“The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” unlike the stellar predecessors of the series, feels curiously starved for real insights into the opposing shades of the human soul.

Overall, The Little Things — which is how Deke refers to the details that lead to killers being caught — isn’t much of anything.

It’s immediate and specific and painful and impressive.

The Owners is tense, uneasy and brutal, escalating from the creepy to the ludicrous over the course of 92 deliberately unpleasant minutes.

Knox Goes Away is a character study of a disappearing character or maybe a thriller that stays away from actual thrills. However you label the film, it’s low key but satisfying.

Everything’s Going to Be Great understands the hopeless can-do spirit of not quite getting there but coming close enough that you’ll never, ever give up.

Although the film's ultimate payoff feels a little too big, and too insufficiently explained, to justify all of the obfuscation that led up to it, the script keeps the audience engaged and guessing right up to the end.

Whether Terminator: Dark Fate is the last chapter in this story or the first in an all-new franchise is, for now, irrelevant. The film works either way, bringing the tale of the first two films to a satisfying conclusion while reintroducing the classic storyline, in exciting new ways, to an excited new audience. It’s a breathtaking blockbuster, and a welcome return to form.

Black and Blue is chock-full of heart-pounding car chases and suspenseful moments that are certain to entertain mainstream audiences, but the film falters when it attempts, beyond its tittle to reflect a necessary and under-discussed conversation about societal issues.

Empire of Light feels more like a sweet experiment on nostalgia and memory than an articulate film with something to say.

Hotel Transylvania 3 always goes for the joke and rarely misses.

Take your seat and bask in the presence of the coolest characters actors working today, but don’t ask for more than a few chuckles. Don’t call it fan service – call it coolness oblige.

Marshall-Green’s directorial debut is an intriguing story centered on a flawed protagonist, and with more polishing in the second half of the film it could have really sailed.

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.

Awash in bold colors, bright patterns and ebullient kids, director Ava DuVernay’s new take on A Wrinkle in Time dazzles its way across time and space even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

100% pure Statham, and after many years where audiences had to settle for the diluted variety it’s a welcome return to form.

The cast is just as game for the broad humor as it is for the emotional beats; the latter’s familiarity doesn’t detract from its poignancy.

We keep getting glimpses of a compelling subject, but it’s hard to know what Nichols is really going for, since he tosses so many disparate elements together without tying them into a meaningful thread.

It may be odd and insular, but it’s very much intentional. Even the heavy-handedness feels genuine.

While the film far outshines most of Cage’s recent efforts (he was direct-to-VOD when direct-to-VOD wasn’t cool) in terms of art direction and fearlessly madcap storytelling, the results are nonetheless muddled and messy.

It’s easy to forgive cheap aesthetics and a rushed finale when the middle of the flick, the sharktastic bloodletting where no character is safe, is such a hoot.

A big heart and strong cast go a long way towards elevating its prosaic approach.

The film is stuffed with so many plot strands and so many different genres (sports movie, YA rebellion movie, bounty-hunter movie) that it never gets moving.

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.

It fills up the uncharted territory between parody and pure fan service with a guileless weirdness that the biopic genre never knew it could accommodate but, in a post–“Walk Hard” world, could stand to emulate.

If all you want is another Beverly Hills Cop, here it is. If you want a great new Beverly Hills Cop, keep waiting.

It’s the movie equivalent of a multi-course banquet of colorful foams: wisps of flavor emerge here and there, and admiration reigns, but in the end you’re unlikely to believe you’ve actually had a meal.

Phoenix’s transformation from a scotch-soaked pile of tweed into a homicidally self-righteous ubermensch is fun to watch, but Allen too frequently loses sight of the story he’s telling.