Director Leandro Neri’s lighthearted romantic comedy delivers hijinks and a few sweet sentiments about having the courage to embrace destiny. Nevertheless, its broad comedy and thoughtful themes aren’t completely cogent, due to a lack of properly motivated character developments and questionable scenarios.

Mc Carthy serves up a generically foreboding premise and pulls off several efficiently traditional jump scares in this variation on a haunted-house formula, but it’s the shape-shifting mind games of his own narrative that most unnerve the viewer, as seemingly fixed plot points of who is under threat — and when, and why, and so on — keep darting out of sight.

Rogers’ stage play is a smart, mature piece of writing, but one that transfers rather clumsily to the small screen, in part because its makers don’t show quite the same confidence in their audience’s intelligence.

Very little of Spirit Untamed lives up to what the studio is selling.

The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.

The hell we see here isn’t heightened; it’s graphic and terrifying. Yet the greatest terror may be that it was necessary. Apocalypse ’45 is a haunting document of men who fought their way through hell to save all of us.

Julio Quintana’s likable family film misses nary a cornball trick in Hollywood’s underdog-drama playbook, and just about pulls it off.

It omits a crucial detail of the “Play” success story (that the album took off through the licensing of songs for commercials — not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it captures the astonishing ride to icon status it put Moby on. He didn’t stop drinking and drugging; that would take years. But he found a groove he could stay on, even after the mega-sales cooled.

The director, who brought a wicked edge to pop-culture redux “I, Tonya” a few years back, has rescued Cruella from the predictability of the earlier “101 Dalmatians” remakes and created a stylish new franchise of its own in which a one-time villain has been reborn as the unlikeliest of role models.

If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.

Like its source, the movie is a blast, one that benefits enormously from being shot on the streets of Washington Heights.

The spectacularly gruesome and grotesquely elaborate murder scenes do ample justice to even the most revered of its slasher forebears, but the procedural elements feel stilted, and despite a lead performance that oozes empathy as much as her hapless victims ooze blood, the emotional impact is barely discernible: an ebbing heartbeat.

In this bright, engaging film, Kerr’s story is faithfully and lovingly preserved, though its tougher, quirkier details are mollified by a layer of palatable movie gloss.

Seance proves a disappointingly boilerplate retro slasher that’s pedestrian on every level from concept to execution.

All I Know So Far is a singular portrait of the larger-than-life rock rebel as life-size mom.

It can be hard to believe that both the sequel and the instant-classic 2018 original were produced by Michael Bay, a filmmaker who has pushed the moviegoing experience to ear-splitting extremes, since Krasinski so effectively embraces the opposite strategy: Less is more, suggestion can be scarier than showing everything, and few things are more unnerving than silence.

Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.

The Woman in the Window would like to be a contempo “Rear Window,” but it’s so riddled with things you can’t buy that it plays like a bad Brian De Palma movie minus the camera movement.

This crowdfunded labor of love is unlikely to generate much buzz but will be appreciated by audiences looking for congenial entertainment.

This lean thriller doesn’t provide much food for thought, but it delivers a compact dose of extreme jeopardy.

Effervescent performances from an ebullient ensemble make Finding You a palatable and compelling female coming-of-age tale.

As directed by Taylor Sheridan, Those Who Wish Me Dead offers a much bigger sandbox for the gifted actor-turned-action maven, whose scripts for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” have launched him to the front of a genre dominated by CG robots, superheroes and other IP once associated with Saturday morning cartoons. Such movies are plenty popular, but this one marks a welcome departure — one intended for grown-ups seeking more “realistic” diversion — without shortchanging audiences when it comes to either spectacle or sound.

No, the “Saw” series hasn’t really changed. So depending on whether you’re a fan or not, eat up…or throw up.

Some of this is stirring stuff, and all of it is worth learning about, but as a documentary Citizen Penn is more diligent than riveting.

An exceptionally compelling Outback Western.

Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.

Despite some strikingly accomplished elements, the awkward whole never quite gels, sewn-together parts from “Red Dawn,” “Independence Day,” et al., failing to cohere amid major logic gaps, not to mention lead characters more off-putting than interesting.

A clever example of creativity thriving within the strict protocols of the coronavirus pandemic, tense confinement thriller Oxygen plays like “Buried” in outer space.

The film’s significant humor comes from amusingly implausible situations coupled with rapid-paced droll dialogue; its equally sizable heart derives from the script’s respect for society’s outcasts and Jensen’s way of nimbly endowing every character with their own emotional backstory, all in need of healing.

It has a pleasing brawn and sweep, and you get caught up in it. As meat-and-potatoes escapism, it’s good diner food served with extra ketchup.

An engaging for-kids ghost story whose fantasy elements are thoughtfully grounded by real-world concerns.

If the film falls short as a possible tale of heroic enlightenment, it’s still pretty absorbing, in the in-between moments, as a study of a dude still working out the intersections between wild public success and neurotic torments. To the extent that its middle and best section is really a story of politics driving someone already prone to depression deeper into it, that’s when The Boy From Medellín feels most timely.

