Spencer may be a let down as a story about Diana, but as an exaggerated portrait of Stewart, it’s magnetic.

Zhao, whose film Nomadland was everything this is not — spare, naturalistic, moody — struggles with so much going on. The fight scenes are repetitive and the dialogue often stilted.

You’re probably not coming to Finch for lessons, you’re coming to Finch for Hanks. The good news is that he’s not just the reason to show up, he’s the reason to stay around as well.

While neither of their character’s gets enough depth, McKenzie and Taylor-Joy sustain Last Night in Soho, a movie filled with reflections to both past fiction horrors (Straight on Till Morning, Suspiria) and today’s #MeToo terrors.

Rarely have the hues of black and white, cinematographically speaking, looked so beautifully lush as in Passing, the hugely impressive directorial debut of actor Rebecca Hall.

Despite the admirable ambitions and the prestigious names involved, including stars Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons as well as producer Guillermo Del Toro, it doesn’t really work either as metaphor or engaging, thought-provoking entertainment.

It’s a film no one really demanded and yet is loads of fun.

Ron’s Gone Wrong thinks it’s being subversive when its really being very corporate. It wastes its voice cast — including Olivia Colman, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis — and it never really connects, ending as awkwardly as a modern-day seventh-grader with a rock collection.

With an immense sense of scale ranging from mosquito to (Jason) Momoa, Dune renders an age-old tale of palace intrigue and indigenous struggle in exaggerated cosmic contours. Like any drift of sand, Dune feels sculpted by elemental, primal forces.

Perhaps there is something to the fact that fairly or not, some of the luster has dulled due to familiarity, but The French Dispatch remains a highly enjoyable, sophisticated and experimental ode to the romantic, and fictionalized, idea of the midcentury heyday of magazines like The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

The violence is expertly choreographed, but some of us surely could have done with less bloodshed (there are Tarantino-esque flourishes here, too) and more dialogue to deepen some of the tantalizing relationships Samuel introduces.

Whatever your level of familiarity, Haynes’ doc — the first for this accomplished director — is so stylistically compelling, it doesn’t really matter what you knew coming in.

The big problem is that Halloween Kills is less of a sequel than a half-baked interlude before the finale. It is a bloody, violent, chaotic and cynical mess and not even in a good or particularly scary or insightful way.

The movie, written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, is not the tale of manly valor that it first appears. The Last Duel is more like a medieval tale deconstructed, piece by piece, until its heavily armored male characters and the genre’s mythologized nobility are unmasked.

Kranz’s film isn’t perfect. As the conversation ebbs and the four parents stagger out of the room and awkwardly part, the movie, too, struggles with how to walk away. But in this plainly photographed, mournful, restrained movie, the back-and-forth is bracingly sincere.

This should be a no-brainer for anyone who watched the saga unfold on television, but even those who weren’t glued to the screen in 2018 should seek it out. The Rescue is easily one of the best documentaries of the year.

It’s hard to overstate just how much the relative success of this film comes down to Hardy and his go for broke performances as Eddie and Venom.

It doesn’t all work, but Titane is a messy, provocative and wild piece with attitude and style that is never uninteresting.

One problem here is time, something the film obviously plays with. The Many Saints of Newark arrives 14 years after The Sopranos ended and that may be too long for anyone but the most ardent fan to keep up. The brain strains trying to connect new faces with old ones.

The movie has a valedictory, “let’s get the band together one more time” feel, as Bond enlists old comrades — including Naomie Harris’s Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw’s Q — to destroy the weapon of mass destruction.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always isn’t a flashy movie, but that’s part of its unnerving power. With her empathetic camera and transcendent storytelling, Hittman elevates their story — so ordinary-seeming on the page — to a great lyrical odyssey.

For much of the film, it’s difficult not to imagine the Saturday Night Live sketch that’s probably already being written. More than the age difference, though, Platt’s performance is a constant reminder of Broadway artificiality in a movie striving for something real.

Gyllenhaal is absolutely commanding throughout the lean 91-minute runtime, a compelling ball of stress, anxiety and frustration working only with computer screens, phones and disembodied voices. It is no understatement that the success of The Guilty rests entirely on his shoulders.

What’s most disappointing about the film, considering its origins, is just how distant anything like real life feels. From the first moment Jamie slides on a pair of ruby red stiletto pumps, there’s not any doubt things are going to work out for him.

The film is apparently supposed to be a meditation on masculinity, with Eastwood’s one-time rodeo star Mike Milo taming and rebuilding his young rebellious charge into an honorable young man. Instead, it’s a meditation on clumsy and predictable filmmaking.

Although “Tammy Faye” may be imperfect, it does succeed in at least one significant way: We’re not just looking at her makeup anymore.

Malignant at least has originality going for it. It’s also a thanklessly humorless and offensively sadistic film that fails to capture any sort of authentic emotion or make any meaningful statements about trauma.

Toggling between Texas Hold ’Em and Iraq War nightmares makes for a head-spinning collision. But I think the incongruities of The Card Counter also give it its power. Schrader’s film is so self-evidently the impassioned work of a singularly feverish mind that its flaws add to its humanity.