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.