Like the H character, Wrath of Man walks into the room confident and secure in its abilities, professional, efficient and potentially lethal. All of this is best experienced in a movie theater, if possible.

The three leads summon lovely chemistry, re-creating a dorky-kid dynamic in later life that feels like the perfect summation of the film’s almost Spielbergian belief that at 10 years of age we are our best and truest selves.

What’s good about the movie is that Crystal, who co-wrote and directed it, has an inside knowledge of the showbiz comedy world (as he demonstrated in 1992 when he directed and starred in the acerbically accomplished “Mr. Saturday Night”), and the prickly vivacity with which he portrays it roots the movie in something real.

Faya Dayi is predominantly a mood piece that seeks to evoke the leaf’s own perception-altering properties.

Despite having characters incessantly explain key plot points, Separation lacks basic logic.

Hopkins isn’t awful in The Virtuoso, but the movie that surrounds him is.

Its content and execution are innocuous to the point of tedium, while the protagonist is no undervalued sweetie but the kind of grating personality that can clear a room.

Overall, however, Best Summer Ever is too earnest and charming to ever feel smart-alecky or unduly spoofy, and the winning performances by DeVido and Wilson go a long way toward encouraging a serious emotional investment in the relationship between Sage and Tony.

While well cast and plenty compelling (including feisty turns from Christopher Walken and Christina Ricci), this reductive farmer drama deals in emotions more than explanations as it seeks to convey what it means for a little-guy grower like Percy Schmeiser to go up against Big Agro.

What lies beneath Things Heard & Seen are clichés.

Once again showing a keen eye for detail, Hákonarson naturalistically presents the rigors of farm work, the plainness of his solitary protagonists’ lives and their affection for their cows.

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a lively formulaic action-hero origin story, dunked in combat grunge, that demonstrates how a resourceful lead actor can bend and heighten the meaning of a commercial thriller.

Chen’s delicate, nuanced portrait of the heartbreaks afflicting a dedicated schoolteacher and dutiful wife is suffused with love and humor, and directed with striking maturity and restraint.

Within its modest boundaries, Bloodthirsty does a creditable enough job balancing supernatural suspense with the drama of a young artist’s insecurities at a key early career juncture.

It’s an engaging, mostly well-acted tale, full of surprising twists, even if some seem a bit too on the nose.

Rest assured that there’s a wacky enjoyment to be had even when things don’t make sense.

True to the game, the violence is both ghoulishly creative and gratuitously extreme.

Joe Penna knows how to make a movie that holds you without being pushy about it. His voice as a filmmaker comes through, even in a genre as studded with commercial tropes as this one.

Ottinger takes us through this formative time of her life in a way that deftly balances past and present to paint a picture of a threshold era of both positives and negatives.

The laughs come at a clip few movies can sustain, stacked so dense, repeat viewing (and in some cases, strategic freeze-framing) is required to catch them all.

Although promising a deep-cut dash of contemporary topicality by reimagining the main character as an undocumented African immigrant, there is the sense that the unimpeachable craft and performances — especially from rivetingly charismatic lead Welket Bungué — ultimately add up to just too slick a package.

We Broke Up stays together nicely thanks to Cash and Harper’s appealing tag-team, but also because of the winsome work of Bolger and Cavalero as the seemingly goofball, soon-to-be hitched duo.

Reefa, based on an enraging, heartbreaking real-life event, paints over the colors, creativity and chaos of its true-life tragedy with layer of film-convention formula

Vanquish isn’t bad so much as inert — nothing here is convincing, tense, kinetic, outrageous, or silly enough to give the movie even fleeting life. The script is so by-the-numbers, the performers can hardly hide their disinterest, a feeling soon to be shared by viewers

Lame humor and incoherent plotting are among the shortcomings of “The Rookies,” an initially engaging but increasingly tedious Chinese action-comedy-thriller that not even kick-ass movie queen Milla Jovovich can breathe much life into.

Monday, shot with a mostly Greek crew, has been made with some liveliness and skill, and the two actors really fuse. . . . But Papadimitropoulos treats most of the film as if he were making “Blue Valentine” or “Head-On”: a study in masculine narcissism.

Although the journey feels rather drawn out in the film’s 142-minute running time, and is strewn with one ear-splitting brawl too many, the mystery of each protagonist’s true intentions, and the unpredictability of their course of action, keep tensions on a continuous simmer.

Brendan Fitzgerald, the director of The Oxy Kingpins, fills in the nuts and bolts of how the racket actually operated the way Scorsese did in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Casino,” giving the audience a wide-eyed, engrossing, information-packed street-smart tutorial.

Aesthetically, too, Norbu’s film offers steady, muted levels of intoxication, giving constant pleasure while never quite tipping into flamboyance.

In general le cinéma de Falcone is not a pretty (or hilarious) thing. Thunder Force is, at best, more a light chuckler than a laugher.

Voyagers is a dutiful thriller about the beast within, but there’s not a lot of surprise to it. Even when the characters let themselves go, the drama remains in lockdown.

Despite Crampton and Fessenden’s game playing, and a few nicely icky practical effects, “Jakob’s Wife” feels strangely anemic, which, as we all know is more fatal to the already iron-deficient movie vampire than garlic, holy water and sunshine combined.

