It’s the story of a couple of guys who love cars and live to make them go fast: Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and his pal, Ken Miles (Christian Bale). In the mid-’60s, they happen to find themselves the pawns in a war between a behemoth Detroit automaker and a smooth Italian sports car magnate.

The twisty little tete-a-tete is a fine vehicle for the two charming British actors – Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen – but it’s potentially the politest, gentlest movie about a scammer ever.

“Charlie’s Angels” isn’t rocket science, but thanks to a charm offensive of stars, it’s an easy breezy blast of an action flick that delivers as many laughs as it does roundhouse kicks and proves to be another fascinating entry in the Kristen Stewart canon.

The creators of “Playing With Fire,” a clodhopping comedy about California smokejumpers, built in little pauses after many of the film’s sight gags and verbal jokes, presumably to accommodate audience laughter. Bad idea.

A sprightly, attractively composed coming-of-age comedy set in World War II Germany, “Jojo Rabbit” is an audacious high-wire act: a satire in which a buffoonish Adolf Hitler delivers some of the funniest moments; a wrenchingly tender portrait of a mother’s love for her son; a lampoon of the most destructive ideological forces that still threaten society; and – perhaps most powerfully – an improbably affecting chronicle of moral evolution.

Director Louie Schwartzberg, with the aid of gorgeous time-lapse photography and mycophilic talking heads including Michael Pollan, Eugenia Bone and Andrew Weil, covers a lot of ground – pun intended – from mushrooms’ role in developing the human brain to their healing history (think penicillin).

What is the hold that “The Shining” has over us culturally? It’s the popularity of Stephen King, indeed, but it also is, specifically, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. The surreal and disturbing imagery, the unforgettable performances and the film’s hypnotic rhythms have woven their way into our collective unconscious and gotten profoundly stuck there.

In the past couple of years, it seems we all decided to admit that those made-for-TV holiday movies starring D-list celebs were actually pretty fun to watch. Since then, they’ve only exploded in popularity, drawing more and more stars, the networks expanding their seasonal offerings well into autumn. Christmas movies aren’t just a guilty pleasure anymore – they’re a bona-fide booming mini-industry. While Hollywood studios usually release a family holiday movie or two in the vein of “The Family Stone” or “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” each year, Emma Thompson and Paul Feig’s holiday rom-com “Last Christmas” feels much more in tune with the Hallmark Lifetime approach, just with higher-profile stars and a much bigger music budget.

In its combat scenes, “Midway” is a triumph. Though heavily enhanced by CGI, the action is rendered in crisp clarity and breathtaking immediacy, a direct view of the action from the dive bomber’s cockpit careening through smoke and bombs and anti-aircraft fire.

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Former Vanity Fair editor-at-large and documentarian Matt Tyrnauer pulls back the curtain on Donald Trump’s notorious mentor Roy Cohn in the rollicking, salacious documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” a fast and furious portrait that is almost overwhelming in its breadth and depth.

A movie starring Cynthia Erivo – and co-starring Leslie Odom, Jr. and Janelle Monae – cries out to be a musical. But “Harriet,” in which Erivo plays American icon Harriet Tubman, dispenses with interpretive flourishes or showy set pieces simply to tell its story straight and true. That story is of a young woman who was born into slavery and who, in the mid-19th century, dared to escape her owners’ Eastern Shore plantation, travel more than 100 miles on foot to Philadelphia, then dedicate her life to leading more enslaved people to freedom, eventually becoming a leader in the abolitionist and suffrage movements.

In the age of blockbuster superhero entertainment vs. micro-budget indie films, Norton has delivered a movie of another era: a sturdy, wordy politically minded and wholly engaging whodunit.

True to its title, there’s a subtext of fatalism to “Dark Fate” that lends the film, however much of it may repeat the first two, a new tone – one that is even more at war between optimism and cynicism. Sarah Connor may have averted one dark version of the future, but another even darker destiny may be inevitable.

What’s new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and other streaming services.

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson play mismatched lighthouse keepers in a film that essentially functions as a two-man show. Dafoe’s Thomas Wake is the sea dog tasked with overseeing the lighthouse on a remote island off the coast; he’s authoritative, superstitious – and quite flatulent. Pattinson plays a former timberman named Ephraim Winslow who is just looking for an honest wage doing chores and manual labor under Thomas’ supervision.

“Western Stars,” a new documentary co-directed by and starring Bruce Springsteen, swaggers across the landscape like a cinematic epic, but it’s basically a concert flick with some extras. And those extras are not the best things in it.

In this raunchy, ribald, expansive and forgiving ode to moviemaking and self-creation, Eddie Murphy plays the titular comedian with the kind of all-out commitment and panache that made him not only a successful comedian but also a huge movie star 30 years ago.