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An overstuffed follow-up to 2014’s Maleficent (a skillful Sleeping Beauty spin-off), Joachim Rønning’s sequel finds one worthy reason to exist in Michelle Pfeiffer’s wicked Queen Ingrith. As the nemesis to Angelina Jolie’s red-lipped siren, Pfeiffer gives us exactly what we want—the same hissing Catwoman attitude she heated up for Mother! Intimidating in Ellen Mirojnick’s pearl-encrusted costumes, Pfeiffer strides into character: Her Ingrith plots to overtake the realm, poisoning the familial bond between its young queen, Aurora (a graceful Elle Fanning), and her misunderstood godmother, Maleficent (Jolie, glamorous and imposing). Will Ingrith’s villainy destroy the duo’s love, which the first film so thoughtfully built? Even if you have an idea how that question gets answered, Pfeiffer’s deceitful empress (with flower allergies) keeps things entertaining. The rest of the package isn’t as inspired, despite Patrick Tatopoulos’s fanciful production design, which recalls a lesser Avatar, and all the cute, flickering things hovering around. A smitten Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson), engaged to Aurora, sometimes downgrades the otherwise central Maleficent from feared potentate to anxious empty-nester. There’s also an underground clan of creatures that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor’s horned Conall, living in hiding from human threat. It all leads to a noisy finale that wears out its welcome. (You’ll crave for more of the quieter battle from an earlier dinner scene, when Pfeiffer an

It's the laugh that gets you: Joaquin Phoenix’s half cackle, half rasp has all the soothing music of a vulture in a blender. It’ll be ratting around in your head long after the old-school “The End” card flashes up on this unrelenting, grimly funny and brilliantly visceral reinvention of the DC supervillain. Joker is a truly nightmarish vision of late-era capitalism—arguably the best “social horror” film since Get Out—and Phoenix is magnetic in it. He runs Heath Ledger cigarette paper-close as the finest screen Joker. Like everything in this drum-tight movie, the title’s lack of a definite article is no accident: It’s not the fully formed Joker being introduced here, but Arthur Fleck, a man whose ambition to tell jokes professionally is at odds with the living he scraps as a clown for hire on Gotham’s grimy streets. Judging by posters of the movies playing—Excalibur and Blow Out—it’s 1981, but it feels more like the ’70s of Death Wish. He lives with his frail mom (Frances Conroy) in a broken-down tenement, eking out a little joy watching a TV chat show hosted with oily relish by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Arthur’s on seven types of medication and has a neurological condition that causes him to laugh—okay, cackle—uncontrollably. In these domestic early scenes, Phoenix establishes Arthur as a man who sees himself less as an underdog than a mutt waiting to be put down. “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore,” he says. And no wonder: It’s a seriously bleak world he inh

This Jessie Pinkman-centric spin-off is a fun if inert slice of fan service.

A languid, undercooked affair, writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s playful stab at the zombie movie returns the genre to the backwoods America of George Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead and gives it a half-meta reworking. It sprinkles in an ensemble cast to die for, bursts of OTT flesh-chomping gore, nods to zombie classics (look out for Living Dead’s 1967 Pontiac LeMans) and a few big laughs, but its zeitgeist-y concerns and self-conscious final-act twists don’t quite land. It’s a love letter to zombie movies typed in Comic Sans, and it reminds you that Jarmusch’s best work has an invisible rigor, even at its loosest. Sadly, that’s missing here. In the spirit of Romero, the undead apocalypse arrives in the Midwestern town of Centerville via interrupted radio signals, daylight that lasts too long and, most alarmingly for this rural spot, a missing chicken. Is the cranky hermit outside of town to blame? (He’s played by Jarmusch lucky charm Tom Waits, 50 percent gravel-voiced omniscience, 50 percent beard.) Disturbing news bulletins about fracking knocking the Earth off its axis point to a bigger story. But at the urging of an obnoxious MAGA type (Steve Buscemi), cops Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) investigate, with the latter oddly certain that it all points to an invasion of the undead. Sure enough, said invasion arrives, presaged by a zombie Iggy Pop and a particularly chewy scene at the town’s diner. The shuf