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.

Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

If the point of the documentary is to make clear to viewers how special Walters was and how dynamic she was and how influential she was, it also made clear how irreplaceable she was, at a time when her talent at extracting information and confessions is needed more than ever.

Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

There’s no better time for a throwback than summer, and “F1 the Movie” is here to send audiences to a blissful era before constant cape slop, when the movies were loud, their stars were hot and the male main-character energy was flowing with exhilarating abandon.

The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.

There’s nothing wrong with a good, dumb comedy, but “Bride Hard” doesn’t even qualify as in-flight entertainment.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

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.

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.

Adapted by Flanagan from King’s 2020 novella, this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent.

Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.

Dragon imparts these pearls of wisdom with verve and delight, in a telling that is as visually impressive as it is emotionally stirring.

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

The script by Nick Lepard never quite figures out how to fill its 98-minute run time with new cat-and-mouse (or shark-and-marlin, as Tucker dubs her) twists, and “Dangerous Animals” loses steam treading familiar trope-filled waters en route to an oddly mawkish ending.

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.

At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.

Once Perry brings his magnum opus to its many climactic conclusions, the bait-and-switchy gamesmanship and sheer swing of his conceit have become irresistibly contagious, and viewers can’t help but be moved.

De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.

It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.

Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.

Karate Kid: Legends combines the best of all those sequels plus a 2010 remake — a simple underdog tale, appealing casts and crisply filmed action — to contribute a new and worthy chapter to the canon. It’s one whose ambitions meet, and occasionally exceed, our expectations.

The Last Rodeo may not be bodacious, but it’s a satisfying ride.

It’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.

Despite a snoozer of a pat ending that strains to bring its themes full circle, the live-action iteration at least proves that the franchise, with its notion of ohana and several films, spin-off series and countless plushies sold to date, hasn’t lost all its heft — just its original spark.

The story, held at well-mannered arm’s length by Piani, never gets too messy; even Agathe’s deepest psychological issues — a phobia that makes travel difficult and, later, the explanation of its traumatic roots — are handled with efficient, unfailingly discrete politesse.

The Final Reckoning stays true to those core tenets, even if it too often feels baggy and redundant. It’s a nesting doll of life-and-death deadlines within life-and-death deadlines, with one wildly improbable stunt leading to another, even more wildly improbable stunt.

The message of “Deaf President Now!” comes across loud and clear: We will be heard.

The film has the whiff of easy paycheck. It looks glossy but is empty. It sheds light without gaining insight.

In an era beset with dizzying setbacks in the ideals it celebrates, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round feels particularly necessary right now.

Friendship is primarily a movie for Robinson’s hardcore fans, but, for the Tim-curious, it serves as an amusing — if haphazard and uneven — introduction to his distinctive sensibility.

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.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

Thanks to its thoughtful protagonists and filmmaker Jeremy Workman, what starts out as a quirky human interest story becomes a profoundly humane portrait of creativity and community.

Shakespeare this ain’t. In the long, long history of “Romeo and Juliet” movie adaptations, “Juliet & Romeo” lands well below the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and just above 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” in which the characters are portrayed as animated garden gnomes.

There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.

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 Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

To paraphrase the T-shirt, everyone here went to the Isle of Capri, and all we got was this lousy movie.

It’s certainly a movie nobody asked for, as Marvel itself acknowledges. But it’s here. And it’s just fine.

The film also suffers from erratic pacing and half-baked reveals, but at its best, it throbs with raw, human, horrific honesty.

As a director, Minahan knows his way around a track, but on the evidence of this film, he’s not yet ready to run wild.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

Brax’s knuckles may be perpetually bared, but his heart’s always in the right place, which “The Accountant 2” spares nothing to remind us, even while the mayhem escalates into sheer outlandishness.

A remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same title...the new film is unnecessary as such, but it’s a determinedly openhearted crowd-pleaser with a handful of delicious performances, and it’s just about impossible to dislike.

Sinners gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

Even if such murky doings aren’t your cup of absinthe, the skill with which Guiraudie weaves his web is mesmerizing.

