The plot of Godzilla vs. Kong matters far less than the basic fact that it’d be a much better movie if it stuck, firmly, to its title.

There is so much dead space between the death-defying set pieces that you can feel things grinding to a halt long before the next adrenaline spike hits.

The creative workaround does drop you into the middle of the shady-as-hell action in a way that, say, recordings playing over a close-up of a grainy photo does not. But it also starts to become more than a little distracting, and you find yourself tuning into the performances instead of the particulars of the case.

The movie is so overbearingly high on its own fizzy, clever stylishness that it strands the heart of its own story.

This is a film steeped in myth and ritual, besotted with secrets, history, and imagination — with a clear eye on the Ivory Coast’s politics.

The World to Come is full of inversions, deviations from the usual themes, complicated as it is by interlocking contrasts, unexpected emphases. This is a movie in which love springs in winter, whereas spring beckons devastation.

Chaos Walking doesn’t even get to the level of high camp, where pleasure is found in the sheer badness of it all.

As a traditional, accessible, familiarly-structured crowdpleaser, Boogie, in its modest, far-from-flawless way, challenges them to enjoy one as well.

Coming 2 America is a good time — even more, it’s evidence that this actor-director pair are on the verge of something great.

And while the action-set pieces and stand-offs and Raya–ders of the Lost Ark sequences are indeed thrilling, it’s the buddy-comedy aspect that actually makes the movie come alive.

We have plenty of information about the idea of the Notorious B.I.G., but Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell offers a rare look at the actual human being behind the legend.

An all pain, no gain, minimal-reprieve character study completely unaware of the ways its selling the singer short.

As for viewers, well … whoever won in the endless round-robin of interspecies chicanery, we all lost.

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.

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.

Test Pattern, for its emphatically binary sense of the world as summed up in the differences between these two people, for its literal examinations of blackness and whiteness, and gender, and everything else, somehow avoids falling into the trap of painting the world in black and white. It is a film that — more than presenting the mess of the life — dives in headlong, wisely, cuttingly, and to devastating effect.

The film is well-paced, tightly edited and engaging, and at times, it’s quite inspiring.

See the movie for the performances and the concept — and watch it closely for the potential it contains, but doesn’t entirely exploit.

As a film about two gay men in their middle age, Supernova does all the right things, anchors its sense of conviction in rhythms and silences, in-jokes and private conflicts, that cohere into a natural portrait of being together. In a word, it’s a solid, emotive drama, all the more so for the pain at the movie’s center being equally natural, valid, inevitable.

Kevin Macdonald’s drama is determined to put a name and a face to the legion of largely anonymous casualties of the War on Terror — not the victims of attacks, but the other ones, i.e. mostly Middle Eastern men who, by some circumstantial evidence, slivers of association or maybe just their nationality, became wards of the state held in a perpetual purgatory.

Judas and the Black Messiah can’t do everything. What it accomplishes is nevertheless quite something. It is a bittersweet compliment to what’s here that we end the film wishing it’d done even more.

The purposely messy, garish and disposable comedy from Bridesmaids writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who also star as the fortysomething Midwesterners of the title, is so determinedly low-stakes that to quibble with its candy-colored craving to be liked is to be a terrible killjoy.

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.

It’s a genuine revelation, and the sort of holy terror that restores your faith in a genre.

The black-and-white glossiness of it, the close-ups, the knock-down drag-out verbal tussles: This is the kind of movie that practically begs comparison to John Cassavetes, while also giving us a lead character who’d berate us for making the comparison. It gets a little boring. Turn the movie off at the 20-minute mark and you can ultimately still say you’ve seen the entire thing.

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.

Bahrani’s take on Balram’s present-day circumstances is eventually so restricted to the beginning and end of the film that it begins to feel like a foregone conclusion, rather than like the curiosity that it is.

Notturno is not journalism. Yet from its very outset it raises the same questions about itself and its own making, about the film’s ability to show what it shows, because what it shows is often so immediately intimate — private to the point of making a viewer want to avert their eyes.

This is a passable substitute for the real thing. It could have burrowed so much deeper.

It’s the kind of alchemy achieved when an artist has his or her vision brought to a larger audience by someone who understands exactly what they’re doing. It’s a testament to the power of the material and the determination of its interpreters to not dilute it one ounce.

