It’s a busy film, so it holds your attention that way. But it’s busy checking off all of the crooks and crooked cops cliches it can, leaving the project little time to experiment with much that’s new. Or worthwhile.

In the end, Let Him Go is like a Southern Gothic, only set in the Northwest. It’s just a genre movie that delivers the goods, but the restraint and emotional insight of the direction and the quality of the performances bring it up an essential extra notch.

The humanity Snyder’s cameras capture is stirring as these young people work past their issues and together on shrewd political strategies.

The most shocking thing about Come Play, however, is that it has a pretty good ending after such a long, poorly paced slog through scary movie cliches.

This is the sequel to “The Craft,” folks. For what it is, the movie’s OK, except that it tried to be more than it is, and it isn’t.

Two things to know about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It is appalling. And I haven’t laughed this hard at anything in months.

But it’s also kind of a mess. Even as the animated film piles on mismatched funny animals, uninspired songs with on-the-nose lyrics and a plot-driving motivation that appears universal but is in fact hard to buy, the project feels both generic and misguidedly overstuffed.

When it’s not repulsive, The Witches drags, but for one brief yet gripping sequence, in which the boy and his friends sneak into the head witch’s hotel suite.

The film raises an intriguing issue not generally addressed by science-fiction films: time traveling into the past while white is one thing; time traveling while Black is something else entirely.

Rebecca has a couple of slow stretches, but James is always interesting and always sympathetic, if only because we see her struggling to do her best. After all, it’s much easier to not give up on a character when we see she hasn’t given up on herself. The movie further benefits from the absence of 1940s-style censorship, which suppressed a key plot detail that’s restored here.

Still, if you love this kind of movie, you will at least like Honest Thief.

Exquisite and moving documentary.

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the subject brings out everything that’s good about Sorkin’s writing — not just the clever banter, which is a constant delight, but his way of conveying who the good and bad guys are without succumbing to hero worship or moral posturing.

When the books are written, The War With Grandpa — the first family film to hit theaters since the pandemic — will have a special place in De Niro’s vast and varied cinematic legacy as the absolute worst movie he ever made.

Bloody good.

But that’s also the movie’s charm, painting a world where all you need is talent, a little luck and a couple of shoulders to cry on when things get tough. It’s a stripped-down “A Star Is Born” — without the rehab and suicide.

Long before the finish, Possessor descends into ugliness, with grotesque scenes of violence and lots of blood. You may feel creeped out, like you want to take a bath. But no, not in a good way.

As for Murray, it’s just a shame he can’t make a Sofia Coppola movie every year. As in “Lost in Translation,” Coppola brings out all of Murray’s many colors, sometimes all at once — his flippancy, his authority, his warmth, his isolation, his expressiveness, his inability to say everything he wants to say.

Ultimately is less a horror film than a valentine, from a daughter to a father, and a sweet portrait of a man going gently into that good night.

The dreaded question with a film like this is, “Wouldn’t a documentary have been better?” In this case, there’s a double answer. The first half of The Glorias is better told as a drama, because it’s fascinating to see (and not just be told) the obstacles in front of Steinem and how she overcame them. But the second half would have been better as a documentary.

The best thing about Scare Me is that, for all of its entertaining qualities and acute cuts at white male fragility, this is one excellent guide to writing and filming good horror.

Like all great works of art, the story’s point has resonances beyond its era and even beyond the specific subject of gay people, generally.

Dolby provides Dern with a chance to be cranky and vicious, but what else is new? The revelation here is Lena Olin, who gets her best role in years as the artist’s second wife, Claire, an artist in her own right who gave it all up to make a home with and for a demanding husband.

The watchable LX 2048 certainly gets an “A” for effort, including a creative take on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. I’m not sure how good a movie it is, but it would be an excellent basis for a streaming series, in which its ambitious ideas would have time to develop.

The monster is kind of cheap looking and not particularly scary, the gore is non existent, the acting is variable and the characters tend to make boneheaded decisions. Yet, for all of that, Shortcut does sport a certain moody charm, and at least it has the good sense, at a brisk 80 minutes including end credits, to not wear out its welcome.

At its best, Kajillionaire provides a chance for Rodriguez to play a breezy extrovert and for Wood to play a damaged introvert, and for their characters to alter and deepen through contact with each other. They’re both excellent, but they can’t make the movie any less slow, and July’s relentless whimsicality occasionally sounds some false notes.

A bright young actress, a movie-star actor and a potentially interesting concept gets smothered in 128 minutes of colorful, empty nonsense.

The whole movie is kind of like that: direct and devastating without overdoing it. The Nest unfolds in the way smart people tend to express their deepest disappointments — get it out, regain emotional control, divert for a while if you can.