It’s not easy to make an amusing, accessible diversion that mixes LGBTQ positivity and national politics, but “Red, White & Blue” passes the test with flying colors.

In this film, whenever Harper gets to do nothing but direct, as in the action scenes, Heart of Stone works. It’s in the convolutions of its flat script that the movie falls apart.

Gran Turismo is just the same cars, going around and around and around.

But for now, we have The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which actually was a pretty good idea that just didn’t have enough wind in its sails.

A touching combination of fact and fiction makes The Unknown Country one beautiful road trip.

Marc Turtletaub’s gentle, winning comedy Jules is technically a science-fiction film, but it is actually about loneliness and aging, much like the classic ’80s audience-pleaser “Cocoon,” which this film often resembles.

The film, written by Tomine, remains largely faithful to the book, which was already filled with caustic dialogue primed for a slacker movie. Yet there’s a sense that Tomine’s world has become sanitized in translation.

Aside from its scintillating title character, Bobi Wine: The People’s President is valuable because it stands as a clarion call against authoritarianism.

Petzold said he conceived of the film during the pandemic lockdown — that makes sense, considering the sparseness of the setting and small cast — and was inspired by the character studies of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, he needed inspiration from another great artist: Christian Petzold.

Though Meg 2 is by far the biggest production he’s ever helmed, director Ben Wheatley doesn’t appear to be in over his head with this; special effects and stunts are proficiently delivered, no matter how ludicrous

Based on the litany of deep cuts and the intrinsic understanding of the concept in “Mutant Mayhem,” it’s clear Rogen and Goldberg bring a particular love for the franchise to the screen.

Raw, provocative, sometimes humorous and always humane, Kokomo City is an engrossing documentary about four Black trans sex workers who constantly disarm with their outrageous anecdotes and their palpable fears of living in a world that’s often hostile to them.

Before it becomes entirely too Australian, the well-crafted haunted-hand horror movie Talk to Me perfectly captures the one-upmanship of social-media-fueled youth culture.

Kemper is good throughout. Her radiant likability gives her the power to sell weak material, which means she will often be offered weak material. But there’s enough in Happiness for Beginners to make me glad that she did it.

Sympathy for the Devil does the two things that every good Nicolas Cage movie must do: It gives him license to be manic, but it also gives him a realistic context in which his mania can delight and surprise.

Haunted Mansion shouldn’t have been rebooted, but if made, it should have clocked in at a modest 90 minutes.

Amid all the mayhem, a fairly lucid portrait of disturbed child psychology emerges. Although derivative, Chris Thomas Devlin’s script has enough sick, witty ideas to make the fearsome goings-on seem fresh and immediate. At the very least, after watching Cobweb, you’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.

It’s marked by a polished balance of humor, searing emotion, all the information about the toy business you’d ever want to know, and cautionary advice concerning investments in something silly like stuffed animals — or, by extension, NFTs.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan takes an eggheady topic and, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, turns it into a gut-level experience. He shows that the kind of hyper, jacked-up, ultra-modern filmmaking associated with the action and superhero genres can be harnessed in the service of a smart, serious movie.

Although the war in Ukraine is still raging, 20 Days in Mariupol is already a historical document. So much has happened in the war in the 14 months since these events, and graphic, front-lines reporting is now ubiquitous. However, Chernov’s team was among the first to document what many say are war crimes by Russian troops, and it provided an early window into the conflict for Western news media.

Barbie is an impressive and original work of the imagination. Its story holds up most of the time and for most of the way, with the unifying through line being Barbie’s existential crisis.

Theater Camp, a mockumentary about a summer workshop for thespian adolescents, offers plenty of theater and plenty of camp, to the point that it often plays like one, big inside joke. But the film offsets its drama class insularity with a rousing message that the stage will always be a magical place for children to dream — and to discover themselves.

McGann, whose 2016 documentary “Revolutions” explored the women’s roller derby scene in Ireland, spins a compelling yarn about two fascinating people, although she doesn’t go much below the surface.

