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.