A.A. Dowd

Unfortunately, this handheld coming-of-age story is frequently interrupted by variably convincing stretches of channel surfing, as though someone recorded over much of the former with the latter. And even with pros like Charlyne Yi and Kerri Kenney lending their deadpan chops, real weird TV is funnier. Weirder, too.

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.

Here and there, some of this starts to feel a little less like homework and more like fun. Though part one used up many of the good monsters—like Medusa and the hydra—part two is a fleeter entertainment, free of origin-story requirements.

If it’s possible to be both impressed and appalled by a movie’s pull-no-punches savagery, Maniac earns that dubious distinction.

[An] unconvincing, oppressively somber take on the Lizzie Borden story.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wahlberg, delivering a performance that feels like community service, just isn’t up to driving a drama whose conflict is almost entirely internal; his default setting of sneering irritation is the wrong tool for the job. It leaves you wondering if this should have more fully been Jadin’s story, especially given the sensitivity of Miller’s turn.

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

The result, unfortunately, is a movie featuring a teenage hero who spends most of his screen time watching from the sidelines, passively observing events that just sort of happen around him.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Ultimately, it’s hard to shake the sense that her picture is a character study bending itself, painfully and unnaturally, into the shape of a nightmare-in-the-boonies horror flick. Is this the only way films about female friendship can get greenlighted these days—by drenching themselves in genre tropes?

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.

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.

This innocuous crowd-pleaser delivers everything that its pedigree and ad campaign promise, courting the patronage of foodies, Oprah Book Club members, Travel Channel subscribers, and Helen Mirren lovers alike.

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

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 is a space opera animated not by joy but insecurity—the anxiety, evident in almost every moment, that if it’s not very careful, someone might feel letdown.

Una demonstrates that when it comes to the staginess of stage adaptations, the cure can be worse than the disease.

An early contender for the most Weinstein movie of the year, Woman In Gold bends a complicated legal quagmire—heavy on questions of ownership and national responsibility—into a crowd-pleasing David and Goliath story. The title, too generic for Klimt’s masterpiece, suits the movie just fine.

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.

Pine neither convinces as a conflicted peacekeeper nor a resolute resistance fighter.

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.

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

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.

A candy-coated French throwback to the Hollywood rom-coms of the ’50s — especially the ones starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day — Populaire is old-fashioned in more than just its pastel color scheme.

Much of the first half of the film plays like a straight drama, establishing the conflicts simmering between two couples on a weekend getaway. This setup is so credible, in fact, that it’s doubly disappointing when the thriller elements do finally materialize and then promptly fail to thrill; it’s as if someone snatched the remote and changed the channel to a half-assed slasher starring the same characters.

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.

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.

Even at a hefty 142 minutes, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hasn’t the time for its surfeit of plot, nor for the sprawling ensemble of supporting characters caught in the sticky web Webb weaves.

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.

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.

Hamm gets to dig deeper than he has before on the big screen, tweaking some Draperian notes of aloofness into a credible emotional dimension, even when Nostalgia abandons its unsensational, slice-of-life-in-boxes approach for something closer to traditional tragedy.

The film lands somewhere between self-flagellation and apologia; however hard von Trier is on himself, he’s not above mounting defenses, and he spares plenty of punishment for us, too.

If there’s a real draw to this bastardized variation, it’s Louis-Dreyfus.

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.

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.

While it’s been orchestrated with some skill and even intelligence, a question still pokes at the viewer, like rusty scissors jabbing at soft flesh: What’s the point of a less extreme version of a film whose whole raison d’être was extremity?

With Elysium, the director proves that he still has one hand on the X-Box controller; maybe he should give the allegories a rest already and just get back in the game.

It’s a reasonably clever spin, but not much more than that; once the novelty of the genre swap wears off, you’re just watching another inferior variation.

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

Despite Bibi’s need for speed, Racer And The Jailbird sputters more than it guns.

Satrapi makes some bad calls in her attempts to balance bleak humor with bleaker thrills, including ending the film on a glibly cheerful note. Her best decision, bar none, was entrusting such heavy material to the guy who played Van Wilder. Behind that perpetual smirk lurks a talent for quiet depravity. Bonkers looks good on him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ironic side effect is that this major influence on today’s new class of dystopian YA smashes now looks like just another greedy knockoff on-screen—a monochromatic "Divergent," or something similar.

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."

While Watts deserves some credit for treating a totally ridiculous premise with a straight face, his grisly first feature plays very much like what it is: a 90-second joke stretched uncomfortably to full length.

