A.A. Dowd

Payne, who never met pathos he didn’t feel inclined to puncture with slapstick humor, has somehow made his best drama and his worst comedy rolled into one.

Adult Beginners, by contrast, is mostly just… nice. Neither dramatic enough to qualify as drama nor amusing enough to completely succeed as comedy, it’s the kind of movie that coasts on pleasantness, content to elicit a few smiles before disappearing from memory banks.

That makes the role well tailored to its occupant: Gere stays within his range of moneyed playboys, while still getting to indulge in the kind of unflattering behavior that a more put-together Richard Gere character would never exhibit.

Locke, as fascinating as it is in theory, never evolves into anything more than a glorified acting exercise.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro) offers some reliably, well, clean hand-to-hand combat without showing us anything we haven’t seen before. Only a mid-film twist and the oddly sympathetic motives of the bad guys distinguish Cleaner from a thousand other movies with basically the same sturdy premise.

The movie reaches for big insights about America’s obsession with winning and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek tragedy.

Maybe Malick has committed so hard to his own principles, artistic as well as ideological, that he’s lost his grasp on drama. I’d love to see him step out of the church he’s built around his work and give us the world again, with or without a script.

As a curious hodgepodge of ideas, White God gets by. But the releasing-of-the-hounds at the start is a bad omen. The film, like the dogs, mostly goes downhill.

There’s a messy, first-draft quality to how the film fits said ideas together, and a general sloppiness to the execution, with Riley botching the timing on too many jokes.

It’s nice to see June Squibb land a starring role for once, but her quest for revenge in this Sundance crowdpleaser is more cutesy than charming.

A comedy that proves that an appealing cast (Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore) and a wonderful premise are no guarantee of big laughs.

Though Peli stages a few fun and creepy effects shots, nothing that happens here couldn’t be surmised from simply reading the film’s title.

While its righteous rage is bracing, fans of the filmmaker Bahrani used to be will mourn the subtlety and careful character development of his early triumphs. His heart remains in the right place, but his head has gone hopelessly Hollywood.

The Trial Of The Chicago 7 wants to bottle the revolutionary spirit of its setting—the take-to-the-streets idealism of the ’60s—but its snappy montage-glimpses of demonstrations verge on costume-party kitsch. The movie is at its best and most persuasive in the courtroom, when Sorkin can draw on the clashes of ideology and personality.

This bombastic bid for respectability mostly left me thinking that their courageous, inspiring inspiration deserved a better movie, one with more nuanced plotting and a less overbearing score.

Stewart never seems to find an emotional reality for the icon she’s playing; the resonance begins and ends with the stunt casting of one hounded target of the bursting flashbulbs as another.

Maybe this all works, accidentally or not, as a time capsule of very contemporary irritation. Will future audiences look back on Locked Down and feel some of our pain, watching two good actors sputter through a simulacrum of cabin-fever conflict?

Capernaum’s neorealist spirit is smothered by its sentimentality and endless string of indignities; it’s as if the film is operating as Zain’s trial defense, every moment making his case that it probably would have been better if he’d never been born.

Benicio del Toro's understated performance as a soft-spoken detective is about the only interesting thing about this new Netflix thriller, which drowns a thin murder mystery in lots of ominous atmosphere.

Give Blair time. He may have a Green Room-grade corker in him yet.

It’s the epitome of the anti-vanity project—a way for a veteran charmer to prove that he has more to offer than charm.

Shiny but not exactly new, Bill Condon’s live-action Beauty And The Beast is a curious nostalgia object, synthetically engineered to reproduce all the same sensations as a 26-year-old movie.

This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.

Directed by Alexandre Moors, who made the D.C. sniper movie Blue Caprice, The Yellow Birds might have used its nonlinear structure to confront us with how war reshapes these young men, putting who they were and who they become into conversation. But the performances don’t capture that psychological change.

The structural gamesmanship is just a smokescreen, a way to obfuscate the pulp nature of what is, ultimately, little more than a glorified, low-aiming potboiler.

