Ann Hornaday

Intriguing, if uneven, thriller.

As touching as Hayek’s performance is, Beatriz at Dinner too often forsakes nuance for caricature.

Ratner makes a hash of the story and characters his predecessor brought to such complex, sympathetic life, delivering a pumped-up exercise in mayhem, carnage and blunt-force trauma.

Reese Witherspoon paces and cries through Rendition in a performance that does as much a disservice to her talent as the movie does to the issues it raises.

Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.

Uplift winds up getting the better of “Don’t Worry,” in which Phoenix delivers an impressively committed performance that nonetheless can’t overcome the movie’s worship of Callahan’s most immature, solipsistic and self-dramatizing foibles. A movie that’s supposed to inspire winds up being irritating instead.

A picaresque romance of self-discovery that delivers a near-constant flow of small delights until veering too far into screwball preposterousness.

For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.

Risen turns out to be an intriguing, if ultimately frustrating, retelling of the familiar story, here reconfigured as a detective procedural.

For its eventual lurid machinations and hyped-up emotionalism, the film winds up being a handsomely efficient one-man show. Like the man Gyllenhaal so convincingly embodies, it gets the job done, even if it inevitably goes over the top.

Even amid the corny jokes, awkward segues, forced conflicts and predictable resolutions, Bergen and Giannini manage to develop a low-simmer chemistry between the insults.

Rather than a meditation on desire, Ma Belle, My Beauty becomes a portrait of how people simultaneously crave intimacy and keep each other at bay. Viewers may wish there were more to it, but what’s there is teasingly intriguing.

Whatever good intentions were brought to bear in Cruella are lost in an overlong, awkwardly shaped mash-up of coming-of-age drama, caper flick, action adventure and fashion world sendup.

Still, if for the most part Death at a Funeral is as tame as the tasteful parlor where most of its action takes place, it manages to explode one taboo, in casting mostly black actors in roles originally played by whites.

The result is that Revolutionary Road is a hard movie to love. Plenty of people will appreciate the hopelessness, but they might wish for a little less emptiness.

"Wakanda Forever” winds up feeling hopelessly stalled, covering up an inability to move on by resorting to repetitive, over-familiar action sequences, maudlin emotional beats and an uninvolving, occasionally incoherent story.

The best part of Walk Hard, oddl enough, is the music. I might not care to see Walk Hard" a second time, but I can't wait to hear it again.

Triple 9 feels more like a collection of good scenes than a novel, propulsive whole. Viewers are apt to be entertained by the film’s visceral pulp pleasures, but left apathetic when it comes to its instantly forgettable genre cliches.

Micmacs brings an infectious note of caprice to the old-fashioned caper film.

As affectionately as Taylor has brought The Help to the screen, and as gratifying as it is to watch Davis and Spencer bring Aibileen and Minny to palpable, fully rounded life, their narrative, like "The Blind Side" a few years ago, is structured largely around their white female benefactor.

At its best, Woman Thou Art Loosed conveys the unfathomable meaning behind those words.

This is a downbeat, indulgent and self-consciously quirky little movie.

An action thriller that adamantly refuses to deliver action or thrills, instead engaging in a brand of arty, self-conscious formalism rarely seen outside repertory theaters or cinema-studies classrooms.

An engrossing but uneven comedy-drama.

"Everything is achievable through technology," a character says more than once in Iron Man 2. Not so.

This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.

All the God-talk and philosophical musings about morality and "meeting our makers" aside, Prometheus is primarily about delivering those visceral, terrifying jolts. That it does so without generating the taut suspense and moody atmosphere of its antecedents qualifies as one of its greatest failings.

This would have made a fascinating film if Freedomland were one movie. Instead, it turns into several movies, none fully realized. What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay’s filmmaking and Phoenix’s central performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy You Were Never Really Here depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls. One person’s trope, after all, is another’s shopworn cliche.

Lovely to look at and listen to but doesn't reward any closer study.

The sad truth is that, for all his ambition, cinematic prowess and hyper-confessional candor, Aster doesn’t stick the landing. Instead, he’s made a movie about unresolved ambivalence that itself goes confoundingly unresolved.

Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “State of Play”) does a passable job of evoking post-apocalyptic atmosphere in How I Live Now, although the film suffers from uneven tone — is it a teen romance or wartime adventure? — and, ultimately, a regrettable lack of focus.

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

After Yang again demonstrates Kogonada’s mastery of form, framing and composition. But audiences will be forgiven for wanting to reach through the screen to mess it up a little, if only to inject some recognizable warmth and spontaneity.

Unfortunately, Provoked possesses the tiny production values and schmaltzy music of a prime-time special, despite its ensemble of terrific actors.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

Upon leaving The Big Short, audiences are likely to feel less enlightened than bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, albeit one wrapped in layers of eye-catching silks and spangles: You may be too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.

It resides in that cinematic middle ground of not-bad, not-great, just okay.

As skillful an artist as Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

Epitomizes the best and the worst of what animated filmmaking has become in an era dominated on the one hand by ever more sophisticated computerized imagery and, on the other, by the grasping, increasingly grating desire to be hip.

Despite all the swooping and spinning and swinging in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield looks less like a kid having fun than like an actor entangled in a corporate web that, at least for now, he can’t escape.

Even filmmakers and actors as fine as these haven’t managed to solve one of cinema’s most enduring challenges — making criminals interesting without exalting them.

Whimsical, fantastical and self-consciously charming, it slinks around viewers’ ankles like an affectionate cat, purring ever more loudly until the audience can’t help but succumb.

Irrational Man isn’t a comedy. There are, however, moments that invite rueful chuckles of recognition, especially when Posey’s character is giving Abe the business. She strikes a welcome madcap note in what is otherwise a series of bland medium shots of people talking.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

Terrific looking in the extreme, The Beach is the movie equivalent of vacation reading: no more demanding -- and no less satisfying -- than a sandy paperback left on a damp towel.

The best way to appreciate this fitfully funny collection of japes and jests is to treat it like any teenage boy in your midst: Focus on the positives and know that even its worst is only a phase.

To its credit, Men, Women & Children seems to allow for a rational middle ground between technophobic Luddites and the lamentably over-wired. It never turns down the moral panic entirely, but neither does it let it completely boil over.

Threatens to become a serious movie, but they're quickly overwhelmed by another indecipherable rampage or outsize visual effect.

Unexpected would have been enriched by a more generous balance between the two characters’ worlds. But Swanberg shows a sure, sensitive hand in limning the upshots and downsides of life’s most blessed events.

For all the energy and personality of its subjects, Planet B-Boy tends to drag, especially toward the competition finals.

If it’s a bit dull, and too dependent on a what-I-learned voice-over to make its points, it can still be applauded for resisting the temptation to overreach.

There's many a slip between the page and the stage, to which The Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, ploddingly attests. [26 Sep 1997]

Thank heaven for Judi Dench, whose M provides Quantum of Solace its sole quantum of peppery brio.

Lynch/Oz possesses undeniable value, if only to remind viewers that cinema is worth dissecting, thinking about, arguing over, mulling around.

As gratifying as it is to see forgotten history brought to light, it’s disappointing, too: There’s an epic story to be told within Free State of Jones, but this white-knight tale isn’t it.

The two actors have charisma to burn, finely tuned comic chops and the kind of smoldering physical star power that manages to look effortless and superhuman at the same time. But even gifts as prodigious as Bullock’s and Tatum’s can’t keep “The Lost City” afloat.

As pungent as McDonagh’s writing is, it may be his too-easy pessimism that makes Calvary engrossing and thought-provoking, but not great.

When the tone goes from daffy to dour in the course of a harrowing plot point, the story becomes more forced than fierce.

In this case, director David Michôd — working from a script he co-wrote with actor Joel Edgerton — doesn’t make the material distinctive or provocative enough to merit a second, far more dramatically inert go-round.

Has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon. What it doesn't have is heart. Like so many vehicles that have popped out from the DreamWorks Animation snark tank, Monsters vs. Aliens is too clever by half.

Any resemblance to last year's breakout comedy hit "Bridesmaids" is purely intended in a film that seeks the same kind of liberated raunch but too often succumbs to talky, edgy-for-its-own sake glibness.

An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.

Even if Scream 3 lacks the punch and verve of the first two installments, it manages to wring some ironically metaphysical comedy from the movie-within-a-movie motif.