Yet nothing short of overhauling the material into something genuinely fresh could make Ray’s Secret feel essential. Tweaks aside, it remains, by in large, the same movie — which is to say, fundamentally redundant.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Neither particularly frightening nor especially funny, the Yuletide horror-comedy Krampus scrapes by on the novelty of its setup.

Despite a few deviations, About Last Night is basically the same sanitized rom-com, bearing the slightest hint of resemblance to its source material. In other words, most of the perversity of Perversity has again been excised — the Chicago too.

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.

The kills come and go with a perfunctory swiftness that suggests a condescension to the material, not a genuine affection for it. That’s why the gore feels like scant reward: There’s plenty of blood but no heart put into pumping it.

Either way, Ted 2 strikes a sometimes-awkward balance between sincerity and cheap provocation. It also forgets that the real draw of the first film wasn’t Ted himself, but Wahlberg, whose sweet-lug routine scored a lot of belly laughs.

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

Solid chunks of the screwball humor land like bricks, and the characters — most of them idiots, a**holes, or suckers — are colorfully over-the-top but not especially memorable.

This may look like the same story, but the soul of it is missing — lost on the way out of the ground.

McCarthy co-wrote the film with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed and appears as the heroine’s wormy tyrant of a boss. Their collaborative mojo results in some winning sweetness, but not a lot of hilarity.

Capone presents the man’s health problems as a different sort of comeuppance: a reckoning of the mind and body, though not necessarily of the soul. But that doesn’t leave Hardy terribly much to do but dismantle his intimidating presence; it’s a commanding physical performance in search of a richer characterization, of any sense of who Capone was.

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?

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.

There’s just little here that the X-Men series hasn’t shown audiences before.

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.

Jojo Rabbit, a very nice but thin crowd-pleaser about love conquering all, bills itself as an “anti-hate satire.” But true satire challenges and provokes. This one offers free hugs.

The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things wouldn’t fall anywhere near the bottom of a time-loop power ranking—it’s a divertingly fizzy bit of PG-13 puppy love. But its characters are basically stick figures of unblemished youth, pretty virtuous from the very start, and so their astrophysical dilemma never accumulates any dramatic or comedic urgency.

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.

Oddly, counterintuitively even, what’s most endearing about the film is how middle-of-the-road it is. While 2011’s "Shame" treated the same subject with too much seriousness, and next week’s "Don Jon" treats it with too little, Thanks For Sharing acknowledges that sex addiction, like most other problems in life, can be a source of both suffering and humor.

As a time-travel movie, Project Almanac pays fast and loose with its own fantastical rules, contradicting itself constantly.

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.

What Cesar Chavez critically lacks is a unique, complicated, or personal perspective on its world-famous subject. As is often the problem with portraits of influential firebrands, the film never quite sees past the movement to the man leading it.

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.

One is left to admire the literal and figurative wallpaper—to be blessedly distracted by the mise en scène and Puiu’s attempts to constantly vary how he’s filming each interaction.

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.

Lost River displays almost no distinctive personality of its own. The film proves that Gosling has refined taste in movies, and that he’s a quick study, but not that he has much to say as an artist. Not yet, anyway.

Dramatically speaking, it’s a failed thought experiment—you get, watching it, why no one has really told this kind of story in this way. But it’s still hard not to admire the film’s perversely un-perverse strategy, its good-faith attempt to do something more than simply trot out the awful, salacious details.

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.

But it’s still quite the mismatch of content to form — a movie as ordinary as Rodin himself was extraordinary.

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.

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.

all the retro production design in the world can’t disguise the sheer familiarity of the film’s paranormal parlor tricks.

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.

Though Serenity is blessed with a goofily enjoyable high concept, it doesn’t exploit it very effectively. You can make the viewers detectives themselves, allowing us to slowly unravel a mystery, or you can give up the charade early and just run with the premise you’ve opted not to conceal very carefully. There’s little sense in doing neither.

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.

Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat?

Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.

Perhaps the energy Crowe could have expended on shaping believable characters went instead to the cultural context.

Perhaps The Laundromat just runs into the limits of trying to merge agitprop and fun. Soderbergh’s assemblage of Hollywood somebodies is the sugar to make the medicine go down; he’s hoping, like McKay, that disguising this dissertation as a stylish, star-studded good time will help its lessons stick. But the result is occasionally as tiresome as an economics professor more concerned with being liked than with teaching you anything.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What’s the point in shooting a horror movie in the catacombs if it’s just going to end up looking like every horror movie not shot in the catacombs?