For the most part, though, this hour-long curiosity feels like a fans-only doodle, riffing on motifs Joe has done better elsewhere. Even for a filmmaker who takes pride in scaling the fantastic down to everyday proportions, there’s such a thing as going too slight.

What stands out most are the performances, delivered by two actresses capable of generating a little emotion, even in a film that insists on keeping the volume “realistically“ low. The reality between the two of them is the one that really counts.

Lowery, it can’t be denied, has Malick’s moves down pat. It’s the Malick touch that eludes him.

It’s shockingly humorless and glacially slow for a film featuring a bendy boy genius, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a talking pile of stones.

Spaceship Earth mostly skims over both the findings and the failings, and neglects a lot of the logistics—understandable omissions for a two-hour documentary more interested, perhaps, in the social ramifications of those two years behind glass. Not that it totally illuminates that aspect either.

To those outside his bubble, it can look at best like a form of child abuse, at worse like a cult: the nuclear family as survivalist militia.

Barnard, who made The Arbor and The Selfish Giant, has an impeccable sense of grubby pastoral space, and her performers locate some truth in cliché. But this is a kitchen-sink drag.

Happy End is far from the best Michael Haneke movie. But it just might be the most Michael Haneke movie — a kind of grueling greatest-hits collection from the reigning scold of European art cinema.

All of this agony is captured with great skill and artistry. Shot in Cinemascope, in crisp 35mm black-and-white, The Painted Bird is beautiful just to look at, even when its content is unspeakably ugly; there are images that will burn themselves onto your memory, whether you want them to or not.

The movie never becomes truly involving — mostly because it’s hard to get wrapped up in a narrative when you can’t shake the nagging feeling that the rug under your feet is being tugged.

Too bad both actors are stuck in a hollow provocation. Pietà may be all about the burden of debt—financial, spiritual, or otherwise — but it’s the audience that really pays a price.

If Perry’s last film, the throwback psychodrama Queen Of Earth, used Bergman worship as a jumping off point for its own genre games, Golden Exits is just a tin-eared imitation: Interiors remade as a stilted exercise.

Silverman tackles the role with total conviction, which should come as no surprise to anyone who saw her play a similarly unhinged character in "Take This Waltz" — or, for that matter, anyone who’s seen her perform live.

Like "Elysium," this rusty A.I. story is basically just "District 9" with a new coat of paint; it’s distinguished only by the jabbering, irritating personality of its title character.

As an act of storytelling, it’s curiously perfunctory, never rising to the level of effort and care put into creating its cornucopia of visual pleasures.

Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.

No wonder Green Book, which is like an inverted "Driving Miss Daisy" by way of "Rain Man’s" mismatched-buddy road trip, is already earning ovations: Intentionally or not, it flatters the delusion that racism, in its ugliest form, is more of a past-tense problem.

It’s nice to look at, easy to watch, and impossible to remember for the length of a car-ride home.

he performances are strong, and the situation itself presumably carries a harrowing veracity, but an ordeal is about all the movie offers. Shaking your head over and over again is the only suitable reaction.

At least everyone seems self-aware about how much they’re repeating themselves yet again.

Rarely is a film of this budget and scope so proudly difficult to follow.

Cultural authenticity seeps into the cracks of this low-key lowlife drama, whose best attribute is the pungent sense of place it possesses.

With The Monster, writer-director Bryan Bertino plants a prickly mother-daughter drama at the center of a violent creature feature. It’s an intriguing combination in theory, but the individual elements both feel a little half-baked, and stirring them up into one doesn’t help. They’re two mediocre tastes that taste mediocre together.

With 22 July, Greengrass pushes up against the boundaries of respectful representation, traipsing queasily close to outright exploitation with his reenactment of the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 77 people, many of them children.

Conversely, a more straightforward documentary might address the bigger questions Herzog barely grazes in fictionalization. Family Romance, LLC straddles the line between the two tacts and finds no ecstatic truth there.

