You leave The Assistant thinking about why some of us are invisible and some of us don’t notice — and about how evil lives in the places from which we look away.

Sonic the Hedgehog is bright. It’s cheery. It’s here and then it’s gone in a relatively compact 100 minutes, leaving little beyond a slightly sweet aftertaste to mark its passage.

I enjoyed Downhill purely for Louis-Dreyfus’ performance; we don’t get to see the “Veep” star on the big screen very often, so why not revel in her talent when we get the chance? As an exhausted working mom unable to keep from micromanaging the vacation — and a wife suddenly questioning her choices — she’s funny and moving and utterly believable in every moment.

Sometimes too many ideas collide into each other — a zippy back-and-forth structure in the screenplay gets abandoned, and the pacing in the final act feels off — but Birds of Prey is never boring and often great fun.

You watch wondering what good actors like Lively, Law, Jeffrey and Sterling K. Brown (as a former C.I.A. officer) saw in this muddy screenplay, and why Morano, best known for the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” couldn’t find a way to make them spark.

The dialogue, the violence, the humor (largely provided by Grant’s character) and the intricacy of the storytelling make for a picture in which most everyone in it seems to be having a great deal of chatty, bloody fun.

For a fun time to dispel the gloom of January, Dolittle is just what the doctor ordered.

If Like a Boss had a decent screenplay, and was competently directed, it might have been pretty good.

The first creature feature of the new decade is here, and boy is it dumb.

While occasionally the film wanders a bit too far into sentimentality (a scene involving a baby feels like it crosses a plausibility line), watching 1917 is an emotional and moving experience. You think of these two young men as one minuscule piece of an enormous tragedy, filled with individual stories.

This Little Women purist was moved to tears by this movie, and didn’t want it to end. Beautifully intimate, gentle and wise, it made me — and all of us — part of the March family. And what better Christmas gift could we wish for than that?

On the whole, “Spies” is a very nice trifle turning up just in time for the holidays for families seeking a kinder, gentler alternative to “Star Wars.”

Ultimately, the film’s unwillingness to go deeper makes it fall flat.

You can imagine how other filmmakers might approach this — it’s a beautifully cinematic story — but no one else would film it quite as Malick has. This quiet, meditative and very deliberate film (nearly three hours long, though not a great deal happens) is at once historical drama, love story and ode to nature.

“Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way.

The Rise of Skywalker rates right up there with the 1977 original, “A New Hope,” and 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Eastwood’s very good with actors, and the central trio of Richard Jewell make the film worth watching.

It’s all undeniably silly, but satisfying in an overstuffed blockbuster sort of way.

It’s a pretty picture and a sweet adventure, and sometimes that’s enough.

Johansson and Driver are remarkably, heartbreakingly good in every scene; showing their characters’ journeys to an unflinching camera, letting the gap between them get wider yet unable, for their son’s sake, to completely walk away. It’s a drama playing out on two larger-than-life faces; a family torn apart, and yet enduring.

Schultz has a lovely way of telling a just-on-the-verge-of-melodramatic story on a very human level.

Not every moment in the film works perfectly — Matsoukas, on occasion, slips the actors’ dialogue into internal monologue voice-over, which mostly just seems confusing — but Queen & Slim has a remarkable power. You watch it recognizing the world you know, and wishing you didn’t.

Ruffalo, as a character more polished and reserved than he usually plays, is compelling as ever; he’s able to convey the sense of time passing, with the case weighing down on him more heavily as years slip by.

In this season of Big, Serious Movies, what a treat to find this wonderfully silly, perfectly paced hall of mirrors hanging out at the multiplexes. It’s as if Agatha Christie came back for a visit, after getting caught up on pop culture in the beyond.

While A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is charmingly filmed (I loved the animated depictions of the toy Neighborhood, and the way Heller switches camera formats to give a more old-school portrayal of Rogers’ TV show), it didn’t quite have the emotional wallop I expected.

Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee (the latter also wrote the screenplay, both directed the original), it’s gorgeous-looking. It’s briskly paced. And it’s tuneful. Uh, about those tunes: They’re blaringly, oppressively, crushingly LOUD! With “Frozen” we got the rousing Oscar-winning “Let It Go.” With Frozen II, someone should have told the songwriters to tone it down.

As a movie, The Good Liar is just so-so, but as a master class in performance and star quality, it’s a pleasure.

Whether you care about motorsports or not, Ford v Ferrari is a kick: both a rollicking true story well told, and a moving depiction of male friendship.