Shot mostly in deeply shadowed interiors, the movie rarely makes effective use of its widescreen format. Indeed, it has a stagy quality and plays mostly as a series of theatrical exchanges between Gilles and Koch.

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.

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

As a feel-good fact-based fable of financial comeuppance, Dumb Money is funny enough. But as its name suggests, it isn’t especially smart. Unlike its protagonists, it isn’t interested in making a quick buck, just an easy laugh.

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.

To reference yet another cultural touchstone, Aporia comes across like an expanded, indie-film version of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s never going to set the world on a new and unfamiliar course, but it does its job well enough.

If The Exorcist: Believer is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.

In the end, Jules performs a magical if tiny bait-and-switch: It’s less a sci-fi parable — “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” for the AARP demographic — than a fairy tale reminding us that the tribulations of getting old are more natural than sad, and best done in the company of loved ones.

You're invited to fish for the comedy within the movie, within Harry's world, which happens to be falling apart around the hapless schlemiel's ears.

By the end of Invisible Beauty, it’s obvious from all the accolades that [Hardison] made a difference in the lives of a new generation of Black models.

The major problem with the film is that the exposition is not nearly as clever as the premise. After warming to the idea behind the movie, one tends to cool off as it trudges toward a resolution.

The film’s execution isn’t entirely convincing. It’s not the actors’ fault.

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.

To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

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.

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.

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy.

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.

Produced by the New York Times, which broke the story, and with its authors Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor appearing on camera and listed as consulting producers, “Sorry” sticks a finger in a wound that, for some of those involved, hasn’t quite healed.

As much as the script quotes Shakespeare, it’s a lot closer to “The Shawshank Redemption,” a well-meaning reminder that the incarcerated are human beings, too.

Daddio may stay too long at the fare, but its maker is hardly a hack.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

With more daring than success, Joker: Folie à Deux says that anyone who takes the Joker for a hero to be emulated is as delusional as Arthur Fleck, and it serves up its comic-book cake at the same time it stuffs it with rat poison.

It’s sprightly enough to make a lot of audiences and Warner Bros. bean-counters happy, but it also confirms that one of the most distinct visionaries in American film history has become a corporate repurposing machine. It’s not insane, and that hurts.

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

As written by Park and performed by Stella and Plaza — both players with crack comic timing — the interplay between the two Elliotts is the best part of “My Old Ass.”

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.

Super/Man is a weeper, to be sure, for the reminder it brings to fans that this Man of Steel was only flesh and blood.

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.

As a simultaneously slick and provocative entertainment, “War Game” is chilling and a tad infuriating, offering a white-knuckle ride — “Civil War” for policy wonks — that may feel a bit too fresh in the memory for viewers who are still traumatized by the real thing.

Made without stars or much of a budget but with a lot of heart and good vibes, it’s an exemplary and moving independent film.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on “Superman,” banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favor of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humor.

When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies while sitting beneath a city bridge — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down. “Dandelion” is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.

The Wild Robot has reduced a lot of respectable early reviewers to happy tears, and chances are that you and your children will feel the same.

The movie loses many opportunities for stronger emotional resonance — the Sonic the Hedgehog films succeed far better because of their strong focus on character relationships. Yet, while watching this movie, I was reminded of the beginning of cinema.

Directed by the inventive Uruguayan horror specialist Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), the new “Alien: Romulus” was billed as a back-to-basics reboot, and to its credit, it’s a no-frills, straight-up genre piece built largely on the bones of the first two movies. All that’s missing are originality and a convincing final act, and, honestly, you could do worse for a Saturday night eek-a-thon.

Fly Me to the Moon strains to achieve liftoff, sometimes quite amusingly. But in the end, it’s just too heavy to get off the ground.

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.

In spite of cliches as thick as stars in the sky, the price of admission to "The Mountain Men" may be worth almost as much as one 1830 beaver pelt.

It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.

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

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.

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).

Rumours is too slap-happy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end.

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

It’s a film prone to tonal whiplash. Yet the script has made some sharp trims, scrapping a subplot about Ellen DeGeneres and eliminating some of Ryle’s most outlandish behavior.

The film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work.

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.

Like Maxime’s roach-man, “Despicable Me 4” is a hallucinatorily imaginative yet overstuffed amalgam of unrelated elements.

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.

Ironically, it’s Zemeckis’s reluctance to embrace theatrical artifice over attempted photorealism that prevents “Here” from hitting as powerfully as it might.

Sayles brings familiar tools to "Roan Inish": a passion for language, labor-intensive lifestyles and, of course, the moody beauty of the geography. The writer-director frequently links his characters' personal happiness with their environment. That, more than the unusual marine life of Roan Inish, is the theme of this amiable visit to northwestern Ireland.

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

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

Listening to “Sweet Caroline” feels like a hug — warm and fuzzy to some, smothering to others. Watching Song Sung Blue has a similar effect.

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.

What it establishes is hard to put your finger on. It's not a sensibility, exactly; it's more of a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in the right place -- that she is a sophisticated, caring, feeling person.

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.

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

J-Lo is essentially an elaborate distraction, which is just fine as the story goes, but not exactly a kinetic position for a star.

Beecroft’s screenplay — which the actor turned filmmaker wrote after moving in with Tabatha and Porshia, off and on, for three years — is not as strong as her visual storytelling. Some of her dialogue trips over its own bootlaces.

Almost every narrative choice is ludicrous. And yet, “Mercy” is also a hoot and a half.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

The movie does not demystify a rarefied world, or paint an emotionally accessible portrait of the artist, but rather assembles a somewhat stuffy compendium of literary references and insider-y bons mots aimed at tickling theater aficionados.

I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.

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.

Making memories it ain’t. But making 89 minutes of your life disappear almost painlessly has its place, too.

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.

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

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

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.

The screen writers have come up with a simple-minded scenario, true, but it is enlivened with enough laughs to make up for the shortcomings.

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

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.

An astonishing lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence keeps Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” from falling apart — which is ironic, given that the new film depicts her ripping at the seams.

It’s a mark of creative achievement that Zlotowski’s film manages to dwell in uncertainty — about what’s really going on, where Lilian’s marbles have gone and, for that matter, why her ex is so game to chase them around with her. Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny, low-key unsettling but far from provocative, and elbow-deep in dreams and memory but without much discernible revelation.