A.A. Dowd

At heart, The Rover is something of a buddy road movie, albeit one almost completely devoid of humor.

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

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."

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

Believe it or not, some of this mayhem—muscularly orchestrated by directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, who made 2010’s "Rabies" — does provoke laughter.

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.

The easy elevator pitch on Swiss Army Man is that it’s "Cast Away" meets "Weekend At Bernie’s." Weird as that movie may sound, it’s not nearly as weird as the one actually cooked up by “Daniels,” a.k.a. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the branded directing duo making its feature-length debut.

It’s minor pleasures from a major talent: B-movie fun in the key of Kurosawa.

Holy Hell has an undeniable car-crash fascination, especially once Allen reveals just how deeply this particular phony guru abused the trust of his faithfuls.

As a historical epic, Napoleon is handsome but a little impersonal – you can really feel the absence of texture lost in getting it down under three hours. But between the textbook bullet points, a very funny anti-Great Man biopic peeks through, thanks largely to Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as a Bonaparte who’s more boy than man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For all the fascinating insight the film provides into a musical subculture passing slowly into the archives of history, its melancholy is more universal: Anyone who’s ever devoted themselves fully to a passion, only to discover that the rest of the world barely gives a shit, will smile sadly with recognition.

Make no mistake, this is pure caveman bullshit. Yet it’s caveman bullshit made with style and wit, qualities that extend from its screenplay to its performances to its staging.

The movie itself sometimes feels a bit lobotomized. But never when Goldblum is on screen. He plays Freeman as a deluded fraud, horrifying but a little funny, too, in that stuttering, seductive Goldblum way.

Ready Player One, based on the bestseller of the same name, is a pandering, crassly commercial victory of intellectual property law that’s also, in its best moments, a grand popcorn entertainment, made with skill and wit and even sincerity.

An ambitious, expertly crafted, and admittedly kind of ludicrous horror movie.

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

The most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, with its cock-shot montages and frankly descriptive narration, is how flat-out funny it often is.

Godzilla and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards returns with an original (albeit derivative) science fiction vision: the story of a future war between man and machine, as told through the bond that develops between, well, a man and a child-sized machine. As pure spectacle, The Creator is often jaw-dropping in its imagery, its relatively frugal special effects, and the detailed depth of its futuristic design. It's shakier as drama and sci-fi – and in its sentimental depiction of synthetic humans just trying to live their synthetic lives, a bit out of step with the anxieties of our increasingly AI-dominated age.

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.

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.

For most of its brisk 90 minutes, The Guilty is just Gyllenhaal, in tight close-up, constructing a movie out of sweat and tears alone: a glorified radio play of a thriller whose thrills are generated almost entirely through his reactions.

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.