Charles Solomon

The previous feature, “Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us” (2018), offered an original and relevant story. ”Mewtwo Strikes Back” feels like poké-business as usual.

Director Kenji Nagasaki pulls out all the stops in the climactic battle, serving up a dazzling array of explosions, lightning, punches, kicks, storm clouds and more explosions. The brilliant palette infuses the sequence with a striking visual beauty, even if the result is a foregone conclusion.

The filmmakers give Hinako weaknesses and doubts as well as strengths and talents. She’s a more complex, fully realized character than many heroines in recent American features.

“Weathering” is a luminously beautiful film. Shinkai’s artists capture both micro- and macroscopic: the wonder of a raindrop acting a prism, casting refractions onto the surrounding surfaces and the glow produced by light shining through clouds.

Zilbalodis’ storytelling is intriguing but oblique.

The Tower is an angry, ambitious and often moving film from an underrepresented group, but its story might have been told more effectively in live action.

Some of the special effects are genuinely spectacular, but the narrative is often difficult to follow.

The nonstop mayhem will delight “One Piece” fans, but the uninitiated may find the film exhausting.

Rezo Gabriadze comes across as a genial, unpretentious man. But the viewer sees too little of the internationally respected artist and leaves feeling shortchanged.

After seeing every leaf on every bush in so many features, it’s fun to sit back and enjoy a film that pushes its look and palette beyond mere reality to create a fantasy world that could exist only in animation.