If F9’s repetitive stunts-and-speeches structure begins to pall, this is a movie that knows its lane and stays in it, however recklessly.

The first Latina actress to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — the “EGOT” superfecta — Moreno doesn’t just seem to keep getting better and better, but more and more interesting.

Beyond the music itself, The Sparks Brothers offers viewers a bracing example of musical curiosity and extraordinary resilience — not to mention the singular pleasure of working at your craft long enough to be accused of ripping off the acts who have been stealing from you for 50 years. The Maels live. And living Mael is the best revenge.

It ain’t worth the price of admission, but it is, in one of the drowsiest, dullest summer movies ever, a bit of an eye-opener.

If you’re looking for that kind of moral-rich message, delivered with equal amounts of sincerity and syrup, congratulations: You may have found the mythical source from which all other malarkey springs.

To quote In the Heights itself, the streets are made of music in the first genuinely cheerful, splashy, exuberantly life-affirming movie of the summer.

Directed and co-written by Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose films often deal with gay themes, Sublet feels like it’s setting itself up, just a little bit, as a same-sex version of How Stella Got Got Her Groove Back.

The scenery of wind-and water-eroded mesas and stone archways is lovely, but the voice performances are largely inert and unremarkable. Other than the risky shenanigans of the PALs, which ought to give any parent pause, so is the film.

Blind faith, I’d say, is beside the point here. As with all the films in the Conjuring universe, — really exorcism films in general — sitting back and enjoying the ride, to whatever bowels of heck it might take you, is enough.

Thanks to the taste and shrewd judgment of director Julio Quintana, this funny, heartwarming movie provides just the right combination of adventure, character-driven humor, spiritual depth and inspirational uplift.

Plan B possesses the requisite number of outré sight gags and gross-out humor to qualify it as a sophomoric teen flick. But director Natalie Morales keeps the action running smoothly, allowing her two gifted stars to deliver genuine breakout performances in vivid roles.

Whatever good intentions were brought to bear in Cruella are lost in an overlong, awkwardly shaped mash-up of coming-of-age drama, caper flick, action adventure and fashion world sendup.

Like A Quiet Place, Part II is a lean, nearly flab- and gristle-free piece of sci-fi steak.

There are plenty of left turns (and the occasional dead end) here, but Riders of Justice is no waste of time. The mayhem is mixed with unexpected thoughtfulness.

New Order recalls 2019’s Oscar-winning Parasite, but unlike that film’s superficial rich-people-bad/Quentin-Tarantino-good message, this one is far more grounded, both in reality and genuinely original thinking.

Collette certainly brings spirit and character to this project, elevating the film, although Dream is not her best or most interesting work.

As with Wadjda, Mansour gives audiences a candid, often wryly amusing glimpse of life inside the Saudi kingdom, which is so often cloaked in opacity and menace.

Director Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa) brings handsome period production values and a lyrical, restrained sensibility to a narrative that might not qualify as riveting, but exerts its own unmistakable emotional pull.

Final Account aims to provide insight into the psychological mechanism that would allow otherwise good people to stand idly by (or actively participate in) the perpetration of mass murder. As such, it’s only partly effective, and frustrating.

The Woman in the Window is the kind of film that could go places, but sadly never manages to get out the door.

There are no real surprises here, except maybe one. It would never work, Finley warns us, and it seems she might as well be talking about this cornball movie. But thanks to something ineffable — Redgrave, leprechauns, moondust, or maybe just understated performances from two appealing protagonists — Finding You kinda, sorta does.

Spiral, which involves the hunt for a serial killer by the police force of a nameless metropolis, is a thriller, a mystery, a police drama, but it hews closely to “Saw’s” grisly curriculum.

Still, there’s something about Screenlife that’s not just gimmicky — like the found-footage craze that preceded it — but numbing. All this technological terrorism should be terrifying, but it mostly just feels like eyestrain.

The domestic drama, like the heist story line, fizzles out in the end.

