It’s an odd, lumbering patchwork of a film, occasionally fascinating but otherwise bloated and aimless.

Skywalkers might be the first of a new genre: extended vlog (or TikTok, or Instragram reel) as feature film, existing somewhere between fact and fiction and all in service of promoting a brand.

The sequel is epic in length and spectacle, but not in feeling.

The film is a winning reminder of the pleasures of the midrange movie, one stylish enough to feel distinct but not too caught up in an effort to sell some startling, singular vision. It’s proudly genre and fills its allotted space with humor and detail.

The difficulty of The Mountain is the growing sense that its sinewy, thoughtful style may tip over into outright preciousness—which is exactly what happens.

Kinds of Kindness is clever and a bit snide, a curio cabinet not designed for beauty.

Because Spielberg seems as eager as Wade to get back to the digital fantasy world he’s created, a lot of the human element is elided or glossed over.

The Lodge falls into the more common trap of spinning its wheels in a mudbath of obviousness and red herrings, dredging up anxieties and questions that it doesn’t quite know how to push forward, or inward.

Greyhound has texture—it’s carefully, credibly mounted and subtly performed—but doesn’t do much with it. There’s nothing wrong with a fleet little chase movie, but the Battle of the Atlantic had real sprawl, both in terms of its geography and its crucial effect on the outcome of the war. That scope is only gestured toward in Greyhound, undermining any possibility that the film might take on an epic shape.

At times, Hermanus’s style is effective, selling us on the film’s lonely, years-spanning heartsickness. But too often the film’s muted emotion feels more gimmicky than credible to Lionel and David’s circumstances, particularly because Hermanus is so demure about sex; we barely even see the men kissing.

Vivid and bracing as the film’s swimming scenes are, Nyad crackles most when Nyad and Bonnie are grooving together on land. Bening and Foster have an inviting rapport, credibly playing old pals (and onetime lovers) who are in it for the long haul.

A New Era really, really should be the end of Downton Abbey, but I’d happily watch these freaks stumbling through the 1930s if they were so inclined to let me.

The riskiness of that—the way Knock at the Cabin, accidentally or not, courts and even invites sympathy to one of the right’s most dangerous shibboleths—gives the film a surprising, alarming, but not unwelcome edge.

Here is an opportunity for a wild and sorrowful confluence of gay dream and national nightmare. Alas, this Kiss of the Spider Woman gives us a competent but glancing rendering of the easier, more palatable aspects of a story that should be anything but.

Much of Master Gardener is disarmingly placid. It’s a warmer, more optimistic film than one might expect, even if it does at times creak with the antiquated perspective of a stalwart septuagenarian filmmaker unwilling to shake off some of the past’s bad habits.

Despite a wildly uneven “Americarrr” accent (through which the voice of Queen Elizabeth sometimes shines), Foy is excellent in the film, rigid poise giving way to feral anger in always convincing shades.

Triangle of Sadness needn’t be a fair film, nor one that readily delivers the simple righteousness of have-nots triumphing over have-lots. A more carefully shaped argument would have been appreciated, though. And one that didn’t dissolve so quickly into a juvenile snicker.

Let Him Go is a swift entertainment, claustrophobic and anxious in its depiction of an impossible, frustrating situation, and satisfying in its gnarly climax.

Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film.

Whatever LuPone is doing, it’s undeniable. Here, long into a meandering and fitfully rewarding film, is something worthy of fear—or maybe it’s awe.

Clarke, too, shines as a woman who’s made sacrifices Han cannot imagine. To the extent that the movie is a western at heart, its smartest, subtlest influence is the Joan Crawford classic Johnny Guitar, about a woman who makes her way in the Wild West against all odds, and in the face of all morality.

There are personal fragments of interest here; it’s useful to see how a man like Bannon narrates the story of himself, mythologizes himself, if only for the glimpses of worldview that sneak through in his presentation of the details. But the failure of Morris’s film is that it snuffs so much of that out.

Trite as it may sound, we gradually accept that the beautiful boy of the title is not some innocent child, lost to the past, but rather the real and imperfect young man hunched before us. It’s Chalamet’s great accomplishment, and the film’s, that we feel that so keenly.

With its limp humor, canned sentiment, and over-egged efforts to gross us out, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a waste of a good cast and a defacement of a classic film’s legacy. Most galling of all, it was summoned willingly by people who should know better than to mess with what’s long been peacefully laid to rest.

The familiarity of RW&RB’s obnoxious indulgences are, in some ways, its greatest triumph: its version of storybook love is allowed to be just as annoying, in the same ways, as the heteros’.

Had the movie pitched itself on a one-way trip into the black, Deutch would no doubt have been up to the task. She’s a squirmy wonder in the film, loathsome and pitiable and, perhaps, grimly relatable. At times, Shephard overstates Danni’s detachment from polite society, but otherwise she and Deutch keep things in frightfully believable bounds.

Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.

Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.