Not a great movie, but courtesy of director Robert Lorenz, a lean, plausibly entertaining one with all the fixin’s and none of the extra flab of deep, incisive meaning. It’s a buddy movie, a cartel chase, a sentimental redemption story. It’s a comfort watch.

Come for the snickering, it seems to say. Stay for the unexpected lump in your throat.

The choices that King and Hoover make relative to the public pressures they applied to one another only serve, in Pollard’s recounting of this bitter history, to twine these men together ever so tightly. This is all part of what gives Pollard’s film its deafening urgency, its tingling aura of imminent danger.

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.

It works far better as a partial document of life under lockdown than as a genre mash-up.

While this mix of thrills, chills and eyeroll-inducing WTFs is an inauspicious way to start a moviegoing year, it’s the type of viewing lark that works best through the haze of a long day’s journey into last night’s hangover. It isn’t bad. It should be better.

Pieces of a Woman largely belongs to the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown at its center, however, and it’s Vanessa Kirby who gifts the film with The Performance.

One the feats of McQueen’s movie is that, by the end, the ability to read — proof of having been educated — is all the more powerful for seeming exceptional.

This movie, like Hanks and Greengrass’s Captain Philips, only excites — quite capably — when it needs to. Greengrass’ trademark efficiency as a storyteller is very much here. But more often the movie sticks to the contemplative: a moody character study with dashes of hillside danger and inner turmoil and post-war social conflict and all the rest — the allspice seasoning of the adult western genre.

The movie is sturdy and stylish, full of ideas and fun to watch, strange as it may seem to say. If it doesn’t always maintain the sharp effectiveness of its opening, it’s proof of a writer-director willing and able to stay ahead of the curve.

When the spell gets broken, temporarily or otherwise, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the craft and care of this affectionate reclamation and still feel that all the swooning that heaven allows is almost, but not quite, enough.

The Midnight Sky is a good example of a movie that sells itself short by trying to be one thing — serious, heavy, emotional — when, by all available indicators, it should be more of a thriller, or more ridiculous, or at the very least more fun.

There are many elaborate lessons on life and how to live it in Soul, though its best may ironically be its simplest: Look. Listen. Learn. Enjoy. You may not turn the film off with an answer to what a soul is. But you may find yourself wondering if you’re forgetting to occasionally connect with your own.

If Alex Wheatle proves less powerful than the other films in this series, that’s in large part because of the strengths of the series. Every entry in Small Axe is a study in expansive miniatures. None of these films flexes its muscle by way of length. They burrow. Alex Wheatle’s primary imperfection is that it almost doesn’t burrow enough. The intricacies of Wheatle’s inner life feel almost rushed through or limited in their illustration. I wanted to know more about this young man — which is also a sign that the film is doing something right.

Courtesy of the stars, and of the filmmaker’s clear affection for her subject, there’s a little more soul here than there had to be, thankfully. That’s not everything. It’s also not nothing.

The movie comes not to bury this legend but to praise him. Inhuman endurance or not, you worry it may end up having to do the former regardless.

For all the majesty and naturalistic realism of its imagery, Nomadland is nevertheless full of sublime, uncanny details that lift it somewhat above the fray.

Here’s McQueen working in one of his most exciting modes as a director: cool anger. In contrast to the passionate political thrust of of Mangrove and the heated groove of Lovers Rock, Red, White, and Blue is wrought of images that feel clinical and removed — until you mash them together into a movie. That’s when the hellmouth cracks open, and all the seeming poise at the movie’s surface is revealed for the disguise that it is. The studied symmetries, the visual confrontations marked along racial lines, all of it is expressive, and much of it works.

This is what it looks like when you Glee a beloved Broadway production to death.

If you’re willing to be patient, the characters become richer, the narrative takes more risks and the set pieces are more enthralling, like an engrossing disco sequence and a lumbering car chase in giant, period-accurate sedans.

Watching Collective when it premiered on the fall festival circuit last year, it was easy to see that it should be considered a flat-out masterpiece regardless of timing. Yet to watch it, or rewatch it, now is to experience something even deeper. It’s a story of a nation’s inability to take care of its citizens that comes to us in the middle of a pandemic that’s crippling America’s economy and killing its citizens.

