Polarizing is too tame a word to describe reactions to Luca Guadagnino’s radical rethinking of Suspiria. Either you’ll dig in or bolt for the exit — no in between.

For some, the chance to hear the divine sound of that voice and see that smiling mug once again will be worth it. For others, it will simply feel like song half sung.

Doctor Sleep relies way too much on borrowed inspiration and eventually runs out of — pardon the word — steam. But this flawed hybrid and King and Kubrick still has the stuff to keep you up nights.

The way that Qualley brings her star presence and her chops to Honey O’Donoghue, however, feels unique. You’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do their variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part.

Cruella is never more galvanizing than its petty tit-for-tat and power wrangling.

August keeps a discreet distance from the harsher realities, making The Best Intentions must viewing only if you find diluted Bergman better than no Bergman at all.

Look at it through the lens of a dual star vehicle that isn’t afraid to sacrifice coherence in the name of cheap thrills, and this bird only slightly sings off-key.

There’s much to gasp and fawn over here, and too much forgettable filler. But at least audiences have a chance to see it, so Serkis and his collaborators can finally turn the page on this particular book.

When Blunt and Miranda cut through the film’s glucose overload and take off into the wild blue of their own unique and extraordinary talents, Mary Poppins Returns shows it has the power to leave you deliriously happy.

There is a sense of healing — emotional, personal, psychic, definitely and defiantly sexual — that this filmmaker seems to be chasing. The ultimate goal, however, is really just casting away creative shackles and just letting it all hang out without professional worry. Yakin has assuredly done that.

It’s capable of quickly upshifting from tense to intense, and also of having the appearance of a scary movie rather than being one.

The proceedings are raised when Hodge is onscreen, using every nuanced look and gesture to jump the hurdles of a banal script and reveal the pain tearing up Banks. Having made a mark in films like "Straight Outta Compton" and "Hidden Figures," and on TV in "City on a Hill," Hodge hits new heights of commitment.

The less enamored of Eleanor the Great you become, however, the more and more thankful you are for the presence of June the Magnificent. There’s a lot of joie de vivre she injects into even the most morose moments, and Squibb knows exactly how to use spoonfuls of sugar to help the regret, the side-eye snark, and the heartache go down. The film’s just good enough. She’s great.

It’s a portrait of girls that decries how sexuality is force-fed to them and/or viewed as the only way to foster self-esteem at far too young an age. It is the polar opposite of what it’s accused of being.

Whatever this eye-popping head trip lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in flash and a sense of a world spinning off its axis.

Make no mistake: This is really one man’s look back in anger, sorrow, joy and sentimentality. “Robbie Robertson on the Band” would be a more accurate description.

It’s far more effective as an indictment against media rapaciousness, as well as their treatment of the homeless and mentally unwell.

Stylish entertainment and smartass fun when director John Dahl ("The Last Seduction") plays his strong suit (a gifted cast) instead of his weakest (a derivative plot).

Turitz keeps it comic and romantic in just the right doses. Looking for a fun date flick? You found it.

If it’s an ASMR video for pandemic-raddled emotions you’re after, you could do so much worse.

It’s a bumpy ride for sure, but Smith and Lawrence haven’t lost their irresistible mojo and Bad Boys For Life plays like a blast of retro ’90s action. It’s like they never left.

The Aeronauts is hobbled time and again by the attempt to add the juice of fiction to a story that could and should have stood on its own. The truth, in Hollywood terms, is never enough.

Aussie director Anthony Maras, in his feature debut, brings a Hitchcockian feel for suspense and a documentarian’s eye for detail to the brutal events that transpired over three days in November 2008 when the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba initiated an attack on the city of Mumbai.

Co-written by Selick and Peele, Wendell & Wild has a nagging tendency to throw a lot at you and simply cross its slender, skeleton-ish fingers that even a little of it coheres and sticks.

What you’re ultimately left with is the typical catch-and-release horror template that occasionally sags under the weight of its own ambitions, as well as one that, having exhausted the idea’s potential early on, simply limps to the finish line.

