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.

Tenet sweeps you away on waves of pure, ravishing cinema.

This teeming film sometimes bursts at the seams, but it’s abound with an exuberant energy that honors Dickens without embalming him in the literary past. It’s irresistible.

The expression here is one of shared humanity regardless of background, gender identity, race or creed. The common language being used here is cinema.

Even in these pandemic times, when we all hunger for escapism, this long journey to a lame ending hardly fills the bill.

Whatever this eye-popping head trip lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in flash and a sense of a world spinning off its axis.

Even marking on a B-movie curve, Unhinged is running on empty.

The 24th has its share of unevenness. It also has the blessing, and the curse, of necessity. It’s a story that has to be retold.

The film is torn between a tough-minded plea for animal rights and edge-free, PG family entertainment. But its advocacy of kindness to man and animal is indisputable.

A striking film that frustratingly never coheres but still holds you in thrall.

Though Yeon can still deliver memorable frights, like the car horn that literally does wake the dead, he can’t decide what kind of movie to make. So he does a genre mashup, tops it with a sappy ending, and hopes for the best. The result is decidedly uneven.