They Cloned Tyrone can be heavy-handed times and runs a bit long, but the committed performances of its plucky triumvirate of stars go a long way toward the fun.

The Miracle Club won’t rock your world, but it’s a nice movie. There’s always a place for nice movies.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One may not be a great movie, but it’s a special movie deserving of its own kind of event and worth appreciating. Only Tom Cruise makes movies like this, and you either understand why this is pretty wonderful or you should give yourself the chance to find out why.

If anything keeps “Red Door” going, it’s Autumn Eakin’s exquisite cinematography. The Further looks like a shadow reflection of the real world, and she and Wilson never fail to come up with aesthetically interesting and sometimes ingenious light sources to illuminate portions of it.

The Out-Laws is dead on arrival.

This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.

Joy Ride feels like it easily could have been better, but it’s certainly good enough, and it might be remembered as an early milestone in some significant careers.

Leaf applies a documentarian’s dispassion to the telling of this fictional story, and to a large extent that works. One of the virtues of documentaries is also a virtue of this narrative feature — it depicts a kind of person who usually doesn’t get movies made about her and tells the world her story with respect and empathy.

Wham! tells a sweet story, but also a goofy and entertaining one, because these guys were more ’80s than anybody, more even than “Miami Vice” and Duran Duran.

Prisoner’s Daughter is, in a way, a simple movie. It’s also a cleverly (perhaps unconsciously) disguised version of John Wayne’s swan song, “The Shootist.” It’s one of those movies that you’ll enjoy as it goes along, only to realize, a day or two later, that it was even better than you thought.

By the time we get to a kaiju-inspired third-act throwdown involving multiple giant sea monsters and a mystical trident, this story feels like it’s gotten too big for its small frame.

With a zippy soundtrack and breezy editing style, Every Body comes off as an up-to-date declaration that being intersex is something to be celebrated. In the end, we can’t help but share in the enthusiasm.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

Close to Vermeer is much more than a chronicle of the exhibition. It is a globe-trotting tale of diplomacy, a detective story and a fascinating insight into the insular world of museum curation, research and preservation, which helps keep culture alive through the march of history.

The engaging HBO documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, both a guilty pleasure and meaningful slice of queer history, delivers a loving yet irony-laced tribute to a closeted movie icon whose tragic death from AIDS changed the course of the epidemic and cemented his place in LGBTQ lore.

A distasteful, overlong slog, but at least the filmmaker appears to have put everything he wanted to up on the screen.

So, Dial of Destiny isn’t great, but it’s still a lot of fun — even compared to some previous “Indiana Jones” movies.

It’s as if no aspect of Perfect Find were thought through because everyone expected that, whatever happened, Gabrielle Union could be counted on to carry the movie. She almost does, but doesn’t.

Basically, No Hard Feelings is everything you like about Jennifer Lawrence, brought together in one movie and then magnified: her down-to-earth irreverence, her comic timing, her idiosyncratic naturalness and her unexpected sensitivity.

Often the most exalted of filmmakers — like Terrence Malick, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock — have the ability to communicate their consciousness, so that you get the feeling that you’re inside their head, or they’re inside yours. Anderson has come close to doing that before, but this time he really does it.

Amid scattershot pop culture references, flying cars and squads of armored knights with laser-guided crossbows, Nimona makes a cry for acceptance that has mythic resonance.

You have never seen anything like this.

This is a horror movie the way the original “Ghostbusters” is a horror movie –– that is to say, not really — and like that film, there’s a “hanging out with friends” energy that gives The Blackening its charm.

The sequel is even more enjoyable than the first, with action sequences that are as good or better than anything you’ll see at the theater.

The Flash gets credit for effort, because this superhero movie isn’t trying to be stupid and convoluted. It gets there by accident.

For Pérez Biscayart, it’s the sound equivalent of a masterful silent-film performance, and for Perelman, it’s the welcome return of an important filmmaker.

