A feminist recasting of the familiar story is welcome, of course, but the screenplay focuses so insistently on its female-empowering message that it feels at times like we’re just getting hit over the head with it.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about Vacation Friends. There are a few genuinely good laughs to be had involving drugs, golf and a catamaran, both during the vacation and the wedding. And there’s some tedium during the inevitable falling out segment. But it’s enjoyable in a way that doesn’t make you think about lost time and experiences over the past year.

Beneath the beauty and the violence is a story about the ties between siblings, fatherly expectations, the modern world’s demands versus traditions and our own legacies.

DaCosta can make a stroll down a well-lit, modern and clean hallway somehow creepy. This is confident, smart filmmaking. There’s a stunning scene in which the Candyman mirrors his prey’s movements and one in an elevator where blood droplets create their own horror-inside-horror.

At the film’s center is Q but there is a hollowness there. She can rappel down a staircase using a fire hose, endure waterboarding and use a dinner tray as an assault weapon, but there’s little insight in her inner life or emotions and her backstory appears too late.

Like its characters, it’s drunk on what came before, relying too heavily on noir tropes. But its smart, thought-provoking concept isn’t so easy to shake off.

Confidently directed by David Bruckner from a clever script written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, The Night House excels in tension building —it is both unpredictable and unnervingly restrained. In other words, you’re rarely at ease for 110 minutes.

Heder, who adapted her screenplay from the 2014 French film La Famille Belier, makes crucially effective decisions throughout, but none more important than the casting, with three extraordinary deaf actors playing the deaf family members.

The script by Tracey Scott Wilson (Fosse/Verdon) is a collection of scenes that don’t add up to much, never really building and interrupted — by necessity, of course — with overly long music sequences. This film needed someone to sharpen and clarify.

It’s a charming concoction of cliches cribbed from other movies, from Tron to Truman, without its own coding.

Will you exit with any sort of elevated understanding of artists or love or tragedy? Maybe not, but, again, this thing called Annette has a way of taking up residence in your mind, whether you like it or not. If you’re even the slightest bit intrigued, you should let Carax and the Maels take you on this bizarre journey.

The chapters don’t cohere in a sustained rhythm, but in richly evocative imagery, The Green Knight makes its own vivid film language and pacing.

Bill is a hard part to pull off, but Damon does, creating a flawed but compassionate character, made doubly hard since he outwardly reveals little emotion.

They are outcasts, weirdos, laughing stocks and whatever you call Nanaue. That makes The Suicide Squad — as ridiculous as it is to say about a movie that renders a bloody rampage with gushes of animated daisies and birdies — kind of beautiful. Plus, the shark in jams is funny.

It is a fine adventure with two genuine movie stars that may very well become a rewatchable staple like the films it references. But on first watch, it mostly comes across as an earnest and safe homage.

Of course, it all comes down to a Shyamalan-style final twist — the most entertaining part of the film, but it comes way, way too late. Listen, we’re all up for some summer fun on the beach. But by the time we’re allowed in on the secret here, we’re feeling a bit tired.

Golding is simply not the right actor for the part. He’s not exactly bad, just miscast and misused. And despite the novel trimmings and flash around him, his character is woefully generic.

Thanks to Kilmer’s relentless drive to document things, Val is a remarkably intimate film and a moving one, too. For a performer who has come off as chilly and difficult, this doc doesn’t counter those perceptions as much as explain them.

One cannot fault Roadrunner for not coming up with clear answers. There rarely are clear answers, anyway, and this film seems to want to be about a life, not a death. A fascinating life, parts of which will forever remain unknown.

McKay, director of The Lego Movie, is most at home in humor, and The Tomorrow War can be funny. It’s less adept at some of the operatic notes it tries to strike, but, well, aliens can be tricky.

It’s a manic movie in a familiarly corporate kind of way that provides kids with a computer-generated candy rush. The movie’s own business imperatives occasionally show through like a leaky diaper.

Taylour Paige is phenomenal, for one. The movie, though, is a bold and admirable experiment that doesn’t totally work.

Here DeMonaco finds richness in flipping the script on traditional right-wing notions of the border and immigration.

With so many murky motives, there’s little to care about, no way to anticipate the next con and no sense of real peril.

As played by Johansson, excellent here, every action for Natasha is tinged with acceptance and revulsion for her own nature. Black Widow becomes, kind of stirringly, a movie not about franchise extension but sisterhood, improvised families and traumatic pasts.

And though the performances are riveting — standouts include Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples belting out Take My Hand, Precious Lord and the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ O Happy Day — it’s the shots of the all-ages crowd that makes this film come alive, with the vibrant fashions, the incredible faces, the excitement, the boredom and the humanity of it all packed into every frame.

Luckily, Neeson has a way of lending his rough-hewn dignity to even the most perfunctory of plots — because this one, it must be said, is perfunctory.

I Carry You with Me couldn’t be any more specific about the trials of an undocumented gay couple trying to carve out a place for themselves, but it’s that specificity that makes its themes and emotions all the more universal.