Written and directed by series veteran Dean DeBlois, “The Hidden World” may not overwhelm in its necessity.... There are two compelling parts of “The Hidden World” that validate it.

High Flying Bird is a heady movie, full of political thought about sport, entertainment, race and power. Rather than float on production value, it sustains itself on the tension of ideas, exchanged rapid-fire in gleaming office towers.

Isn’t It Romantic stays pretty surface level, which makes for a fine and pleasurable viewing experience, but doesn’t exactly do anything to show that rom-coms would be better if the best friends had more of an inner life, for example. In fact, it just kind of redeems the formula in some ways.

Pugh never looks quite at ease in the ring in Fighting With My Family, but her performance is so layered with ambition and self-doubt that the film exceeds its familiar framework.

The final moments are unexpected, and perhaps frustrating. But the title comes back to you. This film may leave you exhausted but also somewhat dazzled. It’s best not to look away.

The film crams in so many plot lines that it risks being overstuffed but somehow stays true to its mesmerizing vision and emerges as a sci-fi success, if not a triumph.

By the end of this film — perhaps not Farhadi’s most piercing work but surely a polished, textured, and very engaging effort — you’ll look at the final two faces on the screen as they sit down to talk, and will likely still be asking yourself: Did everybody know?

Henson does as best she can with this material, attempting Lucille Ball-level physical comedy. But she’s laboring and often overshadowed by the one unpredictable spark in the film — provided by Erykah Badu.

Velvet Buzzsaw doesn’t lead anywhere inward; it becomes just a litany of (exquisite) death scenes for art-world caricatures. Still, what caricatures they are.

Rodriguez and her fans deserve better than Miss Bala, a disappointingly bland and formulaic Hollywood remake of a much grittier and bleaker Mexican thriller.

It’s pretty amazing just how compelling this is for being so simple, but it allows the viewer to really get wrapped up in the minutiae of it all: The performance, the landscape, the minor triumphs and major setbacks.

I’m not sure just how much more the studio can mine out of this concept that was once so brilliant. But happily, The LEGO Movie 2 doesn’t destroy everything the first worked so hard to build. It’s just trying very hard to be exactly the same.

A surprisingly delightful film full of action, heart, a crazy-haired Patrick Stewart (as “old” Merlin) and a few genuinely good gags.

While it might not be a conventional history lesson, it is a necessary and utterly urgent one.

For all the hype behind these three characters meeting, and the years it took to get it off the ground, Glass is one big anti-climax.

Although it might be a stretch to categorize this as a movie, A Dog’s Way Home is harmless enough and a nice little adventure that’s fit for the whole family. But you might want to have the tissues ready.

Few films in memory have squandered so much acting talent in such a cliche-ridden, exploitative and dishonest way.

The filmmakers haven’t gone so far as to put you in the game, too. A lot of it is watching all the characters find keys and have their own revelations, so by the time you get to the fifth room, it’s understandable if interest is starting to wane a bit even with the addition of a link between the six people.

While Destroyer can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.

It is simply terrific — an understated but smartly told crowd-pleaser about the legendary comedy duo in their last act, with wonderful production value, a sharp and surprisingly poignant script and brilliant performances from John C. Reilly, as Oliver Hardy, and Steve Coogan, as Stan Laurel.

Brooklyn is a story for anyone who has ever left home. It’s a story for those who’ve waffled in indecision, for those forming their identities and forging their own paths. It’s a story awash in muted pastel nostalgia about family and love and ambition and heritage and goodbyes. And it’s one of the loveliest films to grace cinemas this year.

Jones is truly marvelous in the role, showing Ginsburg’s burning desire to change societal unfairness and also, more intimately, coming to terms with her own daughter’s rebelliousness.

As The Mule ambles toward its conclusion, it draws closer to Stone, and maybe to Eastwood’s legacy, too.

Hopefully it will attract an audience either tired or turned off by the franchise’s past rigidity and addiction to spectacle. This is what we needed: Smaller, quieter, more human and sweeter.

