The new paint job is nice, but the insides may be too creaky to salvage.

I saw Tully twice. After my first screening, I wasn’t sure what to think of the ending. The second time, I was convinced of the film’s brilliance.

This is more than just the predictable story of who Ginsburg was and who she has become. It’s also a monument to the formal written legal legacy that transcends her own life story and changed a nation.

Lelio, whose A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar this year for Best Foreign Language Film, has a knack for observing small moments as well as huge dilemmas.

Sitting through its 2 hours and 30 minutes is like gorging on tapas: You wind up both overstuffed and unsatisfied.

I Feel Pretty has more nuance than the trailer suggests. Unfortunately, those shades of meaning get mangled up in nonsensical plot contrivances and tired running jokes. If it’s offensive, it’s because of its blandness, not its political incorrectness.

There are moments when the movie takes us firmly by the hand and escorts us down a darkened path, and they lead to one of the most profound of communal pleasures: the sound of a movie audience screaming as one.

Not everyone likes a movie that sneaks up on them, so be advised that Lean on Pete is the ugly-cry event of the spring.

The film makes its primary case eloquently and elegiacally: The only thing more lonesome than a cowboy, surveying a land where no one understands him, is that same cowboy without a horse.

Ramsay’s fourth feature operates on the viewer in much the same way. With a minimum of resources, she creates a primal atmosphere of dread, then assaults the viewer’s consciousness in a single, sharp blow.

Blockers is about as funny and heartfelt as studio comedies get (which isn’t meant as a backhanded compliment), while smart and insightful enough to double as a guide to raising teenage girls.

Ready Player One has no obligation to be a rigorous intellectual exercise, even if it amounts to a wasted opportunity to explore who else might steer tech, and society, toward greater equity. But it doesn’t have to be so facile, either. Maybe next time the screenwriters shouldn’t set the difficulty mode to “easy.”

In a film of more prepossessing style, the glaring leaps of logic might be easier to overlook, or at least there’d be more incentive to do so, but the cellphone is Soderbergh’s enemy as well.

It’s hard to resist Isle of Dogs’ energy and wit, the filmmakers’ evident joy in exploring the miniature world they’ve imagined.

An obligatory setup for a sequel slows down the final moments, but until then, Tomb Raider feels like a perfectly paced trio of espresso shots, with a shot of adrenaline to the heart as a chaser.

The best thing you can say about The Strangers: Prey at Night, the sequel to writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion creeper, is that it reminds you the original exists.

For all of Wrinkle’s unevenness, DuVernay still manages to draw out some glimpses of more intimate beauty, the kind that one expects from the filmmaker.

The back and forth between McAdams and Bateman is what makes Game Night sing.

Feminist cinephilia has always been a complicated proposition, but it should surely demand better than this blunder.

Duncan Jones must have believed there was an incredible movie in his head. If there was, it’s still in there.

Whatever the working balance is between mystery and revelation, Annihilation, the new sci-fi–horror drama from Ex Machina writer-director Alex Garland, never quite pulls it off.

There is something special about seeing a bawdy spectacle of feigned sex and quivering emotion test the boundaries of Hollywood’s rigid traditionalism, and their goofy thrall over audiences make for especially fun experiences in a theater. These movies are derivative, often ridiculous, and, in the case of Fifty Shades Freed, unquestionably hilarious, but they’re also the overheated comfort food I crave.

While the film is deliberately crude in some respects — Park once described his aesthetic as making sure that, no matter how carefully sculpted his clay figures were, he always left the thumbprints showing — it’s fastidiously detailed in others, dancing between broad humor and subtle, almost subliminal gags as it plays out the conflict between Neanderthals and their evolutionary successors.

Black Panther could have been just another Marvel romp—a fun but ultimately disposable entry in the studio’s catalogue. But Ryan Coogler and company had the power, and perhaps the responsibility, to do much more. And they did.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Great(ish) ideas and terrible ones sit cheek by jowl, original notions and blatant thievery corralled together with no discernible logic. It’s a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

The ironic distancing makes it hard to get emotionally caught up in the sad story of Kenney’s self-destruction when the film enters "Leaving Las Vegas" territory.

Focusing the camera on Vega, an openly trans actress (apparently Chile’s first), allows A Fantastic Woman to tell a different, richer kind of story and allows us to process the subtleties of her performance without always having to evaluate the success of the underlying transformation.