One of the more fun things about M3GAN, besides the batshit megabitch AI in pop starlet’s form at the center of the movie, is that this is all, immediately, such a bad idea.

The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

There’s a sensitivity in even the most grand-gesture flourishes Polley and her editors Christopher Donaldson and Roslyn Kalloo throw in, but you also know there’s a voice behind this camera. And it belongs to an artist who definitely has something to say.

It’s the star himself who, even more than the decor and the change of cultural scenery, lifts Living out of the realm of a remake and into something far more profound. It becomes another story of a man at long last learning how to embrace the world, yet one that is completely substantial and shattering and, yeah, even life-affirming on its own.

Corsage is not a great movie, but it’s good at detailing one woman’s circumstances. It doesn’t browbeat us with meaning, which it had every right to do, but instead attempts something humbler.

Baumbach overreaches in White Noise. The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured.

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

There’s a constant feeling that a lot of hands were wrestling for the steering wheel of this biopic behind the scenes, with various parties pushing the story this way and that, even with the united goal of collectively crafting the greatest love letter of all. Yet Ackie just keeps her eyes on — and her energy directed toward — delivering a screen-worthy Whitney, scaling the heights and earning her Hall of Fame status.

The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.

How can a movie that seemingly does so little amount to so much? It’s because of the story lurking beyond it all — the psychological battle being waged, so quietly, under the surface of everything.

The Way of Water is like its predecessor: sincere to the point of being brash, wide-armed and open-hearted toward the world it loves and vengefully, comically violent toward the people who arrive to destroy that world. It’s a better movie than the first outing because Cameron lets things get weirder, wilder.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any movie starring Olivia Colman can’t be all bad, of course, and Empire of Light wisely knows how to play the ace tucked snugly up its sleeve.

The Whale knows it has a dynamo at its core, yet still keeps trying to prove to you it’s a substantial, significant statement. It can’t stop itself from being crushed under its own symbolic and sensationalist weight.

Emancipation is not better off for laying any claim to the actual man that it purports to be about. It is a historically dubious, morally incurious piece of genre fare that satisfies as entertainment and not much else. Pure Hollywood heroism.

For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.

This is the sort of lazy, slapdash, self-impressed excuse for “edgy” entertainment that makes you enraged. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good; this is so bad you’re tempted to kick those responsible for it right in the jingle bells.

Nanny starts as a movie about a reality that we’d rather not face — the plight of Black domestic workers, of immigrants, of the barebones fact of financial survival — and ends as a movie about reality that we cannot bear. That is the horror of it — and, in Jusu’s hands, the galvanizing thrill.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a winding misadventure about a sweet-tempered donkey, inarguably qualifies as an animal’s-eye view of all that’s warm and cruel, comical and arbitrary about human nature.

There’s a good deal of fun in Glass Onion too, along with some sharp throwaway lines and the joy of watching actors dig into parts in which the option of going over the top has already been built in.

A movie that starts off as a scalpel-sharp satire, casually slides into becoming a skin-of-your-teeth horror film and ends as a flamebroiled screed in more ways than one, director Mark Mylod’s Grand Guignol take on the master-and-servant relationship of hospitality industries will not suit everyone’s palettes.

This is not a tale of a young man who can “pass” and, knowing that it may matter to his survival, toughens up, puts on a masculine drag. It’s a movie intent on showing us that this is all drag — it’s all put-on, all available to the play of identity.

This tender, gory trip through the guts of a nation is blessed with one of those magical instances of casting the right actor in the right part, and it’s impossible to think of someone else who could do justice to this young woman the way that Taylor Russell does.

She Said doesn’t pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work.

Mitchell has an inside-scoop aptitude for titillating details and unexpectedly insightful connections, a gift for association and cool, collected storytelling that propels the documentary along at a fast, satisfying clip, overwhelming us the number of nods to stars, to movies — big and small — and to his own impressions.

No one would blame you if you prefer your gothic-lit tales straight with no meta-chaser. Yet, largely thanks to Pugh, Leilo’s semi-experimental attempt at blending an old-fashioned melodrama with Media Studies 101 commentary never makes you feel like you’re watching something created in a dorm-session smokeout.

Lohan’s most distinguished quality as a star is that glowing goodness, a real, unshakeable joy that can only barely be imitated, let alone replicated, and which feels perfectly at home in the bright, buoyant, only glancingly ironic realm of happy-go-lucky comedy.

The movie isn’t always on such sure footing. But that’s almost appropriate: a messier movie trying to reckon with a messier range of feelings.

Ultimately, Something in the Dirt doesn’t quite convince as a genuine mystery — and it doesn’t seem to be meant to. Having fun with the artifice of it all — the loose “documentary” format, the well-played and visibly signaled “clues” scattered throughout — seems far more to the point.