Christy, a biopic that plays by the rules, doesn’t do justice to an athlete who gloriously broke so many of them.

All the world is a farce, Ansari seems to say, while suggesting that it can still be saved. But like a breezy sitcom episode, his big-screen creation doesn’t feel the need to offer solutions.

The kind of statement that makes you feel like you’re watching a movie not about real people but about how eight years after #MeToo, we still haven’t figured out how to talk about it at all.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

That existential paradox — are we all in this thing called life together, or is it every man for himself? — gives the film and its protagonists something meaty to chew on as it, and they, progress. But “The Long Walk” doesn’t dig into it in any deeply satisfying way.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Directed and co-written by the Samoan filmmaker Miki Magasiva, the movie features a unique central character, a powerhouse star performance and some truly uplifting choral singing. Those are the good parts. The less good part is a script that pummels audiences with melodrama, manipulation and sentimental clichés until we all cry uncle.

Rather than aim for the flagstick, “Happy Gilmore 2” seems all too content to lay up in search of one gimme putt after another.

Smurfs may be all over the multiverse, but it doesn’t land anywhere worth writing home about.

As a blithely likable blunt instrument, Heads of State gets the job done, justifying its anesthetized mayhem with a sweet-natured message about the importance of friendship, international alliances and institutional continuity.

The Unholy Trinity is a reminder that they don’t make ’em like they used to — and maybe that’s a good thing. A pokey, low-budget Western enlivened by a couple of aging stars happily hamming it up, it’s the kind of B movie they used to program before the feature and after the cartoon in the old days.

Straw has all the feels it wants and little of the art it needs. But there’s nothing to suggest Tyler Perry would have it any other way.

Henry Johnson is unusual for Mamet in that it focuses on the prey. It’s also as close as a movie can get to a filmed play without including your dinner and a ride home.

Rust, Alec Baldwin and Joel Souza’s slow-moving, sepia-toned homage to the American western, is the kind of respectable if unremarkable genre exercise that would have come and gone without much notice were it not for the circumstances of its making.

The latest collaboration between ever-reliable Brit of Few Words Jason Statham and writer-director David Ayer — who teamed up more fruitfully on last year’s “The Beekeeper,” a revenge flick as wonderfully unhinged as its title — seems to belong to a bygone, channel-surfing era.

Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

It speaks to a cultural sisterhood that knows exactly what Paola Cortellesi is talking about. But some things get lost in translation, and this lovingly crafted work of neorealist cosplay is one of them.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

Destined to be forgotten in the wasteland that stretches between the actor’s best work and his worst, this dumb-but-not-dumb-enough, simultaneously heartwarming and disheartening film features layer upon layer of wedding-disaster clichés (complete with a trashed cake).

There’s just enough bite there to give the stars something to work with, and Diaz especially responds with the joy of the well-rested.

It’s too bad that the premise hints at more of a horror twist than the movie actually delivers. Heller frequently interrupts a thin story with ambiguous dashes of magical realism that only serve to confuse.

The songs aren’t the problem. Rather, it’s the muddled story, which takes way too long to give Moana — now a skilled wayfinder scouting new lands and new peoples to reconnect her long-isolated island tribe with the world — her mission.

The Piano Lesson offers a spirited if uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

In any event, Pugh uses her expressive eyes and ardent, intelligent sensibilities to paint a touching if underdeveloped portrait of an artist desperate to leave her mark before being rushed too soon from the show.

This lethargic romantic drama forces chemistry where there is none and, worse, sells out its aspirationally cool, intelligent female protagonist with an endgame that she — and the luminous Dern — hardly deserves.

Is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too.

You Gotta Believe is an entry in the “heartwarming true story” genre, Little League subdivision, and it isn’t bad so much as resolutely average.

The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better — for Kravitz’s filmmaking future and for us — if we just forgot the whole thing.

It’s a critic’s failure to gauge the movie he wishes had been against the movie that is, but in this case the movie that is is disappointingly bloodless, cold rather than chilling, with a payoff that isn’t shocking so much as an admission that we’ve spent 90 minutes we’ll never get back.

