Huerta comes across as warm, wise and indefatigable in Bratt’s provocative and inspirational film, but he doesn’t engage in hagiography.

There’s something here for lovers of all kinds of movies — even silents and musicals — but the director transcends mere pastiche to craft a work that feels like the product of our collective film-going subconscious.

Where “In A World…” felt intimate and focused, delightfully dysfunctional but relentlessly hopeful, “I Do” is noisy and meandering.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

Downsizing sees Payne and Taylor working on a larger palette than usual, but like their shrunken characters, the filmmakers’ humor and their sharp observation of the human condition have survived the change in size and scope.

The film’s major saving grace is how it seeks to be inclusive in its depiction of Christianity. Through a collective endeavor, a sense of community and faith is reinforced.

Heslov, making her debut, therefore largely does an impressive job balancing the contestants’ deeply disturbing stories...with the near giddiness they express while getting dolled up. It’s infectious.

As alternatingly silly and serious as its mix of wisdom and wallops, and even with that blond bro gumming up the works, “Birth” is nevertheless zippy, B-movie entertainment.

For the millions of true believers out there, however...the film provides a blissfully melancholy roll call of pleasures.

No matter how much directors Eric Warin and Eric Summer (who wrote the story with Laurent Zeitoun) try to distract with dumb comedy — usually involving the annoying Victor — or cartoony action...the relationship between Félicie and Odette is a warm, heart-tugging one.

The new horror-thriller is cheesy, asinine, convoluted and ludicrous. On the plus side, if your eyeballs need a vigorous workout, this will have them rolling nonstop.

Wirkola is more comfortable engaging with gunfire than people.

Chon’s dense, ambitious, and observant film is full of impressive craft and insight.

Marjorie Prime is a contemplative, intimate and poetic chamber piece, superbly told and nimbly acted, with equal parts nuance and empathy.

Liman’s tone, channelled through Cruise gently straining to deconstruct his own iconography, achieves neither real comedy nor actual tension. The movie feels lightweight, even while pointing fingers at the American government’s meddling foreign policy and lies.

What sets it apart from other overpraised festival indies is its tremendously gifted lead.

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

It’s confused about whether it wants to be a ticking-bomb tale of heroics or a complex insider account.

It’s a movie about two people that ends up being about no one at all.

Pilgrimage travels quite far on the momentum provided by a series of reveals. Each shifts the film’s stakes significantly enough that we look forward to the next divulgence as much as the succeeding battle scene. It ultimately stumbles when it reaches for depth, arriving at a hollow conclusion that mistakes cynicism for profundity.

The cast seems game, and perhaps they realize it’s on them to elevate the material, so the scenes between Reynolds and Jackson have some genuine snap to them, even though the dialogue and characterization are barely memorable.

Spicer has a deft touch with his story, and his cast marvelously fleshes out a bunch of people we care about even though, in most cases, we know we probably shouldn’t.

It didn’t take long for this fleet-footed sequel, spry and charming, to win me over.

This is a filmmaker precise in her composition and in her texture, her comedic beats reminiscent of both David Lynch and Issa Rae.

Whose Streets? vitally offers — despite its birth in sorrow and its many war-zone-like stretches — is a tale of alertness and awakening.

In Cretton’s hands, this fact-based tale of an oddball, destitute upbringing rings false. It’s based on a woman’s complicated personal recollections of her traumatic childhood, and yet it feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged.

This is a movie full of characters you would walk away from at a cocktail party, engaging in the flattest brand of smart banter imaginable.

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.

On the surface a tense investigative piece with Renner as a regular Sherlock of the snow, it also slips in cogent and damning points about the limitations and dead ends virtually forced on many residents of Native American reservations.

Although the filmmakers return to outsize wackiness too frequently, the film mercifully isn’t one chaotic gag after another.

Between Berry’s committed performance and the film’s brisk cocktail of dread and adrenaline, Kidnap makes for a rousing, if ridiculous, ride.

With fantasy material like this, we need to be made to believe in the inventions and the conceits, and we cannot do that if they are shot and staged in such a truncated and perfunctory way.

The best way to watch Chronically Metropolitan is to think of it as a parody of a particularly pretentious brand of indie romance. Unfortunately, though, director Xavier Manrique and writer Nicholas Schutt (“Blood & Oil”) play it so solemnly straight for their feature debut that it seems unlikely they’re aiming for satire.

The competition in Step isn’t just to hit a stage and win a talent prize, but to beat the odds in life. Start figuring out now how to clap and dab away tears at the same time; it’s that kind of experience.

