Director Nimrod Antal (Predators) stages the mostly vehicular mayhem with as much variety and visual excitement as possible, especially in a crucial scene in which Matt is cornered by the police in a tunnel. But there’s only so much he can do with the hackneyed premise.

Thanks to its well-observed, amusing depiction of teenage girl angst and a genuine sweetness at its core, it proves thoroughly winning. And if you don’t get all verklempt at the heartwarming ending, you’ve probably never had a best friend.

Moss tackles the idea from a more intimate and feminist perspective, questioning how far mothers are willing to go for their children, or simply to become mothers at all. If what happens in her movie seems altogether extreme, maybe it’s because the world we live in tends to push such women to extreme places.

It’s a credit to the cast and Rodriguez’s assured direction that we believe Miguel’s efforts stand a chance.

Medusa Deluxe is saved from its own potential waywardness by a series of stellar performances. The cast animates the strange, disquieting world of beauticians who describe their craft in profound, almost holy terms.

Even with its brief 93-minute running time, Strays feels thin and repetitive; after all, there are only so many times you can laugh at, say, a dog happily eating another’s dog vomit. But the film nonetheless delivers plenty of laughs, making up for many of its clunkers through sheer volume and the talents of its starry voice cast.

Aided by the dynamic cinematography of regular Ari Aster collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, a pulsing electronic score by Brit musician Bobby Krlic and sturdy effects work, Soto brings an assured hand, balancing action with character-driven scenes and comedy with suspense throughout. The pacing is brisk, infused with youthful energy, but never so frenetic that it doesn’t allow intimate exchanges time to breathe.

The Monkey King is no exception. It mines rich source material for a widely accessible episodic adventure laced with rowdy martial arts clashes and fantastical detours. Even if its Americanization follows a standard template, the movie maintains a flavorful sprinkling of the material’s cultural specificity.

It gets the job done and is sure to pull solid numbers. It doesn’t hurt that Gadot has appealing chemistry with co-star Jamie Dornan.

[Ovredal] handles the darkly creepy atmospherics expertly and makes fully convincing the ship’s fateful voyage through stormy and vampire-besieged seas. But he’s not able to bring much spark to Bragi Schut, Jr. and Zak Olkewicz’s slow-paced, formulaic screenplay, which lacks the dark wit necessary to keep us invested in the gory proceedings.

In this case, it’s the thrills that sell, and Gran Turismo has plenty of those.

Greer, Gathegi and Maadi are all on-point as regular people facing spatial-temporal realities the impact of which they fail to fully grasp until it may be too late. Sure, they’ve changed the world, but be careful what you wish for.

The stories in Simon’s doc live in a French context, but the plight of its participants is near universal. In the face of resurgent attacks on bodily autonomy around the world, Our Body is an urgent and political project.

As much as it’s a joy to watch Statham slinging explosive harpoons from a jet ski, Meg 2 offers only scattershot pleasures. It’s too ridiculous to muster serious scares and too tonally uncertain to convince us that it’s consistently in on the joke.

From its very first minute, this searing drama of rural strife, xenophobia and cultural hostility is filled with almost unbearable tension.

The quiet but stirring effect is a dreamscape of eye-opening geography, existential longing and the enduring workaday.

Adopting a decidedly younger spin toward its teenage heroes, the hugely entertaining and funny film seems destined to reinvigorate the franchise and attract plenty of nostalgic adults as well as young fans.

The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.

I don’t think Meeropol’s formal choices always match the story she wants to capture, and After the Bite runs out of energy well before the end of its 90-minute running time. But I mostly enjoyed the idea of a more muted version of Jaws that suggests that if we have a contemporary shark attack problem, the solution is going to require more than a bigger boat.

Part of the attraction of Madeleine Collins is in seeing how far Barraud is willing take things until providing a reasonable explanation. It’s a tricky balancing act that’s one-third Hitchcockian intrigue and one-third Chabrolian study of broken bourgeois homes, with the final third bordering on kitsch.

At a running time of over two hours, the experience eventually feels as wearisome as riding the same ride over and over again.

Cage chews up every scene he’s in and seems to be having a blast — he’s always over-the-top and never boring to watch, in a film that delivers the goods for those who like him best when he’s just about lost his mind.

Corner Office succeeds all too well in conveying the deadening effects of office work, practically serving as a testimonial to the pandemic-created trend of working from home.

This is an elegiac story, a humanistic metaphor for a vanishing world seen through the prism of a vulnerable couple cruelly written off by their families as worthless encumbrances.

It proves more interesting in its chronicling of the business practices that made the Beanie Babies such a sensation, at least for a while, than in its portrait of personal dramas, the veracity of which obviously has to be called into question. Overall, the movie follows a by-now familiar trajectory, with the company’s mammoth success inevitably followed by its big fall.

The documentary that it chooses to be instead has appeal but, in the rush to get it onto screens before the next time somebody dares underestimate Curry, perhaps it lacks sufficient refinement.

This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed man, his legacy complicated by his own ambivalence toward the breakthrough achievement that secured his place in the history books.

Barbie is driven by jokes — sometimes laugh-out-loud, always chuckle-worthy — that poke light fun at Mattel, prod the ridiculousness of the doll’s lore and gesture at the contradictions of our sexist society.