In Those Who Wish Me Dead, Jolie demonstrates her career-long fascination with action derring-do and physical punishment, to diminishing effect. In this pulpy, borderline laughable genre picture, not even her hair is believable.

But this is Statham’s show, and his stoic brutality makes this a captivating slow burn.

Oyelowo brings a thoughtful sensibility and thoroughgoing good taste to the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t produce anymore but shouldn’t be so quick to discard.

Unfortunately, The Columnist doesn’t live up to its initial promise: What might have been a trenchant cultural critique couched within poisonously playful genre exercise becomes an indulgence in undifferentiated rage for its own graphic sake.

As the title of the film suggests, it tells a story involving as much human drama as geopolitical maneuvering. It’s a story of personalities and, at times, the fragile male ego.

What sets Four Good Days apart from the many other films of its ilk are Close and Kunis, who sharpen and elevate its well-worn contours with vivid performances that are honest and grounded. These are characters you can connect to, on both sides of the equation.

Surprisingly, it isn’t heavy-handed, moralizing, polemical or sentimental. And you can enjoy the film without knowing any of that.

It’s tempting — and not entirely inaccurate — to call this oddly moving little film a comedy-drama, but if so, it’s a dark one at that.

Dreamlike and deliberate, pedestrian and theatrical, bland and strangely beautiful, About Endlessness takes in the suffering, struggle and moments of vagrant joy in life and propels them into the cosmos.

An engrossing but uneven comedy-drama.

It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny. It simply zigs when you expect it to zag. This is a small, simple story, free from emotional pyrotechnics and, mostly, false notes. It has something to say about the deeper meaning of alone-ness, without being pretentious.

As an exercise in sincerity, fellowship and earnest inquiry, it might be the most subversive movie in circulation right now.

You’ve got to give Wheatley credit: In the Earth is like nothing else you’ve seen — although some might wish it were a little less, er, original.

The sci-fi thriller Voyagers is grounded in very real current fears. But otherwise, it’s a bit of an airhead.

At times, The Man Who Sold His Skin plays like a cultural parody, but its aim is dead serious, and more sobering. The pathos and tragedy of the global refugee crisis is its target, not the pretensions of the international art market, and it, from time to time, delivers a sting.

There are times when French Exit beggars belief and tries the viewer’s patience. But as long as the camera stays on Pfeiffer, we’re all hers.

Even within the confines of its generic plot and sometimes stilted dialogue, Concrete Cowboy winds up being an engaging and moving family drama. Its sincerity, accomplished cast and proud Philadelphia roots manage to keep it real.

One half of Godzilla vs. Kong wants to tell a human story. Believe it or not, it partly succeeds. The other half just wants to break stuff.

For anyone with a taste for the stylized violence and self-aware cartoonishness of the John Wick films — a taste for blood and mayhem that comes closer to corn syrup than most cinematic carnage — Nobody is a brutal treat.

Still, The Courier makes a smart, stylish stand for the kind of old-fashioned period spy thriller that is increasingly being turned into bingeable series for streaming services. Its modesty and carefully managed ambitions define its strong suit at a time when such films are scarcer every day.

This endearing, thoroughly entertaining movie might be what we all need right now: An invitation to stop and smell the roses — or, if you’re lucky, their far less showy fungal cousins.

As nervy and well-made as it is, Cherry feels less personal than pageant-like, especially in a rushed and glibly perfunctory final sequence. It unfolds like an American dream that becomes a nightmare, before switching back again — just before we wake up and shake the whole thing off.

The Father, ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.

Yes, it’s a coming-of-age story: If Boogie were fully evolved, woke and enlightened, there would be no "Boogie." But the film is just rough and unformed enough to suggest that Huang might still have some growing up to do as a filmmaker, too.

Too frequently and too loudly, the sci-fi bells and whistles of Chaos Walking overwhelm its quieter, more engrossing elements, making it hard to hear what the film really seems to be saying.

It’s not great cinema. It’s good at what it sets out to do. Which makes it great fun.

Full of incident, heartbreak, secrets and betrayal, The Affair and its choppy formal structure don’t do justice to an enormously appealing cast.