Like the other Bad Boys movies, this is the cinematic equivalent of exquisitely prepared fast food, empty-calorie entertainment that people love to eat because it tastes good going down.

As for whether this is the last film Eastwood gets the opportunity to make, the jury is still out on that. But you can’t accuse him of resting on his laurels. Artists half his age couldn’t come up with a cinéma du airport read this intriguing.

The Lodge strains credulity beyond the breaking point; “contrived” is the mildest word you could use to describe the plot. Luckily, Franz and Fiala are masters of setting a mood that makes your skin crawl. And Keough — she’s Elvis’s eldest granddaughter — is a subtle sensation.

Summering works better as a mood than it does a movie, succeeding in channeling a certain feeling of transition despite ambling, or occasionally stumbling though more traditional kids-flicks narrative beats.

Julia Roberts glitters like gold dust, and she is ideally partnered with Rupert Everett, who gives a witty, wicked, bust-out performance.

Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning feels like a conclusion to 30 years worth of proving that yes, you still can conjure up a certain vintage strain of Hollywood magic. It also feels like the end of an era.

The Equalizer 2 feels uneven and off balance. But not Washington. Despite his trashy trappings, there’s no one cooler to watch in action.

The Little Things settles sleekly into its place as a movie of the week. That’s a satisfying enough ambition — even as the actors onscreen give performances that point to a richer, wilder movie.

The movie’s ambitions exceed its grasp, and it’s hard not to wonder if the ideas here might not have been better served in a shorter, tighter format.

Everything goes to hell in a decorative handbasket. What starts out as a simple plan will be destined to become, well, "A Simple Plan" redux.

Like the apex predators slithering at the center of it all, it gets the job done once it lets is more brutal, primal instincts take over. Bon Appétit.

Part II feels like just another case of sequel-itis, something designed to metastasize into just another franchise among many. Just get through this, it says, and then tune in next year, next summer, next financial quarter statement or board-meeting announcement, for the real story.

There’s undoubtedly better adventures on the way for the Four in future endeavors, and this should truly be viewed as a first step to making them a major deal in the MCU. But to say their introduction is fantastic would be pushing it.

This is not a reinvention of the wheel, just a rotation of the tires. For a story that started with a young man trying to follow in huge footsteps while blazing his own path, it might be unfair to play the compare game here. Yet Creed II does not give us anything but another, slightly superior Rocky sequel. It wins on points. Just don’t expect a knockout.

Big, loud and lurid, but no less entertaining for that.

What these guys do for revenge during one hellish day in the Big Apple makes the panic room look like Barney's toy box. The film itself goes off the deep end way before the end credits.

Brought to the screen awkwardly but ardently by Mamet-actor supreme Joe Mantegna in his feature-directing debut.

It’s a good-looking, well-acted movie with a solid kicker. As for the odyssey of emotional nuance that its style and portent seem to promise, it digs beneath the surface, but to a shallower depth than it seems to think.

Trap is… well, you wouldn’t say it’s good...It is undeniably camp, however, and we look forward to attending one of those midnight reclamation-revival screenings à la Showgirls, where everyone screams the dialogue and dresses like Hartnett’s normcore Norman Bates, a decade from now.

There’s a words-escape-me, tingling, offbeat something about this movie that reels you in — a something dimmed, maybe, by the brunt of the film so clearly guiding us toward this impression. Once it gets there, it doesn’t quite know where to go. Wit gives way to enervation.

The whole thing takes on a level of fractured fairy-tale storytelling that nods to both the Brothers Grimm and the father-figure Cronenberg.

The plot doesn’t make much sense, but the film is filled with lovely little moments courtesy of Bridges, who brings a casualness to this character that feels right.

With the Bard’s words, Henry roused his soldiers to action: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” With this mediocrity, it’s more a case of how the war was wan.

Director Brian Robbins ("Good Burger") and screenwriter W. Peter Iliff ("Prayer of the Rollerboys") have wrapped their moral fable in a glossy package of hard football action and towel-slapping, hard-body fun that might seem exciting if you've never seen a movie before.