Vice is frenetic and fun, flippant and frustrating.

It’s Pawlikowski second-straight masterwork, only one with a critical if seldom-seen error. His movie is too short.

This is a complex man and artist worthy of a complex story, not a would-be-feel-good farce.

“Moonlight” is a hard act to follow, and while Beale Street might not quite reach the heights of Jenkins’ instant classic of a best picture-winner, it is its own kind of marvel, lovely, transcendent, heartbreaking and as smooth as its jazzy soundtrack.

To both the movie’s benefit and detriment, the seas here are choppier than in the predictably (and sometimes boringly) smooth sailing of a Marvel movie. But the bright spots (Momoa, that octopus) can be difficult to really relish amid the oceans of exposition and a typically pulverizing, overelaborate screenplay.

It’s sweet news indeed that Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel 54 years in coming, provides just that spoonful of happiness in the form of Emily Blunt, practically perfect in every way as the heir to Julie Andrews.

A film that’s fantastically fresh, both visually and narratively, trippy and post-modern at the same time and packed with intriguing storytelling tools, humor, empathy and action, while also true to its roots — still telling the story of a young man learning to accept the responsibility of fighting for what’s right.

A slow but captivating burn that may leave you questioning your own hard-set ideas of right, wrong and family.

Hedges is as excellent as he was in “Manchester By the Sea,” but it’s fair to say the movie belongs to Roberts. It’s a career peak, and a performance that deserves to be seen no matter how crowded your holiday moviegoing schedule.

The film, for all its prestige and edginess, its lofty goals and contemporary messages, is not a particularly engrossing experience.

Much of The Favourite is caustically clever but it’s Colman who elevates it to something magnificent.

Cuaron is content to take his time with Roma, allowing the camera to linger on his subjects and the frustrating banalities of ordinary, everyday life that sneak up on you with poetic significance as the film goes on

Somehow, this amusingly chaotic mashup of genres finds a way to strike a final note that’s simple and true.

The movie isn’t always quite up to the task. It would be better if it went further and wrestled more with the online world than used it as another bits and bytes background. Really, it doesn’t quite live up to the title. Ralph could have done more damage.

Creed II pulls off a rather amazing feat by adding to the luster of its predecessor and propelling the narrative into a bright future while also reaching back to honor its past, resurrecting unfinished business from “Rocky IV” and adding a dash of “Rocky III.” Pound per pound, the sequel might even be better than its predecessor.

If there is a big studio movie that’s more generally crowd-pleasing than Green Book this season, I have yet to find it.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is often dazzling, occasionally wondrous and always atmospheric. But is also a bit of a mess. Even magic bags can be overweight.

McQueen builds tension masterfully throughout, although is so sprawling that at times you’re left wondering whether this might have been better told as a limited television series. Then again, is it worth complaining about relative brevity when done this well?

The greatest tension in Larsson’s “Millennium” series is how Salander so bristles with unease in the world, even while she expertly manipulates everything in it. No such conflict is found in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a commonplace thriller for an uncommon heroine.

Credit goes to the film’s visual effects folk, who made fur alive and gave texture to smoke. But retreading this story with a Cumberbatch, should send Hollywood bigwigs into the booby hatch.

The Front Runner is appropriately paced like a thriller, as everyone involved gets pulled down into the drain, helplessly.

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is visually marvelous, inconsistently acted and rather incoherent in that fantasy genre way.

It’s not complicated. But there are worse things in life than 88 minutes of uncomplicated chuckling.

This is the first Hollywood film from South African director Donovan Marsh, and he does cook up some captivating action set pieces...which may have you laughing, rolling your eyes or even cheering (as a fair amount of people were in my screening), but it’s never boring.

A pair of other recent films — “Minding the Gap,” ″Skate Kitchen” — better explored the camaraderie and freedom of skater culture. But there are glimpses here of a more radiant, lyrical film.

Like Haemi’s melancholy dance in the half-light, Lee has beautifully, wrenchingly summoned an unshakeable sense of disquiet.

