Buoyant, bracing and, most shocking of all, brief, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” represents a quantum leap of ship-righting.

Candid, pitiless and deeply humanistic, Fleifel’s portrait feels simultaneously timeless and urgently new.

The bones of this memory play are familiar, but Davidtz is a natural filmmaker, and the sense of a tattered but privileged world teetering on extinction is visualized with fresh and evocative details.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

Smurfs may be all over the multiverse, but it doesn’t land anywhere worth writing home about.

The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.

Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.

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.

What makes My Mom Jayne remarkable is how Hargitay manages to move forward from the big reveals. This isn’t just a fact-finding mission for her, but a long-overdue reckoning.

This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

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.