In Elemental, we have a visually splendid and absolutely gorgeous rendering of a half-baked idea. For some of its running time, it can get by on looks. But ultimately, things like story and making sense start to matter, and that’s when the movie takes on water.

Unwittingly, Lynch/Oz ends up demonstrating the flimsiness of comparison as a tool of film criticism.

At its base level, Dalíland is all about what a drag it is getting old, especially for a narcissist. But more importantly, it’s also a cautionary tale about the dead-end that is narcissism — not just in life, but in art.

By the film’s gentle conclusion, we get a rich portrait of Nora and the bittersweet, itinerant nature of her past lives — and the commitment to art that’s remained her constant.

The only people to feel sorry for in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts are Anthony Ramos (“In the Heights”) and Dominique Fishback (“Swarm”) who play actual humans trying to save the planet, when in real life they’re just humans trying to save a movie. They’re fine, but they can’t make a dent in the awfulness.

While it plays with familiar themes, The Boogeyman is a step up from many modern mainstream horror titles. It’s a thoughtful, organic piece of filmmaking that just happens to have a monster in the middle.

Even more so than the original, the gravity-defying Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is as close to a moving comic book as one can get.

Moore’s admirers made this biography an homage, and if you’re not already a fan, you may tire of the valentine.

There is not one line of dialogue or one sight gag in About My Father that can’t be found in other bad comedies, and Maniscalco . . . and director Laura Terruso seem to believe the path to humor is to go as far over the top as possible.

After 96 minutes with these people, you’ll care even less than you do now.

It’s an action and suspense film, and, like Butler’s earlier 2023 flick “Plane,” a good one. Impressive set pieces include a car chase through a small-town bazaar, and a midnight shootout between Tom, outfitted with night-vision goggles, and a helicopter.

In its modestly comic way, the movie delves into the question of when it’s better to lie than tell the truth.

The Little Mermaid origin story lacks room for this more feminist take. It simply is not deep enough.

Sean Mullin’s documentary It Ain’t Over is literally inside baseball. The film is essentially a Berra family project, an attempt to rehabilitate the professional reputation of someone who often doesn’t get his due as a player.

This new iteration may be interesting from a cultural perspective, if not particularly worthwhile on its own — unless you’re a Jack Harlow fan.

It’s revolutionary due to Sadiq’s care and close attention to detail with all of his characters. It’s a love letter to a place and people he knows intimately, and I hope to see much more of his work soon.

The pace of Master Gardener is measured, but there’s nothing relaxing about it.

If you love the “Fast & Furious” franchise, you will like Fast X. If you merely like the series, the new movie will leave you indifferent. And if you’ve never seen a “Fast & Furious” movie, Fast X is not the place to start. It’s a middling installment, a big step down from the stupid-wonderful “F9: The Fast Saga,” but with just enough of the crazy stunts and chases that you can’t find anywhere else.

Smith deserves a 21st century reassessment, but you won’t find it here.

There is a great deal of movie-backlot sleight of hand that looks fine while you’re watching, but when you think about it comes off as mostly façade. In that way, at least, Rodriguez successfully links form to content.

Lacking the velocity and excitement of an action movie and the reality of good drama, The Mother is the worst of both worlds.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is irresistible. While his Alex P. Keaton of “Family Ties” and Marty McFly of “Back to the Future” are beloved characters, the actor who gave them life is much more interesting and real.

BlackBerry was ultimately left behind — in the cemetery plot next to Myspace. Still, if you ever had a BlackBerry, there’s something not only entertaining but nostalgic in watching this movie.

Book Club was, at best, a pleasant diversion. But Book Club: The Next Chapter is something more. It’s a movie that proves that it’s possible to make an entertaining, full-length picture with practically no story.

Indian director Shekhar Kapur, who returns to film after more than a decade, is known for “Bandit Queen” (1994) and “Elizabeth” (1998), so this may be considered among the acclaimed director’s lighter films. But the Academy Award-winner’s skillful steering of characters allows the movie to showcase a diverse milieu rather than become a narrow East versus West portrayal.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is overstuffed and a tad too long. But it’s also a humorous, heartfelt farewell by Gunn to his band of misfits. While the film takes pain to emphasize that the Guardians will go on, whatever comes next will certainly be different without him.

