What a waste of a superb actress. Buckley almost makes Men worth sitting through. Almost.

The series’ many diehard fans will still, and should, flock to their beloved Downton and its denizens. But, as a standalone film, the fatigued period drama goes in one era and out the other with little to add.

The editing of the action sequences — and let’s face it, they’re the heart of the movie — is terrifically effective. Speed is one thing. Clarity is another. Top Gun: Maverick has both.

Hurwitz takes a terrific subject and treats it with undisguised, and justified, affection.

A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.

Strange’s superpowers are many. So are Cumberbatch’s, and one of them is making sneering seem practically jolly.

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

The Bad Guys takes the cute kid with a fishing pole in the DreamWorks logo and replaces him with a rather raffish-looking wolf who sneaks his way up onto that crescent moon. Right off the bat, we’re being told to expect irreverence and inventiveness. Those expectations will be met.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

Nicolas Cage has had one of the stranger careers in Hollywood history. Considering Hollywood history, that’s saying something. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, with its splendidly winking title, trades on that strangeness.

It’s a happy task to report that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a marked improvement on “Crimes.”

Ultimately, Father Stu is a movie about faith, but some kinds of faith have limits. So does casting. Wahlberg as a seminarian is one kind of stretch.

The movie is what it is: relentless, shameless, and purely as an exercise in technique almost dementedly skilled. A Bay explosion explodes, a Bay collision collides, and Ambulance has both in abundance. For some viewers, the result will be 2 hours and 16 minutes of movie heaven. It might make others want to call for an ambulance.

The filmmaking is stylish yet impersonal — or can true style be impersonal? Maybe that’s why proficiency is a better word. A general slickness obtains.

In his last movie, The King of Staten Island (2020), Apatow was stretching, both emotionally and tonally, and it largely worked. Here he isn’t, and it doesn’t.

This is movie as inundation. It’s daring, dashing, often delirious — except that the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels, as they like to bill themselves) keeps the delirium under just enough control.

Even at 104 minutes, practically a short by superhero-movie standards, Morbius feels draggy.

As in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), about the last day of school and first night of summer vacation in a Texas town in 1976, Apollo 10½ maintains a wondrous balance between Lone Star specific and anywhere-in-America general.

Sometimes it works — let’s say 12 percent of the time — and The Lost City can actually be deft and imaginative. Unfortunately, that leaves 88 percent which doesn’t.

Not to get all Aristotelian about it, but for a plot to be more than just a succession of incidents, it needs some kind of mindful opposition to the protagonist’s efforts. This “Infinite Storm” lacks.

The Outfit would be a splendid thing if limited to Rylance’s voiceover and long lingering shots of him working with fabrics.

Open-endedness in a narrative can be a good and challenging thing; or it can be a sign of having gotten in too deep and not being able to figure out how to get out. “Get Out” knew how to get out. “Master” doesn’t.

For a stylish thriller to work, it needs to be at least a little bit stylish and offer an occasional thrill. Deep Water does neither.

From the texture of red panda fur to the detailing of a Toronto streetcar, “Turning Red” is a feast for the eyes. But the plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards.

The movie has an unhurried rhythm, not slow, but unpressured. It’s a visual equivalent of the clacking of the railroad tracks.

With so much going on, that means a lot of balls need to be kept in the air. Some of them drop. Of course they do: The Adam Project is entertaining but no masterpiece. What’s unusual, and impressive, is that the dropped balls often keep bouncing. That’s a tribute to the movie’s wit, energy, and imaginativeness.