A solid film with a few good gags and a fair amount of heart.

It’s sluggish at times and too withdrawn for such a vibrant tale. But it stays nevertheless in tune with the spirit of Burnett’s book, and by the time it reaches its late crescendo, this “Secret Garden” blooms nevertheless.

A novel like Coetzee’s invites readers to fill in the blank spaces. On a screen, we tend to crave more specificity. The result, coupled with a too-languorous pace, is a film that’s intermittently engrossing and always interesting, but less potent than it could have been.

King Beyoncé’s new film takes you on a journey of Black art, music, history and fashion as the superstar transports you to Africa to tell the story of a young man in search of his crown, matched to epic songs she created while inspired by “The Lion King.”

The charms of Summerland aren’t in its plot. They’re in the sentiment, which is too good-hearted to be cynical about, and the characters.

What most vividly comes across in The Fight is the never-ending nature of freedom and democracy.

Franco has made a briskly entertaining debut feature, a nice way to spend an escapist summer evening. Not from your Airbnb, though.

With some notable exceptions, this is a traditional treatment of an extraordinary life, complete with deathbed scenes that bookend the film and frequent lines, in Jack Thorne’s screenplay, in which Curie single-mindedly speaks of scientific progress less like a person than a grade-school teaching tool.

The one saving grace is King, a genuinely delightful young actor who manages to hold your attention and empathy even if her underwritten character barely deserves it.

Greyhound is perhaps not so much a thriller as a very spare, economical drama.

Samberg is predictably charming and funny here. But it’s Milioti, who may be best known at this point as “The Mother” from “How I Met Your Mother” or “that girl who was in that one ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” who is the big revelation, finally getting the spotlight which has been a long time coming.

The Old Guard, while in many ways typical, is wonderfully unconventional in all kinds of less obvious ways.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the film is how prophetic it is. Although it doesn’t offer any reflection on the current moment, it also won’t come as a surprise how we got here.

Kail’s camera captures actors’ intimate faces during key moments in a way impossible for theater-goers and incorporates audience reaction to create an electric filmed version.

It’s often hard to see comedies for what they are, or what they might be, on first viewing. But “Eurovision” is that rare film that strikes the right chord from the start. And, weirdly, it might even spark some interest in the actual show.

Irresistible has its smart laughs and real pleasures.

The documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, is vigilant in widening is lens to capture the broader problems at USA Gymnastics.

Objectivity is not Meeropol’s goal here but better understanding of who this slippery character is, and this film succeeds in that.

Babyteeth is an assured and stimulating feature debut from director Shannon Murphy, who is working with a script by Rita Kalnejais. It is raw, funny and often uncomfortable.

The tension escalates quite effectively, but the payoff feels weak, because the thing — or person, or whatever — that we’re supposed to be most scared of is hardly as scary as the buildup.

For those who have spent the last few months hungering for a big-spectacle mess (they are, after all, a feature of summer moviegoering), now you can take in a big-budget flop from the comfort of your own home.

Absorbing, brash, exhausting, urgent, sometimes brilliant and sometimes unapologetically messy

For Miranda disciples, it’s essential. For everyone else? It is a good-natured peek at the origins of this freestyle hip-hop group, which ended up being a springboard for some pretty incredible talents

There are few more daring actors around right now than Moss, and “Shirley” may be her best performance yet. She’s brutally cutting but the pain of every slight ripples across her face.

It’s not a compelling environmental film or a good drama about racers. Like many of the electric cars on the track that season, it stalls.

It’s both a compliment and a criticism to say that “On the Record” left me wanting much more.

The Vast of Night is, in a slinky way, about escaping small-town small-mindedness.

Yes, you’ll likely guffaw at one key moment, but it probably won’t spoil the fun. And when you catch yourself saying, “That wouldn’t happen!“— well, let’s remind ourselves that this is precisely the time for a little escapism.

Watching The Trip to Greece at a time when such travel is impossible has only heightened the considerable pleasures of these movies (and made the food all the more appetizing). But mostly it’s reinforced the simple delight of sitting table-side with Coogan and Brydon. For all their trivial sparring, they are exceedingly good company.