It's a promising concept, albeit melodramatic, but what keeps the movie from halfway working is its infernal preciousness. [03 Sep 1993]

Graciously accompanied by Washington (who can even make eating mac-and-cheese compelling), Zendaya emerges as the star of this show, delivering a performance that calls on sudden, turn-on-a-dime reversals — emotional figure-eights that she executes with impressive, unstudied finesse.

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

Overwrought and overthought, this Carmen somehow winds up being underbaked, as Millepied throws various ideas at the screen, with precious few taking hold with any conviction.

Firmly ensconced among the forgettables in Stiller's career, a generic romantic comedy of the one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B variety.

The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

“No No” performs the valuable service of elevating Ellis’s legacy beyond one game, reminding viewers of a career during which he was almost always, as one observer notes, “a chapter ahead.”

A wild, inventive ride through the unconscious, by way of Art History 101 and An Introduction to Film Tropes. The story of a famous psychoanalyst struggling with his Oedipal demons with the help of some hardened burglars isn’t a story at all, really, but a decidedly rickety scaffold on which Krstic can hang his images, an array of ecstatic references to the painters and directors who have inspired him.

As lighthearted, late-summer escapism goes, Logan Lucky is an amusing if convoluted and undisciplined bagatelle. As a hotly anticipated comeback, it feels like a slightly dippy, ultimately disposable warm-up of a director whose brains, chops and judicious taste we need more than ever.

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

It's one of those movies whose appeal depends on the viewer's tolerance for watching French people suffer, smoke and sigh prettily.

Often astonishingly beautiful, but in a way that's the problem: You wonder what visionaries such as Tim Burton or Michel Gondry might have done with the material. As it is, "Benjamin Button" is little more than "Gump" by way of "Dorian Gray." It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

Good points aside, In Good Company is a bland, occasionally phlegmatic pastiche of cliches and dull encounters.

Bardo seems to be Iñárritu’s deeply personal — if hermetic — attempt to make sense of the conflicting and unresolved impulses that have animated his life and art over the past two decades, during which he’s gone from promising emerging filmmaker to Oscar-winning superstar.

It's Walken who grounds every scene with the kind of watchful honesty that has become his brand in late-career.

Think Like a Man Too, the derivative, intermittently amusing follow-up to the surprise hit rom-com from 2012, is so frenetically paced and hysterically pitched that it makes almost no room for simple enjoyment.

Rather than a movie that breaks the mold, it looks like Anning has inspired one we've seen before.

Between this film and last summer's "Horrible Bosses," Aniston's coyness - starring in explicit movies without having to be explicit herself - seems to be becoming her stock in trade. It's not a particularly commendable one, and Wanderlust does little to disprove that she's still a star more suited to TV rather than the big screen.

Without the benefit of deeper psychological spadework, The Kings of Summer stays resolutely on the surface, resembling more of an extended sitcom than a memorable movie on a par with the films it references.

Thank heaven for William H. Macy, whose portrayal of Happy's sheriff strikes the only honest note in a film that earns its laughs the cheap way.

First-time director Chris Gorak is no Rod Serling, and in his hands the enterprise tends toward the lurid, especially after his nifty third-act twist.

May not be perfect but must be given credit for all that it does right.

His [Director Mike Figgis's] techniques do make the film at least watchable.

It's impossible to tell whether the film's ending is happy because it's happy or because it's ending.

Fake or not, Unknown White Male doesn't live up to its tantalizing potential.

It's difficult to know whom to root for.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

As shaky and unfocused as Captain Marvel often seems, it manages to reach its destination with confidence. In the end, Larson sticks the landing, albeit with something more muted than absolute triumph. The final takeaway is clear. Mission accomplished: More movies ahead.

There's a lovely moment with Mirren and John Hurt that helps send Brighton Rock toward its final note of tenderness. With so much style to burn, Joffe handles the tinge of Greene-ian ambivalence just right.

They succeed in presenting a compelling series of dots, to use the current parlance, but they don't succeed in connecting them.

It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.

To watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which continually sacrifices its potential for sophisticated fun on the altar of style and physical stunts, is to realize how far we've come from the great movies of, say, George Cukor or Howard Hawks.