For all its casual mayhem, Free Guy turns out to be a rather cuddly crowdpleaser, a high-concept blockbuster trifle with bubblegum ice cream clogging its circuits.

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

For as much as the story concerns leaping into other people’s heads, Flanagan never quite gets into Danny’s; his tortured grappling with his memories is abstract at best, McGregor’s mostly functional performance failing to offer the necessary window into that process.

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.

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.

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.

Though it revives at least a dozen of Stine’s most popular beasts and fiends, the new Goosebumps movie rarely recalls the old preteen page-turners for which it’s named.

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.

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

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

Lucy In The Sky ends up playing like some unauthorized Jackie Jormp-Jomp version of the Lisa Nowak story, as though they couldn’t get the rights to the names, or to the shit.

Even, however, if its thunder hadn’t been immediately stolen by "Birdman," which premiered three days before it at last August’s Venice International Film Festival, The Humbling would still look like a folly. Bad timing is the least of its problems.

In different hands, Runner Runner might have worked as sleazy tropical noir, but director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) never quite embraces the tawdriness of his material.

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.”

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.

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.

Harry Potter, for all his nice-kid incorruptibility, looks downright four-dimensional compared to Redmayne’s milquetoast Newt—an impossibly twee soul with few discernible flaws or even particularly interesting characteristics.

The reality is that Justice League’s problems go beyond who was behind the camera. The villain is still generic and silly-looking. The plot is still assemble-the-team boilerplate, hinging on the hunt for glowing MacGuffins with a goofy name.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

Physically speaking, the transformation is as impressive as the one Gyllenhaal underwent a year ago to embody the gaunt, wiry sociopath of "Nightcrawler." But was this character, a boxer battling the myriad conventions of his genre, really worth the training regimen that brought him to life?

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.

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.

Directed by Tod Williams (Paranormal Activity 2) and co-scripted by King himself, it brings a best seller to the big screen with a minimum of spectacle, a maximum of affordable Georgia locations, and a couple of names to splash prominently across the Amazon rental thumbnail.

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

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.

Bilbo fades into the sidelines of his own movie, and that may be why the mournful finale of Battle feels so canned, like a roiling tide of crocodile tears. Eleven years ago, Jackson earned the fond, seemingly endless farewells of The Return Of The King. His Hobbit series has only one ending, and it comes not a moment too soon.

For every viewer happily creeped out by the franchise's simple scare tactics — its video vision of things going bump and creak and moan in the dark — there's another moviegoer completely unfazed by such low-budget prankery.

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.

Where is the Zemeckis who projected a cartoon-noir Christopher Lloyd into every child’s nightmares? The same director has thrown a softening, coddling filter over Dahl, preserving the shape of his source material while sanding down its edges.

What’s missing — and this was the crucial component of part one — is a little sour to undercut the sweet. Like its protagonist, a bad guy gone boringly good, Despicable Me 2 has no edge. It’s fatally nice and insufficiently naughty.

The film is well-acted, slickly made on a shoestring budget, and blessedly efficient, with a runtime that inches just past the one-hour mark, credits included. It’s also nearly devoid of surprises, sending its characters through some Hitchcockian paces en route to an ending that’s more depressing for its predictability than its bleakness.

If there’s undeniable difficulty in Velvet Buzzsaw’s genre alchemy—its attempt to mix a caustic, half-comic portrait of the gallery set with a supernatural Tales From The Crypt scenario—it’s all in service of a moldy screed about the commodification of art. Is there anything safer than telling people something they’ve heard a thousand times before?

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.

The Mummy is crippled by a failure of imagination.

For better or for worse — okay, mostly for worse — he’s made the exact film he wanted to make; it just took him some time, and a lot of charity, to get the earnest thing off the ground.

Say this and little else for the new Robin Hood movie: It’s less of a self-serious slog than the last Robin Hood movie.

No amount of imaginative trickery can fill the void of feeling at the movie’s center. Whimsy for whimsy’s sake is just too much to take.

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

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.

It treats the complicated moves and countermoves of a major election as fodder for a broadly comic grudge match.

It’s the rare instance when you can see this great actor laboriously acting.

The real issue, though, isn’t that Bloodshot would fail an IQ test. It’s that its dumb fun isn’t executed with panache, smart or otherwise.

Look, for a movie based on a soda campaign, Uncle Drew isn’t that bad. It’s got some solid comic alternates.

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.

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.

