The parade of subplots and explanations keep sinking a story that previously floated along so effectively. I saw It Chapter Two a few nights ago and I think it just ended.

What a pleasant surprise that the movie is far funnier and more perceptive about this brutal, hilarious time in a child’s life than I anticipated.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is drenched with symbolism and layered with ideas about lost innocence and the power of stories — and the power of creating something that resonates with an audience for years and years. I suspect this movie will do exactly that.

Hobbs & Shaw is the movie version of a replacement-level player. It is adequate, but not exceptional. It’s the baseline version of what one of these movies should be, now that they’re not about undercover cops chasing thieves anymore.

The movie has an elegiac quality; it’s filled with passionate feeling about the fleeting nature of life and the magical permanence of cinema.

As a purely technical achievement, the new CGI cast of The Lion King is impressive. As a means to tell its fictional story, it is deeply misguided.

The stuff about this couple in decline is lacerating and painful in the best and most hilarious ways possible. The stuff about the solstice is standard horror fare made unfurled, with exceptional craft, at a snail’s pace. And the longer Midsommar goes, the further it gets from the pain and the loss that fueled its emotional core, until it has lost touch with the things that made it special.

Spider-Man: Far From Home is best viewed as the dessert at the end of an elaborate and overindulgent tasting menu. You’ve already eaten twenty-two courses, you’re totally stuffed and in no mood for more food, and then they bring out the cookie sampler with eight different kinds of homemade sweets and of course you eat it and you’re even more full than before but it was worth it because the cookie sampler is amazing.

In my mind, there’s no question Toy Story 4 is the weakest movie in the series. But it’s also the riskiest and the most pleasantly unpredictable.

The degree to which Men in Black International wastes Hemsworth and Thompson’s talents — and in the process almost makes them seem like bland, uninteresting actors, despite all the previous evidence to the contrary — is almost an accomplishment in and of itself, and the rest of the film is equally useless (not to mention long, at just under 120 minutes).

The whole movie hinges on Jean Grey, a character we hardly know (the Sophie Turner version was introduced in a minor role in X-Men: Apocalypse) and her relationships to a team of heroes we’ve hardly seen.

The writing as well as the sprightly character animation captures the spirit of these creatures at their absolute best and hilarious worst in a way every dog owner can recognize and relate to. When the film sticks to that, it works.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is as narratively incomprehensible as it is visually, with an even-more-talented roster of overqualified actors tasked with carrying the film’s insipid story and trying to make their characters’ bizarre decisions seem halfway plausible.

It’s got more than its share of disturbing sequences, and a string of brutal murders. It’s also got surprisingly decent special effects for a movie that was surely made on a fraction of the budget of a DC Comics film. And it has a perfectly cast Jackson A. Dunn as Brandon.

The nicest thing I can say about 2019’s Aladdin is in its best moments it reminded me of a movie I liked a lot as a kid.

None of the life we see J.R.R. Tolkien live in the film illuminates his great works of art — or even makes for a particularly compelling tale.

While the film refuses to be subtle with visual metaphor, Exarchopolous and Seydoux hungrily devour their scenes; they are articulate in ways both emotional and verbal, seemingly recreating, in detail, a sumptuous feast to share with an audience that could never possibly know how it tastes. But we get very close.

Beneath the predictable story, Detective Pikachu isn’t about much, and if you need Wikipedia to explain who Mewtwo is, most of the jokes will go right over your head. The whole thing is a bit too childish for adults, and a bit too convoluted for kids. It absolutely deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects however, even if the subject matter makes me think it’s unlikely to receive one.

No matter what comes next from Marvel Studios, this Avengers is a gargantuan love letter to the equally enormous mythology that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and the rest of their collaborators built — and to the generations of readers and moviegoers who truly believe in it.

Characters repeatedly yell jokes from offscreen or while their backs are turned to the camera. They are, almost without exception, not funny. And they’re indicative of a movie that feels like it was worked and reworked in the editing room almost to its literal death.

Dumbo’s great skill, flying around a tent in a circle, becomes a little old after it’s repeated ad naseam over the course of two full hours. Adorable though he may be, Dumbo’s kind of a one-trick pony, in a matter of speaking.

Fans occasionally refer to Shazam as “The Big Red Cheese” and this movie is very faithful to the spirit of that nickname. It’s warm and sentimental about blended families, and it sincerely believes in the importance of being a hero and doing the right thing. It’s got plenty of goofy kid-gets-to-play-superhero-for-real humor. And other than some friction between Levi and Asher’s performances, it all works.

Captain Marvel itself has none of that rebellious spirit. It takes very few risks in the way that something like Thor: Ragnarok did, beyond the fact that it is the studio’s first blockbuster with a female hero in the lead. Personally, I like my movies about rule breakers to actually break some rules.

The cast was the original’s greatest asset, and every single character of note is back, along with the original film’s mordant sense of humor and surprisingly charming sentimentality. Best of all, 2U weaponizes your knowledge of the original — your confidence that you have seen this all before and you know what’s going to happen — and uses it against you.

Alita barely considers any of the existential questions about humanity that are typically central to this kind of sci-fi film. It’s just a slick action film. That is one way, at least, it does feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie.

A great cast and a fairly clever turn into the realm of horror can’t redeem what otherwise feels like a very familiar, very safe piece of satire.

Very cute and very sweet. There was that part of me, though, that kept thinking about the first LEGO Movie, and how much of a genuine Hollywood aberration it seemed — if not a flat-out miracle. The Second Part is fine, but even its title suggests it’s more cog in the machine than disrupter.

I sat watching Fyre in a state of amused disbelief (while, yes, occasionally taking the Lord’s name in vain). There’s not too many places to see this much madness, ego, greed, and full-on stupidity on display at the same time.