The Amateur may be off to a rocky start as a spy franchise, but it scores one for the IT crowd.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

Warfare is a process movie: It’s less interested in character development and “narrative” than in simply plunging viewers into an environment and giving us a sense of what life is like within it.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

Too often, in a film about an ostensibly peaceful form of dissent, it feels like adversaries are being targeted, albeit subtly, when the real enemy is war itself.

The Friend is a better dog movie than it is a people movie, but it’s such a wonderful dog movie that you may not mind that the people are merely fine.

The biggest surprise is that “A Minecraft Movie” ends up feeling more necessary in an era of depreciating art appreciation. Like Garrett, this movie may be tacky and loud, but it also makes a great point.

The mystery is why a movie so hell-bent on having fun feels so formulaic.

Whatever your familiarity with [Liza's] indelible performances, the amount of deep cuts and candid behind-the-scenes material is an archivist’s dream.

Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

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 speculative ending is actually the most intriguing thing about “The Alto Knights,” more interesting even than De Niro times two. And yet the film’s climax nevertheless fails to raise much of a heartbeat in this boglike slog through a momentous moment in murderous mob history.

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

True, the CGI dwarves (not “dwarfs,” thank you) are a pox upon the eyeballs, but other than that? It’s pretty good.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

Eephus belongs with the great baseball movies not because of any major league ambitions but because it understands what the game has meant and still means in small towns, among average people and weekend players.

Without demonizing either side, it shows how Israel’s pattern of mistakes, if not arrogance, may have helped set a pot on the stove that is now boiling over with venom.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

Even with a gimmick engineered to orchestrate endless bursts of Looney Tunes-style hyperviolence, “Novocaine” lives up to its name, all right — a tedious action-comedy so numbingly bland, you feel the pain of its 110-minute run time even as its protagonist can’t feel a thing.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

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.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

Much like its characters, “Last Breath” simply goes about getting the job done, without fuss or fanfare. Maybe no higher praise is necessary.

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

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

It’s as a satiric bourgeois psychodrama that “Armand” works best and reveals its genetic heritage to the works of Bergman and Ullmann (the latter no slouch as a director herself).

If “Parthenope” is a love letter to his hometown and its subject an embodiment of the city’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions — beauty and decay, religion and hypocrisy — the whole thing comes across like a deranged mash note, more off-putting than seductive.

It’s an affectionate finale for the character, crafted with such care — from Molly Emma Rowe’s costumes to Kave Quinn’s thoughtful production design to those signature needle drops, monologues and Bridget-isms — it’s a shame “Mad About the Boy” isn’t opening in U.S. theaters.

Whether Whishaw’s version of the famous-blue-raincoated furry Londoner returns or he doesn’t, no one can deny that “Paddington in Peru” is smarter than your average bear movie.

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

With Love Hurts, 87North has gone farther south than ever, churning out a muddled, mean-spirited action comedy that manages to feel slack and listless despite a flyweight run time of only 83 minutes.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

No Other Land, the Oscar-nominated documentary (and odds-on favorite to win), is the record of an atrocity: the erasure of a people from the land on which they’ve lived for centuries.

As the tropes pile up faster than tears in a Nicholas Sparks novel, so do the bodies, dispatched in increasingly inventive and grisly ways.

An Oscar nominee for best international feature, Denmark’s harrowing, slow-boil thriller “The Girl With the Needle” has been described by some as a horror film. And from the hallucinatory opening montage of distorted, leering faces, this black-and-white drama promises to be the stuff of nightmares.

Screenwriter-director Peter Hastings — who also voices Dog Man’s barks, woofs, howls and assorted canine musings — has shoehorned a streaming season’s worth of plot into this sub-90-minute enterprise, and its caffeinated tempo makes “Moana 2” feel like a Terrence Malick joint.

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).

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

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.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

Between its verisimilitude-killing caricatures and hand-waving montages, “Unstoppable” is all too easy to pin down as a by-the-numbers misfire.

Better Man, a delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey, chronicles the singer’s tumultuous rise, celebrates his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits, and gives the project of ensconcing Williams in the hearts and minds of the global masses another go.