A.A. Dowd

A film that’s a lot like the last one, just not quite as funny or endearing. If you loved Goon, you’re gonna kind of like Goon: Last Of The Enforcers.

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

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.

Stripping away almost all traces of movie-star glamour to reveal the naked, nervy talent underneath, Pattinson finally bursts out of the chrysalis of his pin-up boy celebrity. The metamorphosis from YA heartthrob into electrifying character actor is complete.

Like the "Conjuring" films, Annabelle: Creation is a symphony of cheap tricks; its scares are strictly of the funhouse variety, not the keep-you-up-for-days kind, but they’re executed with precision and panache.

Come for the breathtaking architectural scenery, stay for the likable pair staring up at it.

Driven by another of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ murmuring folk soundtracks, Wind River turns out to be the weakest of Sheridan’s loose trilogy — the one with the thinnest characterizations and the toughest time disguising its subtext as plainspoken townsfolk rapport.

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.

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

Landline rarely feels less than truthful, but there’s also something a little sitcom-easy about its storytelling.

The real shame is that Joey King got yanked into this cut-rate crap.

Get on the wavelength of this mesmerizing, singularly unusual genre experiment and the undead being at its center stops looking so silly.

Much of the film’s infectiously youthful spirit comes courtesy of its star. At 21, Tom Holland is only a hair younger than Toby Maguire was when he first donned the tights.

Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom.

Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.

What this Beguiled has done is deepen the material’s implicit wellsprings of loneliness and longing, mitigating some of the inherent sexism by attempting to genuinely grapple with the desires of its cooped-up characters. It’s “tasteful” hothouse pulp, if such a thing is possible.

There was more than the usual dating-scene obstacles threatening their future together. Collaborating on the screenplay for The Big Sick, Nanjiani and Gordon have made a perceptive, winning romantic comedy from those obstacles, including the unforeseen emergency that provides the film its title.

The actors navigate their uncertain motivations with finesse — especially Asano, who captures not just the shell-shocked daze of someone trying to readjust to life on the outside but also a carefully, unnervingly suppressed wellspring of resentment.

The best thing that can be said about Cars 3, the studio’s dispiritingly formulaic return to a world of talking jalopies, is that it isn’t another feature-length showcase for the limited comedic stylings of Larry The Cable Guy.

The Mummy is crippled by a failure of imagination.

Night School takes the human-interest route instead, and while that doesn’t allow for the most complete vision of the program, it does put a touchingly human face on the movie’s opening statistic—as well as grant a sliver of hope for those 1.2 million American kids who abandon their education every year.

You’ll believe you’re watching two people who love each other but no longer know how to live with each other. You may still wish Band Aid better distinguished their relationship.

The best thing about Wonder Woman, the overlong and intermittently enjoyable new DC superhero spectacular, is Wonder Woman herself.

In its best moments, The Wall is just a movie, a tense and nasty black-box thriller that conveys its politics through the microcosmic stakes of its life-and-death scenario. Pity that when the characters open their mouths, they sometimes unleash some very heavy-handed artillery, their speech coated too often in cliché.

Turns out that, every once in a while, wedding something old to something borrowed can make something new.

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.

The Dinner wants to chill bloodstreams by revealing what decent, civilized people — the kind that adopt children from other countries, consider their politics liberal, and wine and dine in high class — are truly capable of. But as food for thought goes, that’s pretty lukewarm.

Individual personalities emerge, none more magnetic than Khaled Omar Harrah, who gained international recognition in 2014 for the rescue of a 10-day-old baby.

All the comic-book elements are accents; what we’re really watching is the highly conventional, highly familiar tale of a good guy trying to extricate himself from a bad situation, the life of crime he’s fallen into to provide for his family. There is a formula here. It’s just had a Tony Stark suit of armor thrown on top of it.

This is the second time Lee has filmed one of Smith’s plays, and like A Huey P. Newton Story, about the Black Panthers founder, it’s more of a valuable document of an event than a full-fledged movie.

The film ends on a strangely moving theatrical exercise, as the various performers gather together on a soundstage recreation of the Ramsey home to dramatize all the major theories in tandem, creating an overlapping spectacle of speculative horror.

It’s more of a gently comic character sketch in boxing trunks.

Fun, often funny, but about as disposable as an empty clip. We already have a Guy Ritchie. We don’t need another one.

What’s surprising about A Quiet Passion, given the writer-director’s own incurable melancholy, is how lively, how flat-out funny, it frequently is. The film sometimes flirts, even, with becoming a full-on comedy of manners, at least before characters start keeling over and breathing their last breaths.

This handmade approach is a big part of the film’s DIY charm. It’s also a perfect match for the story, which seems to have been pulled, too, from the messy locker of teen-boy imagination.

