Director Dallas Jenkins comes from the world of faith-based media, and that world is not generally known for delicacy in its messaging, so it counts as a Christmas miracle that Best Christmas Pageant generally avoids heavy-handed sermonizing.

So confoundingly ridiculous that it takes mediocrity to another level; narrative cinema rarely cares this little about actual narrative, transforming what’s supposed to be the concluding chapter of an ongoing saga into little more than pure sensation — blobs of color, bursts of sound.

It’s an effect that gives viewers the feeling of being an audience member at a play or, more appropriately, at Disneyland’s old Carousel of Progress attraction, where a rotating stage showed tourists the same living room over the course of decades as fashions and technology evolved at each stop.

With so many potential crises underfoot, Saturday Night manages to pass the Apollo 13 sniff-test of historical dramas: we know everything’s going to come out all right, but the film nonetheless generates enough suspense to make us think that it might not.

The film’s intentions are unquestionably noble, but the execution falls wildly short, even with so many talented artists involved.

Fortunately, Harvest recounts this pre-historical fall from grace not as dry socio-economic history, but as a sort of universal myth.

Vermiglio is a film that proceeds carefully with few narrative missteps, until the ending sends Lucia on a highly improbable journey across Italy that upsets the tale’s strong sense of geographical unity. One wishes for a more emotional and convincing ending.

The Killer’s Game gets credit for letting Budapest be Budapest, rather than trying to pass it off as a featureless European metropolis, but that’s about the only way in which the movie avoids the generic.

It proves that this mechanized world and its inhabitants are better suited to cartoon form than the headache-inducing Michael Bay movies, but it’s ultimately another piece of elaborate fan service that will bore the uninitiated.

It’s a delicate piece of storytelling, one where the poignancy never feels forced and where the comedy springs from its characters rather than pop-culture references or lazy scatology.

Behind its superficially avant-garde aesthetic, Baby Invasion is a shallow, conservative, masturbatory piece of work. It leaves behind an uncomfortable choice: either Korine has run out of anything interesting to say, or he has actually been trolling us all along.

Adding an extra religious dimension to an already densely packed sociopolitical soap opera, Costa tells a rich story here about the fuzzy line between democracy and theocracy, clashing spiritual values and inflammatory culture-war rhetoric.

A small-town coming-of-age story blown up to rock-opera dimensions, And Their Children After Them puts a roaringly romantic widescreen frame around some well-worn dramatic themes, but never quite hits the epic emotional high notes it strains to reach.

The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance.

This ebullient equestrian comedy thriller is effortlessly enjoyable as camp spectacle, with shades of Almodovar in the mix, even if its twist-heady screwball plot ultimately delivers more style than substance.

As ever with Almodóvar, the healing balms of beauty, art, friendship, love and sex offer some consolation in the darkness, including a small but obligatory queer subplot.

The film is a mirror and a warning.

Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film.

The film ultimately exists as a delivery device for Clooney and Pitt to engage in prickly banter and deadpan wisecracking. Any ideas deeper than that are rejected like an unsuitable liver.

As a procedural, it’s by-the-numbers. If it’s supposed to be a character study, the characters are TV-familiar.

Babygirl is the rare adult drama that understands that complicated characters can be likable, even if their behavior is sometimes decidedly unlikable; it addresses power and gender dynamics in ways that avoid easy, post-#metoo buzzwords; and it’s going to lead to some really interesting post-screening date-night discussions.

Maria is most truly involved with its subject when it abandons any impulse to scale her down, to reduce a titan to life-size, and opts instead to remember the singer as grandiose, allowing her memory — and Jolie’s perfectly suited performance of that memory — to fill the biggest screen.

Perhaps most miraculously, it represents Tim Burton getting his groove back, successfully returning to the dark comedy and outrageous visuals that marked his extraordinary early work.

Blink Twice emerges as a true late-summer surprise, a witty genre film with more on its mind than surface excitement, that draws its sense of dread out of real-world pain without ever exploiting that pain, that serves as an evergreen reminder that if the party seems too good to be true, it is.

The slime and the shadows and the silences are back. Horror DNA is honored rather than pointlessly duplicated. This time, at least, IP familiarity breeds contentment.

Cuckoo would have benefited from explaining itself much less or much, much more; as it is, it lives in the atmospheric middle of the road, confused by itself.

Usually, the architecture of a thriller involves introducing a complicated scenario and then slowly but surely ratcheting up the tension; with Trap, Shyamalan has chosen to set it and forget it, spelling out the circumstances of the titular snare and then rarely bothering to introduce new elements or to elevate the suspense.

While Ryan Reynolds still seems to be having fun playing the cheeky mercenary, both the inside-baseball comedy and the cartoonishly bloody mayhem wear out their welcomes in the film’s final third.

Even if the screenplay stretches credulity at times, Blanc’s brisk, bouncy, twisty narrative should keep most viewers gripped.

Despicable Me 4 plays like an assemblage of note cards that have been stapled together in a rough approximation of a screenplay. There are about 20 different plot threads that aren’t woven together as much as they’re shoved into one ungainly knot.

