A.A. Dowd

As one might expect, it’s not his most focused act of impassioned muckraking.

When the movie does turn to the predatory behavior, it mostly feels like an aside; one gets the distinct impression that the filmmakers had to scramble to insert some uncomfortable new material into their otherwise completed documentary.

Frozen II is just an echo, drawing prospective fans in without finding many new notes to hit.

Better, then, to think of this handsome, inoffensive Little Prince less as an adaptation than as a tribute — one that makes the relationship between the book and those who love it a central focus.

This new Terminator, the first since the dreadfully dreary and Arnold-less "Salvation," is engineered to feel at once eerily familiar and raise-the-stakes fresh.

Watching Onward, it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe Pixar has overplayed the mundane half of its winning equation. They’ve made a movie about looking for misplaced magic in the modern world that, well, kind of misplaces the magic.

Did the super dark times need to arrive at all? If the scenes of shit-kicking naturalism feel authentic, the thriller that replaces them — a kind of junior "A Simple Plan" — relies too heavily on unconvincing psychology.

True to its title, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a mildly inferior sequel, diluting the modest charms of its predecessor. Said charms do remain, however.

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

The film’s aspirations to prestige smother its immediacy, the thrills of the genre it’s supposedly occupying. Antlers fancies itself a message movie, but on that front it’s muddled at best.

Knife + Heart sometimes feels as rough around the edges and inelegantly plotted as its pornos-within-the-movie, but maybe that’s just conceptual consistency.

It’s the kind of vanity-free, dignity-be-damned performance that Nicolas Cage regularly delivers, and by the time Keanu is bellowing hysterically about free pizza, the urge to surrender becomes difficult to resist.

For a good long while, anyway, it does offer the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make a point about society’s ills.

A Glitch In The Matrix unfolds as a flood of exposition and conjecture, accompanied by a gaudy infotainment montage of video-game footage, movie excerpts, and computer-animated recreations.

With her piercing baby blues that never seem to settle on a subject, even when she’s locked in conversation with it, Ronan seems just… off enough to play a vampiric vixen.

The movie is written and directed by the British filmmaker Richard Curtis, who specializes in fantasies — the dozen intersecting rom-coms of "Love Actually" the fairy-tale courtship of "Notting Hill", the endless receptions of "Four Weddings And A Funeral." At a glance, About Time appears to be of a piece with those crowd-pleasers.

The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.

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.

There’s something mildly depressing about viewing petty gamesmanship as the engine that fuels and sustains male friendship. But funny is funny, and Tag gets by, appropriately enough, on the personalities of its stars.

For better and worse, Lee’s Oldboy is a more somber affair.

At its best, The Thoughts That Once We Had functions like a kind of film-buff mixtape, queuing up one magic moment after another. But the quasi-academic aims of the project mute Andersen’s passion; the director must have felt he needed a respectable framework for his cinephilia, but the personal component often seems directly at odds with the Deleuze component.

This psychodrama didn’t go exactly where I expected it would. It didn’t go anywhere particularly interesting either.

A potboiler that doesn’t break any molds or reinvent any wheels. Still, there’s something to be said for setting modest goals and achieving them; if this really was some lost relic of the VHS era, it’d pass the blind rental test: There is a witch, and she’s as creepy as the box art would surely promise.

The eccentric touches—a Wham! musical cue, a dash of screwball body horror—are just accents on a stealth franchise extension. At a certain point, you have to do more than just recognize and point out the mold. You have to actually shatter it.

Jurassic World, a goofy and fitfully entertaining summer movie, understands and even winks at its place in the pecking order of blockbuster sequels.

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.

There’s something a little canned about the film’s emotional arc; the strings show more than they used to on Planet Pixar, even with DeGeneres providing empathy by the gallon.

The Beach Bum, by turn, seems to exist in the hazy headspace of its protagonist, a kindred spirit in less-than-lofty, party-till-you-puke ambition. But there’s a bummer relevance lurking in his fantasy of a rich idiot who does whatever he wants and faces no consequences for his actions.

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.

It’s good for business but bad for drama, and the inelegantly titled Mockingjay—Part 1 suffers from an unavoidable sense of anticlimax. It doesn’t build to an ending so much as just eventually grind to a halt, like a video game demanding more quarters to continue playing.

Waves felt to me like a bitching soundtrack in search of a movie. Maybe I’ll find one on rewatch.

As a showcase for Mikkelsen’s commitment, it’s sometimes gripping...Mads gets to show an intense vulnerability for once. That’s worth seeing, though one wishes Arctic complicated its life-and-death ordeal a little more, or at least varied its obstacles. At a certain point, even raw, screaming endurance isn’t quite drama enough.

Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.