Even though it might be difficult to watch at times, it’s done with such evident love and sensitivity that it’s hard to imagine a human being not connecting in some way, and perhaps even learning something along the way.

The only time Bohemian Rhapsody works is when it finally retreats from not just the standard biopic narrative but from storytelling altogether.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? sings best — or rather, grumbles spectacularly — when McCarthy and Grant are together. They are kindred misfits and malcontents happy for each other’s company.

Wildlife isn’t just a great first film, it’s a great film.

While Green’s Halloween, which he penned with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film — the stoic killer, the gruesome executions, the suburban nightmares — what makes his Halloween such a thrill is how it deviates from its long-ago predecessor.

A film like this, as authentic and raw as it is, should probably leave audiences in a puddle and not exiting the theater wondering why they’re not.

For as naturalistic and real as The Hate U Give is, it goes off the rails just a little bit at the climax to make its grand point about the effect of this kind of climate on innocents, but there is too much heart here to really nitpick at a little hyperbole.

Gosling’s task here is not merely to give dimension to a mythical American hero. He also has to play a man who famously kept his emotions in check. That may not be an asset for a movie character, but sure was an asset for the first human to set foot on another world.

Goddard’s film looks terrific and has all of the — as Hamm’s character would say with exaggerated Southern flare — “accoutrements” of an intoxicating slow-burn thriller, but none of the payoff.

With tenderness and toughness, Greengrass has made a great film about a terrible act.

The film’s off-kilter schizophrenia gives it a madcap appeal. While Fleischer seems to have a darker, moodier film in mind, Hardy has the good sense to steer Venom in a more over-the-top direction, even if the movie around him can’t catch up.

A Star Is Born, is simply terrific — a big-scale cinematic delight that will have the masses singing, swooning and sobbing along with it.

The Sisters Brothers takes a bit of getting used to at the start, but the rewards are worth it.

Like countless studio comedies of the past few years, Night School is a straightforward concept that relies too much on the charisma of its performers to carry a weak script.

Were it not for Redford, the film would be — well, why even ask, because Redford is the point. He chose the role, optioned the New Yorker article, chose the director. It’s a perfect role for his swan song. But hey, Mr. Redford? We won’t hold you to that.

The script crackles with small, brilliant moments.

Nothing much in Life Itself feels like life itself. It is too polished, too winking, too big and too much to be all that relatable, even with a cast as appealing as this.

In broad strokes, Westmoreland’s film succeeds as an inspirational period tale so much for today about a woman seizing her independence.

Whether Moore’s frenetic but absorbing work here — the cinematic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, where you throw everything and some of it sticks — pleases or frustrates you, one thing is clear. Moore’s at his best when hitting a subject dear to his heart.

You can see why Hold the Dark might have made a compelling book, but the film is one grim and pitiless journey.

The film somehow manages its own witchcraft in finding the perfect un-sweet spot — it’s too scary for little kids, not scary enough for older ones, not funny or clever enough for their parents, and too redundant for everyone. Poof! Watch the audience disappear.

For the big tonal swings in A Simple Favor to work, the characters needed to be more plausibly grounded. Lively and Kendrick’s early scenes ping-pong nicely with odd-couple chemistry, but “A Simple Favor” loses the thread, and never shakes the feeling of a rushed Gillian Flynn knockoff.

Black’s filmmaking is old-school, grounded in ’80s humor, reveling at its over-the-topness and often gleefully thumbing its nose at political correctness. That might be refreshing, but it also can lead to questionable decisions.

Peppermint is not some model of equality, it’s just violent escapism that happens to have a woman in the lead role. And, frankly, as long as this genre continues to entertain audiences, Garner is a compelling a lead as any, and more so than quite a few of the men who get so many parts like this. But maybe, just maybe, next time consider a woman or two behind the camera (and script) as well.