True to its franchise roots, the film is atmospheric, well acted, and frustratingly intent on draining every last drop of pleasure from the genre-movie conventions it cannibalizes.

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.

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.

Borrowing every single component of its complicated plot from other sources, The Mortal Instruments is hodgepodge claptrap, but there’s a faint flicker of fun in its introducing-the-world passages.

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.

It’s gnarly as hell.

Watching A Little Chaos, one might assume that its makers were dramatically limited by the details of Le Notre’s life, when it was really just their own imaginations do the limiting.

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

More sad dad and noble martyr than creature of the night, Evans’ dashing Prince Of Darkness inspires less fear than just about any incarnation of the famous character, save perhaps the one played by Leslie Nielsen.

Were Mandela solely interested in that early chapter of its subject’s life, when he was reluctantly turning to violent tactics in the war on apartheid, the film might have achieved a uniquely complicated perspective. Alas, the first passage is just a portion of what turns out to be a typically sprawling, bloated biopic.

Chase, who co-wrote the script with an alum of his writers’ room, Lawrence Konner, flattens the world of The Sopranos into a generic, vaguely Scorsesian crime epic. At times, the film suggests the shapelessness of a biopic, as though it were beholden to some historical record of facts and figures.

Becky is not without its grisly low-brow pleasures. But nothing in the movie makes a damn lick of sense.

While The New Mutants aspires to some inventive mash-up of high-school soap, haunted-house movie, and comic-book origin story, each of its elements feels half-baked; if Boone studied Buffy for reference, he clearly paid as little attention to it as his horny, preoccupied young heroes do.

A ponderous vampire romance that surely ranks among the writer-director’s most sedate, immobile studies of black life in America.

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon can’t quite salvage You're Cordially Invited, a comedy that's as overcrowded as the dueling nuptials it depicts.

Synchronicity is more contraption than movie, its plot as mechanically functional as a clock, rotating characters around like gears.

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.

The problem here isn’t the dramatic liberties, though. It’s that they’re much less, well, dramatic than the real events the film leaves curiously off screen: the sensational trial of one Arne Johnson, who made history (and headlines) by insisting in court that he was under demonic influence when he stabbed his landlord to death.

By making it so that everyone can see the evil coming, it also robs the franchise of one of its most potent pleasures: studying the frame for signs of trouble, little telltale hints that something is about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Sentient inkblots are a poor substitution for that sensation.

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.

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.

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.

The film feels like a creative resignation, too, meeting the end of the world with a shrug of tepid postmodern shtick. It puts despair itself in quotation marks.

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.

The results play like some Robert Zemeckis splicing experiment gone wrong, as though Clooney had somehow digitally inserted an earnest social-issues drama into a zany mishap noir.

When it comes to what should be the reliably dumb fun of tomb raiding, maybe there are worse crimes than insulting viewers’ intelligence or bombarding them with crappy special effects. Boring them? Now that’s a felony offense.

Yes, yes, this is a kids’ movie, so it hardly matters that none of it makes one lick of sense, even on its own terms.

The film is blatantly, unmistakably about mental illness, and that makes it hard to ignore or forgive what it ends up saying (hopefully by accident) on the subject.

Rather than push this character or story forward, the film cravenly hits the reset button, doing more of the same with much less passion and skill.

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.

At least Bacon commits, putting all of Theo’s hangups on display and treating his scenes with Seyfried—including a humdinger of a subdued fight about Susanna’s own secrets—like the stuff of a genuine marriage drama, not mere emotional context for a ho-hum thriller. He makes Theo a real character, even as Koepp uses him more like a Rorschach test everyone would interpret the exact same way.

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

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.

This futuristic sci-fi thriller has some good moments of ambiguous tension, but it’s too scaled back to make much of an impact.

Preparations inspires intrigue, then curiously squanders it.

The results are sometimes striking, in pure visual terms, but rarely engaging; even as a brutish saga of underworld retribution, the film fails to get the heart pounding.

There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.

It’s not unreasonable to expect something like excitement out of a story about freedom fighters plotting to take back the planet. Captive State does not clear that fairly low bar.

The real problem is that all that speculative fun has been shaped into a rather clunky, derivative bit of supernatural claptrap: a haunted house movie curiously low on mystery or honest scares.

The Monuments Men feels not just self-conscious but also a bit self-congratulatory, its creator squashing the spirit of adventure with too many grandiose lines about the Importance Of Art.

In Haunt, scares are scarce and tropes are liberally lifted from better movies.