Although audiences will admire the film's do-it-yourself energy and commitment, Poster Boy finally collapses of its own contrived weight, deflating just when it should soar into madcap -- or at least thoughtful -- satire.

Falters when it falls into exploitation (Irena's flashbacks to scenes of depraved sexual torture) and fatal contrivance.

One of the most eagerly awaited cinematic projects of 2006, which may be why it lands with such a curious thud.

Sandra Bullock is a disheveled, grumpy, adorable mess in Premonition, a psychological thriller that was no doubt pitched as "Medium," only longer and brunette. Or maybe "The Eternal Sixth Sense of the Spotless Groundhog Day."

It's like a ferret on crystal meth that belatedly discovers ecstasy, and it's a tiresome trip either way.

But for all its passion and topical currency, the movie plays too often like a college colloquium. And it ends on an unsatisfying note, with each character's choice, whether fateful or fatal, hanging in a confounding limbo of indeterminacy.

Mac manages to find some moments of comedy within a movie that often feels like it's going into extra innings

If listing the cast of Love Actually is exhausting, it's even more tiring to watch it.

A slick, earnest, ultimately inert adaptation of the eponymous book of the Bible.

A yawn and most unforgivably features some appalling arrangements of the Beatles' best-loved songs.

The premise -- a roundelay of New Yorkers looking for connection, or to escape it -- feels tired, and Mitchell's portrayal of sex as the ultimate vehicle for transcendence, self-knowledge and healing, while conveyed with authentic sweetness, seems shockingly naive.

Canadian director Atom Egoyan delivers a rare misfire with Where the Truth Lies, a shockingly fatuous murder mystery with pseudo-intellectual pretensions.

Still breaks the first and only commandment of remakes: Thou shall at the very least do justice to the original, or thou shall not be made at all.

But despite doing its best to jiggle, giggle and ogle its way into a niche somewhere between "Heathers" and "American Pie," it becomes just another forgettable pastiche of sight gags and pop-culture references.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

Silly? Contrived? Vapid? You bet. Put more simply, "The Prince & Me" is . . . cute.

Falls as flat as a bottle of corked Bordeaux.

The kind of bland, generic, high-concept midsummer comedy that drives a critic to the thesaurus in search of new ways to say "vapid."

Parading through most of the movie in a cutoff T-shirt and bikini briefs, Ricci takes the stereotype of the oversexed farmer's daughter to gothic extremes; Jackson's character, named Lazarus, is similarly drawn with oversize strokes.

When a Stranger Calls never manages to convey the primal, almost atavistic terror that has earned John Carpenter's movies and the "Scream" franchise their places in the teen horror canon. The most lasting psychological effect of this pulp non-classic will most likely be limited to a deep pathological fear of Architectural Digest.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner.

It's a depressing little kingdom, even when Gordon tries desperately to goose the drama with the requisite "Eye of the Tiger" riffs and some junior high-level palace intrigue.

Why this movie -- a rushed, wildly uneven, tonally jumbled caricature -- and why now?

Blessed with some outstanding performances, among them Ribisi's.

It's a bloated, shockingly tedious trudge that manages to look both overproduced and unforgivably cheesy.

Overblown sanctimony and sentimentalism as corny as the Fourth of July.

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.

An only fitfully engaging L.A. soap opera.

Brain-softener.

Busy, over-stylized mess of a movie.

This fitfully funny but mostly dull misfire defines exactly where the line can be drawn between truly subversive humor and lazy cynicism.

A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.

Offers jaw-dropping visuals, but its troubling images of violence may cause this revolutionary effort to miss the evolutionary boat.

Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.

(Perry and Willis) are blown off the screen by Amanda Peet and Natasha Henstridge.

There's very little that's even kind of funny in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which can't accurately be described as a comedy but isn't a true drama, either.

As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.

Michael Caine delivers a stunning performance in Harry Brown, a rancid little revenge fantasy that probably doesn't deserve him.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

Of Madonna's considerable talents, making the camera love her isn't one: The screen seems to go dead every time she's on it.

With a grating combination of naivete and arrogance, The Green Mile consistently overplays its melodramatic material, including a portrait of a black man that is as breathtakingly offensive as it is earnest.

If Shutter Island, a gothic thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, were put to a free association test, the word most likely to come to mind would certainly be "weird."