The actors try their best, but Östlund’s insistent conceptual droning overtakes them.

The movie starts off as yet another Kill Bill, et al. clone. Thanks to its star, it at least goes out as something closer to Kill, Bill, Kill!

Veering on the maudlin, the film ultimately succeeds by striking a universal chord on the subject of inconsolable loss. It's a stirring, humane testament from a surprising source.

Compared with ("The Sixth Sense"), there's no contest. Stir of Echoes has been outrun and outclassed.

You could, however, accuse this Black Christmas of elevating the subtext of decades’ worth of slasher flicks to the point that the text itself starts to take a backseat, or that its third-act reveal may be trying a tad too hard to grab the social-thriller brass ring. You would not necessarily be wrong.

The Dry is solid and appreciably sad but, for all the virtues of its rough symbolism and intriguing backstory, almost too jampacked with discovery for its own good.

At its best, The Predator is a movie that makes you forget there’s an iconic killer alien involved at all — with the exception of a slaughter in a lab and a shoot-out near a spaceship, the high points mostly involve the cast simply cracking wise with each other.

The Hunt is neither a harbinger of Western civilization’s end nor quite the Swiftian satire its creators want it to be. It’s simply a better-than-decent B-movie, the kind that takes pride in its sick kills and throws a lot of punches that only occasionally connect.

There’s such beautiful artisanal touches that Russo-Young adds to what could have been a standard YA-lit flick and so much that the actors do with scenes of people just talking that you can’t write it off. And there are too many dramatic moments that flatline when they should spike, too many plot turns that feel false and too much reliance on “coincidence” as some higher-power string-yanking to say it completely works.

There's not that much that's new in screenwriter Marshall Karp's sitcom-ish memoir, but Alexander keeps the laughs coming.

The Gray Man wants to remind you of what an old-school dopamine dump these types of entertainments are, and it has what seems to be the necessary ingredients to do it. Which, to be honest, only makes you wish this was tighter, tauter, tougher, better. It could be. It should be. The movie’s aims and instincts are killer. Its endgame has way too much filler.

In a genre that runs the gamut from A Hard Day’s Night to Can’t Stop the Music, filmmaker Rich Peppiatt’s gonzo take on the band’s story — titled, simply, Kneecap — falls somewhere between those two markers of quality; the group may be groundbreaking, but this recounting of their struggle to achieve fame, glory, and inhuman levels of intoxication sticks to an extremely familiar template.

Velvet Buzzsaw is never less than a feast for the eyes even when it reduces the plot to B-level butchery. What’s missing is the potent provocation that Gilroy seemed to be developing at the start.

But just watch Hanks, with the effortless grace of a Jimmy Stewart, turn the loony into something sweetly logical. Now that is magic.

Whether the climax, which veers close to magical realism and even closer to cloying, undoes the good will its built up will defend on the filmgoer. But for a long while, the tour these unlikely dreamers take you on is worth the trip. Samuel Clemens would have approved.

Totally Under Control is very much in control: It makes the whole of this crisis feel explicable. That proves frustrating. With the tragedy of the pandemic still ongoing, and thus still fresh, it also proves gratingly impersonal.

This lively mess proves that when Toback loses his head, he does it with style.

The premise is a perfect opportunity to take a cold, hard, genre-inflected look at the American experiment’s current slouching toward self-destruction — the only question is whether Garland’s wild potboiler wants to explore or exploit our state of the nation, and the jury’s still out on that.

Juliet, Naked is annoyingly hit and miss. But when Annie and Tucker connect with the gob-smacked Duncan, the movie substitutes the hard sell for grace notes and wins us over.

No one wants to rock the camakau too much here, and the overall sentiment seems to be something like Sequel 101: You loved the first movie, so here’s a second movie that’s a lot like the first movie. This is the good news if that’s what you’re after. If not, well: It’s one hour and 40 minutes.

Ronan can’t save The Outrun from its limitations as a drama, or from its worst stack-the-deck instincts. But she does lift this film up and infuse the storytelling with a genuine sense of what it means to try living one day at a time for the rest of one’s life.