Lowery doesn’t stray too far outside the lines — this is still a Disney movie based on a beloved family property — but he also doesn’t shy away from mining a familiar tale for meta commentary. Far from deconstruction, it’s heartfelt and introspective.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

Beautifully acted and suffused with warmth and humor, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret is a film worthy of the long wait in bringing Judy Blume’s classic 1970 children’s book to the screen.

Funny, heart-tugging, intermittently awesome and a loving if ambivalent homage to the heyday of martial arts cinema, writer-director Larry Yang’s film may not blend tones as seamlessly as Chan’s best work from the 1980s and ’90s did. But “Ride On” is moving and thrilling enough to be a worthy capper to the Chan canon.

You’ll see lots of movies in 2023, and you’ll forget most of them. But Carmen is so sincerely passionate and peculiar that you’re bound to remember it.

Ghosted is repellent without ever quite being obnoxious and worthless without ever being boring.

Blume’s insistence on first-person realness, on the page and in life, centers this thoroughly delightful documentary from directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, who met at Stanford University. But don’t expect the same degree of exploration Blume brought to her own protagonists.

A structure might have inhibited Aster’s impulse for meaningless excess. Instead, we get a movie that’s all talent and no discipline, which, in practice, is even worse than a movie that’s all discipline and no talent. At least the latter tries to please the audience; the former just pleases the filmmaker.

It exists within a franchise but doesn’t add anything to it, ultimately feeling as hollow as the reanimated corpses it centers on.

What Ritchie is able to convey is the terrifying nature of this kind of small-scale combat, with the enemy coming out from nowhere and from every direction. Even if you’ve never experienced anything like this, there’s something about what Ritchie does here that feels authentic.

This sometimes clever, outrageously gory and slickly violent horror comedy is more “John Wick” than Tod Browning, and that’s just the tip of its tonal confusion.

Mafia Mamma is a one-joke movie, but it finds ways to keep that one joke funny for 100 minutes.

The movie is about a sculptor, played by Michelle Williams, in the days leading up to a gallery show. That’s all it’s about, and yet it’s enough. The pleasure of Showing Up is in being dropped into this woman’s life and, more profoundly, into her consciousness.

The film follows its own winding path and covers a lot of emotional ground in 96 minutes, with Michaela Watkins lovely in a key role as Carl’s former lover and colleague. Some movies are more than just a story, they’re a world — and Paint is a world worth visiting.

These people seem real, even if their primary motivations are ideological. Perhaps more than they intended to, Goldhaber and the actors make the political personal. That’s a triumph of craft over appetites for destruction.

Occasionally amusing but rarely engaging, it leaves one feeling like they’re standing to the side and watching someone else play a video game.

Air might not quite be in the class of “Gone Baby Gone” or “The Town,” but it’s old-fashioned in the best sense: solid, confident, simple, straightforward and entirely entertaining. It’s the work of an intelligent classicist.

Rye Lane keeps winning you over by being a satiric-yet-sincere love letter to creative expression as much as to love itself.

As a movie, Spinning Gold is a clumsy effort with a lot wrong with it, except for the real-life story, which never stops being interesting.

First-time feature director A.V. Rockwell, working from her own script, tells an epic tale in miniature.

Tetris holds an audience’s attention until the finish, without ever quite commanding it. To some degree, Noah Pink’s screenplay deserves credit for taking an arcane business story and rendering it entertaining. But the story gets so extreme and unlikely in the movie’s last half hour that it becomes easy to separate fact from fiction.

There’s no question that John Wick: Chapter 4 is really good for what it is. The only bad thing is what it is.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feels like Daley and Goldstein, who also co-wrote with Michael Gilio, asked ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI: “Write a Marvel movie except with ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ characters.” Seconds later, this spit out.