Todd VanDerWerff

Director Chiemi Karasawa is on her best footing when she deals with Stritch not as a Broadway icon and occasional film and TV star, but rather as a woman approaching 90 and holding on thanks to lack of filtering and an indomitable will to perform.

Director David Leitch is a little too nonchalant about the gigantic pile of corpses his heroine leaves in her wake. But damned if it doesn’t look cool as hell. And sometimes in life...all you want is something that looks super awesome, regardless of whether it makes any sense. Atomic Blonde manages that trick in spades.

It's a lot of fun. But there's also something very bizarre about Kingsman. Namely, its politics are incredibly strange, wildly vacillating between a kind of egalitarian progressivism and the equivalent of shrugging wildly and saying, "Who cares! The status quo is fine!"

Burdened with tangential musings, The Cold Lands is at its most effective when grappling with those who believe themselves so self-reliant that they refuse help from anyone—be it government, charity, or just a well-meaning friend.

Like all Pixar movies, Cars 3 is gorgeous...but like most of the studio’s 2010s output, its storytelling is perhaps too complicated to really register. The movie is constantly trying to outmaneuver itself, leading to a film that’s pleasant but not much more.

Just like the first movie, the film’s politics are all over the place in a way that should be fun but ends up feeling distracting. Yet it’s hard to hate this movie too much. It has a weird generosity toward its audience. It keeps giving and giving and giving, until you’re overstuffed. It’s a Thanksgiving feast movie, where you’re vaguely impressed at all of the effort, even if the individual elements leave something to be desired.

There’s fun to be had in The Last Knight, if you can find it among the chaos — and if you can remember it after the fact.

Dead Men Tell No Tales tries to serve far too many masters with its story.