How can you recreate the first Ziggy concert in 1972 at Borough Assembly Hall, Aylesbury, and fail to evoke even an ounce of the moment’s dynamism even when you have the moves down? Does Stardust exist solely to make Bohemian Rhapsody seem better by comparison? Why are we still watching this?

This movie’s primary strength is in Wilson’s words, his facility with ideas and symbols and attitudes, and what the actors do with all of the above. The movie, as a movie, has its limits. But Wilson’s material remains unbound.

Winter’s impressive doc admittedly works better as a preaching-to-the-choir portrait than a work of advocacy or conversion. But it is one hell of chronicle of Frank the Walking Contradiction: He was a rock star and a symphonic composer.

The movie feels at times like a miracle — not least for what it does not do. McQueen’s ability to render a universe of incident and emotion out of granular details, sounds and visions that feel specific and fully lived, should not surprise us at this point in the career. This is a director whose work has long displayed an ability, and a fascinating eagerness to display, the power of dramatic tangents and uncanny effects of sound and image.

It’s not a knockout, but the actors frequently are. The rest is an exercise in not overdoing it. It’s here, it’s queer, it’s not much else — and that’s OK.

There’s something stealthy in its awareness, in the ways it accrues crumbs of insight and observation and dispenses them throughout the narrative without us even noticing. You emerge from the movie with an enriched, nearly felt sense of the Mangrove as a place, not just as a symbol.

If Belushi does nothing else, it does a fine job of scaling him back down to size without giving his immense talent short shrift.

Sound of Metal understands the importance of immersing you in this brave new noiseless world and giving you a compelling Virgil to guide you through it, but its real strength may simply be its powers of observation.

Forget the title; the film barely works itself up into a half-hearted trot. It isn’t even howl-worthy in its campiness or badness, with one notable exception.

It’s a clever mash-up conceit that director/co-writer Christopher Landon and his cast milk for all its worth, none more so than the two leads.

The movie sometimes feels a little caught up in its own virtuosity. But the actors, Covino and Marvin — a sentient grenade and spineless but loving worm, respectively — keep it lively and make it meaningful. If the movie succeeds in surpassing the exercise it easily could have been, it’s because of them.

Among Fincher die-hards, the result will probably bemuse some, bore many, and thrill a relative but hearty minority. Count me in the minority.

It’s not hard to be sympathetic to Let Him Go’s desire to broaden, drift, be all-encompassing; that’s what yarns are good for. It’s what makes the movie an okay hang as is. And it’s also what may make you crave a better movie.

We sing O’Connell’s praises so loudly because he’s really the only reason to check out Max Winkler’s tale of blood bonds, brotherly love and bloody bareknuckle bouts, and to remind you that sometimes, even the best and brightest can’t save something so banal and by-the-book.

What Ammonite needs is to dig deeper and imagine more — to find a Mary Anning of its own to excavate what’s hidden inside it.

The basic spell remains the same, updated for the age of inclusivity, toxic masculinity and Princess Nokia. The magic, however, is M.I.A.

There are much worse things than semi-stylish, slightly generic horror films, especially those channeling the sort of moody children’s-lit work of authors like Maurice Sendak (an alt-title: Where the Wild Things Scar?) in the name of creepiness. There are also better movies to seek out in the name of mining childhood for nightmare fodder.

His House is a strong debut, and exciting — even as its horrors risk redundancy as the film wears on — for its uncanny merging of political experience and the usual, perilous haunted-house thrills.

Fire Will Come is a movie that will go down easy for the right viewer, a movie strangely energized by an unexpected dash of suspense. But the film’s ideas, the questions it sends aloft as we watch, remain stuck in our throats.

What’s dredged up by every bit of the film’s fabric and style is a sense of isolation.

The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.

The magnetism of Goggins keeps this vehicle from running out of gas.

This is a perfectly fine postapocalyptic mash-up that really is just the sum of its parts, and nowhere near a gleeful, shriek-inducing whole. For some, that might be considered a feature. For the rest of us, it’s most definitely a ginourmous, gaping-jawed bug.

What distinguishes this documentary from other movies about mass incarceration is the novelty with which Bradley subverts the mass and trains our eye, frequently literally, on the particular.