What distinguishes The Nun is its silky, sumptuous shadows. Directed by British filmmaker Corin Hardy (“The Hallows”) and shot by Maxime Alexander (who was also cinematographer on the “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle: Creation,” The Nun shrouds itself so much in darkness that it at times verges on becoming a nightmarish abstraction. You almost lose sense of what exactly is going on, as Sister Irene falls into a labyrinthine abyss.

For a movie centered on brotherhood, it’s remarkably empty of any sense of kinship.

All in all, it’s just a little underdeveloped. Perhaps in novel form its polite pace and subtle revelations made a certain amount of sense, but the movie is lacking.

For a movie so excited to tell a story about the CIA’s “most highly-prized and least understood unit,” it sure doesn’t do much to ensure you leave any more informed than you were when you sat down.

A sumptuous-looking but slow-moving prison drama that at times will have you dreaming about an escape of your own.

It’s almost reassuring that in today’s often sanitized, assembly-line mainstream moviemaking that a film can be as crude, as off-brand and as bad as The Happytime Murders. Almost.

The film buzzes along with introspective conversations, all-too human moments, a terrific soundtrack with everyone from Marianne Faithfull to The Pretenders, and a few delightfully awkward scenes that really drive home the whole “don’t meet your idols” conceit.

That Crazy Rich Asians is a rom-com where the mothers are its most vital co-stars is one of the movie’s best attributes. Though some of the satirical edges of Kwan’s book have been smoothed down, it remains a love story more about immigrant identity and Chinese heritage than romance.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years, from composer Terence Blanchard.

The Meg is best when it acknowledges its derivativeness, just one more silly shark movie in an ocean full of them.

It all fits together a little too well, too predictably and, well, too Disney. Pooh and company have always been a wonderfully neurotic bunch, but in Forster’s polished film, they’re a little suffocated, a little lifeless. Any semblance of authentic childlike glee remains purely theoretical.

The story is not only derivative of so many other dystopias and kids with power sagas, but, and perhaps worst of all, it never even really gets going — a clear and infuriating set up for some future installment.

The main problem with The Spy Who Dumped Me is its strange dissonance of tone. There’s nothing wrong with trying to be a hard-knuckle action film and a goofy comedy all at once. But here, that effort results in moments of occasionally stunning violence that simply don’t mesh with the light-hearted vibe the filmmakers seek elsewhere.

Much ink has been spent analyzing this enduring phenomenon called Tom Cruise, and what motivates him, onscreen and off. “I just want to entertain people,” he said recently. That’s one mission he can still nail.

Teen Titans GO! to the Movies is the sort of silly film you and your kids can both enjoy, a slice of pure escapist fare in these divisive days.

There’s an upside to the film so eagerly jumping from anguish to slapstick, from social drama to buddy movie. Blindspotting is, like the Oakland it so dearly loves, always many things at once.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this whole sequined bell-bottomed experience is you might even find yourself getting a little emotional. But not too much, this is vacation after all.

Fuqua is a lyrical director who directed Washington to an Oscar in “Training Day.” He’s not afraid to spend time in the still darkness with McCall and likes to focus on small moody elements, like rain hitting the gutters. But he can also deliver red meat: A sequence in which McCall fights off a passenger in the back seat of his car is a mini-masterpiece of taut, sinewy direction.

There are quite a few good pieces and performances in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, but, ultimately, it also has the feeling of a first or second draft that isn’t quite where it should be.

Eighth Grade is a revelation of both a remarkably natural young performer and a clever, sensitive young filmmaker.

It’s counting on your amnesia to the past, on screen and off, and it will readily supply you with two hours of mindless escape. It does the job better than most, thanks largely to its hulking hero.

McMurray has a deft touch juggling action sequences, humor and intimate dialogue.

For some Marvel devotees, Ant-Man and The Wasp will be a clever enough diversion in between the more main-event releases. But it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want in a superhero movie: a funny cast, zippy action scenes and not an infinity stone in sight.

While it doesn’t always work, Riley has clearly held nothing back and after 25+ years of using his voice and unique point of view in the world of hip-hop, this is as audacious an entry into the world of feature filmmaking as one could possibly make.