Nothing short of wiping their memories with a real-life neuralizer is going to convince moviegoers that the supernatural buddy-cop comedy R.I.P.D. is anything more than a thinly disguised "Men In Black" ripoff.

Even with its edges sanded down, Kick-Ass 2 is unmistakably Millaresque — a juvenile comedy of excess, in which skewering adolescent power fantasies looks an awful lot like indulging in them.

The film’s artificial, stylized remove—what might be called his current style, a kind of half-ironic, half-romantic wooziness—seems an odd landing point for the scrappy DIY filmmaker behind Momma’s Man and the genuinely touching and hilarious Terri, which DeWitt also wrote and which was so human it hurt.

This Is Where I Leave You demonstrates, a great cast is a terrible thing to waste.

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.

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.

What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning.

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.

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.

When the wisdom being imparted is this conventional, you better find a dramatically or comedically satisfying way to package it. Stewart hasn’t.

Wonder Wheel is uncomfortably revealing, its real-life parallels too blatant to be anything but intentional. But to what end?

Batman V Superman takes a title fight kids of all ages have been speculating about for decades—costumed titan from the cosmos, meet costumed vigilante from the city—and invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.

In just about every way, the film is an inferior sequel — dumber, flatter, lacking even the barbaric extremity of its predecessor. Where’s a flesh-eating Elijah Wood when you need him?

In other words, what starts as a glorified "Pretty Little Liars" episode eventually evolves (devolves?) into a flippant hybrid of "The Craft" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

Willy’s Wonderland is a jokey elevator pitch in search of a movie. It’s the kind of genre junk—a low-rent, one-gag cartoon slasher—whose supposed gonzo appeal begins and ends with a description of its premise.

It suggests that Zeitlin, throwing more handfuls of fairy dust over an impoverished American South, is something of a lost boy himself. Like Pan and his posse, he stubbornly refuses to grow.

To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.

Maybe the rabbit and his studio both took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Space Jam: A New Legacy takes almost nothing but wrong turns, all leading to a glittering CGI trash heap of cameos, pat life lessons, and stale internet catchphrases. Its first misstep: keeping Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the gang on the bench for about as long as it would take the audience to watch three and a half Merrie Melodies.

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.

This humorless science-fiction cautionary tale feels like a relic from an earlier era, pulled out of a dusty old box of zip disks and 56k modems.

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.

It’s just more joyless junk, another title to bury at the bottom of Fuqua’s resume.

The film still feels more like a game of cards with a stacked deck than a story that demanded to be told.

Tempting though it might be to celebrate any earnest, good-faith attempt to talk about race in America, it’s clear that the creator of Mind Of The Married Man was not the right one to do the talking.

Delivery Man may be a change of pace for Vaughn, but it’s the exact opposite for its creator, the Québécois filmmaker Ken Scott. Belonging to the Funny Games school of carbon-copy remakes, the film is an identical Hollywood retread of Scott’s 2011 festival favorite Starbuck. Every scene, every joke, nearly every shot of the movie is straight out of the original.

Instructive mainly for screenwriters looking for tips on what not to do, Walking With Dinosaurs takes the education out of “educational entertainment.” The entertainment, too.

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

The film exhibits almost nothing that resembles recognizable human behavior.

Again and again, Sparks takes the stuff of great four-hankie melodrama—love, death, cute dogs—and grinds it into a formulaic mush. Ask more of your paperback romances. At least ask for a different one each time.

I Origins is an exercise in supreme obviousness, beginning (but not ending) with its double entendre of a title.

Improbably, this saccharine melodrama comes courtesy of Jason Reitman, the Hollywood scion director who made "Juno" and "Up In The Air." Clearly, he’s chasing a change of pace, a hard right turn away from the sardonic redemption stories that have previously sported his byline and into the unfamiliar realm of Sirksian soap.

It’s an empty approximation of art, all gleaming surfaces masking a hollow center. And unlike a fake vintage chair, there’s no basic utility to this imitation.

There’s more existential wisdom in five random, zombie-infested minutes of Shaun Of The Dead than in the full two hours of this feel-good folly.

The demands of action and comedy, however, are apparently much too great a weight for this action-comedy to Lyft.

It’s a strange thing to say about a movie so obsessed with the red stuff, but this Carrie is bloodless.

This may be the first role that’s really capitalized on Crowe’s celebrity reputation as a hothead, even if the unnamed lunatic he’s playing only barks threats into a phone instead of chucking it at anyone.

