The cast puts its effort into a slightly less underwhelming movie, one a little more willing to engage this gallery of personalities, which, insofar as they’re based on the characters in the novel, are just engaging enough to watch this once and never think about again. Austen works hard. But mediocrity, this movie reminds us, works harder.

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.

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.

while director Olivia Newman (First Match) and screenwriter Lucy Alibar (Beasts of the Southern Wild) retain the book’s breathless, beach-read momentum — sudden violence! love triangles! plot surprises! incredibly photorealistic sketches of shells! — there doesn’t seem to be much of a spark in the engine powering these narrative turns. Can a movie be both hyperventilating and lackluster at the same time?

The doc is a capsule history lesson on an eons-old natural phenomenon. But it’s also the greatest lava-fueled love story ever told, and the fact that those two elements remain as inseparable as the spouses at the center of it all is a testament to how sublime this stranger-than-fiction masterpiece really is.

For something so reliant on dramatic engagement in addition to spectacle and giggles, Love and Thunder feels oddly unengaging; even the love and death aspects often feel like cold transmissions from distant sources.

Hallelujah isn’t a definitive, life-spanning doc on Cohen’s life, nor does it claim to be, but the tale of “Hallelujah” serves as a metaphor for Cohen’s life.

Elvis is an entertaining movie about the man’s sex appeal and a pretty good movie about his life, even as it never dials things back enough for anyone to catch a breath. Luhrmann’s zigzagging, triumphantly kitschy style suits his subject.

For all of the painstaking work that went into making this intricate animated feature feel not just handmade but heartfelt, Marcel is a wisp of a wistful film, whether it’s being existentially deep or essentially silly. Most of all, it just feels like a salve.

The movie often plays like another Stranger Things dilution, watering down the paperback thrills of literature’s reigning master of horror into an inferior throwback substitution.

Spiderhead was adapted from a short story by George Saunders, but halfheartedly and with decidedly less wit.

The movie would hit every bullseye it needed to even without her near-surgical deconstruction of the narcissistic monsters who scream “action” and “cut.” With Cruz’s take on artistic “genius,” however, this satire officially becomes a work of actual genius.

The movie is at its best when it’s twining together the stories of characters whose fate seems to be pulling them toward possibilities that they hadn’t only just dreamed of. Where it manages to go once they’ve gotten there is almost less satisfying. The getting-there, the discoveries made along the way, are not only the central pleasure, but the point.

It’s a surprisingly good sports movie that wants little more than to be a surprisingly good sports movie, one that knows it’s working with creaky triumph-of-the-underdog clichés but is willing to do a full-court press to sell them.

It is, in essence, a light, breezy, better-than-average Disney movie that just happens to feature a most-valuable Pixar player, while barely feeling like a Pixar movie at all.

This is a movie that keeps going out of its way to be any kind of blockbuster except an actual Jurassic World movie.

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

This is what the work of a visionary filmmaker looks like. Forget the new flesh. Long live the old Cronenberg.

As a movie about the subjective fears of a woman on her own, being hunted or haunted by male violence both commonplace and supernaturally eerie, the movie basically works: Your heart races, you’re skeeved out, you’re crawling out of your skin. As a movie about why those men are the way they are, which is an idea that occupies a substantial chunk of its runtime, well…

The interactions between the people may seem small in comparison to the wide-open landscapes and rolling hills. In the hands of everyone involved with this moving drama, however, they echo long and loudly nonetheless.

The effects are dodgy and unconvincing. The emotional investment is nil. The running time is only 94 minutes long, thus proving there may, in fact, be a merciful higher power out there. It’s still a four-alarm disaster.

It’s a fresh-faced gloss on the original, in other words, powered, like the original, by a star who’ll simply never stop being a star. The big mission makes for the most exciting moment; the build-up is worthwhile. When Maverick goes its own way, it tends to lose itself.

It’s these life-or-death stakes that Happening puts front and center, as it forces viewers to not just confront the stigma associated with abortion — a word, by the way, that’s never uttered in the film — but to immerse themselves in the same dread and paranoia that Anne feels.

What Raimi has done with his contribution, however, is construct not another roller coaster but one hell of a haunted house, one fueled by an abundance of eccentric creativity, imagination, and finely honed chops. The methods he employs to his Madness are what makes this movie stick out, in this or any other universe.

Once you’ve seen this deft blend of genres and tones, all of the inspired laughter and the lumping of throats, you see exactly how Hit the Road fits all of its elements together with remarkable seamlessness.

It’s an oft-stunning visual feast and an entertaining peek into Eggers’ instincts as a choreographer not only of historical detail but of bloody action. It is also an instructive example of how the most visionary intentions can’t always enliven an otherwise rote story.

You wish the movie wasn’t content to be a feature-length meme and truly deserved what Cage is doing with this long, hard look in the fun-house mirror. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not unbearable by any means. It just should have been so much better.

Sciamma is weaving a spell here, so pure in its emotional resonance that it breaks your heart even as it heals wounds.