As much as I wish the filmmaking team had refrained from splitting the story into pieces and delivered one three-hour musical adventure, Wicked: Part One won me over. There is magic here — elements that defy conventional cinematic gravity — and I’m not about to let my reservations bring me down.

While I am as cynical about the current state of the human condition as anyone, Red One taps into something honest and hopeful. Right now, with all that’s going on in the real world, those aren’t emotional states of being I want to take for granted. More importantly, I’d like to believe I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Juror #2 is a bona fide crowd-pleaser that’s guilty of being hugely entertaining.

Venom: The Last Dance is even more gloriously daft than its predecessors were.

Smile 2 made me angry.

Maybe it is appropriate that The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi has made something so perplexingly frustrating, yet still aggravatingly mesmerizing, out of the relationship between young New York real estate developer Donald Trump and firebrand lawyer Roy Cohn.

We Live in Time is undeniably a showcase for Garfield and Pugh’s seemingly unlimited talents. On that front, they, and by extension the film, do not disappoint.

Terrifier 3 is more of an audaciously repugnant test of endurance than it is anything else even moderately substantive. Interested parties already know who they are.

I still don’t think Joker: Folie à Deux works. But because of its ambition, and in large part because it gave me something I felt was worth the time and effort to think about after I left the theater, I’m willing to give Phillips and his creative team props for shaking things up.