The pleasurable jolt of a silent scare has given way to predictability.

As it gathers to its grim conclusion with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, The Black Guelph becomes a quietly furious critique of power, corruption and lies among Ireland’s elites, from the police to the church to the upper echelons of government.

The use of first-time and non-professional actors gives the film an authenticity and immediacy that more seasoned performers may not have delivered.

Even if the only way to endow 1960s biker gangs with a sense of majesty and glory is to compare them to what would come later, Nichols captures those moments of fleeting greatness, allowing his lost men room to inhabit their own private inventions, to build their subculture and its mythologies, if only for a short time.

By necessity, Inside Out 2 goes to even more complicated places than its predecessor, but it does so with real understanding, illustrating the ways that leaving childhood behind and forming the earliest stages of what will become an adult identity can be both liberating and terrifying, exhilarating and mortifying.

While the film is filled with shimmering images aplenty – including a literally sparkling trompe d’oeil – the director falls short of using the texture of his 16mm film stock to its full potential. The same could be said of his characters, who could do with more thoughtful fleshing out, while their slow-burning relationships generate more a sense of lethargy than melancholy.

Fleifel’s influences are many, from 1970’s Hollywood to Palestinian poetry to American novels, as he readily admits in his interviews, but To A Land Unknown is unique in its brutal realism; a heartbreaking tribute to exiled people.

The fourth film of a franchise that probably should have packed it in at least two movies ago, this by-the-numbers sequel offers absolutely nothing unexpected, starting with its opening beaches-and-bikinis montage to the climactic standoff with the villain.

Young Woman is a biopic with all sharp edges removed, the kind of non-threatening, inspirational Disney movie that teachers screen for fidgety students on the last day of fourth grade.

The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.

The plot of Everybody Loves Touda is sensually expressed in Erradi’s whirling, energetic performance, and visually told by the brilliant, soft camerawork of Virginie Surdej, expressing the character’s ups and downs.

Blending autobiographical elements with heartfelt homages to Iranian cinema, writer-director Matthew Rankin's charmingly surreal comic fable reimagines Canada as a Farsi-speaking dreamland.

This sly and clever reverse reworking of romantic drama tropes warmly suggests that there can be as much hope and connection to be found in splitting up as there is in coming together.

Building slowly, the story morphs into a thriller, and finally a sort of horror film, though these parts feel more like decent imitations than real genre work.

An epic tale of love, revenge, youth, rage, and class, Beating Hearts (original French title L’Amour Ouf) is an extraordinarily lively work of cinema.

[Kapadia’s] delicate touch remains very much the same, as she offers a gentle but clear critique of the challenges faced by women in India today.

Low on laughs and with a thin plot, Christophe Honore's Marcello Mio is a quirky tribute to one of European cinema's most famous filial relationships.

Gomes is a director poised between ironic narrative and experimentalism pure and simple, and his films (often described as strange, lyrical and hypnotizing) divide audiences into the visionaries and the unconvinced.

Sorrentino somehow makes it work in a film that is truly a sensual pleasure to watch.

The Shrouds feels a little unruly and unfocussed, with too many loose threads and undernourished side plots. Even so, this is still an absorbingly weird autumnal statement from one of the most consistently original screen voices of his generation, still probing away at some familiar psychosexual obsessions, this time under a gathering cloud of looming mortality.

An overlong runtime, underwritten characters and some uneasy tonal wobbles dampen the film’s punchy humour and propulsive energy.

Jeremy Strong’s vicious portrayal of Roy Cohn will long be remembered alongside the finest of Hollywood’s eccentric baddies.

Conceptually staggering.

Despite a few bumpy moments, actor-director Noémie Merlant's gory feminist horror comedy paints a rowdy, richly imagined portrait of three ladies on fire.

Ullmann Tøndel deftly uses the claustrophobic setting to gradually unveil the layers of psychological chaos lurking beneath many respectable façades, particularly in the tightly constructed first half of the film, where the verbal and the visual coexist in a riveting harmony.

The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

Re-shuffling footage from films he has shot over the last 23 years, Jia Zhang-ke places his awe-inspiring cinematic mastery on full display in Caught by the Tides, though its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story.

A movie that is neither Schrader’s best work nor his most scandalous.

The conflict is pretty obvious and the film’s naturalistic shooting style can’t take it to another symbolic level, so as drama, what you see is what you get.

Not every joke hits the target, and not every thematic tangent is fruitfully explored, but a stellar cast and lively pacing lend comic force to even the weaker lines.

This very modern brand of post-Warholioan digital fame is a much-debated cultural phenomenon, and Wild Diamond adds nothing especially new or insightful to the discourse. That said, Reidinger does display a rare degree of empathy and understanding towards young women who pursue this kind of tabloid celebrity.

Graced by a strong cast, visual poetry and great formal control, this brooding meditation on evil still resonates a century later.

In Bird Andrea Arnold once again shows she has the magic keys – in this case Franz Rogowski’s piercingly tender bird-man, and Barry Keoghan’s manically affectionate drug-dealer dad -- to extract drama, fantasy and authentic emotion from characters living on the lowest rungs of English society.

