While it’s not exactly a sequel to “RBG,” the hit documentary from earlier this year, the film does seem designed primarily for viewers who just can’t get enough Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Viewed through that lens, On the Basis of Sex sort of works. As filmmaking, it’s clunky, but as fan service, it’s more effective.

Deliberately paced, unapologetically mannered and contemplatively attuned, If Beale Street Could Talk invites audiences to venture beyond the screen in front of them to connect with the characters and their world on a deeper, more mystical plane.

On the plus side is the eye-popping production design, although that is also, like the plot, too, too much, dazzling the eye with more fantastical Atlantean technology and — inexplicably — underwater fire than a Las Vegas edition of Cirque du Soleil. Like the frequently shirtless Momoa, it’s pretty at first, then it just hurts.

Structurally, Vice is a mess, zigging here and zagging there, never knowing quite when to end, and when it finally does, leaving few penetrating or genuinely illuminating ideas to ponder.

In the end, Bumblebee is less a movie about giant robot aliens punching each other than it is a story about friendship.

Hogancamp was a talented illustrator before the attack rendered him unable to draw. In retreating to a world of his imagination as a way to exorcise the demons that tormented him, he ended up creating real art. I’m not sure Zemeckis’s achievement rises to the same level, but this cinematic excursion to Marwen is almost certainly a trip to someplace you haven’t been before.

There are certain pleasures here, mostly in the cast of characters. Malkovich’s misanthropic egoist is chief among them. And Bullock makes for a fierce and relatable Mama Bear. But as for tension, there’s precious little.

I mean, homage is one thing, but this reeks less of nostalgia than sweat. There is so little tolerance for spontaneity, in a film that feels calibrated to the millimeter to be magical, that reactions like delight and surprise — when they occur at all — feel manufactured.

The story is bloated and, despite flashes of imagination, overly familiar. And the dialogue, peppered with well-worn catchphrases.

With its air of intimacy and fractious affections, Shoplifters feels like “The Borrowers” by way of Yasujiro Ozu, a discreetly observed drama about resourcefulness, loyalty and resilience in an era of obscene income inequality and a fatally frayed civic safety net.

Did you find “The Favourite” just too weird, too raunchy, too . . . too? Perhaps Mary Queen of Scots will be more your cup.

The tight time frame gives the movie a welcome urgency, but it doesn’t prevent its second half from becoming lurid and melodramatic.

Roma, a masterful drama by Alfonso Cuarón, is many things at once: epic and intimate, mythic and mundane.

Ultimately, Divide and Conquer offers useful lessons — and maybe even a little hope — for people on both sides of the national divide, about just how we came to this terrible, but not irreversible, place.

While the young cast does its best to sell the gleeful music, its delirious premise eventually loses steam, as do the songs, which are stronger in the first part of the film. Yet despite this doomsday setting, Anna and the Apocalypse ultimately delivers an uplifting message.

An ambitious but ultimately ungraceful meditation on pop superstardom that spans decades, awkwardly weaving themes of school shootings, terrorism, obsessive fandom and post-traumatic stress into the psychological portrait of a singer whose career was born of tragedy.

In some ways, Mowgli feels like an origin story. There’s a slight but unmistakable suggestion of a potential sequel to its open-ended climax.

A deliciously diabolical comedy of ill manners and outré palace intrigue.

This familiar-sounding melodrama works because of the extraordinary performance, in the title role, by Alba August, a young actress whose every emotion is made manifest, like passing clouds or a burst of sunshine, on her uncannily expressive face.

As Eleanor, Bonham Carter delivers a sweetly oddball performance playing a high-maintenance but fiercely determined grouch who is mostly impossible to like. Swank, for her part, is no picnic either: A former psychiatric nurse who discovered law later in life, her Colette is a largely charmless workaholic.

Creed II is a respectable if not revelatory sequel to the sequel, even if it lacks its predecessor’s grace and narrative texture.

Much like the painter, who died without the recognition he deserved, the movie approaches greatness without quite achieving it.

Ralph and Vanellope’s growth in the first film was what brought them together. Here, it’s what might force them apart. In Ralph Breaks the Internet, they’re attempting to hold on to one another while also trying to let go, and the film treats that struggle with sensitivity and care (along with some flatulence jokes).

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

“The Mortal Remains” brings all these tales together beautifully, by which I mean in a coda that is somber and hauntingly unsettled, like the last note of a dirge. Its music lingers in the air long after the closing credits.

Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist.

Most winningly, Green Book puts two of the finest screen actors working today in a sexy turquoise Cadillac, letting them loose on a funny, swiftly-moving chamber piece bursting with heart, art and soul.

It proves how smarts and style can elevate even the pulpiest material into something shrewd, socially attuned and bracingly observant. Rarely has a movie been so illuminated by a single character simply breaking into a smile, and rarely has a smile been so unequivocally earned.