Through twists and turns, The Painter and the Thief depicts not just the two-way transactional relationship between artist and subject, but the shared pain and mutual rehabilitation that can inspire and surround art making.

Rae and Nanjiani make the ride fun enough with their easy chemistry and silly, wide-eyed panic at everything they’re witnessing. Still, The Lovebirds lacks the singularity of its stars’ other noteworthy roles.

"Scooby Doo” was never the most unpredictable of shows but Scoob! has merely swapped the original’s blueprint for that of a superhero movie. You’ll be left mournfully munching a bag of Scooby Snacks while wondering, “Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you?”

Al Capone’s last year could make for an interesting film, but there is little poetry or transcendence in Capone, and nothing even remotely close to the quietly devastating third act of “The Irishman.”

More concrete examples of how mushrooms or dropping acid aided life are sorely needed.

Spaceship Earth, with a glowing score by Owen Pallett, doesn’t cast judgment on most of its subjects. It’s content to go along for the ride, marveling at all the surrealism. You’d say the story was out of this world if it wasn’t so much of it.

Based on Caitlin Moran’s semibiographical novel, How to Build A Girl is a wickedly funny, sweet and vibrantly told coming-of-age story that feels like a teen classic in the making.

Hallgren weaves together a compelling narrative with these public and private interviews that builds chronologically to the present.

What distinguishes this debut feature from Andrew Onwubolu, aka Rapman, is firstly its storytelling structure, making welcome use of the writer-director’s rap talents to serve as a Greek chorus. And secondly its cast, with several vital performances of note, especially from heartbreakingly vulnerable newcomer Stephen Odubola.

It’s Tassone’s perspective that Finley largely keeps to, which — if you don’t know the true story — lets Bad Education unspool if not surprisingly at least captivatingly.

The editing is more than a little rough and the plot gets a little stretched, but just as things start to get seriously hairy, the Pierce brothers suddenly have something really interesting to say about erasure and how families can abandon their histories.

A Secret Love is guaranteed to pull at your heartstrings. It might be the quarantine or it might just be effective storytelling, but a scene near the end of the family coming together — not even a sad scene — left this reviewer in tears and I’m willing to bet I won’t be the only one.

If the framework is less inspired, the story remains grand.

The word distraction has started to lose all meaning this deep into our home lockdowns, but there is a certain comfort in curling up with a big, silly action pic like Extraction. It reminds you of something you might have spent money on to see in an ice-cold theater on a hot summer day.

You’re always waiting for the movie to really get going. It’s shot like a political thriller without the thrills.

Tigertail comes off more as an idea of an arthouse movie than one propelled by its own volition.

Your enjoyment of the new Netflix comedy Coffee & Kareem may depend on whether or not you find insanely vulgar middle schoolers funny. It’s not just cursing either. Oh no, this is a whole symphony of vulgarity that would make Seth Rogen blush.

May not be the most heartening portrait of our political system. But it’s a vital one and it provides reasons for optimism, too.

The pleasures of Uncorked are in how it gently eludes stereotype and brings a rich sense of texture to even its smaller moments.

The Banker is a pleasant watch.

It’s a worthy story even without the coda of the fight for their civil rights. You never know where empowerment might stem from: Sometimes, it’s a hippie camp in the Catskills.

Bloodshot is just smart enough to be more than trash, and just trashy enough to be less than smart. It will do fine if you’re looking for a lesser simulation of a good movie.

The Hunt is not great satire or even a great film. It’s an unstylish and heavy-handed horror-thriller that turns into a revenge gore-fest as it mocks everyone with a big clumsy paw.

The joys of First Cow are many. The thoughtful, unshowy textures of its clothes and surroundings. The fabulous chemistry of its two leads. The softly stirring guitar of William Tyler’s score. All of these details add up to a wholly original western, one with its own rhythms, ideas and iconography.