In a sense, what we’re watching is a classic con-artist movie, built around someone who plies his shady trade not for money but esteem—the feeling that he matters, that his name carries weight.

It’s probably worth noting that the whippersnapper behind the camera is none other than one-time sitcom star and indie darling Zach Braff. Did he owe someone a favor, or is this his attempt to break into the studio system he scorned with his last feature, the gooey Kickstarted passion project "Wish I Was Here"?

In the end, it’s the hard questions that linger, disquietingly unanswered.

Whatever imprint Queen Of The Desert makes belongs mostly to Kidman, who stresses Bell’s compassion, her fearlessness, her eponymous regality.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a clammy hand on the back of the neck, a chill running down the spine, a shot of ice water straight to the veins. Every moment, almost every shot, has been carefully calibrated to stand hairs on end.

At the very least, its central mystery keeps you guessing, right up until a final turn that’s nearly as clever as it is convoluted.

Gage leans on the bright personalities of her subjects, while using roving handheld camerawork, smears of big-city color, and a shallow depth of field to capture some of the romantic grandeur they see in the world. All This Panic feels like a gift from her to them. Fortunately, we get to enjoy it, too.

Life is a B movie on an A budget, an old-fashioned creature feature that delivers its cheap thrills expensively.

It’s a gamble, building a comedy around a character this boorish.

The Belko Experiment teeters between “fun,” gory brutality and a more seriously disturbing variety — the latter epitomized by the film’s centerpiece, a chillingly organized process of elimination that echoes mass shootings and historic Final Solutions in equal measure.

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 stunt-driven nonfiction project rearranges the well-reported dirt on the church, placing it into the context of something considerably less useful: a documentary about how hard it is to make a documentary about Scientology.

Skull Island has a lot of globe-trotting fun assembling its team of expendables.

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.

What really stinks about Before I Fall is that it zaps all the fun and humor out of its time-bending premise, leaving behind a lot of moping to randomly selected pop cues.

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

What’s special about Logan is that it manages to deliver the visceral goods, all the hardcore Wolverine action its fans could desire, while still functioning as a surprisingly thoughtful, even poignant drama—a terrific movie, no “comic-book” qualifier required.

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

Wildly entertaining.

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.

Equal parts baroque fairy-tale, atmospheric mystery, and hideous body-horror nightmare, the film puts what could have been a cost-effective genre exercise on steroids, giving life to a two-and-half-hour, R-rated Frankenstein monster.

The cheesiest thing about it is the punny English-language title with which it’s been saddled. Otherwise, Land Of Mine is tough and admirably grim, turning a harrowing history lesson into a study in how the battles of wartime don’t always cease with the ceasefire.

Rings doesn’t end up doing much with its fresh ideas. Instead, it transforms into a kind of remake of a remake, borrowing not just the washed-out look of Verbinski’s movie—lots of blue hues and overcast skies—but also its basic plot structure, which was itself lifted from the Japanese original.

Chelsom applies the middle-school-dance sentimentality with a ladle, leaning heavily on the tinkle of an overbearing score and a soundtrack of generic, cost-efficient pop cues.

Dark Night isn’t really a polemic. It’s a mysterious elegy for a community on the verge of a nightmarish crucible.

Try as its talented cast does to pump some life into these desperate archetypes, it’s impossible not to draw unflattering comparisons with other, better films.

On top of the general hoariness, this is also an uncommonly, at times unbelievably inept movie; from its acting to its script to most of its technical aspects, it feels barely fit for the big screen.

Between Us is most compelling when it’s putting Feldman and Thirlby one on one, to talk about or around what ails their characters, in revealing tête-à-têtes or confessional voice-over.

In showing us the interest one man takes in everything around him, he’s suggesting that living a life of simplicity and security can be conducive to beautiful expression—even, or perhaps especially, in a place as ordinary as Paterson.

While Beginners unfolded almost entirely from the point of view of its directorial stand-in, 20th Century Women creates a more generous equilibrium of perspective.

Barry doesn’t so much offer glimmers of the man Obama would become as lay experiential groundwork for his later life choices.

What the two actors lack in vocal polish they make up for in commitment — and chemistry. La La Land is the third film to romantically pair Gosling and Stone, after "Crazy, Stupid, Love" and "Gangster Squad," and that history of onscreen relationships fortifies their playful rapport:

Assembling a whole comedy festival’s worth of very funny people isn’t a foolproof recipe for hilarity, but it should assure at least a decent number of laughs. Whether Office Christmas Party clears that very low bar depends on how generous you want to be — in this season of generosity — with the definition of “decent number” and “laughs.”

