So we have a compelling storyline, and characters we genuinely care about. But since Akhavan doesn’t drill deeply enough, the movie ends at what should be its midpoint. And her lovely final shot winds up feeling as avoidant as it is poignant.

For fans of Ivory’s films, A Cooler Climate reveals more about him than his memoir did, but on certain subjects he remains as tight-lipped as he needed to be in his youth.

While Tyler Perry’s Acrimony doesn’t quite live up to its stylish trailer — that water-torture sound design promises a floodgate that will burst at any moment — it’s the kind of “women’s picture” that used to be Joan Crawford’s bread and butter, the sort that allows its star to glamorously lose her grip in a succession of great outfits.

The Wind might not quite succeed as a frontier-set “The Witch,” but it certainly signals the arrival of a promising talent bound to find her voice in due course.

There’s nothing in Home that you haven’t seen before, but there’s a lot in it your kids haven’t; as animated sci-fi for small fry, it’s a success whose modest but well-executed ambitions are no small part of its charm.

There are certainly any number of inroads to creating a contemporary comedy about interracial relationships, but You People winds up playing as merely outdated and mediocre, with Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus caught in the cobwebs.

The romance of patriotism and pain, depicted here in lush greens and velvety blues, makes “The Imitation Game” enjoyable enough to render it a vindication of the formula. It disappoints as biography, but makes for a great yarn, even if you've heard it before.

Brand: A Second Coming is messy, muddled and occasionally maddening; it’s also a strong and stirring portrait of a funnyman who’s realized that some things just aren’t that funny.

The conclusion of Great Freedom manages to finesse the flaws of the movie, and it winds up feeling genuinely tragic.

Neville is deeply respectful — “Roadrunner” is an unabashed tribute to its subject — but the filmmaker doesn’t occlude the chef’s dark side.

Even parents who found the earlier outings reasonably tolerable may find themselves making excuses to linger longer at the concession stand.

While it spends perhaps too much of its running time either recreating or directly quoting moments from its 1983 predecessor, it still manages to land some new and original gags of its own.

Stilted but commendable for its intent, the movie may function as a great conversation-starter if watched with young kids who might be receptive to new material. For fans of international animation, there are sporadic diamonds of craft, but likely not enough to impress viewers accustomed to the quality of the GKIDS catalogue.

A minimalist film like Columbus depends almost entirely on the shading of the characters and the depths of the performances. By that metric, it’s a too-delicate creature, tickling and piquing instead of fully thrusting us into the realm of feelings.

This movie hardly rates as first-class animation, but it gets in, gets the job done, and moves on both swiftly and well.

There may be nothing new about America Underdog, but it’s still good enough, as far as non-perishable comfort food goes.

Content with dipping its toe into a social issue without risking much, what’s most revealing in The Jesus Music is what’s left out.

In spite of its flaws, this new It does capture the spirit of the book, and especially its metaphor for coming together as a group to combat evil.

In the end, Top Gun: Maverick counts as a worthy sequel in that it succeeds and fails in many of the same ways as the original. It’s another cornball male weepie and military recruitment ad that feels like every WWII movie got fed into an algorithm, and the flying sequences are breathtaking enough to make you forget that these guys and gals are engaging in the kind of combat scenarios that start wars.

Baumbach’s textural/visual/sonic approach is stylish enough that even when White Noise is just churning along, there’s always a keen detail to absorb or killer observation to take in, if not an emotion to latch onto.

The film, while well-intentioned and informative, is a somewhat unfocused piece.

The Love Punch gets by in no small part thanks to the individual charms and collective chemistry between leads Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.

It’s inarguable that some fans, somewhere, will relish every detail.

Derrickson and Cargill successfully tailor their focused and mostly compelling narrative to a Steven Spielberg/Amblin Entertainment–esque bit of Stephen King–sploitation.

This is a very difficult personal narrative to try to digest and make sense of, but at least XY Chelsea makes for a start on this, even if it cannot approach anything definitive on her singular story.

