“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” might be the only superhero movie in recent memory besides its 2018 predecessor, “Into the Spider-Verse,” to inspire you to leave the theater waxing rhapsodic to the people you came with about how great it looked. The animated sequel — a format surprisingly lonely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — is a perfect union of cinema and comic-book style. It’s determined to dazzlingly restate, in a visual sense, what people mean when they talk about art’s limitlessness. It’s thrilling to watch the movie giddily hopscotch aesthetic modes, from Lego-world blockiness to washed-out pastel to dot- and thick black line-heavy mid-century aesthetics, as its multiverse-traversing requires. “Across the Spider-Verse” reminds you why animation is probably the most effective host for superhero drama: it’s the medium where one is arguably readiest to accept credulity-stretching. When you respond to hand-drawn people the way you might emoting flesh and blood, you can believe practically anything. Amid a superhero-movie landscape where staleness permeates, where phoning it in is the vibe, it’s nice to get something like “Across the Spider-Verse.” It’s been made with true flair; it’s genuinely visually inventive.

Little of what “Across the Spider-Verse” has in visual electricity is matched in its storytelling, though. Like basically all superhero movies, no dramatic beat or arc, no matter how shiny the packaging, doesn’t feel blandly familiar — worked out within an inch of its life. Especially during its final section, that roteness can throw the nearly two-and-half-hour-long movie into tedium even when it’s energetically presenting us with yet another visual eyeful. (I also struggle to care much about superhero mythology and its endless permutations; “Across the Spider-Verse,” because why wouldn’t it, is engineered for the people who react oppositely when presented with both.) 

“Across the Spider-Verse” begins a little more than a year after the action of the first movie. Its 15-year-old Spider-Man, a.k.a. Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), this time becomes privy to a secret Spider-Man society of sorts whose members are made up of Spiderpeople across different universes. They frequently band together to not merely keep order in their own worlds but also ensure that there isn’t any meddlesome cross-contamination — something many villains tend to find a way to do to sow chaos. Exhortations by web-slinging colleagues that Morales not mess with the “canon” is, on the one hand, an effective metaphor for his desire to live unencumbered by expectation, to chart his own path. On the other, it’s a wearyingly brazen method for Marvel to introduce new properties that it can later potentially exploit, as it’s wont to do.

“Across the Spider-Verse”’s primary villain calls himself the Spot (Jason Schwartzman). A former scientist, he’s given himself that name because, after an explosion in the lab he worked for, he was left able to spontaneously create portals with his hands. (He learns to take advantage of that in a broader, more multiverse-endangering sense in the course of the movie, which takes him from villain of the week to a colossal, prismatic threat.) He’s determined to bring Spider-Man down because he had an inadvertent hand in the accident responsible for what he looks at, at first, as a curse.

I think I’m getting that all right. Most intelligible in this pinballishly plotted movie is its more basic human conflicts, which are too facsimiled in feeling to have much of an emotional effect anymore. There’s Miles wanting more than anything, but not being able, to tell his doting parents (Luna Lauren Vélez and Brian Tyree Henry) about his identity so they can better understand why he’s flaking on them all the time. And there’s Miles more than anything wanting to romance his previous-movie love interest, Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). She’s also part of the spider network — she’s a Spiderwoman of sorts, sleek in white-hooded getup stylishly blotted in girlish pink — and she’s struggling with problems of her own, mainly her police captain father’s (Shea Whigham) almost rabid hungriness for Spiderwoman’s capture. He’s naturally oblivious to the connection. 

“Across the Spider-Verse” is best when it’s most playful, a trait common among superhero movies with heady doses of seriousness. Its sweetest spot comes in the middle, when it’s introducing, with cheeky aplomb, alternate-universe Spider-Men, like a beautifully maned, dripping-with-swagger one living in a Mumbai-Manhattan hybrid and another hailing from the U.K. that could be best described as Spider-Man being as good at spinning webs as out-Sex Pistoling the Sex Pistols. It’s a disappointment when “Across the Spider-Verse” ends with a cliffhanger, a move about which I might not have been as unhappy had I not just groaned at the one capping off “Fast X” a few weeks ago. I assume part three will contain much more of the downcast earnestness that so often makes “Across the Spider-Verse” a drag, though maybe I’ll be surprised: anything is possible when there’s a multiverse to explore.

ON JUNE 3, 2017, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old woman working for the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation as a translator, was arrested on suspicion of leaking to The Intercept an NSA report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. (The report suggested hackers in the country had gained entry into voter-registration data through an email-phishing scheme.) Winner was convicted in 2018, then sentenced to more than five years in prison as part of a plea deal. 

A new movie, “Reality,” takes another look at what happened to Winner, though not through dramatization allowing for some subjective reexamination. In a nifty change of pace from standard-fare biographizing, the movie proclaims at its start that the dialogue performed by its three principal actors — Sydney Sweeney as Winner and Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton as the FBI agents interrogating her at her sparsely decorated home in Augusta, Georgia — is taken entirely from an audio transcript. (The movie originated in 2019, when its director, Tina Satter, first introduced it in dramaturgical form at the Vineyard Theatre.) This no-frills film’s stage origins are obvious; it would probably be a lot more sweat-inducingly tense in the cold and claustrophobic darkness of a theater. But “Reality” still works as a chillingly concise thriller made eerier by the fact that we’re seeing something close to exactly how it had happened — something you aren’t accustomed to when watching movies that source their dramas from life. The movie’s title thus works twofold: to signify that this is a portrait; to indicate that what we’re about to see is almost entirely the truth as it unfolded.

One may more than likely desire more details than received, namely more context into who Winner is and how, exactly, she conceived of ultimately beneficial actions when not under a microscope requiring selective word choice that would prove to not actually matter that much. But we do get some tastes in it in the little heartbreaks, from her having to make pleasant small talk with men who don’t have her best interests in mind to worrying about the well-being of her shy pets while she’s grilled, what’ll happen to all the people who’re showing up for the yoga class she’s leading tomorrow. 

It goes without saying that “Reality”’s success is contingent on Sweeney. She’s proven herself a major talent on the excellent “The White Lotus” and the generally bad (but compulsively watchable) “Euphoria” — both of which, like “Reality,” are Max properties. But she’s never had a part this verbose, this emotionally tricky. How does one, as an actor — a job that amounts to high-level lying — approach a part that requires you to not just obfuscate truths but obfuscate true emotion in front of scene partners? It turns out that Sweeney, truly magnificent in the movie, knows exactly what to do.

This column originally appeared in 425 magazine.