It’s as if Reybaud wants to put in every scene and character he has ever thought of in one film, and so his two main characters get lost.

In the end, human decency and resilience are this narrative’s common threads. And you needn’t have lost a loved one to recognize it.

This is about as egregious as filmmaking gets.

Based on the best moments of Atomic Blonde, I would very much like to see a series of films in which Charlize Theron’s ruthless, brutal and glamorous secret agent dispatches a variety of Cold War-era enemies to the accompaniment of hit songs from the 80s.

It is a soul-crushing disaster because it lacks humor, wit, ideas, visual style, compelling performances, a point of view or any other distinguishing characteristic that would make it anything but a complete waste of your time, not to mention that of the diligent animators who brought this catastrophe into being.

There is no doubt that Gore has a life-altering passion; he just doesn’t possess the personality required to express it cinematically.

Its low-gear celebration of fandom-inspired ingenuity, and belief in the power of creating as a reparative balm, earns it enough well-deserved smiles when things fall predictably into place in the latter stages.

A day can be mind-numbingly dull or fate-alteringly momentous. Person to Person expresses this duh statement with scarcely more wisdom, nuance, or emotional pull.

As summer movies go, Logan Lucky is especially tasty bar food, slung by a master.

It succumbs to evasiveness and sentimentality at the end, but this does not extinguish the memory of the many funny, touching, and captivatingly odd scenes that have come before.

Detroit has a vital sense of authenticity, rooted as it is in history, conveyed via Bigelow’s meticulously crafted cinema vérité style that, essentially, thrusts the viewer into the tense events. She is an expert at managing suspense and deftly blending sensitivity with a journalistic sense of details.

Crumbling nuclear families are a well-worn movie genre; you could even add “in Manhattan” to that description and the examples would be many. “Landline” is simply another one, not appreciably worse than the average, but not much better, either.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

Nolan has crafted a film that’s sensational in every sense of the word; it aims for both the heart and the head, to be sure, but arrives there via the central nervous system.

Noxon, a TV veteran making her directorial debut here, had suffered from an eating disorder herself, as did the film’s star, Lily Collins. It’s surprising, then, that the script offers only generalities instead of any real insight.

The filmmaker’s outsize, and sometimes unnerving, stylistic choices jump into the frame and vanish just as quickly.

Chasing Coral is not impartial. It’s staunchly pro-life, in the truest sense of the term.

It features a striking lead performance, but it ultimately leaves the viewer unmoved, and possibly confounded.

Unfortunately, to follow these characters around is to experience not great theater, nor rich cinema, nor architectural wonder, but rather the itch of the restless spectator.

The death scenes range from goofy and completely preventable to modestly suspenseful.

There are few surprises here.... But that’s okay, because we’re in it for the ride, the company, and the pure pleasure of watching these women, and the actresses playing them, embrace an independence Hollywood doles out too grudgingly.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets might well represent the apotheosis of Besson’s singularly loony brand of filmmaking. It’s bonkers and gorgeous and confusing and thrilling and tiring and overflowing with ideas.

As information-age documents go, it’s as necessary a glimpse of 21st century heroism and ideology warfare as you’re going to encounter, and a brutally effective argument for compassion toward those forced from their homeland.

You get flashes of the clever comedy this might have been — a funny line here, an amusing bit of business there, the occasional whiff of relevance — but it too often lumbers along, coasting on the backs of some very talented performers.

13 Minutes is well-acted, with authentic settings and an involving structure, but it’s undercut somewhat by a rather flat love story.

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

The result is a “Spider-Man” that feels a little more punchy, laugh-filled, and exciting than one might expect from a property that’s already been given plenty of chances to succeed.

The Little Hours is no one-trick pony. While the lunacy of nuns who swear like sailors makes a comically boisterous impression, it’s also about women in the Middle Ages forced into religious life for various reasons and how they cope, viewed through a decidedly humorous lens.

It’s not just the CG that’s visually impressive here; “War” boasts some extraordinary set pieces.

While The Big Sick isn’t always a complete success — it’s another film bearing the name of Judd Apatow (he produced with Barry Mendel) that could stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes — it’s the kind of sweetly funny love story that’s so bizarre that it has to be real.

One of the biggest takeaways from "My Journey” and Tavernier’s enthusiasm for the confluence of image, performance, writing and sound is something hard to ignore the next time you see a contemporary film: the care of shot selection that previous generations deployed, and that barely exists in today’s sloppy, keep-filming-and-figure-it-out-later ethos.

The Bad Batch feels less like a coherent film and more like a pastiche.

