Somewhere around the midpoint of Hobbs & Shaw, the action sequences become so elaborate that they start to weigh the movie down; it becomes less a lean machine than an unwieldy, chubby sausage. And even if you feel certain there’s no such thing as too much action, you surely know when you’ve had too much sausage.

Doesn’t always have the dramatic force it should, and unanswered questions linger.

And while the new Lion King is slightly easier to take—maybe because these heavily CGI-enhanced “real” lions don’t have the same cartoon humanity of the earlier version’s animated ones—the picture still has a manufactured, preachy sheen. This is calculated virtuousness masquerading as imagination, though it’s easy to be sidetracked by how adorable the cub Simba is.

The whole teenage soap opera is so pleasurable, and the performers so much fun to watch, that it’s a drag when Spider-Man: Far from Home has to get down to the business of being a regular old superhero movie.

Aster is obsessed with building tension to the point of losing the plot. He can’t stop at merely glancing or suggesting.

Yesterday, a fantasy that works well enough as a Beatles love letter but falls short in the love-story department.

When Rose-Lynn opens her mouth to sing–her speaking voice has a Glaswegian burr, but her singing voice is all Tennessee–you’re wheedled into forgetting her flaws and sins and wanting only the best for her and her kids

Let’s call it a perfectly acceptable work of superfluousness.

It’s the most truthful movie you’ll see in 2019, because it swears on nothing but the Gospel of Bob, and in more than 50 years of singing, songwriting and much, much touring, he has never promised us anything beyond pleasure and illumination.

It has the wiggy energy of a workplace that might sometimes drive you crazy, but is never boring. This is a great workplace comedy about the ways in which people who seem to be holding you back can also, sometimes, be the ones pushing you forward. Crawling under your desk gets you nowhere. It also means you miss all the fun.

This isn’t just a story about displaced communities, it’s about displaced souls, people so connected to history that they never feel quite at home in the present. Majors and Fails give fine performances here, in tune with each other but also with the pulse of the city that surrounds them.

Some of the writing is sparkling. Joke for joke, there’s probably just enough to keep you laughing. But if Always Be My Maybe isn’t terrible, it’s still lackluster enough to make you feel that underserved and underrepresented audiences deserve more.

This radiantly sensual film ends on the perfect note, a rush of emotional intensity that’s wrapped in a secret, as hushed as the rustle of silk.

Feldstein and Dever have a kind of mad, cartoon chipmunk chemistry, playing characters who know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences and step on each other’s lines. What their friendship really needs is a little room to breathe. Booksmart is smart about that too.

This is a tender, rapturous film, both joyous and melancholy, a reverie for a lost past and a door that opens to myriad imagined possibilities.

It tells us nothing new about evil or our need to take a stand against it; it barely makes us feel what it’s like to stand against evil. All it has to offer is soft-focus piousness. Its ethical purity is inert, a dead butterfly in a jar.

Everything about Pain and Glory is awake and alive, and Almodóvar’s nerve endings become ours, too.

Rocketman is magnificent and ridiculous, a feathered melanage of clichés and originality, of respectful homage and unrepentant nostalgia. Sometimes it’s comfortingly conventional; other times it’s gloriously off the charts. Even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s just so damn alive, meeting right at the intersection of the human heartbeat and the also-human love for shiny things.

Hogg has made a gorgeous, haunting movie drawn from a very real place and time.

The Dead Don’t Die is better when it’s riffing on zombie heritage, or just being silly. But it’s best when Jarmusch is acknowledging, in that characteristically Jarmuschian way—half resigned, half jubilant — that the world of people, even with all their terrible flaws, is worth preserving

Wine Country springs to life here and there, but there’s something dispiriting about the way these women seem to be working hard for laughs rather than just being funny.

She’s (Theron) a marvelous comic actor, as at home with bawdy humor as with the brainier kind, and her timing has its own rare and specific style: her lines tend to tilt sideways, with the quiet finesse of a balsa-wood glider, before coming in for a soft but neat landing. She’s an elegant goofball, funny in an over-the-shoulder way, not an in-your-face way, and every moment spent watching her is a pleasure. Hail to the chief.

Avengers: Endgame isn’t a great movie, but there are flashes of greatness in it, and quite a few of them belong to Evans. His Captain America rewards us with a revelation and escapes with a secret. The best thing in Avengers: Endgame is everything he doesn’t say.

Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors’ and the camera’s movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse.

As played by Rodriguez, Wise and Snow, these women embrace one another’s differences and help ease the way through tough times. The city is theirs for the taking, a backdrop for their raunchy jokes, furtive sexual encounters and procurement of various feel-good substances.

Her Smell is an uneven movie, occasionally dipping into clichés. But Moss’s performance works as a distillation of one of Love’s signature lines, from the song “Doll Parts”: Becky knows what it costs to be the girl with the most cake.

Although Little bears some similarities to the 1988 kid fantasy "Big," it’s a thoroughly modern comedy, one that lives comfortably with the idea that women can hold power and authority–though because they’re human, they can misuse it, too.

Pet Sematary is creepy for a time, before it becomes stupid. Then it’s creepy again: The final image will make you want your mommy.