For all its whimsy, Fingernails is delicately profound. Its characters aren’t making bold romantic moves; they’re interrogating their assumptions of what is ultimately an unknowable phenomenon.

Someone Great is fizzy, frivolous, and probably easily forgotten, but for a weekend-friendly jolt of entertainment, rom-com fans could do far worse.

That The Rip is such a bland venue for its charismatic stars’ reunion is a terrible shame.

It has plenty of breezy fun probing the dilemmas of modern media, without abandoning the glitz that made the original so enduring.

The film shares some of the unsettling horror of Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I’d call Beau Is Afraid a more straightforward comedy—as long as the idea of Looney Tunes crossed with Portnoy’s Complaint sounds funny to you.

Wachowski’s gamble is that viewers will enjoy a film that’s heavy on philosophizing and introspection as long as it retains the emotional, romantic hook that powered the first movie. Reeves and Moss sell their reunion as Neo and Trinity persuasively, glowing with the overwhelming chemistry and affection that Wachowski needed to push the film beyond cynicism.

The script, by Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan, is capable but unremarkable, as is Howard’s direction. But the cast...consistently elevates the material.

The joy of the romantic comedy lies less in its mise en scène, and more in its witty repartee and character chemistry, which Set It Up is loaded with. The will-they-won’t-they tension is enough for the movie to power through the silliest moments.

Van Groeningen isn’t too curious about what got Nic into drugs, nor how he finally pulled out of the spiral. Beautiful Boy largely exists in between those two stories and ends up feeling like a limited, grueling experience.

To quote another of the Bard’s royal characters, it ends up feeling like a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Another kill is coming, and because we’re in this peculiar, mischievous film, it’ll be a playful one. But the outcome will always be the same: Someone who was once there is now gone. In the face of that chilling, prosaic nightmare, all Perkins can do is laugh.

Yes, visual-effects technology is up to the task of re-creating a cartoon on a larger scale and dotted with real actors, and yes, these redos tend to turn a profit for their makers. These shouldn’t be the only reasons for art to exist.

For Avatar fans, I have great news: The latest installment of James Cameron’s magical-alien adventure saga is here, and you’re going to love it. . . The bad news for anyone not already on board: This film has no interest in you.

Babylon is the kind of grandiose folly that at least gives the viewer a big old mess to chew on.

With The Big Short, McKay threaded a needle by managing to be jokey while still serious, and angry while still entertaining. With Vice, he fails in both directions.

Hathaway delivers a sharp, witty dissection of female celebrity, at once impenetrably vain and entitled, yet also riven with self-doubt. It is both the most pointed and most amusing way in which the movie toys with gender expectations.

The most crucial aspect of the role-playing game is community—the fact that it’s played with friends and relies on teamwork. The writer-director Dan Scanlon’s clear grasp of that makes for a warm, gentle film that doesn’t try to merely dazzle the audience with wild fantasy visuals.

It reminded me that religion and pop and fascism each revels in uniforms and shared, shouted praise. But it didn’t make me feel all that much.

So much of The Front Runner feels like stenography, giving audiences the basics and then letting Hart or Bradlee monologue to the camera about how the norms of yesteryear are slipping away, perhaps forever.

Like a frustrated player speeding up the falling blocks to end the game, the film haphazardly stacks ideas atop one another until, well, it’s a relief when it’s over.

In the end, Velvet Buzzsaw is a pretty soulless piece of art about the soullessness of art; but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a little fun proving its point.

The film picks and chooses what to carry over from its forebears in a way that’s both fascinating to watch and—as is typical with DC Comics movies—gives the sense of a plane being built in midair. But fortunately for Birds of Prey, that manic energy suits Harley Quinn just fine.

What surprised me about Multiverse of Madness was how much fun Raimi was allowed to have in the middle of it, turning every action sequence into something quite inventive and even delivering some cheeky scares throughout. This many years into the Marvel experiment, I’m heartened to see space for a real genre auteur amid all the multiversal machinations.

A number of the observations about the strictures of gangland life that The Many Saints of Newark bumps up against are compelling, but the film is a victim of its own compression, telling a season’s worth of stories in two hours.

This movie is little more than a vibrant-looking tableau, a two-dimensional take on an intricate piece of history. It’s a tale that’s been told better before, and Willimon’s modern updates are less enlightened than they initially seem.

As a jolting piece of entertainment, Scream absolutely succeeds. It can’t reach the terrifying heights of Craven’s original, but none of the sequels could; each one always leaned a little more on meta-humor as the series went along.

While all of the film’s visual excitement is handled with Pixar’s usual polish, the intrigue is only surface-level.

Had the film not taken an introspective turn, I still would have appreciated its skill with generating easy laughs. Happily, Good Boys has a little more to recommend it than gross gags.