It looks amazing, of course, but it might well be the least involving movie he’s ever made, with an amazing cast providing little but momentary distraction.

Freud’s Last Session will certainly find its fans, and the actors are all superlative. But the whole affair feels a bit too dense to enthrall and the script never dives deep enough into these characters’ psyche to tell us something new or particularly unique.

Established “My Hero Academia” fans will probably enjoy Class 1-A’s typically endearing group dynamic, even if none of the jokes in the movie are that great. And their big fight with Nine is genuinely well-staged and climactic, thanks to some impressive computer graphics and director Kenji Nagasaki’s thoughtful staging and choreography.

Writer-director Chris Butler (“ParaNorman”) excels in his decision to direct the story with gorgeous, bright, bold colors but seems to flounder in telling his story in a way that resonates for children and adults. His script seems aimed at elementary school-aged children, with light-hearted and easy humor, but it fails to hold interest beyond a few scenes.

Dabka winningly traces the ways that a callow American gets schooled in concepts like honor and sacrifice until he is considered an expert on a country and a people that he grows to love.

20th Century Women mainly overcomes its flaws through the sheer imaginative sensitivity of Mills’s writing.

Despite trying to be forcefully meta (McGee explicitly says he hates biopics), the platitude-plagued script and mostly mundane filmmaking underscore how ultimately unadventurous Creation Stories is.

In some ways, Soni has the hardest job here: He’s got to make the rigidly old-fashioned, obsessively uptight Ravi likable enough that we want to see him end up with an independent woman. But Viswanathan has some hurdles too, and they wind up being tougher to overcome.

Ultimately, American Pain perpetuates the media’s dangerous pattern of humanizing white criminals under the guise of moral disdain.

Free Fire is an ultra-violent, gut-punching spectacle that borders on a slog. It makes you feel guilty even for enjoying minutes of it, and then empty after it’s all done.

This movie version sometimes feels evasive or incomplete, partly because you can describe some things in a book that you cannot show on a screen, but it is in most ways an admirable adaptation that does look and sound like memories of a particular childhood.

Perhaps because in giving the jump-around view — introducing us to not just Hart (Jackman) and family, but campaign staff, and reporters from a handful of newspapers — the effect is of a scandal skimmed, rather than explored.

There are ominously edited portents and a score that starts at fever pitch and rarely pulls back. But the frayed strands of the horror plot feel hastily woven together, and underwhelming when all is revealed.

The writing in The Wound can be conventional and overly explanatory, but this doesn’t matter because the subject is so fresh.

Vacation does occasionally spring to life, delivering the kind of ouch-inducing humor of personal humiliation and bad luck that we’ve come to know from the ongoing adventures of the Griswold family. But while those laughs are welcome, there aren’t quite enough of them to sustain the experience.

Tragically, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil does not give Jolie and Pfeiffer nearly enough time to face off against each other.

Oklahoma City is certainly well made and relatively searching, but it can only scratch the surface of its very disturbing and complex subject.

Saving endangered animals is not a matter of sentimentality and lifting one up above another. It involves facing hard facts and brokering some compromises, and Trophy makes us fully aware of this.

The degree of difficulty here is steep, and Davies has not been entirely successful in making Dickinson’s milieu come to full and convincing life.

Blending dreamlike locations found in the real world with a dollop of visual effects, Waddington reaches the desired effect of a universe where technology and fantasy interact. Her cocktail of ideas yields a magical sci-fi thriller with an empowering edge, which, though imperfect due to its ambitions, puts women in charge of their own destinies.

Caro’s ability to localize what might feel broad shines through, even though he is operating within set storytelling boundaries.

What The Gospel of Eureka does best is humanize this small and very specific group of people living on the fringes of the Christian and queer communities. They’re given the space to talk about their lives in their own words, praise the town they love so much, and preach empathy, particularly to those without any.

Lost in America isn’t exactly a cinematic masterpiece, and sometimes its prosaic filmmaking does it no favors, but the film’s ability to move the conversation forward merits attention.

The actors are so committed, and the script so heartfelt, you’d have to be a villain to resist this group’s superpowered sincerity.

