Michael Sragow

Kid's stuff: after decades of portentous superhero movies, a little frivolousness can be recharging

Down to earth: in Francesco Rosi's political epic, an archetypal fish out of water comes to feel at home on very dry land

A man and his horse: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s first feature offers an uneven slice of life, cut with a shiv

Out of the blue: lacking a unifying vision and a charismatic star performance, the latest Marvel extravaganza is less a big-screen comic than a patchwork quilt.

Soft boiled: Dev Patel acts with an electric wariness in Michael Winterbottom's otherwise flimsy thriller

Shangri La: Dean DeBlois’s elating cartoon trilogy finds paradise in a story of a boy, a girl, and their giant flying lizards

These arms of mine: the comic-book adaptation is aces as spectacle, but stumbles in scenes about family, romance, and the souls of machines

A flat circle: the 1917 series, screening February 9 in Film Comment Selects, spins tales from the life of The Great Emancipator

A new glossy remake is the first feasible argument for our southern neighbor to pay for building a wall: to keep Hollywood hacks out of the country.

The middle-aged man and the sea: A stellar cast and a froth of plot twists can't keep Steven Knight’s nutty noir afloat

Fighting mad: two brothers take mighty vengeance on an imperialist villain in a kinetic Indonesian action adventure

Small soldiers: Robert Zemeckis reimagines the traumatized world of a Navy veteran who exorcises his demons through customized action figures

Air show: the revisitation of classic material yields holiday delights and a delightful performance from Emily Blunt

Flat-out fun: the late superhero arrival to 2018 turns out to be deliciously entertaining

Woodland creatures: Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s gritty fantasia Sicilian Ghost Story sets a Cosa Nostra kidnapping against a backdrop of expressive menace

School lunches: Anna and the Apocalypse puts a spring in the step of the old zombie song-and-dance

Axe naturally: a 14th-century Scottish hero comes to the screen with grit and grime but not much gravity.

First responder: a hard-charging journalist goes for broke in documentary filmmaker Matthew Heineman's fiction feature debut

Skate kids: Jonah Hill makes his directorial debut with a sensitively observed, modestly conceived story of a skateboarder just growin' up

Mooning about: Damien Chazelle gives us a nobly suffering Neil Armstrong in an outwardly nervy but fundamentally cautious account of the lunar landing