumes and production design work together to put the audience in a trance. It's tough on actors not to get swallowed up in the scenery.

But, oh, that dragon. I'd endure another slog through Middle-Earth just to spend more time with Smaug.

Lucky for us, Dench and Frears pick up the slack and turn slim pickings into a fun time at the movies. But Victoria & Abdul could have been oh so much more.

Director Andrew Currie is better at laughs than scares, but he can’t sustain either as Fido runs out of steam in the final stretch. Till then, it’s fiendish fun.

The film, which is literary to a fault, includes an earthquake, but if the earth moves at all, thank Hayek, who gives the tale a smoldering life that finally lifts it from the page.

Whatever Works feels like something out of time and, worse, out of step. Hell, Allen wrote the script back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel.

Is Knoxville going soft on us? Nah. Bad Grandpa is still the f***ed-up family movie of choice, especially if your family has done jail time.

It's the spirit that Biggie Smalls, born Christopher Wallace, put into inventing himself and his music that ignites Notorious, a biopic that sees the flaws in the man but can't help accentuating the positive.

Director Bryan Singer, who started the whole thing in high style with 2000's "X-Men," returns for a fourth time. Singer shows a lot of energy, but he and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (Fantastic Four, yuck) let the movie get way overcrowded.

The movie is marred by overkill, especially in the brutal and bloated allegorical ending, which feels lifted, clumsily, from The Godfather. State of Grace is most powerful and gripping when it stays true to the emotions of its characters.

Li is action poetry in motion. Damn them for spoiling our popcorn fun with salty tear-jerking.

Stay in your seat for the end credits, in which Murray waters a dying plant and karaokes to Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm." That alone is worth double the price of admission.

In this muddled but marvelous blend of documentary and concert film, director Lian Lunson takes you down to a place where it's possible to look closely at the life and art of cult troubadour Leonard Cohen.