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.

There are, hopefully, still many stories left to be told about the phenom of the Williams sisters. But King Richard is a very good start.

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

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.

Dripping in neon, platitudes, sweat and fear, “Bodies Bodies Bodies"...is playful, cutting and never dull.

It’s a movie well engineered as a late-summer diversion — a big cat movie for the dog days of August — that Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (“Adrift,” “Everest”) insures stays well within the paths of man-against-nature films before it.

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

The emotional payoff takes a while to arrive, but once it does in the last act of this film, you’ll have a hard time forgetting Hopkins’ face.

C’mon C’mon doesn’t really go anywhere in particular. It’s a meandering experience, but purposefully so. And it’s the kind of film that makes you want to leave the theater and ask the big, cheesy, sincere questions of strangers, family, anyone really.

The Sea Beast is notable for its refusal to dumb itself down for a young audience. It’s anchored by interesting and fairly complex characters who actually have arcs to play.

You may think you know Sterling K. Brown, but trust us, you have never seen this version of Brown — a man utterly dripping with villainy, if villainy were in liquid form, and all the more chilling for the calmness with which he intones the most horrific thoughts.

Nouvelle Vague, with a young Godard making things up off the cuff and on the fly, is a reminder how less can be so, so much more. And how it’s nice, as a young filmmaker with big ambitions, to have some company.

Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, Jennifer Eight (code name for the case) is a gripping though improbable thriller with an ample number of plot twists. [9 Nov 1992]

Blitz feels stuck between a conventional war drama and something more adventurous and probing. It doesn’t coalesce the way McQueen’s best work does, but the frictions that drive Blitz make it a singular and sporadically moving experience.

Antoine Fuqua’s Equalizer 3, a taut and textured sequel to Washington’s vigilante series, isn’t one of the actor’s best films. It wouldn’t crack his top 10. But it vividly encapsulates Washington’s formidable on-screen potency.

It’s quite a journey for one film. All credit to Eisenberg, and his superb co-star, for making the road trip so thought-provoking.

Okuno’s taut feature artfully reconstructs a Hitchcockian thriller around, yes, a blonde heroine in Monroe, but one with her own gaze and distinct anxieties.

The film, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, isn’t the farce you might expect. Rather, it’s one of the most textured and affectionate films about basketball that’s come along in a long time. Starring Sandler as a road-weary NBA scout and with several teams’ worth of all-stars in cameos, Hustle has a surprisingly good handle and feel for the game.

It’s an exploration that touches not just on policing and justice, but astronomy, politics, phrenology and race.

The antic chemistry between Mann, Cena and Barinholtz is stellar. Together, they capture the panic, embarrassment and sentimentality of young-adult parenthood as they scramble after their kids, none of whom need saving.

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

Barbarian is firmly of it’s time — online house rental bookings, smart-phone flashlights and real estate square footage listings — and yet timeless, like an arm ripped off and used as a club. It was predictable and yet was impossible to predict.

In more ways than one, Mann’s movie feels like a much-needed feature-length refuge from today’s anxiety-producing devices. Unlike many of Pixar’s moving metaphors of parenthood, this one is, affectingly, for the kids.

An intensely personal and truthful, if not entirely fact-based, account of joining the Marines as a gay Black man in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era. It is the type of film — brave, raw and poetic — that will rightly put Bratton on the map as someone to watch, not to mention the standout performances of Jeremy Pope and Gabrielle Union.

Time is the fundamental metric of prison life, which makes a documentary like “Daughters,” filmed over years, uniquely, maybe even monstrously capable of capturing its passing.

It is charming and silly and sometimes cringey — other people’s relationships always are— and in the end it works exceedingly well because of them and their wonderful chemistry.

So beautifully constructed and acted in the first half is “Heretic” that you won’t really notice when it turns into a horror movie.

Clara's Heart is a warm movie with many lessons to tell, if one is willing to listen. Its force is aided by Goldberg's performance and a noteworthy movie debut of Neil Patrick Harris as David. [17 Oct 1988]