Disney’s gorgeously animated, entertainingly told fantasia Raya and the Last Dragon is a visual feast.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

My Zoe is well acted and well filmed, yes, but the storytelling, in which Delpy stitches together mismatched parts like a Dr. Frankenstein, is its weak suit.

This cinematic triple-decker sandwich is so overstuffed with baloney and cheese it ought to come with a pickle on the side.

Nomadland is the kind of big and big-hearted movie — featuring a central performance at once epic and fine-tuned — that reminds you of how much life one film can hold, when circumstances allow.

It’s rare that a documentary has the ability to take the kind of long view of events that establishes context and consequence.

This is a throwback movie in the best sense of the term, asking the audience to consider the not-too-distant past of anti-Black racism as prologue to its similarly murderous present. It’s also a return to a brand of muscular, serious-minded filmmaking that has been virtually forgotten in recent years.

It’s a good movie, executed with affectionate humor, wistful honesty and tender care.

There are early warning signs that “World” isn’t going to end well. But Fastvold, a Brooklyn-based Norwegian actress and filmmaker making only her second effort behind the camera, never gins up the sentiment, the melodrama or even the sensuality.

There are corners of this quiet little film — less a plot-driven narrative than a two-person character study — that feel powerfully true, in ways that surprise.

Despite a powerful performance by Tahar Rahim in the title role, and despite such marquee names as Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in the supporting roles of Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, and Stu Couch, the Marine lawyer assigned to prosecute him — despite scenes of grotesque abuse that inflame the conscience — the movie lands, through no fault of its own other than timing, with a whiff of been-there, done-that.

Viggo Mortensen makes a sensitive and assured directing debut with Falling, a meditation on aging, mortality and slow-drip loss that will resonate deeply with anyone going through the agonies it depicts.

Bliss isn’t really all that interested in trafficking in the stuff of mass-market science fiction: the bells and whistles, in the form of nifty hardware, special effects and the like. Rather, Cahill’s latest film is an exercise in existential inquiry.

In this absorbing and rigorously disciplined account, Konchalovsky proves that a healthy embrace of nuance doesn't need to result in muddled thinking. Indeed, it can lead to something sharp, bright and dazzlingly precise.

Graciously accompanied by Washington (who can even make eating mac-and-cheese compelling), Zendaya emerges as the star of this show, delivering a performance that calls on sudden, turn-on-a-dime reversals — emotional figure-eights that she executes with impressive, unstudied finesse.

Tucci and Firth have never been better than they are here, and they earn every superlative that has been laid on them in early reviews.

It boasts a sterling main cast — Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto — as well as open-endedness that is simultaneously pleasurable and a bit unsettling, in both the good and bad senses of that word.

No Man’s Land doesn’t quite cover uncharted territory in the way its creators seem to want it to. Nor does it arrive at a destination you can’t see coming from miles away. Still, the destination makes the tedium of the trip worthwhile.

The film deepens and grows more thoughtful — and, yes, sad — as its spotlight on the need for human connection — at any age — comes into focus. The stories of the four people at its center show Villagers to be more than statistics.

The Marksman proves itself to be the cinematic version of comfort food: satisfyingly familiar but full of starch and empty calories.

Written and directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond with superb control and insight, My Little Sister never goes precisely where the audience expects, as the filmmakers dole out crucial information at well-timed intervals, illuminating the pieces of Lisa and Sven’s past that have brought them to this life-or-death point.

Gradually, and with the methodical patience of someone unearthing buried treasure with a tiny brush, The Dig reveals itself to be a story of love and estrangement, of things lost and longed for, of life and death — of what lasts and what doesn’t.

The result is a film that does more than impart facts, or even tell a story: It builds a world, and once we’re in it, takes us on a potent and unforgettable emotional journey.

Vanessa Kirby delivers a bravura performance in Pieces of a Woman. In fact, her performance is so commanding, uncompromising and far-ranging that it often threatens to swallow this otherwise uneven and frustratingly thin movie with one voracious gulp.

