Elemental isn’t a full failure. It’s an original story, for one, and coming from Disney, that’s no small thing. The best thing about Elemental — and, since movies are a primarily visual medium, it’s a very good thing indeed — is that it looks incredible.

Throughout, The Predator feels like it’s been cut to the bone, in a way that ultimately requires viewers to make tiny little leaps to keep up, and all those tiny little leaps eventually add up to a big, big gap between viewer and film.

Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure.

Justice League suffers from a mediocre, mismatched script that undercuts its characters. But Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller make it work for them.

The movie is bad, but the chemistry: It’s good.

Light bigotry aside, everything here is blandly, smoothly cozy. And if you are sad and tired from the holidays since apparently they now start at Halloween, and you need to turn off your brain and watch some straight garbage every day for 18 days, then A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding is here for you.

Roth (Hostel) always loves a good gorefest, and this one is no different — but he tends to hover just around the edges of social satire, which in this case seems to leave him unsure how seriously to take his own film.

In the hands of Deadpool director Tim Miller, Dark Fate by and large pulls off recapturing the goofy fun of the original, though with a twist. It evokes the earliest Terminator films, but Dark Fate doesn’t want to just rewrite Terminator’s future — it wants to reevaluate its past, too.

Isle of Dogs, though carefully crafted, doesn’t have much to say — and that’s what’s frustrating about the movie. Anderson has always been one of the most stylistically distinctive American directors, but at times it’s felt as if his fussiness was a way to wallpaper over a lack of new narrative ideas. Isle of Dogs doesn’t suggest an evolution.

It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.

Joker is a well-made movie, with a killer performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who seems born to play the role. But there’s nothing “bonkers” about it. It has nothing to say about the Joker himself or what he represents, or even about the world in which his brand of evil exists. Go ahead and crack open the movie. It’s hollow to the core.

I’ll be pondering I Love You, Daddy more; for now, though, I’m not convinced it’s thoughtful, and suspect it’s nothing more than clever and funny provocation for provocation’s sake.

Alien: Covenant would probably be a better movie if it had calmed down and narrowed its scope. And yet you have to respect Scott’s ambition, even if you don’t like his movie.

Battle of the Sexes, for all its failings, is still enjoyable to watch. Stone in particular is terrific, and Faris and Dayton make the smart choice to shoot the film with the kind of texture and camerawork that evokes movies from 1973. But as a sports movie, it’s unsatisfying — though that’s not exactly its fault.

Mostly, The King is about the corrupting influences of power, and the idea that war, perhaps especially Renaissance war, is an inhuman, brutal experience. And it is damned if it’s going to let you get off your couch with any ideas to the contrary. No, The King will thump its themes into your head, whatever it goddamned takes.

For me, the bludgeoning tends to blunt the entertainment value.

It’s a tonally strange movie from the get-go, masquerading as a typical holiday flick about long-lost friends getting together at the holidays but ending with mass extinction. Yay!

For its faults as a movie, the story is still compelling as a bit of history, and more so in the midst of a presidential administration that at times seems to be taking all the wrong lessons from Nixon.

It is frequently quite charming, largely thanks to the efforts of Mena Massoud, who captures Aladdin’s irrepressible charisma every second he’s onscreen. Much of the new story material written for the film works, and it’s enjoyable, if pedestrian, family fare. But the terrible musical sequences, the lackluster CGI, and the strange creative and emotional restraint that permeates the film frequently flatten Disney’s original Aladdin into a cardboard version of itself.

For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems like a story about coming to grips with your complicated feelings about the past, but by the end, some of the complexity seems to have evaporated.

It’s entertaining enough to be worth watching for fans of the genre or of Bullock, who turns in a strong performance as a woman who has motherhood thrust onto her in a world loaded with peril.

Though it has some problems as a film — some of which are part and parcel of translating a book to the screen — Native Son still packs a punch, one that connects directly with the gut.

Wherever it falls on the quality spectrum, the bigger, more concerning story here is that Proud Mary’s journey into the movie marketplace is a good example of how Hollywood still fundamentally doesn’t understand what to do with many movies starring black actors.

The movie is pretty to look at, and its stars are great. But here is the thing: It’s just really dull.

There’s fun to be had in The Last Knight, if you can find it among the chaos — and if you can remember it after the fact.

The Holiday Calendar is the kind of aggressively formulaic movie that Hallmark built its brand on. For this kind of movie, the formula is a feature, not a bug: It’s what makes a story feel cozy and worn-in, like a holiday classic you’ve already seen five times before you ever watch it.

Dead Men Tell No Tales tries to serve far too many masters with its story.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. is the most frustrating kind of movie there is: one that almost succeeds, and is more disappointing because it doesn’t.