Tom Russo

At its best moments, Creed II manages a feat nearly as striking as anything that Michael B. Jordan’s Rocky Balboa protégé pulls off in the boxing ring: It doesn’t play all that much like a sequel.

The imaginative, touching, and dizzyingly animated Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sequel with a rich, broad vision that addresses all of these issues faster than you can say Fix-It Felix.

The particulars are often fascinating, but all the solemnity does work against a more rousing finish. The Netflix-distributed feature might equal “Braveheart” (1995) in its gritty authenticity, but that standard-setter’s memorably transportive quality was ultimately a far battle cry from this.

The result is a reworking that feels both unnecessary and uninspired, even if it’s too genial and visually captivating to be flat-out off-putting.

What starts as a modest, agreeable riff on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale — and, more relevantly, Tchaikovsky’s ballet — eventually veers into stultifying action, rote twists, and other badly forced contemporary tweaks.

It’s as if Hill took his familiar sly humor and sneaked it into a segment from Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.”

He (Barinholtz) works hard to creatively lampoon a nation divided, and his first-timer’s ambition and thematic investment are admirable. Disappointingly, though, he lacks storytelling chops, aiming for wildly provocative satire but instead churning out a technically spotty screed.

Go figure that the year’s most outrageously harrowing action movie turns out to be an arthouse doc from National Geographic.

Everyone from Channing Tatum to Danny DeVito to Hollywood transplant LeBron James is here voicing the movie’s winsomely rendered snow creatures, but it’s the creative story more than the routine-if-likable characters that makes this one so engaging.

Tricky territory to navigate, but it ultimately lends some genuine poignancy to the story’s familiar accidental-family themes. If there’s someplace Roth makes a mark, it’s here.

Kendrick’s interplay with Lively crackles, whether they’re going for laughs or something darker. Both are big selling points — as is their director, even if it’s not as advertised.

Notoriously remembered as a mastermind of the Final Solution, Eichmann was also infamous for the just-following-orders dispassion he maintained all the way through his trial, a banality that Kingsley channels expertly.

Some of this smutty irreverence is undeniably hilarious, goosed along by Melissa McCarthy’s game presence as Phil’s estranged LAPD partner and human foil. (In other felt-free casting, Maya Rudolph is equally entertaining as Phil’s trusty secretary, even if Elizabeth Banks and Joel McHale go to waste.)

Berg and Wahlberg deliver a relentlessly paced, addictively slick paramilitary thriller actively catering to fans of gonzo brutality and turbocharged machismo.

The stylishly crafted film mostly succeeds in its engaging (and tagline-ready) ambition to chronicle “how mankind discovered man’s best friend,” even if its naturalistic strengths are swapped out for an exaggeratedly epic tone in the later going.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

It’s surprising to see how straight McGregor plays it for director Marc Forster (the J.M. Barrie portrait “Finding Neverland”), allowing the CG-animated Pooh and friends to endearingly steal the show.

Save for a couple of crisp standalone segments incorporated as tone-setters, Washington’s first-ever sequel is a narratively and visually muddled disappointment, one that regularly confuses numbing brutality with vicariously thrilling righteous vengeance.

It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s superficial, it’s full of likable stars and scientific mumbo-jumbo, and, above all, it taps into the human urge to see big things become little and little things get big. It’s as close to lizard-brain entertainment as superhero blockbusters get, and as the mercury pushes toward 100, I’ll take it.

Character quirks know no limits in the indie dramedy Boundaries, a multi-generational road-trip movie that gives both Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer richly drawn roles to play.

Hawke delivers a strong melancholy variation on his familiar emotional cool as Reverend Toller.

What’s most unexpectedly gratifying is how much energy veteran standup director Jeff Tomsic and his splashy cast pour into ensuring that this is legit entertainment, packed with gonzo wit and even some sentiment.

The drama palpably, potently conveys the group’s misgivings, their jangling nerves, the foolhardy resignation pushing them on despite themselves.

As he did with his "Everest" cast, Kormákur draws a strong, pathos-rich performance from Woodley, filled with moments of her character confronting her own mortality and looking back on safe choices not made. It’s solid drama, but also very slow going.

Veteran London theater director Dominic Cooke (the BBC’s “The Hollow Crown”) and acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan adapt the fractured-narrative feature from McEwan’s book, enhancing the elegant prose with additional bits of rich characterization and handsomely shot scenery.

Thoroughly vanilla comedy, a movie jammed with well-meaning girl power messages but surprisingly little edge.

Keener’s performance keeps the film grounded even as blunt scenes of the opposing camp’s machinations flirt with soap opera villainy.

The pervasive, absorbing bitterness and hurt falter only when the story eases off its characters’ cynical insistence that people don’t change. Sudeikis knows how to play jarringly nasty — see “Colossal,” for one — but choked-up can be a reach here.