As he demonstrated with the recession-themed “99 Homes,” Bahrani is a cynical observer of the forces underling cultural upheaval; the story of “Tiger,” at times, feels more schematic and archetypal than wholly lived by real people. But its ominous message — watch out for the person whose back you’re stepping on — has never been more timely.

As trite as Herself is in plot and emotional beats, what makes it worthwhile are the performances, which are all stellar.

Fairy tales have always held the threat of darkness as punishment for misbehavior, and this Pinocchio is no exception.

As a filmed version of a play, One Night in Miami has the same talky, slightly claustrophobic contours one might expect. But that pent-up quality is an advantage for a movie in which the room where it might have happened is a character in itself.

Say this much for Fennell: She is incapable of pulling punches. Even when they’re swaddled in the puffiest, fuzziest of gloves, her blows land with gut-wrenching force.

Jamal Khashoggi was a complex, even contradictory human being, and his death an affront to freedom and decency. Does the world need two documentaries about him, coming in rapid succession? Maybe not. But you wouldn’t go wrong by watching either one.

"News” is like almost every other western. Still, it works.

This dazzling, if ultimately frustrating, movie seems to pick up where the far superior “Inside Out” ended, leaving behind the inner workings of young people’s emotional lives for an exploration of metaphysical realms that are fuzzier, more speculative and, to put it bluntly, not nearly as involving.

For the first hour and a half, WW84 is a delightful flight of escapist fancy, with Diana and Steve's love story ensconcing itself comfortably, if a bit talkily, within the confines of an action adventure. Then, at the 90 minute mark, it’s as if Jenkins remembers her other deliverables, in the form of special effects, epic global crises and a plotty, ever-more-muddled story line that metastasizes into something much darker and more violent.

Much of Greenland features chaotic crowd scenes. The real disaster is how quickly mankind descends into dismaying depravity.

The Midnight Sky only looks like a disaster film. Slyly, and by misdirection that cleverly conceals its true intent until the poignant end, it reveals itself to be a story of regret over a lost opportunity for connection.

An exemplary lesson in how to make a revealing rockumentary, “The Bee Gees” (premiering Saturday) will satisfy lifelong skeptics and loyal fans. It’s less of the usual tract (we had them all wrong!) and more of a reckoning with the profound degree of artistry and accomplishment that should be the last word on any Bee Gees story. The movie is also a unique consideration of the phenomenon of rise and fall, and how one learns to live with it.

Lovers of musicals will groove on the shamelessness of its footlights worship.

I’m Your Woman isn’t so much off-kilter as it is ballasted by a different, perhaps lower center of gravity. The title sounds exploitative — perhaps even silly — but the tale it spins is one of power and, ultimately, of coming unexpectedly, satisfyingly, into one’s own.

I’ll say one other nice thing: The film isn’t terribly long. You’ll keep waiting for the suspense to kick in. Spoiler alert: It never really does, except feebly, after about an hour and 15 minutes. And then, unceremoniously, it’s over.

It takes us someplace, yes, but the trip is just this side of transporting.

So many of our problems remain, but 40 Years a Prisoner presents a valuable primer on what mistakes not to repeat.

Wolfe keeps the production simple, albeit with attractively rich visual values and gorgeous costumes, allowing the performances to exert their mesmerizing force. And nowhere is that magnetism more palpable than when Davis and Boseman are going toe to toe, their energies repelling one another one moment and fusing the next.

What Mayor lacks in terms of wiki-esque biography it more than makes up for in immediacy and exquisite timing.

Devoid of muckraking sensationalism, it instead evolves into something more tactful, and compassionate, as teams of exhausted medical professionals do anything to save their patients’ lives, or at least grace their final moments with gestures of caring and connection.

It’s a small film made larger by Ahmed’s ability to take something so interior — hearing loss — and make it so visible, so palpable.

The anarchic spirit of the film suggests the screenwriters (brothers Kevin and Dan Hageman, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan) may also have been a little high on bee venom when they wrote this thing.

McQueen’s vocabulary is on particularly glorious display in this lambent gem of a film.