Alex Harrison

I do not regret having seen it, and with all there is to recommend it, I feel comfortable suggesting you seek it out upon release. But do so with tempered expectations.

Landon's latest will be best remembered for its multiple laugh-out-loud set pieces, and with the craftsmanship and performances on display, viewers will likely be willing to forgive its less-impactful stretches.

It's possible to watch this movie thinking mostly of what could have been – if the script was as deft as it sometimes pretends to be, this had the makings of a truly great thriller. But The Rip is a good time when experienced on its wavelength, and worthy material for a relaxed night in.

While it has its weak spots, A Family Affair holds together well enough to entertain.

What I connected to wins out over what I didn't – I have enjoyed sitting with its ideas, and there are a couple flourishes that will stick with me.

The bottom line: even with some inconsistencies, Drugstore June is funny. It creatively approaches a deceptively ambitious setup and doesn't overstay its welcome.

While The Gorge is (ironically) fairly shallow, it offers some strikingly designed genre thrills and is powered by two charismatic stars.

Garner's performance is the heart of this, and if the movie were told entirely through her eyes, I think you'd have the compelling layer of doubt that the film sometimes seems to want.

There's plenty to admire in Maria, and in Jolie's performance, but my connection to certain scenes shouldn't be mistaken for my being emotionally engrossed. In fact, I typically felt kept at a distance.

It sits somewhere at the intersection of Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi, though without the former's control of form and the latter's splatstick comedic timing, it can't quite live up to the potential of that mashup. Still, it's plenty of fun. Zazie Beetz is the ideal badass heroine to carry this movie, and there are more than enough moments of stylish violence (and violent style) to get the whole theater cackling.

It doesn't quite have the courage to be the best version of itself. Still, it works. War Machine is an action movie you feel in your body, and it mixes in the right dose of sci-fi VFX without losing sight of the character that keeps you caring.

The Spanish director's fingerprint is there, undoubtedly. But the movie feels strangely incomplete, as if made with one hand tied behind his back.

Though it risks a slip into fully formulaic territory at times, the new movie is building to a far more interesting endgame than it appears to be, in which all the fleshing out of Cenobite lore and mechanics actually amounts to something quite profound.

It's almost like Cumming has made two films, one through aesthetics and atmosphere and one through story and theme, that ultimately can't coexist. Neither is a bad film, but the former makes a much greater impression, and I wish it had been seen through to the end.

As a story of parental reckoning, Goodrich lacks the interrogative instinct of something like Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks, and it rushes Grace's catharsis as a result. But as a story of a man's late-stage awakening, it strikes a more resonant chord.

Despite having a decent budget and some recognizable actors to work with, writer-director Tommy Wirkola, known for Nazi zombie film Dead Snow and his Santa action film Violent Night, ensured what ended up on screen was a pretty fun B picture. It doesn't have the stylistic touch that can sometimes bring a little something extra to playful genre films, nor does it have a true standout sequence that could give it a chance at a longer cultural life. But it does have just the tone you'd hope it would, especially as it nears its climax, and that's all it really needs to deliver the goods.

Gradually, everything becomes burdened with story. The more the triangle of Kathy, Benny, and Johnny is played up for drama, the less interesting it becomes.

Jenkin doesn't leave the audience without any puzzle pieces; there are enough for multiple stories to be constructed, should the viewer wish to understand Enys Men on that level. At a certain point, however, it becomes so difficult to disentangle the real from the unreal that to try feels pointless, and the last act suffers for it.

As a vampire movie, Salem's Lot is refreshingly old-school.

Given some time to think on it later, viewers might have trouble pinning down what it actually had to say about all those thorny subjects it seemed to be about.

Sam somewhat shrinks into the periphery of the story to make way for Amanda Peet's Dianne, whose tonal world is welcome, but certainly different. Rather than hold things together, Shear the filmmaker seems to step back, too. The result is a film that only exists in moments: sometimes funny, sometimes interesting, always lacking the cohesion necessary to add up to anything.

It would be unfair to assign blame to any one performance, or even to Winslet's direction, when the script is the obvious culprit. Story or character hurdles are thrown up and surmounted with the same neatness, sapping them of their impact. The movie becomes so certain of its footing that the two-hour runtime starts to feel like a chore.

Cleaner is a pretty good reminder of how fun it can be to watch someone with movie star charisma do a Die Hard.

The actors inhabit these characters well, but they don't have the benefit of juxtaposition with normality to really put their work in context.

Layne's performance is a real strength, and she does a great job of not only anchoring us in her character's emotions, but embodying how she feels about singing in any given scene.

Egerton's got something in this vein. Cruise-esque exceptionalism, but cut with relatability like he came from the everyday world but clearly wasn't meant to stay there.

Being halfway between film and TV gives it the weaknesses of both and strengths of neither; trying to straddle the real with the mythic gives us characters that mostly feel too representative to connect with as individuals, and too individual to make compelling representatives.

The material is not lacking in thematic depth, but how the filmmakers choose to express these themes makes for an inconsistently engaging experience. Dreamin' Wild is sometimes too caught up in its own artfulness, and all that weighted form ends up trapping its ideas rather than giving them heft.