Drunk on its own noble aims and rich ingredients, Megalopolis is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas.

Kinds of Kindness is lighter on jokes and visual brio than many of the director’s previous films, with an overlong runtime that weakens the twist-heavy tension and punchy rhythm of having three back-to-back stories. Despite a solid-gold cast and some deliciously bizarre fairy-tale plots, it still plays more like a fun personal stop-gap project than a major career step.

It’s an earnest attempt at a warm embrace that squeezes the life and charm out of itself.

We’ve truly been down this road before, and none of Miller’s many talents can overcome the sense of familiarity that he’s already done all of this, and better.

For all its craft, though, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never finds the “aha” moment that justifies returning to the well for reasons more pressing than branding and global markets.

At 126 minutes, The Fall Guy overstays its welcome for a bit, but the stunts, the comedy, and the spark between the film’s dynamic leads make the movie a delectable kick-off to the popcorn pleasures of the summer-movie season.

Ministry works best when it chucks history out the window and leans into cinematic silliness.

It’s a collective simmer of sight, sound, sweat, and sensation about fascinating, complex people pushed through their paces on and off the court.

Civil War ultimately risks nothing and subsequently says nothing; it’s a thrilling war picture cosplaying as an examination of the zeitgeist.

What Patel has crafted delivers both kinetic action and real-world relevance, an exceedingly rare combination.

If Hollywood insists on continuing its own separate monsterverse, it could do worse than GxK, a film where giant beasts wallop the tar out of each other with thrilling efficacy.

The new Spenglers have the potential to be as memorable as the original cadre of Ghostbusters, but between the cameos by the 1984 cast (whom the film uses more as goodwill ambassadors than like the talented comic actors they still are) and the callbacks to Slimer and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, they tend to feel like afterthoughts.

There’s an argument to be made, and I’m willing to make it, that Kung Fu Panda 4 is the best film in this series.

Drive-Away Dolls is, at its core, a comedy about eccentric people contending with inept but still deadly criminals. But neither the eccentrics nor the criminals feel remotely like real people, and their hijinks never summon up much hilarity or suspense.

The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.

The Eternal Memory is a salute to two courageous people, who were willing to share the joys of their daily lives, but also the anguish inflicted by a cruel disease.

None of this would work without Johnson, whose gift for side-eye and deadpan line readings grounds what could be a very silly story into one with real human stakes (that do not, thankfully, involve the fate of the entire world).

Lisa Frankenstein is a deadly dull and stitched-together effort that doubtless worked better on paper than it does in execution

Director Matthew Vaughn, fresh off the success of his irritating Kingsman franchise, makes Argylle utterly weightless, both literally (the stuntwork all seems to be taking place in zero gravity) and figuratively (the barely-there characters never register).

The film doesn’t stop to give the six characters time for major exposition and backstory, which would only get in the way of the film’s B-movie sensibility, accentuating scalpel-edge thrills above all else.

Chirpy, as colorful as Skittles, and occasionally, appropriately, acrid, Mean Girls is a pleasantly bouncy reworking of the 2004 comedy of the same name.

Night Swim mostly delivers, veering from straightforward shocks to campy excess without ever hitting bottom.

The film commits a sin that is new to cinema: it’s a boring James Wan movie.

This new film resonates powerfully both as an emotional drama and as a welcome addition to the movie-musical canon.

If The Boy and the Heron does wind up being his farewell to cinema, Miyazaki will be leaving behind a beacon of encouragement, a guidepost to remind the world that even when all seems lost, courage and compassion can forge a new path.

Wonka stands as an effective reimagining of a beloved literary and cinematic character — so long as you don’t mind a little extra sweetness.

Even if the concert sequences don’t completely do justice to the thrill of seeing this show in person, this documentary offers an in-depth souvenir of both the show itself and of this particular chapter in the ongoing saga of one of popular culture’s most intriguing, unpredictable, and powerful creators.

Wish plays more like a collection of deleted tracks than greatest hits.

The film’s epic nature embraces not only size and scope but also the exquisite craftsmanship on display, from the detail work of Janty Yates and Dave Crossman’s costumes to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s ability to differentiate a successful battle from a disastrous one simply through his lighting choices.

It’s the absence of Lawrence — or at least of any young performer matching her charisma — that’s a key part of the problem here.

It’s an entertaining, if shambolic, 105 minutes, yet one can only imagine how much of a treat this film would have been if given permission to fully transcend business as usual.

Freddy’s is rarely frightening — a crowd-friendly PG-13 means fear and carnage are suggested but almost no blood is shown — and it doesn’t have much to say about its underlying subject matter besides, “Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if those musical pizza robots came to life and had sharp teeth?”

The Eras Tour spotlights Swift’s musicianship as well as her showmanship: the acoustic section, where she accompanies herself on guitar and piano, could have been the entire concert, if one could build a stadium tour out of such intimate moments, but the bigger-than-life stagecraft on display never overpowers the music.

Dowd and Burstyn’s performances will endure even as the rest of it fades into the memory hole of unnecessary sequels.

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.