It’s vaguely endearing to watch Bacon and Mitchell actually try to act their way through the film’s family drama, as though it weren’t a perfunctory pretext to jump scares. The Darkness needs their chops. It needs anything to distract horror fans from the fact that there’s nothing new here.

Death On The Nile feels chintzier in every respect, with a much lower-wattage cast of potential murderers and a digitally summoned exotic locale about as immersive as a screensaver. If a viewer didn’t know better, they might assume they were seeing the fourth or fifth entry in a sputtering franchise, not the direct follow-up to a global box-office hit.

Child actors can have a tough time transitioning into adult careers, their charm often evaporating with the onset of puberty. But for Chloë Grace Moretz, the trouble isn’t growing pains; she’s just overqualified for the roles Hollywood tends to offer young women her age.

In almost all respects, but especially structurally, Mile 22 is a mess.

Like too many horror films, this one seems targeted at a hypothetical audience using only 10 percent of its brainpower.

It’s curiously flat and dreary-looking ... There was a time when I used to wish that Dolan would settle down a little—the manic energy of his work could be exhausting. But if this is the alternative, I take it all back.

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.

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.

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.

Thriller framework aside, Fantasy Island probably works best as a comedy. At least when it’s not trying to be one.

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.

This Jacob’s Ladder isn’t likely to build much of a fanbase over the next 30 years. It’ll be lucky if anyone remembers it for 30 minutes.

The action scenes are clumsily filmed and choppily edited.

The result is at once labor of love and cautionary tale: Apparently too close to the story to recognize how ill suited she was to translating its charms to the screen, Trigiani has emerged with nothing but corny, stilted Americana, like something Garrison Keillor might burp out on a really off day.

The Equalizer 2, which reunites Washington with director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk, puts fewer disposable goons in McCall’s crosshairs, trading the original’s rote killing-up-the-ranks revenge campaign for some half-assed approximation of a murder mystery. Call it a lateral move for this unfortunate franchise.

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.

Enemy dives into material Villeneuve has described as “personal.” But it’s hard to see much more than platitudes in the metaphoric muddle of its plot.

Resistance is like a maudlin Robin Williams vehicle inorganically fused with a by-the-numbers wartime thriller. In place of showbiz clichés, there are tacky WWII-movie tropes.

After roughly 90 minutes of unbelievable behavior and botched suspense, the twist ending is too audaciously ridiculous to entirely resist. You’ll scream, but not in fear.

The blame belongs most plainly with Michelle Morgan’s script, which requires this gifted comedian to play straight woman to a supporting carnival of Indiewood types.

The film works only, if at all, as an unofficial Air Force One reunion, with Ford stopping just short of bellowing “Get off my jock!” during a pair of gritted-teeth encounters with Oldman. Some pleasures never go out of fashion.

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.

David Slade's long-delayed creature feature is ludicrous nonsense enlivened only by the occasional splash of gore.

But as a comedy, Love Hurts is pretty stale; when not trotting out dopey crime-flick caricatures, it’s simply leaning on the supposed hilarity of a sunny house hunter with a secret talent for breaking bones. You’ve seen many versions of this premise, and better ones, too.

Though the celebrity cast is giant, none of the colorful creatures they’re voicing are particularly memorable. And Krasinski favors trite platitudes over any real insights into the adventure of growing up; his dialogue will leave you pining for the strategic, well, quiet of his last onscreen family. What IF lacks is what it champions: the magical imagination of childhood.

The stars are about the only reason to boot up this preposterous thriller, which ends up playing less like a critique of AI technology than another daydream about its power.

This big-screen take on the indie-horror sensation has too much plot and not enough of the game's primal security-cam thrills.

AI-loving Marvel hitmakers Joe and Anthony Russo join forces again with Netflix to deliver a $300-million sci-fi epic you can safely half-watch while doing the dishes or making dinner.

The Garfield Movie applies some nice animation to an annoying all-ages comedy of product placement, phone jokes, and daddy issues.

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.

This is the flimsiest of hokum, possessing all the gravity of a bible salesman hocking his wares outside the subway.

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

This time around, Leatherface is just a run-of-the-mill bogeyman, slaughtering a new generation of lambs for the sins of our age. It’s a sequel as pretentious as its chainsaw fodder: an act of genre gentrification.

There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.

Definitively establishing that “state-of-the-art” and “chintzy” are not mutually exclusive qualities, Warcraft is a perplexing multiplex boondoggle: Rarely is so much time, money, and cutting-edge technology expended on a spectacle so devoid of wonder.