Version is, unabashedly, a crowd-pleaser — one that arrives at a time when the crowd could use some pleasing. But it’s as thoughtful and, in the way only great comedy can be, soul-baring and honest as it is funny throughout. It signals the arrival of a great movie talent. The joke is on us if we don’t keep her around.

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.

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.

Like the late Jonathan Demme, director of Stop Making Sense, Lee is here not just to document but to heighten. There are close-ups on Byrne’s face, his eyes, even his feet; dynamic roving views from onstage and off; a keen awareness of the audience. And, of course, there’s the thrill of seeing people standing up in their seats, clapping along, silhouetted against Byrne’s bright, inviting presence onstage. All of it lends a sense of alive-ness to this live performance.

It’s 94 minutes that you won’t remember seconds after its over. You could always just throw down the white flag before shots are fired and save yourself the trouble.

Unlike his previous action films and pulpy crime flicks, there’s neither enough grade-A live-wire dynamism nor giddy, guilty-pleasure cheesiness (seriously, have you seen Non-Stop?!) to make this movie actually move. It’s a safecracker-versus-corrupt-feds thriller that’s just north of somnambulistic.

Mulan emerges as a curious act of market negotiation. It is a perfectly fine movie; it will no doubt be meaningful for children, especially those who could afford to see more of themselves onscreen in heroines like Mulan. But its cast, its attitude, its overall eagerness to please — all benefits, one would think — don’t add up to a good movie. They add up to a blueprint of the movie this ought to be.

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.

It grows thrilling to watch. Rathjen’s careful script and intensive eye for environmental details deliver all of this to us with a steady rhythm.

Bolstered by the strength of its admirable and talented cast — which includes Kiersey Clemons, Gabourey Sidibe, Jena Malone, Tongayi Chirisa, and Jack Huston — the movie is good at getting a good number of ideas going at once.

There are too many splendid little touches in this tale of letting go to dismiss it entirely, and too many latebreaking wrong turns it takes to completely forgive it. What you’re left with is the cinematic equivalent of a clipped-wing plummet.

The Devil All the Time has the pretensions of a mythopoetic story that’s chipping away at a community’s dark underbelly. But here the misery is as belly-up and eager to be noticed as a house cat or a dead fish.

Law and Coon aren’t the only reason to see Durkin’s marital nightmare of a movie, but they are the main reason to see it, and both of them give these characters so much shared history communicated without saying a word.

Residue is the kind of movie to make you wonder what may have changed in D.C. during even the short span of its own making. Gentrification works quickly; it arrives buoyed by a whirlwind sense of the rug being swept from under residents’ feet. These are details Gerima builds into the movie based on his experience of leaving for just one year. Jay is returning after time in college. One can only imagine his shock.

Brown has such a natural wit and compelling screen presence, such an ability to shift from curious youngster to screwball comic to charismatic action hero on a dime, that it’s hard not to view Enola Holmes as a coming-out party of sorts.

Kajillionaire feels in some ways like a relic, harkening back to the recent past of indie quirk but dressing it up in the pain of overgrown kidulthood. The difference between July’s work and those other movies is that the quirks aren’t a mere matter of personality or window dressing, but evidence of a way of being in the world that, to the majority, isn’t quite right.

The strange thing is that for all its tricks — even that odd detour through The Wizard of Oz Taymor manages to serve us midway through — The Glorias still falls prey to the problem of making a movie out of a life far too vast for a movie. Which is to say, a deeply political life.

What’s missing is history. What’s missing is a sense that men like this really lived.

The out-of-bodiness you feel from the filmmaking is almost more unsettling than the actual story. It’s pure cinematic dysmorphia: to watch this movie carefully is to feel completely out of place, right alongside the people onscreen.

It’s a little zany, a little blue, emotionally jagged, adventurously all over the place. If you’re a romantic, though, the movie’s inciting incident — the bomb that detonates all the problems to come — probably plays like something closer to a scene out of a horror movie.

You can feel the narrative hitting predictable beats like it was upshifting an ATV’s gears, from infatuations with the outlaw life to blowing off good influences, getting sucked into the game to bad decisions leading to bodies dropping.

For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love.

Somehow, amidst all of the shifting perspectives and timeframes and overall blurring of lines, it also manages to move you to tears even as it leaves you bewildered and unmoored.