If you sit back and enjoy its mindless rhythms, you might have a good time. Just don’t try mining the lyrics for meaning.

The problem with making homages to junky genre movies is that sometimes you just end up with a junky genre movie.

Maybe there’s an epic novel in his head, but what [Costner's] given us with “Chapter 1” is a table of contents instead.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

The Keeper will win no filmmaking prizes. But it doesn’t mean, or need, to. Like an infomercial, its aim is more simple, direct and unapologetic: to call attention to an epidemic hiding in plain sight. By that measure: mission accomplished.

The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash.

Because there’s little internal logic in IF, you may find yourself constantly asking why the characters are doing what they do, or how the whole imaginary-friend thing works within the context of the movie.

The cast does its best with the material, especially supporting player Perry Mattfeld, who makes a meal out of her small role as the mistress who broke up Solène and David’s marriage.

Boy Kills World, a cheeky and extremely bloody action extravaganza, keeps an audience so off-balance for so long that you may throw in the towel well before the final bad guy falls.

As much as Guy Ritchie’s uber-violent, stakes-free, World War II action comedy caper “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” milks its “based on a true story” bona fides, it’s more akin to the last decade’s glut of slick, cool-guy popcorn pictures (including his own) than any meaningful retelling of real heroism.

It’s the right kind of bonkers for the right kind of audience, a gaga genre hodgepodge that, not for nothing, taps Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as its showstopping anthem and reminds us of a truism, of both cinema and life: Adding a dog or two — or 60 — can make just about anything better.

The new film is professionally made, well-acted, entertaining enough, and possessed of no earthly reason to exist aside from the care and feeding of intellectual property.

The lightweight nature of the plot is, arguably, appropriate to the film’s gentle comedy, which elicits chuckles here and there, but rarely stings or draws blood.

There’s the potential for some real emotion here, as well as a touch of real-world commentary about a woman with 21st-century sensibilities trapped in a 19th-century world that feels, at times, medieval. But we can only catch glimpses of it beneath all the flickering layers of paint.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who co-wrote the screenplay with Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, has constructed a work that suffers from the same tunnel vision as other movies of this ilk.

Viewers of “Session” may find it harder to take solace from (or to find entertainment in) this stagy jar of slightly pickled discord, directed by Matt Brown, based on the 2011 play by Mark St. Germain (itself inspired by Armand Nicholi’s 2002 book “The Question of God”).

Migration will be remembered as neither great nor terrible. It will simply fade into the cinematic ether like so many ducks in the wind.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

At times, the film feels less like an homage to a beloved legacy than a 1 1/2-hour piece of advertainment.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.

The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

The Persian Version is an ambitious effort to suture up the rift between past and present, parent and child. But like its heroine, it also suffers from a bit of split personality. It’s a tale with too much drama for the candy-colored comedy of its telling, and too much comedy for the drama to leave much of a mark.

There just isn’t a whole lot to say about this deliberately lowbrow, gleefully low-budget expansion of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s half-hour stage play, originally performed by the duo in 2015 under the auspices of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy group.

The state of uncertainty persists for the entire film, as you wait in vain for the director to tie the pieces together.

Overloaded with incidents, effects and explosions, “The Creator” fails to develop the personalities and relationships that would give its central characters an affecting humanity. The movie’s attempt to touch the heart comes off as, well, artificial.

Fremont has the demeanor of a kitchen-sink drama but is laced with deadpan absurdism.

A Haunting in Venice isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. But that’s no doubt as intended by Branagh, who seems intent on rescuing Poirot from the reassuring, too-cute world of “cozy” mysteries and grounding him in the real-life loss and emotional dislocation of the postwar eras from which he sprang.

For all its faults, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 manages to just get by on pretty scenery and a meticulous inoffensiveness. What else is there to say but, “Opa!”

It’s all so confusing. But reason is an obstacle to appreciating The Nun II. What you need, like Irene and Debra, is faith — in this case, in the power of pure nonsense.

The plot, in which Swank is given little more to do than guzzle Costco-size bottles of liquor and mope, proceeds in somewhat somnambulist fashion, generating surprisingly little suspense even when Paige confronts a suspect whose identity has been telegraphed throughout the film. This comes as a disappointment, at least for viewers who have watched a movie or two before.

