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.