It’s a messy movie about messy lives, occasionally in ways you wish it wasn’t. But The Iron Claw is also a story of redemption that’s less about pinning down opponents and much more about breaking cycles.

It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

It helps that American Fiction has, at its center, someone who gives Monk a keen intelligence, a razor-sharp wit, and a spiky exterior, as well as showing you the perpetually scratched romantic beneath the battle-tested cynic.

It’s all very exciting when it’s not completely exhausting. At least you can’t say Wonka is a generic legacy-property cash grab.

It’s a work that forces you to reexamine how we’ve processed this chapter of history and restores a proper sense of ungraspable horror.

The seeds of our destruction have already been planted by us; they simply need a little water and and sunlight to grow. And the more that Leave the World Behind pokes at that notion, the more you fear that this isn’t a thriller. It could be a documentary with movie stars.

Poor Things never gets dogmatically bogged down — it prefers a swifter, Swiftian attack on bygone mores regarding sex that still don’t feel bygone enough — but whether you dig the manner in which this pilgrim’s progress is presented may be a matter of taste.

Eileen wants us to notice how the psychological brick house it’s been building all along explains the outcome. But the outcome almost doesn’t matter. The real joy is in the hungers we tasted along the way.

Beyoncé’s Renaissance is so much more than a concert film. It’s a superhero epic—as if Bey is filling the void left by The Marvels or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It’s a glorious three-hour tour of the Queen in all her creative splendor, on her record-setting Renaissance World Tour from this past summer.

It’s a testament to Yamazaki’s work as both director and screenwriter that Minus One feels like a wartime character drama first, kaiju film second.

Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy.

Yes, this look back at one extraordinary, joyous, painful year in the life is a music documentary. But American Symphony is also a love story, a look at the personal toll that illness takes on everyone involved (at one point, we ride shotgun during an uncomfortably intimate therapy session), a testament to leaps of faith, and a testimony to the idea that living isn’t a passive act even in the best of times, much less the worst.

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.

Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear.

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

Like the movie itself, the performance doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel in terms of how a good man goes evil. But both the actor and Ballad seem to respect the fans and the franchise, not just in terms of investment but in building out things sideways instead of forward.

No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup playoffs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?

If Rustin only gives you a slice of a story — you could make seven different films out of his life and achievements — it assures you walk away knowing who Bayard Rustin was. The same can be said for Colman Domingo. Attention must be paid a hundredfold.

The Boy Who Lived lacks the complexity and frisson that might have set it apart in an increasingly crowded documentary field, or pushed it beyond its feel-good parameters.

Seriously, this should have been either a “special episode” played out over 45 minutes or a six-hour miniseries, in which the relationships among this trinity could have been better fleshed out and the jarring tonal shifts relegated to separate chapters.

It announces right from the start that you are not just watching a movie. You’re experiencing an immersive portrait of a life and a landscape intertwined, and entering what feels like a feature-length sense memory.

As a portrait of a friendship, one tested by decades of high times and lows, successes and failures, bad behavior and forgiveness, Nyad the movie is trawling deeper waters. As a bio-dramatization of one human’s resilience — and thus a stand-in for the triumph of the human spirit overall — it comes perilously close to merely treading them.

It becomes more of an actor’s showcase, in other words, which has always been one of Payne’s strengths — he’s an old-school director of performers, with a penchant for conjuring memories of several old schools in particular.

As a narrative that pretends to plumb the dark absence of missing children, however, Five Nights at Freddy’s is curiously inert, unwilling to get under your skin even as it grows dense with explanations of what’s happening.

Last Stop Larrimah is ultimately a pitch-black comedy — a digressive slice of cultural anthropology that chuckles into the abyss.

The Insurrectionist Next Door is both comedy, thanks largely to the fact that Pelosi has no interest in hiding her incredulity, and tragedy, in that she locates the humanity in these people who made some horrible decisions on the basis of a loudly propagated fiction, and will be paying for the rest of their lives.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

What should’ve been a major coup for Netflix, and audiences at large, comes off as a rank revival that will only sully the memory of a British classic.