The film does have its moments, mostly involving the relationship between Meir and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, nicely played by Liev Schreiber, whose character engages in delicate negotiations with her over a bowl of borscht, speaking in a seductive, diplomatic rumble.

Director Nimród Antal (“Predators”) does a serviceable job of keeping everything interesting and suspenseful, if not exactly fresh.

There are laughs to be had here, yes, but your mileage will vary depending on your tolerance for sophomoric bathroom humor and gratuitous vulgarity.

With the exception of a few choice words from Haddish, Landscape With Invisible Hand lacks the kind of steady humor and energy that would otherwise keep the story afloat.

The power of the story, such as it is, is not enhanced by the nonlinear narrative structure. In fact, it makes it needlessly confusing.

It’s a sterling cast, capably guided through the motions by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan — no relation to the author of this review, at least none that I know of — in this at times gently amusing and at other times modestly touching dramedy.

It’s just charming enough, just exciting enough and just funny enough to not be a flop, but DreamWorks — the studio that has shown it can challenge Pixar when it comes to pushing the animation envelope — has chosen to play it safe here, rather than try to win the summer family film sweepstakes.

By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.

Maybe the whole endeavor is some kind of self-portrait of an artist who doesn’t know what he wants to say anymore, or how to even say, “I don’t know how to say what I want to say anymore.”

Lynch/Oz possesses undeniable value, if only to remind viewers that cinema is worth dissecting, thinking about, arguing over, mulling around.

The title of the film “Mending the Line” refers to an adjustment to a fly-fishing line to counter the effects of water currents. But there’s a lot more than the placement of a filament that needs to be remedied in this well-meaning but inert PTSD melodrama.

It’s not especially new to see a story about a guy who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, even one this hyperbolic. One might say that Flamin’ Hot is just another serving of cinematic junk food: corn chips sprinkled liberally with the moviemaking equivalent of maltodextrin.

Somehow, for all the work that went into the film, it comes across as something that may have worked better as an audiobook.

This a sweet, mostly cute story about the importance of the people we’re related to, peppered with some fairly broad and not especially hilarious yuks.

Kandahar is very much a box-ticking exercise, with Butler playing the same kind of hero — perhaps literally the same guy — he has built a career out of.

Next to Momoa, the novelty of Fast X lies mostly in its cameos, which only a spoilsport would describe in more detail; suffice it to say that most work, and the most newsworthy come in the film’s final scenes, including the closing credits. Not surprisingly, Fast X brings new meaning to the term “cliffhanger.” There’s definitely more to come. There always is.

I wanted to buy this story. I really did. But its protagonist floats through the action — filled with jealousy, lust and violence — as though he were anesthetized.

Even amid the corny jokes, awkward segues, forced conflicts and predictable resolutions, Bergen and Giannini manage to develop a low-simmer chemistry between the insults.

Overwrought and overthought, this Carmen somehow winds up being underbaked, as Millepied throws various ideas at the screen, with precious few taking hold with any conviction.

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

A meticulously balanced if oddly inert film.

The sad truth is that, for all his ambition, cinematic prowess and hyper-confessional candor, Aster doesn’t stick the landing. Instead, he’s made a movie about unresolved ambivalence that itself goes confoundingly unresolved.

Cheesy, strident, ridiculous and sometimes disarmingly, stupidly funny, Renfield doesn’t go for the jugular as much as give it a playful and quickly forgotten love bite.

The result is competent and informative, but lacks swagger and elegance. Sweetwater is no three-pointer.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods dutifully doubles down on everything that made the first film both charming and instantly disposable. But the heart and meta-humor that were so refreshing the first time feel static and stale in returning director David F. Sandberg’s more-of-the-same sequel.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

Quotation forthcoming.

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

A serviceable mash-up of sitcom and sports flick, 80 for Brady should please fans of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field and/or Tom Brady. Everybody else might want to call a timeout.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, Emancipation turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.

Maybe Strange World only seems to falter because it can’t handle the weight of its own expectations. Nah. It’s just not very good.