The movie is more interested in him as a lovable loser, a working-class palooka who stumbled briefly into the spotlight, and Schreiber — bulked up, mustachioed, having a grand time — leans enjoyably into his hangdog mediocrity.

Unfortunately, the script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski is clunky—in the convoluted nature of its reveals and also in the sometimes-baffling behavior on display.

Infinity War inherits plenty of the problems endemic to crossovers: the privileging of quantity over quality, of spectacle over story, and of the shock value of major changes to the status quo over just about everything else.

It’s a movie you’ve seen many times before, just never in the perverse key of Cronenberg.

They’ve chased a valuable science lesson with something that comes closer, occasionally, to a celebrity profile.

Just about everyone and everything in The Way, Way Back feels programmed, as though the film were written using Mad Libs.

For anyone who’s followed Favreau’s career since the mid-’90s, the temptation to read Chef as veiled autobiography will be overpowering.

In exploring how an honest person might compromise her integrity in the face of insurmountable obstacles, The Lesson compromises its own sense of reality; the movie just keeps piling on the misfortune, pushing past believability into what feels like questionably intentional comedy.

No Time To Die is forgettable in all the places that usually count—it’s a Bond movie with little excitement or panache.

Certainly, viewers may feel a kind of seasickness, their stomachs doing somersaults during this supremely discomfiting movie.

1666 offers about the best you could expect from it: a modestly rewarding resolution, like a finale that makes you glad you finished up the season but not convinced you’ll tune in for the next one.

The big finale never reaches "Chuck & Buck" levels of therapeutic catharsis, because Mooney hasn’t really let us see James’ pain, only his gushy wide-eyed innocence, his lovability.

Halloween isn’t explicitly a horror-comedy, but it does have the destructive habit of undercutting its scares with broad laughs, Green and McBride deflating the tension at every turn with goofball asides.

1994 channels that legacy of give and take, between teen horror of the page and screen, into a polished nostalgia object of secondhand thrills, a throwback to a throwback.

Never does it sound much like something grunge fans might like.

As interesting as it is to see the filmmaker move out of his wheelhouse, Tom At The Farm is neither dramatically satisfying nor psychologically convincing. Something was clearly lost in its transition from stage to screen.

At least Long Shot acknowledges, more explicitly than usual, that it’s a kind of adolescent fantasy.

There’s no cliché so corny that Patti Cake$ won’t exploit it for our approval.

You can admire the ambition of The Life of Chuck while still wondering if such a lightly philosophical story needed to make the leap to the screen – or if turning all of its prose into Nick Offerman voice-over was the best move. It’s less an adaptation, ultimately, than a glorified book on tape from a talented King superfan.

Even when the story takes on biblical overtones, the melodrama never blossoms. And in terms of suspense, Gaia doesn’t so much tighten the screws as endlessly turn them in the wrong direction.

The American remake of Speak No Evil mostly recaptures the squirmy dread of its shocking Danish inspiration… until it doesn’t.

Thing is, this third movie plays less like some bookend chapter of a complete saga than a floundering middle season of a television show that’s settled into a formulaic groove—which makes sense, given that each Trip is actually a condensed version of an episodic miniseries that aired on British television first.

Ben Is Back, which buries its promise, premise, and stray traces of insight under a heap of narrative contrivance, leaves you itching for a drama with something solid to actually say about addiction.

Dinosaur 13 reduces a complicated legal quagmire about paleontological ownership to something of a pity party. But hard luck is not the same as injustice.

There’s no doubt that Spielberg has made The BFG his own, drowning everything in the tinkle of a familiar John Williams score and even managing to incorporate a kid in a red coat. But maybe this is one story that didn’t need to become his own, or really anyone else’s. State-of-the-art special effects are no substitute for Dahl’s inviting prose, for the dreams he blew into adolescent imaginations.