Spenser Confidential is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

Onward makes the most of its strange assemblage to tell a sweet and moving story — enough so to leave you yet again shaking your head at Pixar’s magic act.

It’s so sincere that it’s hard to pick on Wendy for some wheel-spinning, or even the sullen whimsy of it all. It’s headed somewhere good and worthwhile: This ending could warm the hearts of even the most grown up grown-ups in the audience.

For all of the inherent drama, it becomes clear that Burden, the man at the center of a film which bears his name, is really just a cipher, a sponge upon which we put meaning.

Whannell has the talent and cunning to turn The Invisible Man into a chilling and well-crafted B-movie. But if you’re looking for anything more than that, you’ll probably come up empty.

There is little here, amid the high-tech photorealistic animations, that would satisfy London’s concept of “wild.”

The misunderstandings are too numerous to describe. But the proceedings are beautifully paced, and the movie feels light and airy, like a pleasant dream.

Written and directed by Stella Meghie, the film is a gentle and attentive inter-generational tale with a first-rate cast.

The little blue alien who can sprint quicker than the speed of light has ironically benefited from slowing it down, taking a pit stop to retool and emerge this month as a total crowd-pleaser.

The first half doesn’t fit with the second half, there are too many distractions and the filmmakers think it’s clever to leave clues but they do it clumsily and at the last minute and it’s really exhausting for the viewer.

Ultimately it all rides on Robbie, who, along with her blond, color-dipped pigtails, brings an appealing blend of looniness and grit to the role, and a hint of something sadder and darker. Still, one gets the sense the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how far to go with the feminism thing. When she says sadly that “a harlequin’s nothing without a master,” you don’t immediately get the sense that this is a post #MeToo Harley Quinn.

The expressive Garner does a lot with a little. She has no big speeches, no tantrums, no floods of tears. It’s the ultimate unshowy part. If there is a word to describe Jane, it is small. Garner seems to shrink as the day goes on.

Morano is absolutely adept in keeping tension rising, her characters grounded and her audience intrigued, a half-step behind.

Gretel & Hansel is as visually arresting as it is tedious, a 90-minute movie that really should have been a 3-minute music video for Marilyn Manson or Ozzy Osbourne. It’s in the horror genre only loosely. It’s more eerie, if that’s a genre. Actually, it’s like dread for 90 minutes. It’s dreadful.

Hunnam’s presence, alone, keeps the movie grounded. But the movie time and time again exalts the gallantry of its gentlemen heroes at the expense of those unlike them. It gives this glass of Gritchie’s English Lore a bitter taste.

Despite its flaws, this movie reminds us all of the sacrifices made by soldiers and to be mindful of how we treat them when they come home.

It’s really not a good sign when a movie ends with a bold, shocking flourish and much of the audience can be heard muttering through the credits: “Wait, um ... WHAT?”

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of Dolittle isn’t the incoherent story line, the suffocating CGI or the unfunny stable of celebrity-voiced creatures. It’s that Downey’s personality doesn’t come through at all, either a victim of the surrounding mess or a party to it.

“Bad Boys” only works when the bickering cops are center stage.

Ly’s film excels in its lively verisimilitude, its terrific cast and its intensity. Les Miserables is a powder keg, always at risk of detonating.

Director William Eubank keeps the action taut and the look of the film is realistically impressive and dark, with grimy, dirty workers donning cool dive suits that make them each look like Transformers. His camera often goes tight on the shocked faces inside the helmets. Stewart, in particular, shines with a combination of steely nerves and harrowing expressions.

Just Mercy is not always an easy film to watch, but it is necessary.

Yes, it’s a dazzling technical feat. One could also consider it a gimmick, or at least a method that threatens to distract the viewer’s attention. But that ignores the fact that this very filmmaking style is also hugely effective at delivering this particular story, in the most visceral way possible.

Does all this work? Well, it depends on how you feel about ... Cats. Did you love the show? You’ll find stuff to love here. Did you hate it? Ditto! Or maybe ... you’ll have both reactions? That’s possible too.

