All that’s missing, really, is a story. “The Bikeriders” is almost good enough to convince us we don’t need one.

Thelma is about the indomitable human urge to keep going and the hard-won wisdom to know when to heed time’s warnings. It’s a movie that rages against the dying of the light — at 30 mph.

A kind of satisfaction ultimately arrives, but it is not one for purists, or even lovers of speculative history. It feels tacked on: too little, too late, too ludicrous — the past rewritten as a form of wishful thinking.

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

The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb.

Design-wise, the “Inside Out” characters are Pixar’s crudest work, with the blocky colors and stiff hair of a creature in a TV commercial for insecticide. Blown up to the big screen, they just look worse. Narratively, however, the film’s portrait of Joy is beautifully complex.

Shyamalan the elder makes suspense-horror dramas that either give a half-baked idea a fully baked cinematic treatment or vice versa; Shyamalan the daughter’s first feature-length film is just half-baked all around.

The camera is more athletic than anyone on-screen, muscling between bullets and smashing through walls. Heyvaert shoots action so well that you forgive how little physical action there actually is.

The film is heavy on the dread, light on the narrative. It’s all about the tension in the gym where the adults are just as melodramatic as the girls.

It’s frustrating and distracting when flat direction, inconsistent effects and wooden acting break the spell, making it more and more of a slog to stay interested as Johnny slices and dices his way through the film’s 94-minute run time.

The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

It’s rote, sure, but undeniably rousing.

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.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

A blast of pure pleasure and one of the year’s best films, “Hit Man” should be seen with a crowd grooving on its devilish comic energy, its off-the-charts sexual chemistry and the star-making turn at its center.

More than its predecessors dating back to 1979’s lean, brutal “Mad Max,” “Furiosa” highlights the silliness and savagery of toxic men playing “Lord of the Flies” in the rubble of humanity.

Even at its most despairing, the film never gives up a sense of hope.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

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.

Visually, sonically and thematically, “Evil Does Not Exist” is a rich and subtle experience.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise, itself one of the more successful second go-rounds, commercially and artistically, of Hollywood’s modern corporate era. Yet the movie, like its three predecessors, is a fascinating case of content following form.

Civics lessons rarely come this disturbing or this convincing.

If “Oak” brushes up against the fuzzy calculus of melodrama, Mari and Turner always wrestle it back to earth.

Unfrosted may be the Platonic ideal of the Netflix movie: ephemeral, edible, enjoyable, forgettable.

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.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.

It’s a simple, gentle tale that’s told beautifully but feels hollow — like a eulogy for an acquaintance.

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.

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

Tornatore’s tendency toward information overload is balanced by a clear affection for his subject — the film treats Morricone with the tenderness of a close friend, insisting that we see him for more than the melodies that made him famous.

Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale that packs a more poignant punch than most entries in the superpowered canon.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

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.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

It’s hard to fault Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners” for being chaotic and miserable. That’s the mood he’s after — and he captures it with such assurance that the film is a tough watch.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

The film “The Beast” is a Russian nesting doll of genres: a belle epoque romance set inside a contemporary serial-killer thriller set inside a dystopian sci-fi drama.

This is a lean, cruel film about the ethics of photographing violence, a predicament any one of us could be in if we have a smartphone in our hand during a crisis.

Monkey Man seems hellbent on establishing itself as the latest wrinkle in post-Wickian cinema: nonstop mayhem featuring an actor previously thought of as a sweetie pie.

Wicked Little Letters manages the paradoxical trick of being both broadly played and finely acted, the first due to a director intent on underlining every action with a heavy Sharpie and the second to a cast that colors in the outlines of their characters with finesse, depth and life.

Wingard’s not a sentimentalist, and “Godzilla x Kong” stumbles whenever he tries to slap phony emotions onto the film to make it more like a generic crowd-pleaser.

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.

If "Road House” were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor. But it doesn’t aspire to much more than mining the intellectual property catalogue for a quick-and-dirty cash grab.

Regina King gives a lively, convincing portrayal of pioneering U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in “Shirley,” an earnest, curiously listless biopic of a woman whose legacy suffuses modern life, even as it goes unacknowledged.

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.

A modern Gothic slow burn that simmers in pedestrian frights until it finally boils over into bursts of delicious, gory violence. When it does, anchored by an impressive performance by Sydney Sweeney, the bloodshed isn’t just welcome but cathartic, a gonzo takedown of religious patriarchy with one hell of a memorable finale that reconfirms the good news: Nunsploitation is back, baby.

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.

Four Daughters is film as family therapy and family therapy as film.

The story is a familiar one — a young immigrant fetches up in New York to seek his fortune, only to be buffeted by a bumptious city and cut to the quick by its competitive edge — but Torres reshapes it into something simultaneously more fantastical and far more real.

Despite the radio reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and some very “Just Say No”-era drug busts, this is a mythic 1980s and a mythic USA, peopled by venal desperados pulled from the mildewed pages of a 1950s Jim Thompson novel.

There are no gambles in this crossbreed of sports movie and doggy drama that dutifully — and lazily — stays on course from beginning to end. Heartstrings are tugged, dogs are adored and it’s all inoffensively inspirational.

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.

Under the supervision of animation director Carlos Léon Sancha, the film is a graceful, somewhat overbusy visual treat, a playful riot of colors anchored by a crisp sense of line.

Shayda could have been a horror story. Instead, it’s a survivor’s tale, and it’s suffused with gratitude and love.

The humor is often over-caffeinated and anarchic — a style that suits the production — but when the film dares to slow down, it has a gift for reworking classic gags, like a wordless shot of animals stampeding through a china shop.