If you’re here for the director’s trademark chaos editing (where fights go from points A to D to Q), toxic masculinity (and female objectification), comedy scenes rendered tragic (and vice versa), and general full-volume confusion, you’ll get all those things in abundance.

Annabelle: Creation is a professional jitters-fest, made with deep-seated esteem for the genre rather than cynicism about a box-office sure thing.

Brian Knappenberger’s urgent new documentary Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press is the sort of movie that impacts your viewpoint long after it ends.

A stroll along the Venice boardwalk is likely to elicit more laughs, and probably even thrills, than Once Upon a Time in Venice.

Most of these guys want to be “guys” in the most conventional ways, but at its best, this is a movie about how deviations from that norm can still be taken in and accepted and even championed.

The dramatized movie we’ve gotten, All Eyez On Me, is a hagiographic dud that unfolds like a depth-free magazine listicle.

It’s lean and mean, focused and direct, and the jolts are both effective and well earned

Keaton’s terrific, and it’s sweet and airy and so unhurried you really feel like you’ve had a nice afternoon in the long grasses and cool breezes on the edge of the city.

If you share Hartman’s trifecta of obsessions — photography, fashion and fame — you’ll find plenty to appreciate.

Although Bell herself is fascinating, Letters From Baghdad is less so.

The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics.

A sloppy, untossed salad of a comedy, Rough Night survives on funny bits and a game cast.

As a spawner of merchandise, Cars 3 fires on all pistons but, as a movie, it’s a harmless but never stimulating 109 minutes.

It Comes at Night is not a horror film, though it is horrifying, mining the depths of paranoia and fear when unknown forces intrude on domesticity and create desperate rats out of otherwise reasonable human beings.

Somehow, the blistering comedy you would expect never quite manifests, and instead we get a lot of on-the-nose sermonizing and weak-tea social commentary.

This “Mummy” is rags that produce no riches.

Band Aid might sound gimmicky, but Lister-Jones keeps the emotions firmly rooted and the characters believably contextualized.

Weisz and Claflin make a memorable couple, but it’s too bad their chemistry is wasted on such a wan drama. A little less taste and a little more oomph might have made all the difference.

The loss doesn’t hit, and the comedy doesn’t land, leaving Dean a wasted opportunity that offers a few talented artists the chance to do fine work in the service of an empty vessel.

Whatever nuance existed in the original novel, whatever detail regarding the complicated emotional existence of actual human beings, is reduced here to not-quite-suspenseful-enough plot points and an impossible forbidden romance that makes almost no sense.

It’s hard to say the name "Captain Underpants” without smiling, and the big-screen debut of the skivvies-clad superhero (the film’s subtitle is “The First Epic Movie”) maintains that same goofy, innocently naughty nature for nearly its entire running time.

Unless you’re coming to the material with the experience of, say, Steven Spielberg, “violent war biopic” and “inspirational animal drama” are a tricky combo. So while it’s perhaps no surprise that director Gabriela Cowperthwaite struggles to weave these disparate threads together in Megan Leavey, she ultimately does her heroes — both of them — proud.

In the recent flood of superhero movies, several have managed to be quite good — but Wonder Woman ranks as one of the few great ones.

There’s a glimmer of a better movie in Richardson’s and Cox’s scenes, which suggest a thorny marriage that barely survived its low points, but it’s inevitably undercut by Teplitsky’s fondness for slo-mo memorializing, music overuse, and a simplistic pace that wants to brush away all the negativity with a well-timed come-to-Jesus moment, and a rousing radio speech.

You don’t have to be a Deadhead, or even a casual listener, to find in Long Strange Trip a compelling tale of what happens when iconoclasts become icons.

This is a film of highs and lows; there is no middle ground, no moment of silence, reflection or introspection. “Joshua” stays frustratingly on message.

A summer franchise movie that can’t decide if it wants to be a hard-R bawdy comedy, a d-bag-comes-of-age tale or a fairly unironic reboot of the glossy TV show (which ran from 1989-2001), Baywatch fails at all three, despite the best efforts of the perennially game Johnson and Zac Efron.

What’s most dispiriting about War Machine is that you can sense the satire it wants to be — and could have been — but never becomes.

The fifth entry, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, is the most divertingly enjoyable since the first. A professionally crafted brew of action, slapstick and supernatural mumbo-jumbo, it’s less likely to spur timepiece glances than did the last few bloated installments.

A respectful, reserved, and charming documentary.

Shawkat breaks out subtleties that she’s never been able to show off in other roles.

Diaz has made an epic-length small film about the powerless, one full of moral urgency that he chooses to elongate and slow down to a crawl. It’s a quiet consideration of grief and mercy, of control taken and freely given up.