Todd Gilchrist

Unfortunately, what audiences get from Luhrmann is simply excessive: his fast-cutting super-montage style overpowers the subject matter, and the result is an impressionistic, jumbled highlight reel of Presley’s many accomplishments, despite vivid recreations by actor Austin Butler as The King.

Answer the call of The Black Phone if you dare. Just be aware that, much like the severed cord dangling underneath the device, there’s a crucial disconnect between the provocative ideas that it sets up, and what it ultimately delivers.

There are four or five “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” jokes to make here that would suffice as a perfect encapsulation not only of this film, but of the totality of the franchise, but suffice it to say you would be better served by going outside and using your imagination to explore dinosaur-themed ideas than watching how these people spent the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to use theirs.

Joe Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) matches his well-established architectural precision with suitably nostalgic but never pandering emotionality, while Cruise commands the screen in a performance that leverages his multimillion-dollar star wattage to brighten the entire film.

The film feels like a collection of ideas that never add up.

Writer-directors Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite give us two unreliable narrators to follow on a similar, intertwined path to personal, earth-shattering discovery in The Aviary—and the results make for a visually striking, sonically spooky, and deeply unnerving picture.

Ambulance is boilerplate Michael Bay, a thrill ride full of muscle and testosterone and style.

Working with what feels like a larger budget and fewer origin-story obligations, returning screenwriters Pat Casey, Josh Miller, along with franchise newcomer John Whittington, create a globe-trotting adventure that touches on fun ideas for viewers of all ages, even if the film is too long and jarring to stick the landing.

Director Daniel Espinoza stacks vampire cliches with horror classic visuals in a lackluster, but hardly disastrous, Spider-Man spinoff.

As a romantic comedy, 7 Days hardly circumvents a cinematic lexicon of time-honored tropes, but its skill in dismantling stereotypes, sexist beliefs, and even the process of falling in love offers a fresh and charming rejoinder to the cynicism of both its own genre and the emerging repetition of pandemic-set films.

Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, both terrific in their roles, play the couple around whom the film’s meditation on modern sexual relationships revolves, while Lyne proves not only that he can film hot scenes unlike almost anyone in the business, but inject them with a psychological sophistication that complicates their (and our) postcoital bliss.

Whether or not the film necessarily works as a narrative feature, Gainsbourg manages to peer inside her mother’s life and lifestyle with an honesty that should make audiences nervous and envious at the same time, seeking answers we may want from our parents but are afraid of enough to be reluctant to ask.

While you’re languishing in the performances and period detail, West is sneaking up to pull the rug out from beneath you, or to raze some outdated cliché. X is bloody, ballsy fun.

With Pattinson glowering beneath his cowl, Reeves creates a Batman whose psychology is at least as interesting as his crime-fighting activities, for the first time in a long time.

Since making his debut with “Zombieland,” director Ruben Fleischer has developed an aptitude for cheerful proficiency (if not a ton of discernible personality) that he deploys to great effect in this brisk pastiche, especially with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg bickering their way through one set piece after another.

Blacklight is an unsurprisingly tepid action thriller which extends this odd phase of Neeson’s career, but the best thing that can probably be said about it is that it’s not materially worse than most of the others.

The control and confidence of its form, paired with an emotionality that is at once effortless and irresistibly powerful, makes the film feel to the audience the way those pointed and yet somehow ephemeral clips in Yang’s memory feel to Jake. In preying on a sensation that’s only indirectly remembered, the impact it makes becomes unforgettable.

Vaughn’s third installment in this series is ultimately a pretty lousy movie; again, better than the last one, but that isn’t much of a compliment.

It’s a story ripped from at least a few years of headlines, and a subject about which there has been much debate. It may or may not come as a surprise, then, that a single two-hour film fails to sufficiently capture its complexities, even working from a compelling premise with a gifted cast.

On a level of sheer cinematic flourish, Miranda’s adaptation is a triumph; he really harnesses Larson’s songs for the screen and gives them tremendous life, whether or not you’d seen them before on stage.

Greene’s film explores not just the ability of art to repair emotional and sometimes physical injuries but also the resiliency of the human spirit and the solidarity of a group of individuals collaborating to provide comfort for themselves and each other through shared, unimaginable pain.

Without the willingness to connect the dots between his very powerful examples, Chandler creates the opportunity to indict America’s culture of violence and then disappointingly misses his shot.

Committed performances by Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons and extraordinary young actor Jeremy T. Thomas vividly communicate the deeper emotional stakes of Antlers, if somewhat unfortunately without adding an ounce of fun or excitement to its mythmaking.

The filmmaker’s juxtaposition of overworked physicians and desperate patients offers a concentrated and intimate look at the bottomless, unimaginable depths of loss as well as the indefatigable reservoir of hope that sustains humanity during its darkest moments.

Its feverishly edited volume of concert footage and first-person interviews occasionally delivers a slightly dizzying chronology of Bernstein’s life and times, but Tirola does an exceptional job of showcasing the irrefutable truth that he contained a few more multitudes than most.

Even if it was long overdue, or maybe precisely because it was, “Black Widow” still felt like the remnant of a timeline before heroes had reached total market saturation. “Shang-Chi,” by comparison, feels like the new beginning that its predecessor was meant to be, as much as anything, because it truly ventures in a new direction — building distantly on the world that has now become common moviegoer knowledge, but adding stylistic flourishes and an unhurried pace from Cretton that suggests it’s content to be its own story instead of a cog in a larger machine.

Ultimately, Campbell’s film fails because it can’t decide whether to be cheeky escapism or a thoughtful character study, instead landing in between with something repetitive and too often a little dull.

The filmmaker’s diminishing capacity for recognizing naturalistic human behavior once again presents a problem when the time comes for audiences to relate to, much less care about, characters put through the paces of another elevator pitch that he never develops into a compelling story.