Thanks to Mulligan’s electric performance and Fennell’s packed script, the movie never feels as if it lags, but it doesn’t go far enough to smooth over the choppy changes between the film’s witty moments and its stomach-churning dramatic scenes. However, there’s still a lot of promise in Fennell’s film, both in its message, its rape-revenge-influenced riff, and the boundaries it wants to push.

For all the genuine charm on display, you may be disappointed to find that manic activity overtakes said charm, and that more isn’t made of a simple, clever premise.

Ultimately, though, All We Had is exactly the kind of movie of which people say, “Oh well, its heart is in the right place.” A clichéd comment on a clichéd film: what could be more apt?

Indy is a delight who can do no wrong. Though the film around him is not always as assured, he is a star who has earned all the pets and treats a dog could dream of. After all the nightmares he had to endure this film, he more than deserves it.

For its few visual and many script flaws, however, director Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” “Let Me In”) balances the splashy set pieces with quieter moments (sullen teen Kodi Smit-McPhee gives a copy of Charles Burns’ “Black Hole” to a wise orangutan named after Maurice Evans!) in such a way that “Dawn” never feels dull or draggy.

This is a slow-burning movie, but its stealth and intelligence eventually packs an emotional punch.

Dramarama is finally worthwhile mainly because its players are so responsive to each other and to the idea of friendship that they make large sections of the movie come alive.

As a traditional period biopic, it checks all the boxes in fine fashion. But you’d never know it was inspired by a woman whose life was expansive and contradictory and unwieldy in the extreme.

Director Clint Eastwood‘s focus on Kyle is so tight that no other character, including wife Taya (Sienna Miller), comes through as a person, and the scope so narrow that the film engages only superficially with the many moral issues surrounding the Iraq War.

Sixteen years later, 9/11 remains too touchy a subject for a movie as clumsy as 9/11 to get entirely right. And even if the film relies too much on the real-life horror of the actual event to loan it some gravitas, the performances touch the emotions honestly and deservedly.

Though the material isn’t quite ready for primetime, Winstead once again proves herself a major player.

It’s a shame the filmmakers felt constrained by the import of their subject matter, rather than inspired to take some artistic risks. But even when the storytelling falters, the story itself — not merely extraordinary, but eternally relevant — remains paramount.

The film offers one or two surprises. And when its humor lands, Rauch ensures that it sticks.

It finally matters very little that The Happy Prince is haphazardly written and awkwardly directed because Everett is an intelligent man who has a deep imaginative connection to Wilde and his wit and his cruising and his whole worldview.

Given its double burden of being both a toy adaptation and a bloodless kiddie horror show, Ouija winds up being more fun that you might think, even if it's the sort of film you can't really take seriously for a second.

The Walk is that rare movie that might please practically everyone, from viewers just looking for a thrill to those who might enjoy a story that sounds like a tall tale but winds up being discreetly poignant.

There are the expected clichés voiced here about how music can transform hearts and minds, but Gay Chorus Deep South is most useful as a way of seeing how intolerance hides behind evasive Southern hospitality and how it might be vanquished with what that hospitality seeks to avoid: direct confrontation.

A rough but vital film.

For most of its running time, it has a palpable B-movie energy that gives a little oomph to the umpteenth cinematic portrayal of humanity’s end.

The screenplay by Ryan Engle (“Rampage,” “The Commuter”) squanders its potential for emotional depth, making Breaking In a serviceable, but indistinct product.

“Titan” wants to start and end with Rush’s actions when it feels like that conclusion is already littered on the story’s surface.

In the aggregate, Karam’s directing is so meticulously composed about conveying the density of what’s unsaid, and the mood around the people instead of the people creating the mood, that “The Humans” can feel a bit suffocating.

A strong ensemble cast, led by Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall, does a lot of emotional heavy lifting in the otherwise lightweight mockumentary Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

A sensitive drama that marks a notably personal feature debut.