It’s all meticulously conceived and impressively staged, but becomes repetitive and monotonous, devolving for anyone not completely steeped in the “Dune” universe into a hazy orange-and-ocher soup of dust, smoke, flames and sand.

Curiously flimsy and forgettable.

Ordinary Angels, an uplifting drama inspired by the effort to get a sick girl to a transplant hospital amid a massive 1994 Kentucky snowstorm, poses a challenge to cynics: Even if you could resist another spunky, heartstring-tugging Hilary Swank performance in this overstuffed true tale, who among us can deny the sublime beauty of Jack Reacher’s tears?

Io Capitano takes a news story that’s mostly about numbers, and puts a human face on it.

The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor. But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams (literal and figurative) behind the drudgery reveal themselves in a series of revelatory moments.

Madame Web is no blockbuster, but in its own quiet way, it manages to break down a few barriers.

Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma, and “The Taste of Things” provides the ideal showcase for those ineffable gifts.

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.

The direction and performances in “How to Have Sex” are so spontaneous and naturalistic that the film often plays like a slice-of-life documentary; it’s not necessarily a fully realized story, but as one chapter, it’s extraordinarily vivid.

In one scene, I could have sworn I saw a QR code peeking out from a character’s spiral notebook. But maybe it was just the props trying to escape from a crass, obnoxious, woefully misbegotten movie. To which hapless viewers can only respond: Take us with you.

As filmmaking, the movie is straightforward enough — unobtrusively shot, sensitively scored, lacking only a sense of urgency in its pacing. As a memory play and a launchpad for both a writer-director and the young actress playing her, it’s a very good start. And as your latest reminder that Laura Linney can do just about anything, it’s a bracing kick in the pants.

Though it takes place in the recent past, at a time when the Bhutanese people were still getting used to such American imports as James Bond movies and “black water” (Coca-Cola), the film has something important to say about the promise and the perils of the present.

When Vaughn is cooking, his films can be stylish, self-satisfied junk food. “Argylle” leaves the style out of the equation — it’s filmmaking as processed interstate fare, high in calories, low in fiber, tasty until you’ve had enough of it and then you feel sick.

What begins as an intriguing visit to a forbidding but fascinating past becomes the kind of perfunctorily moralistic fairy tale that Kahlen himself might scoff at, before getting back to work. Like the wilderness it depicts, this is a movie that ultimately might not want to be tamed.

It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell.

Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.

The story slows to a crawl toward the end, even with a scene featuring a carjacking. But in its relentless focus on Comer’s Mother with a capital M, as she is called, and her character’s almost primal determination, it gets somewhere that feels unforced and, however uneventful, real.

On the most surface level, “The Zone of Interest,” which Glazer adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf and Hedwig go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless.

Set on the International Space Station, the movie “I.S.S.” is a modest but satisfyingly suspenseful thriller whose central conflict between the six members of the station’s half-American, half-Russian crew is precipitated by a decidedly earthbound crisis.

This “Mean Girls” may be a sugarcoated object lesson about unhealthy, ingrained behaviors, but it’s no downer.

If the formulaic film ever finds its audience — and it’s all too clear that there’s a market for this kind of slickly produced, hindbrain pulp — the best that can be said for it is that the ending (devised by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer) is perfectly poised for The Beekeeper 2.

Whether it works depends less on piety than on taste. Beneath the giddy subversion, there’s a cheerless solemnity — a splash of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” as it were — that often comes close to curdling the farce.

Only the third feature from writer and co-director Ilker Catak, who won a student academy award in 2015 for his film school project “Fidelity,” “Teachers’ Lounge” is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias.

As Kiefer’s monumental art decays, “Anselm” can endure as his memorial.

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”).

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels like the friend at a middle school sleepover whose mom forgot to pick them up the next morning. You know, they know, everybody knows: The friend has overstayed their welcome, but you’re still trying to make things fun.

Its elegiac themes might make All of Us Strangers sound like a bummer, when it’s anything but. This is an intriguing, increasingly mystifying rabbit hole disguised as a romantic drama, with all the sensuous pleasures the genre suggests (not to mention some superfun synth-pop cuts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys).

Moon has lots of setup but no resolution, treading water for most of its overlong running time.

American Fiction would be an enormously entertaining and observant comedy even if it just stuck to the hilarious, if cringey, lengths to which the White establishment will go in the name of psychic safety and self-protection. But Jefferson overlays the story’s most biting wit with layers of warmth, sadness and discovery that make this movie far more than the sum of its parts.

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

Once The Iron Claw populates its first half with peppy needle drops, seaty training montages and brotherly bonding, the pivot toward death and heartache becomes all the more wrenching.

Enzo Ferrari was a real person, not just a narrative device. No matter how ardently he sang of speed and danger, there must have been more to his character than Ferrari manages to find.

In the end, The Color Purple manages to find a sweet spot between tragedy and entertainment. But is that really the best way to honor Walker’s vision?

A good-looking, engrossing, true tale, superficially much like 1981 best-picture winner "Chariots of Fire," but without that Olympic drama's themes of antisemitism and faith. If The Boys in the Boat is missing something, it's substance.

Despite its sometimes overwrought mystery-tale gambits, however, Monster ultimately shifts from a saga of fateful misunderstanding to one of mutual comprehension.

Here, Willy's pure spun sugar, with none of the complex ingredients that make a movie soar: relatability, humanity, foibles.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

This is not a happy-go-lucky story, but an old-school fairy tale meant to frighten, confuse and excite.

While there are no salacious details or plot-moving drama about what makes Queen Bey tick — and there shouldn’t be — Renaissance reveals something else, showcasing the joy to be found in cultural touchstones like the tour and the community built around it.