The movie was directed by Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) who, in the case of The Devil Made Me Do It, reveals a finer hand with the melodrama of possession — the utter internal chaos of it, the feverish disorientation — than with jump scares. The jumps: not so jumpy. More or less predictable.

It’s the personal demons rather than old-fashioned monsters that get you, see, which is one of two central tenets of Cummings’ genre exercise/portrait of a fuck-up mash-up.

To see this sui generis Amerindie star fall to earth with a resounding thud, leaving just a stunningly designed and studiously empty hole in its wake, is a cosmic bummer.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

The tightly-focused origin story of Ruth, played with ferocity and feeling by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is still one hell of a heroic odyssey.

Val is simply the reflections of an actor with a knack for self-documentation, who has seen better days but remains buoyant by the prospect of making art in one form or another.

Maron may not go wide in terms of range yet. But damned if he can’t go deep.

Carter can't sidestep the script's cliches, so he wisely cuts to the fancy footwork whenever possible.

An intriguing stab at modern Hasidic horror — we smell a burgeoning subgenre — The Vigil will feel like well-trod ground to anyone who’s seen a few supernatural thrillers; only the neighborhood has changed.

The visual style, free-flowing and light on talking heads, gives the film a level of authenticity that feels lived-in. The visuals do the explaining for you, allowing you to come up with your own thoughts and conclusions.

The ending, depending on you, may come off as either too neat or appropriately revelatory. But the film’s emotions have a stark, memorable sheen.

As an at-risk teen drama, the film is passable. As a portrait of a community, it’s eye-opening.

Whatever this is, it’s not a movie — it’s a product more deserving of a road test than a review.

It’s not that Robert Getchell’s script is any less crackbrained than Besson’s. This kind of kink just works better with a French accent.

Even with its familiar visual and dramatic approach — the extent to which we are firmly, subjectively pushed into Joseph’s world and made to tumble around for a while amid his unpredictable behaviors — the movie packs an odd little punch.

Here’s the thing about Bad Times at the El Royale: When it’s good, it’s very, very good — and when it’s bad, this retro whatsit is a whole lot of awful.

Fall is a straightforward survival thriller with just enough personality to glue you to your seat.

This is still star-driven, big-screen goofiness writ large, something to be consumed with popcorn and a crowd, and that fact its hitting U.S. screens during the summer dog days couldn’t be more welcome. You just might want to wear two masks in the theater.

The trouble does not emerge from the movie’s noble intentions, but from the stodgy manner in which they play out.

Estevez leans toward sacrificing dramatic power for blatant crowdpleasing. Still, his intent is refreshingly uncynical. Clearly, the quadruple threat doesn’t think audiences will sit still for his message without sugarcoating and a feelgood ending. At worst, you can dismiss him as a naïve do-gooder. At best, you can commend him for actually believing a movie might raise public consciousness and maybe even change things. Your call.

Shadow isn’t a bad epic so much as a banal one.

But the film exerts a hold. The crux is: for how long?

François Ozon’s Summer of ‘85 — which adapts the YA novel Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers — is moving but contained affair, aflush with overwhelming feeling but also distant from that feeling, probing but not always revealing, sensuous and charismatic but not always easy to like.

It’s a valentine to a communal gay experience, penned in a way that’s uniquely both insular and inviting.

If nothing else, Charlie Says puts Van Houten, and to a lesser extent her sisters in crime, in the center of their own story.

What this sequel really seems to be suggesting is that there is nothing scarier than an unstable pop star in 2024, poised on the edge of a public meltdown captured by a million cellphones and consumed by scandal-hungry social-media addicts. When it comes to possessing your soul, a supernatural demon can’t hold a candle to show business.

The question posed by this impressive, if somewhat overheated take on a theater-canon staple is not, in the end, “What curse is it that makes everything I touch turn ludicrous and mean?” It’s more like: Why kill when you can overkill?

You won't forget the way Carrey transcends mere impersonation to find the roots of Andy's torment.