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

Annette is remarkable for its formal intensity—how every image and song is not merely reflective of, but tangled up in the ideas they give life to.

The Suicide Squad walks about as far up to the line of the indecent as is perhaps possible for a film of this size right now, which makes portions of it genuinely exciting. But we get inured to its provocations too quickly, and then the movie tries to soften itself and add emotional dimensions that aren’t exactly earned.

Jungle Cruise is a two-hour movie that has far less consequence than a ride that’s a small fraction of that length. The experience the film more accurately simulates is the standing in line: all that tedious waiting in the heat for the fun to start.

It’s an elusive film, in its plotting and allusions, but is still potent and immediate, as resonant as any of our own late-night quests toward the far reaches of our self-conception.

Shyamalan teases out new information in just the right doses, remembering all the while that this is, at its core, a B-picture. It isn’t gory, but it’s gross, and the camera knows just how much to show to keep us dialed in.

It’s all incredibly silly, yet undeniably honest.

The film is best viewed as a tricky character study, one about the undulations and relentless demands of self-worth—and, of course, of money, which is always a focus of Baker’s films.

The film—structured as an issue of a New Yorker-esque magazine—is fussy and ornately detailed and difficult to grasp. Where Anderson’s past elaborate worlds have invited us in with all their cozy detail, The French Dispatch’s seems to haughtily sniff in our direction; it doesn’t much care if we get it.

Benedetta is full of surprising tones shrewdly introduced by Verhoeven, who keeps us leaning forward to suss out just what his film is trying to be and to say. Cloister drama gives way to steamy soft-core romance gives way to camp comedy gives way to apocalyptic horror.

Trier pulls a lot of stylistic tricks in the film, but they somehow never play like gimmicks, like adornments merely there to show off the talent of their creator. The film has a lilting, lively rhythm; the glimpses we see of months and years in Julie’s life ably provide a whole picture.

From one vantage point, Stillwater may just be a sentimental and lurid riff on the infamous Amanda Knox case. But I think McCarthy has something bigger in mind, which he pokes at intriguingly throughout his movie’s considerable sprawl.

With Soderbergh and his collaborators, you can never complain that great thespian skills were left to wander, or that you were bored. I’m not sure that I ever really knew what was going on in No Sudden Move—something about redlining, pollution, and the American auto industry—but I was never taken out of the moment. Each beat pulsed with both anticipation and absurdity. If that’s not movie magic, then, well, it depends on what you think movie magic is.

Black Widow is a prequel of sorts, and an origin story, a robust and satisfying glimpse into a defining interlude in Black Widow’s life that almost, almost pulls off the trick of being wholly its own thing.

F9’s attempts at classical drama, all its reckoning with dynastic sin, do weigh the thing down quite a bit. Those going to the theater simply for the kicky, bad-joke, MacGuffin charms of F&F may find themselves a little bored and distracted, as I was, by all the turgidity.

Luca does, despite its vagueness, successfully pull off some of the usual Pixar tricks, provoking warm tears and weary sighs as one considers the familiar trajectories of life.

All Light, Everywhere is a tremendous work that anyone merely curious about the various relationships the government has to both private industry and an enormous public ought to see.

The film’s self-seriousness bogs down what should be a mad and skittering thing, jangling us with all its agonizing silence. We should be having more fun as we watch through our fingers.

Cruella is yet another act of co-opting by the biggest entertainment company in the world, an attempt to graft a cheap rebel spirit onto a naked exercise in I.P. synergy.

Those Who Wish Me Dead is missing an act, maybe, some of kind bridge between its drawn-out beginning and its hurried climax. What’s in the film is staged shrewdly by Sheridan, but there’s little sense of cumulative build.

The Snyder of 2004 is utterly revived in Army of the Dead, a shrewdly mounted action film (as opposed to a horror one) that may be saying something about imperialism, or may just be a bloody, satisfying entertainment devoid of allegory.

Basking in the film’s ceaseless swirl is as intoxicating a moviegoing experience as one could want these days, a burst of communal joy (and sorrow) that serves as an effusive welcome back to the world.

The movie is a pallid, dull slog of bad acting and worse storytelling.

It’s all pleasingly robust and cinematic, if fleeting.

The real trouble of the film is that it is stuck, like a spirit, between spaces. It’s cramped in the liminal room between “prestige horror” and something more slick, squalid, and satisfying. The balance is off, for which a strong cast—Rhea Seehorn is particularly sharp as a colleague of George’s—and stately aesthetics can’t make up.

Best to move past Without Remorse. assured that Jordan will find another, more fitting star vehicle for himself. Maybe one that’s a bit hipper to the mores and styles of the present day, and is more willing to let its lead express something beyond the wordless violence of so much canned fury.

Mortal Kombat is a disjointed, halfhearted trip to the past, where things probably should have been left finished for good.