The Eyes Of My Mother is a grotesque, depraved genre movie with the skin of an art film pulled tightly over its bones. If Ingmar Bergman had helmed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," it might look something like this exquisite nightmare.

Jackie shows us the facade and the beneath, which is just one way this boldly off-kilter movie puts its biopic brethren to shame.

The heist-movie plot, the bawdy gags, the ironic repurposing of old holiday-season chestnuts: They’re all here, hastily stuffed into a new package.

Zemeckis has fashioned an unfashionable throwback, and if Allied doesn’t land the gut-punch it winds up to deliver, there’s nevertheless plenty to admire in a blockbuster craftsman and two beautiful stars paying tribute to the spirit of an older Hollywood.

Manchester By The Sea sweats the big stuff and the small stuff, and that’s key to its anomalous power: This is a staggering American drama, almost operatic in the heartbreak it chronicles.

Bleed For This looks at Vinny Paz and sees only unshakable determination, and though there’s a certain queasy, even darkly comic thrill to seeing the man (courageously? foolishly?) bench press his injuries away, Teller can’t make much of a character out of nothing but raw conviction and a spectacularly crappy mustache.

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.

Arrival has come, like a visitor from the cosmos, to blow minds and break hearts.

While one would have to be an unabashed bigot not to be moved by the Lovings’ plight, concluding that it’s not so easily dramatized requires no such prejudice. Quiet dignity in the face of adversity doesn’t make for an enthralling couple of hours.

“Cool enough” doesn’t do justice to this blockbuster’s city - and reality-bending set pieces. “Awe-inspiring” is closer.

Perkins commits even harder to his singularly strange approach to the genre, turning a simple ghost story into an exercise in extremely prolonged unease. It could give Norman Bates the willies.

A fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off.

This is a memory we’re watching, so of course it’s going to be vaguely distorted, its cracks plugged by cliché. Even if you buy that, though, American Pastoral still gives off the strong impression of a rich, complicated story that’s been flattened of its nuance.

Moonlight lets us see Chiron, to see his silent heartache written across three different faces, and that seems a hell of a lot better than good.

Zombie’s new movie, 31, is all attitude. It’s also the worst thing he’s ever made—interminable, incoherent, and devoid of suspense.

From its thinly sketched teen protagonist to its deluge of hero-will-rise clichés, Max Steel evinces all of the imagination and ambition you’d expect from a movie based on a bestselling line of action figures.

Like a lot of really strong short story collections, Certain Women is greater than the sum of its parts, even if one of those parts is also significantly greater than the others.

At various times, The Accountant aspires to a slick corporate-espionage thriller, a no-nonsense action flick, a tortured family drama, a quirky romantic comedy, and an earnest PSA about autism. At nearly all times, it’s preposterous.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and the film can be as exhausting, in its flood of information, as it is exhaustive. But DuVernay keeps it all chugging and churning along, propelled by the force of her montage and the sheer volume of damning, gripping material.

Nate Parker’s film on Nat Turner, imperfect though it is, deserves to be seen.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Newtown is neither adventurous nor unconventional. It doesn’t need to be; no documentary this emotionally direct, this emotionally draining, requires bells and whistles.

There’s still something exciting about seeing familiar tropes placed in an unfamiliar context — in this case, a nation ravaged by violent conflict and stifled by fundamentalist law.

Masterminds leans heavily on its cast of comic ringers—Ken Marino as a yuppie neighbor, Jason Sudeikis as a cavalier hit man, Leslie Jones as an irate federal agent—without giving them anything especially funny to say or do.

The problem is that everything fun and resonant about the movie (like a boy whose eye works as a movie projector, unspooling his dreams onto the wall) ends up feeling rather ornamental.

For once, the frat boys are depicted not as lovable dolts or harmless pranksters, but as sadistic bullies. Likewise, their excessive initiation rites are played not for lowbrow comedy, but for something closer to horror. This is basically the anti-"Animal House."

Blair Witch will make popcorn fly. But it won’t make anyone believe.

What keeps Kelly honest is the wealth of authentic detail he sprinkles throughout.

Trouble is, Yoga Hosers isn’t really a movie. It’s a quarter-to-1:00 a.m. SNL sketch, nightmarishly distended into oblivion. It’s a corny Canuck joke, told for 88 surreally unfunny minutes. It has a target demographic of one: He wears hockey jerseys and, again, loves his daughter.

If the drama is purely abstract, Vikander didn’t get the memo. Even as her storyline takes on the baggage of metaphor, she plays the emotions real and raw and close — her Isabel visibly brightening as she reads her first love letter from Tom or crumbling as a terrible loss dawns upon her. Nothing symbolic there.

The first feature from writer-director Richard Tanne is sweetly speculative historical fiction — a date movie with some very recognizable lovebirds.