It’s nice to report that Green, Gyllenhaal, and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany hit some grace notes—and plant the germ of some interesting ideas—en route to the expected lifting of spirits.

While I admired the one-day-in-David-Ayer-hell energy of the movie, I also found it bombastic and contrived. It’s the police drama as police baton.

Johnson’s singular charisma—his way with a one-liner, the built-in special effect of his unreal physique—grounds Rampage in a consistent personality, even as the tone veers wildly from broadly comic to selectively sentimental to casually horrifying.

What Leto understands is that the lives of these Russian rock pioneers never approached the excess and flashbulb excitement their American and British counterparts enjoyed. Steadicamming through modest concert venues and studio spaces, the film replaces the melodrama of the typical rock biopic with lots of downtime, spent recording and talking about music.

Mostly, however, This Is Us counts on the musicians to supply the personality—a strategy that makes it feel more like an anonymous mash note than a warts-and-all glimpse behind the curtain. Then again, what warts?

Goldthwait is just having too much fun with his bantering couple and the eccentric, guitar-playing Bigfoot fanatics they encounter; the climax feels like an afterthought, the obligatory mayhem he had to provide as justification for making a shaggy romantic comedy about the cult of Sasquatch.

The result is a monolithic slab of Biblical fan fiction, at once deeply serious and seriously silly. It’s a mess, but at least it’s the mess its creators wanted.

Trier’s first foray into the fantastic—his college Carrie—gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward.

Where it fumbles is in the framing device.

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

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.

Fighting With My Family is a shamelessly formulaic sponsored post of a crowd-pleaser that’s also, in its best moments, a genuinely stirring celebration of chase-your-dreams moxie.

While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance.

The early stretch of the movie is its strongest, as Johnson lays out the bric-a-brac of Bigger’s life, which involves a good deal of code-switching, and carefully tweaks the novel’s key relationships, updating the condescension of his employer’s rich-kid daughter, Mary (Margaret Qualley), to a new era of white guilt and microaggressions.

Set in some indeterminate time and place rarely betrayed by modern technology or dress, The Other Lamb mostly operates in the realm of allegory.

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.

The film is a one-joke comedy, but the joke is decent, and it helps that the actors know how to deliver it.

Sollers Point is easy to admire, abstractly and on principle. But you may still leave wondering if a little melodrama, a little bullshit, might have been preferable.

As a primer on its topic, Inequality For All is informative, plainly argued, and — in some of its more poignant anecdotes — suitably enraging.

If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama.

It’s a true star vehicle, practically a tribute to his enduring appeal. Yet for as comforting as Hanks is in the role, and for as much as he sells the poignancy of the film’s bittersweet final stretch, the film feels almost too built around his signature nobility to ever gain much in the way of actual drama.

Forget the fairy-tale romance between Jane and her hammer-wielding hunk. The real emotional center of the Thor series is this sibling rivalry, more compelling than any climactic battle royale or winking teaser for the next chapter.

Woody, now in his 80s, narrates the movie, which lends it a vaguely, symbolically autobiographical slant.

This stereoscopic IMAX vanity project presents the titular rockers not as men, but as living legends, playing the hits at a gigantic venue, for thousands of bellowing diehard fans. In place of introspection, there is only lionizing spectacle; if Monster laid bare the wounded egos of metal’s biggest stars, Never simply re-inflates them.

The film’s messy mix of flavorful, sometimes over-the-top character comedy and sincere racial politics benefits from the voice of its stars, who also wrote the script.

The subplot involving the production of a simulated, backup lunar expedition never quite takes off, comedically speaking, but there’s plenty of appeal in pairing an uncommonly bubbly Scarlett Johansson with an agreeably earnest Channing Tatum.

The more The Watchers comes together, the less interesting it becomes. It’s a puzzle best left unsolved.

The movie leaps to life whenever the bullets start flying. It's the generic gangland stuff in between that's not up to snuff, even with Hardy lending his trusty gruffness to the haunted-cop boilerplate.

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

From the sincerity of the lead performances to the cartoonish gore offered by Werewolves Within director Josh Rubenn. There are much worse ways to spend Valentine’s Day than a genre cocktail for saps and gorehounds alike.

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.

This buddy comedy lives or dies on your affection for its stars, offering complementary shades of good-natured Bostonian ineptitude.

Better jokes, better imagery, and two (!) inspired comic performances by Jim Carrey give this Sonic sequel an edge on its predecessors.

As a blunt object, a machine built to put nerves on edge and fingers over eyes, Annabelle is still crudely (and cruelly) effective. Fear comes cheap.

McLean puts the pedal to the metal from the start, forgoing suspense in favor of instant, gruesome gratification.

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.

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.

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

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.