Though Monsters and Men isn’t the most fully realized work, its innate intelligence and matter-of-fact sensitivity are the kinds of storytelling assets we need more of, especially when the fabric of life for many continues to fray and tear in ways that demand a larger societal reassessing.

Puss in Boots isn’t on a rousing adventure; he’s performing the fairy-tale equivalent of grasping at miracle cures while he’s dying from a terminal illness. And although the film is funny in fits and starts, and exciting in fits and starts, the ultimate takeaway is weirdly sobering.

Like many of Emmerich’s movies, even the better ones, Midway loses sight of the humanity inside its vast vistas of devastation. It’s a giant film with a very small impact.

The Founder never steps up to become the biting satire of American capitalism it so begs to be. The film is not here to praise Ray Kroc, but neither is it here to bury him.

Despite the script’s lack of character depth, Miller gives a consistently phenomenal performance.

Hold the Dark is a perfectly adequate film made by an especially talented director, Jeremy Saulnier. Alternately pulse-racing and somnambulant, it’s a thriller that starts strong before running out of gas.

Without a strong guiding hand we’re left with a finely acted, but only adequate biopic, which brushes against greatness and then paints over it.

Shallow self-congratulation for American moxie at the expense of everyone and everything around us.

It’s a magic act without the storytelling, so every moment is the prestige, and none of it feels prestigious. It’s goofy and shallow and delightful and in a couple days I’ll forget I ever saw it.

Mackie does a decent job of articulating his anger, and the filmmakers clearly care about the issues, but The Banker doesn’t take the narrative risks necessary to tell its story powerfully. Competence is all we get instead, and competence isn’t quite enough.

Attempts to be a psychological campy thriller but gets so lost in trying to construct a message that all the exaggerated thrills die before even lifting off.

The overly simplistic nature of the script becomes both pragmatic and detrimental, never allowing any character the depth they are owed while providing just enough of a formulaic plot, one that asks nothing more than for you to enjoy the ensemble.

There are, to be sure, some worthwhile upgrades this time around — including one sequence that’s an instant classic — but it’s hard not to feel like you’ve already played this game once before.

An ordinary feature that could have been extraordinary as a series of three shorts. Instead, this is what we’ve got: a vaguely watchable animated Christmas movie that only works in fits and starts.

One emerges from the theater thinking we may have just had a good time, but the more it sits with you, the more you realize that no matter how epic the battles were — and they certainly were epic — they didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the original.

As for the writer-director, Ol Parker, he doesn’t come up with any urgent artistic reasons for the existence of its follow-up, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, but he does make it surprisingly watchable, and he manages to overcome some mountainous obstacles.

The lead actors are attractive and charismatic and give nuanced performances. Unfortunately, the dialogue they are given to speak is often trite and too many plot strands are unconvincing.

White Girl wants credit for its provocations, but it’s not provoking us towards any particularly insights, just pointing out that white privilege exists and then calling it a day. It’s “Woke af: The Movie.”

The moments of absurdity land with a wonderfully weird grace, while the desperately vulgar gags about sex and scatology echo and crash as though they were being uttered in a middle-school boys’ restroom.

This journey to cobble together the old squad should be more fun that it is. Although you could say that about most of Uncle Drew. The onus is less on the performances; each former player holds his/her own.

The Chaperone is case of a not-so-good movie made by people who are unquestionably talented.

Mortdecai is by no means a disaster — the occasional joke lands, and there’s at least some fun to be found in the frenetic farce of all the conspiracies and the running-around... Still, I spent most of the movie waiting for it to find its rhythms and set a witty pace for itself that would allow the humor to build and the outrageous situations to pay off grandly.

Central Intelligence doesn’t feel like the birth of a great comic duo — more like a blind date that goes a little better than expected. The chemistry’s not there yet, but let’s give it another shot.

The vignettes sometimes resonate with the viewer but don’t really connect into a plot, there are too many characters with too many stories and pretty good flashbacks, and some of the jokes are impossible to laugh out loud at unless you’re a highly trained and paid actor.

The word Competent! rarely makes it into a movie’s marketing materials no matter how accurate it is.