The film asks us to indulge and share the privacy of its characters. That’s its moody, free-floating allure.

Talented comedians Jia and Zhang, and a fine support cast carry out these shenanigans with an appealing energy that helps smooth things over when the screenplay occasionally stumbles into clunky plotting, super-corny dialogue and scenes that drag on for too long.

"Amundsen” is a visually stately yet naggingly underscripted movie that never quite finds its dramatic center.

Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.

The movie carries you along, and it’s got some high-tension moments, but there are one too many coincidental running-into-each-other-in-town close encounters.

Ideologically scheming and visually inelegant, this is truly tacky stuff.

The Unholy is a good tight scary commercial theological horror film. Its spooks and demons unfurl within a pop version of Christianity, which makes it sound no more exotic than last week’s “Exorcist” knockoff or last year’s helping of the “Conjuring” franchise. But The Unholy has a religious plot that actually works for it.

For French and art-house audiences, there’s no denying the pleasure of a sapiosexual romance such as this, where the turn-on is to be found in the characters’ intelligence.

A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is as classical in theme as it is adventurous in presentation.

Amusing, but not outrageous, and while I’m glad Kummer’s camera was there to capture it, the movie doesn’t reveal enough about the performers’ backgrounds or personalities.

Godzilla vs. Kong is most satisfying when it’s at its most simple, which happens either in quiet bonding scenes between Jia and Kong, or else in those deafening moments when the monsters are duking it out.

There’s bravery in Bateman’s willingness to explore this state of mind, to put so much of herself on the table, but she rolls credits just as things were getting interesting: when Violet blocks out the voices and finally starts listening to herself.

The Vault has all the external factors that heist movies require. Yet without quite being dull, somehow it misses the danger, esprit and camaraderie we need for such escapades to achieve liftoff.

It is Myrupu’s beguiling performance what anchors this intimate and entrancing epic, a modern-day fable about the very concept of modernity and the promise of fabulation.

The movie is diverting enough when it flirts with clerical politics, and that made me think it might be cool to make an exorcist film that dramatized the true-life ins and outs of the Catholic Church’s relationship to exorcism. There’s a major story there, and it could fuel a heady thriller. But The Seventh Day, having established Father Peter as a new kind of exorcist renegade, soon gets down to business as usual.

Six Minutes to Midnight, helmed by Andy Goddard, wants to be a Hitchcockian thriller, but merely manages a familiar pastiche peopled with stock characters that should divert less-discriminating viewers.

If anything, the film’s cross-pollination with faith-based cinema is detrimental to its already minimal tension.

The result is sniggering slapstick that’s two-parts biological fluids and one-part salute to the innate empathy of mankind, often in the same scene.

This superior sequel serves as both a meta-commentary on his humbling past antics and a pivotal point for the eponymous protagonist. It’s an astute, entertaining, light-hearted mix of slapstick and self-reflexive humor commingling with enlightened, sharp sentiments about individualism and commercialism (the latter of which Potter herself wrestled with, and eventually pioneered).

A self-described former junkie who experienced the dirty side of going clean firsthand, writer-director John Swab delivers an entertaining and eye-opening insider’s take on the treatment racket.

Fortunately, “I Got a Story to Tell” bears a life force that looms even larger than Wallace’s — that of his Jamaican-born “moms,” Voletta, who has so much star presence that even Angela Bassett couldn’t quite do justice to it when she played her in the 2009 movie.

The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.

Underplayed is too gentle a probe to risk targeting industry leaders or fandom for more than a moment here or there.

Nobody is a thoroughly over-the-top and, at times, loony-tunes entry in the live-and-let-die vengeance-is-mine genre. Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it’s a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in “Straw Dogs.”

While it’s true that the Croatian filmmaker’s experimental lulu employs such methods as rotoscoping and collage, it’s also vibrant and alive in a way that few films falling under the wide umbrella of animation even attempt to be. And though the audience for elliptical fare of this nature tends to be self-selecting, anyone willing to get on Barić’s wavelength will find the experience strangely rewarding.

Despite a fine Continental cast and gleaming production values, Czech helmer Julius Ševčík has made a muddled, maudlin hash of what ought to have been a sure thing.

Quite what we gain from the experience is uncertain, with most viewers likely to leave the film understanding little more of the Unabomber than they did two hours before. Still, Ted K is impressive and oppressive in equal measure.

For all its narrative and structural shortcomings, Cheng’s film is always visually arresting and frequently very funny as it switches tone and tack at the drop of a hat.

In the end, Alone Together is a love story — about the love between Charli and her fans.

Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.

There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.

For a while, we’re bowled over by the sheer weirder-than-fiction flukiness of it. By the end, we’ve passed through the looking glass of the story’s peculiarity, and what grips us is the sheer humanity of it.

“I’m Fine” teases the structure of comedies in which something must be achieved in too short a span. Only, instead of ha-ha challenges, Danny encounters the poignant, the frustrating, even the perilous.

It’s a remarkable accomplishment: a film with the confidence to pose big questions, and the humility to leave them unanswered.