Alonso Duralde

Blade Runner 2049 isn’t about what happens; it’s about what this terrifying and beautiful world — how could it not be, with Roger Deakins behind the camera — tells us about life and perception and reality.

An utterly idiotic movie that uses social media as a conduit for witchcraft and mayhem.

No one’s going to accuse Goodbye Christopher Robin of subtlety or of rewriting the biopic rules, but it does dare to go darker than most films like it.

There’s nothing particularly world-shaking about Our Souls at Night, but it’s a nice movie about nice people finding love.

There’s not much to Victoria & Abdul, but as a delivery system for Judi Dench, it serves its purpose. Otherwise, it’s just Buckingham Palace fetishism cranked up to peak mumsy.

Sixteen years later, 9/11 remains too touchy a subject for a movie as clumsy as 9/11 to get entirely right. And even if the film relies too much on the real-life horror of the actual event to loan it some gravitas, the performances touch the emotions honestly and deservedly.

Despite the powerhouse presence of Reese Witherspoon, this limp little midlife crisis comedy leaves out the comedy and the crisis, and it certainly never comes to life.

The film veers back and forth between the obvious and the ridiculous.

There’s something here for lovers of all kinds of movies — even silents and musicals — but the director transcends mere pastiche to craft a work that feels like the product of our collective film-going subconscious.

Downsizing sees Payne and Taylor working on a larger palette than usual, but like their shrunken characters, the filmmakers’ humor and their sharp observation of the human condition have survived the change in size and scope.

The cast seems game, and perhaps they realize it’s on them to elevate the material, so the scenes between Reynolds and Jackson have some genuine snap to them, even though the dialogue and characterization are barely memorable.

This is a movie full of characters you would walk away from at a cocktail party, engaging in the flattest brand of smart banter imaginable.

Between Berry’s committed performance and the film’s brisk cocktail of dread and adrenaline, Kidnap makes for a rousing, if ridiculous, ride.

Based on the best moments of Atomic Blonde, I would very much like to see a series of films in which Charlize Theron’s ruthless, brutal and glamorous secret agent dispatches a variety of Cold War-era enemies to the accompaniment of hit songs from the 80s.

It is a soul-crushing disaster because it lacks humor, wit, ideas, visual style, compelling performances, a point of view or any other distinguishing characteristic that would make it anything but a complete waste of your time, not to mention that of the diligent animators who brought this catastrophe into being.

Nolan has crafted a film that’s sensational in every sense of the word; it aims for both the heart and the head, to be sure, but arrives there via the central nervous system.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets might well represent the apotheosis of Besson’s singularly loony brand of filmmaking. It’s bonkers and gorgeous and confusing and thrilling and tiring and overflowing with ideas.

You get flashes of the clever comedy this might have been — a funny line here, an amusing bit of business there, the occasional whiff of relevance — but it too often lumbers along, coasting on the backs of some very talented performers.

Even parents who found the earlier outings reasonably tolerable may find themselves making excuses to linger longer at the concession stand.

It’s not just the CG that’s visually impressive here; “War” boasts some extraordinary set pieces.

While The Big Sick isn’t always a complete success — it’s another film bearing the name of Judd Apatow (he produced with Barry Mendel) that could stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes — it’s the kind of sweetly funny love story that’s so bizarre that it has to be real.

If you’re here for the director’s trademark chaos editing (where fights go from points A to D to Q), toxic masculinity (and female objectification), comedy scenes rendered tragic (and vice versa), and general full-volume confusion, you’ll get all those things in abundance.

It’s lean and mean, focused and direct, and the jolts are both effective and well earned

A sloppy, untossed salad of a comedy, Rough Night survives on funny bits and a game cast.

As a spawner of merchandise, Cars 3 fires on all pistons but, as a movie, it’s a harmless but never stimulating 109 minutes.

Somehow, the blistering comedy you would expect never quite manifests, and instead we get a lot of on-the-nose sermonizing and weak-tea social commentary.

Band Aid might sound gimmicky, but Lister-Jones keeps the emotions firmly rooted and the characters believably contextualized.

Weisz and Claflin make a memorable couple, but it’s too bad their chemistry is wasted on such a wan drama. A little less taste and a little more oomph might have made all the difference.