There is a wild urgency to Greta Gerwig’s Little Women that hardly seems possible for a film based on a 150-year-old book. But such is the magic of combining Louisa May Alcott’s enduring story of those four sisters with Gerwig’s deliciously feisty, evocative and clear-eyed storytelling that makes this Little Women a new classic.

For a movie predicated on satisfying fans, The Rise of Skywalker is a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion to what had been an imperfect but mostly good few films.

If Eastwood had extended the sensitivity it shows to Jewell to others, it might have been worth something more. Instead, it becomes just what it preaches against: a hatchet job.

Like all sequels, the second suffers from not having the delicious surprise of the first, but the seed to a third film is hinted at in the closing credits, which is more than the first film promised.

The question, ultimately, is whether Bombshell ought to have spun quite so snappy a movie out of such a story. It does cartwheels to make a vile tale compelling, and it can feel like a parade of starry impressions rather than something genuine.

It’s obvious that Sandler, the actor, is capable of extraordinary range — not in the traditional, Meryl Streep sense, but a range of incredibly good (“Punch-Drunk Love”) to painfully bad (the horrendous “Jack and Jill”) and incredibly good again, as in Uncut Gems, a frenetic, compulsively watchable, exhausting and exhilarating collaboration with Josh and Benny Safdie.

The Two Popes might promulgate an optimistic portrait of the Catholic Church and its leaders. But in these sweetly sincere scenes, you forget Benedict and Bergoglio are pontiff and pontiff-to-be. And the moment of respite from the world’s arguments and divisions feels like a benediction.

The whodunit turns out not only to still have a few moves left but to be downright acrobatic.

It’s Jones who dominates the film

A film in which everything feels stunningly fresh, raw and new.

The remarkable Queen & Slim is a romance and a road movie, a film about outlaws on the run, two journeys of self-discovery and a nuanced social commentary. It’s not perfect but it’s close — an urgent, beautiful and socially conscious trip through the American racial psyche in 2019.

Where Haynes excels is in teasing out the personal and professional connections that mingle throughout.

Rarely has a movie’s title been so apt as that of Waves, a film that makes you feel like you’ve been knocked flat over by a fierce current — only to be rescued by a gentle, soothing flow of warm surf that arrives in the nick of time.

21 Bridges is well crafted enough to pass the time, but anything more than that is a bridge too far.

The Good Liar is a kind of film one wants to love. Such old-fashioned genre movies, let alone those starring actors in their 70s and 80s, are hard to find these days. But in trying to take a simple crime set-up and stretch it into a more sweeping tale of vengeance and victimhood, The Good Liar has to make some fairly preposterous moves to get there, and it doesn’t do a very good job of cloaking them.

Hanks is such an obvious choice to play someone as beloved as Fred Rogers that his performance is something that could be in danger of being taken for granted or overlooked. He just makes it all look so easy — the almost uncomfortably slow way that he speaks. But it’s a testament to Hanks that you can’t “see” the work. But much like Fred Rogers, you don’t have to understand it to be moved.

It just doesn’t have the exciting, lightning-in-a-bottle feel that the wonderful original had. Perhaps that was too much to ask.

This infectious and engrossing story of the 1966 showdown on a French racetrack between car giants Ford and Ferrari is a high-octane ride that will make you instinctively stomp on a ghostly gas pedal from your movie seat.

The issues it addresses are, to say the least, crucial ones, and even though it trusts its audience to trudge through some dense material, the audience should repay that trust. Here’s hoping it will.

What is most surprising about the latest Charlie’s Angels, which was written and directed by Elizabeth Banks, who also plays the part of Bosley, is how little the “go girl” feminism of the 2000 film has evolved in nearly 20 years. Blame society or a lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers, but there is nothing all that new about the ideas here.

Honey Boy will break your heart. It hardly matters if you’ve never given a second thought to the circumstances of Shia LaBeouf’s life, his childhood or his rocky early adult years. But this is the kind of universally moving work that can only emerge from something immensely specific and personal.