Alonso Duralde

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.

The loss doesn’t hit, and the comedy doesn’t land, leaving Dean a wasted opportunity that offers a few talented artists the chance to do fine work in the service of an empty vessel.

It’s hard to say the name "Captain Underpants” without smiling, and the big-screen debut of the skivvies-clad superhero (the film’s subtitle is “The First Epic Movie”) maintains that same goofy, innocently naughty nature for nearly its entire running time.

In the recent flood of superhero movies, several have managed to be quite good — but Wonder Woman ranks as one of the few great ones.

A summer franchise movie that can’t decide if it wants to be a hard-R bawdy comedy, a d-bag-comes-of-age tale or a fairly unironic reboot of the glossy TV show (which ran from 1989-2001), Baywatch fails at all three, despite the best efforts of the perennially game Johnson and Zac Efron.

What’s most dispiriting about War Machine is that you can sense the satire it wants to be — and could have been — but never becomes.

Which version of the film each viewer sees will be a subjective choice, of course, but the fact that the lead character is so utterly guileless and innocent and kindhearted...makes Katie less a victim of the world and more a victim of first time writer-director Wayne Roberts.

There are quick cuts and CG imagery and bro-ing out in nearly equal proportions; I found some of this excess to be heady and exciting, but by the end of the film’s running time, it all became a bit tiresome, to say nothing of tiring.