To Gordon-Levitt’s credit, he neatly sidesteps the moralizing message his film seems to be building toward. The hero’s problem is not that he jerks off too much; as articulated by widowed, pot-smoking classmate Julianne Moore — the only real human being onscreen — it’s that he’s never actually connected to another person through sex.

Everyone here is stuck in a movie that never lets its emotions breathe, in no small part because its director insists on gussying up a small character drama with plus-sized gestures.

In more ways than one, Catfight lives down to its title. This is a spectacularly petty and mean-spirited comedy that pivots around, yes, two women beating the shit out of each other.

Birth briefly staggers to life when the topic of race comes up — not because that angle on Night hasn’t been covered ad nauseam, too, but simply because it seems to inspire the most provocative discussion.

The irony of Saving Mr. Banks is that it takes this true story of Hollywood conflict, of artistic integrity pitted against studio moxie, and gives it the same warm-and-fuzzy treatment the company gave Poppins. One woman’s failed battle to stop her work from being Disneyfied has itself been Disneyfied.

Alexander Payne’s science-fiction comedy Downsizing is less a fully formed satire than a clever idea stuck in first draft and stretched uncomfortably to feature length.

If you can look past the gallingly obvious and derivative metaphor, Vivarium has its moments of effective "Twilight Zone" creepiness.

The best that can be said for the third, supposedly final chapter is that it jettisons the retracing-our-steps scenario of the 2009 original and its 2011 carbon-copy sequel. There is, in other words, no hangover in The Hangover Part III.

There’s just no real perspective on Buscetta, which separates this brisk but uninvolving history lesson from the truly great mob movies. I was a little bored with it, too, honestly.

The trouble begins when this gaunt, intelligent star is charged with embodying someone lacking in levity, someone burdened with excessive malaise. His deadly seriousness can be deadly dull.

Sometimes resembling a cross between "Winter’s Bone" and "Warrior" — but without the stylized language of the former or the male-weepie conviction of the latter — Out Of The Furnace gets by on the commitment of its cast.

After a briefly discombobulating fake-out twist, Piercing can’t seem to figure out how to advance or complicate its sick-joke premise.

What a pity, then, that almost no imagination has been expended on the narrative.

Derives almost all of its very modest power from its relationship with its better half. McAvoy, turning up the broody charm, isn’t to blame. The trouble is that Conor’s drama, set against the backdrop of a lonely Manhattan, looks even more generic than Eleanor’s.

Pity that Metz exhibits so little interest in delineating the play styles of the players, in capturing what made them the best. Borg Vs. McEnroe all but tells us that we’re seeing the greatest tennis match of all time. But it doesn’t show us.

World War Z bucks the current trend in summer blockbusters by feeling weirdly understuffed. It’s an episodic adventure without enough episodes.

Shelton, who used to make scrappy, wholly improvised indie gabfests, continues to sand down the rough edges of her style, so that each new movie feels a little less distinct — and a lot less transgressive — than the one before it.

In The Earth feeds the indiscriminate appetites of gorehounds and bong-rippers alike. Everyone else may find it as ghastly boring as the violence is just plain ghastly.

What the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lacks is not fidelity, but a spirit of genuine boyish fun.

It may be the only official Star Wars feature that seems concerned exclusively with delivering a no-frills good time. Unfortunately, the film’s idea of a good time includes neither dynamite banter nor particularly memorable action scenes.

Here, it’s hard not to wish Downey were sparring with his costumed comrades again, instead of trading barbs with the far-less-colorful cast members — old and new — of this busy, sporadically diverting sequel.

Blending supernatural hokum with real horrors of U.S. history — namely, the MKUltra experiments performed by the CIA in the 1950s — The Banshee Chapter superficially resembles some lost episode of "The X-Files."

Because the film is meant to resemble documentary footage, West is forced to effectively “play dumb,” disguising his craftsmanship behind a lot of intentionally cruddy handheld camerawork. Still, that’d be less of a problem if the material he was gracelessly filming weren’t such run-of-the-mill claptrap.