A.A. Dowd

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.

Malick’s tricks may be aging, but every world still looks new through his eyes.

As a game of cops and robbers, Triple 9 was probably more fun to play than it is to watch.

The result is a horror movie that comes dangerously close to showing sympathy for the real devils, the kind that burned witches instead of instructing them. Good thing it’s scary.

Scene for scene, line for line, gag for gag, it’s basically the same movie. And the original was no masterpiece to begin with.

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.

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.

This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.

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

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.

A small film of big insights, heavy on dialogue but light on speeches, 45 Years often seems closer in spirit to a ghost story: Nothing goes “boo” or rearranges the furniture, but there’s a unmissable sense that we’re watching two people haunted by a specter from another lifetime.

No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.

What Abrams has done is strip Star Wars down to its core components, rearranging the stuff people liked about the original trilogy and getting rid of what they hated about the rest.

There’s a sense that the whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of the parts, no matter how spectacular some of them are.

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.

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

Perhaps more than ever before, the animators do the heavy lifting: Every detail, from the gentle bob of a beast's breathing to the fluid shifts of Spot's facial expressions, has been lovingly rendered.

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.

Awash in a depressive shade of perpetual blue, Mockingjay—Part 2 out-Nolans Christopher Nolan in the race to see just how dark a PG-13 tentpole can get before the audience itself revolts.

It’s a portrait of the comedy tour as odyssey of madness, a plummet into the abyss.

Move over, "Rudy." Hit the showers, "Brian’s Song." There’s a new tearjerking true story of gridiron triumph, one that combines those male-weepie favorites in a way no focus group could possibly resist.

Like "All The President’s Men," it’s a muckraker movie that celebrates the power of the press by actually showing journalists doing their job, pen and notebook in hand.

What Spectre lacks is the sinister magnetic pull of Skyfall, a Bond movie with real stakes and attitude and distinctive flavor, not to mention more mesmeric images than one can usually expect from this workmanlike blockbuster franchise.

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

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.

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.

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.

Barely a feature at 54 minutes, it’s the closest Anderson has come to just kind of goofing around behind the camera — though, obviously, his version of goofing around is more dynamic than an ambitious effort from the average contemporary.