Bullock's character goes through some changes, but she never turns into some unrecognizably serious actress.

One of the weaknesses of The Sitter is that Hill doesn't develop much comic chemistry with the children.

Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.

Little more than an electronic press kit for the band, produced for the benefit of its fans.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

There's less here than meets the eye, not to mention the ear, nose, tongue and fingertip.

Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.

Eventually MacFarlane's formula -- consisting of filthy, ethnically offensive jokes, scatological humor, tacky pop culture references and random cameos -- begins to wear thin.

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

Anne Fletcher's lifeless comedy about an overbearing mother and her exasperated adult son, has no flawlessly delivered punch lines. It doesn't even have a hangnail.

Conceived and directed by Madonna, W.E. is a gorgeous mess.

To his (Snipes) credit, there are few other stars who could breathe a degree of credibility into a film like The Art of War.

Gerwig remains one of the most captivating new stars to hit the big screen, but she's still looking for a movie that deserves her.

At some point the foul language, lascivious sight gags, references to sex toys, violence against animals and cruelty toward children simply ceases to be funny.

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

Giamatti provides those small moments of triumph that Duets pretends to celebrate but instead stifles with its sense of superiority.

Never makes the Jordans' tribulations feel like anything more than yuppie angst.

As it is, the audience must content itself with baby poop, naughty words and the female anatomy at its pneumatic extreme, while Bateman and Reynolds's search for transcendence continues.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

It would be dishonest to claim it isn’t funny. The laughs may come in fits and starts, usually by way of sight gags and set pieces, but they do come. And then they go.

Brax’s knuckles may be perpetually bared, but his heart’s always in the right place, which “The Accountant 2” spares nothing to remind us, even while the mayhem escalates into sheer outlandishness.

The Woman in the Window is the kind of film that could go places, but sadly never manages to get out the door.

Presumably, Scott is giving the audience what it wants, but purists may wonder whether simply re-watching “Alien” would have provided scarier, more genuine jolts.

For audiences who prefer their movies to be as weird and even off-putting as possible, Annette comes fully wrapped as a pretentious, arty, occasionally breathtaking, ultimately misbegotten midsummer gift.

Adore at its core is a bore, nothing more.

Tyldum...isn’t a dynamic stylist as much as a competent executor of what’s on the page. He gets Passengers to where it needs to go, which is a resolution in keeping with a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too, no matter how much credibility it strains, or how many political and ethical quandaries it elides.

The best thing about awkward moments, after all, is that they usually pass quickly. And, blessedly, just as swiftly forgotten.

Strip away the trite character beats, rote plot points, random dream sequences and other narrative padding, and “Batman v Superman” comes down to the actors, their characters and whether they can sustain interest over the long haul. The answer is yes, if they wind up in the hands of filmmakers blessed with authentic imagination rather than serviceable technical chops.

Don’t expect to see a great film, or even a very good one. Whether you discover a meaningful channel with which to continue your walk with the film’s protagonist, however, is strictly between you and your god.

The film might take its name from poker subculture, but it lacks all the urgency, single-mindedness and swiftness that the title implies at its most literal. Runner Runner is a bummer. Bummer.

Full of incident, heartbreak, secrets and betrayal, The Affair and its choppy formal structure don’t do justice to an enormously appealing cast.

The end result is a movie that feels oddly detached, especially considering the raw intimacy of Leigh’s previous films.

Even Monáe’s magnetism can't elevate Antebellum above roots that are firmly planted in the blood and soil of pulp exploitation, shaky liberal earnestness and rank opportunism.

Even viewers who are mildly diverted by the whodunit angle are unlikely to find themselves emotionally engaged in the outcome.

War Dogs stays at arm’s length from the subjects, afraid to implicate us in the pleasures and prosperity of their rise, thus making their fall seem distant, puny and unaffecting.

Writer-director Rupert Goold, here making his feature debut, fails to capture the chemistry and tonal complexity necessary to make this grim, often grisly tale anything more than a tragically lurid anecdote.

Only the most committed Aster-pologists are likely to enjoy Midsommar at its fullest; others, meanwhile, may admire its handsome visual design and bravura performances without completely buying in to the alternately diseased and fuzzy fable at its core.

There’s a ripping good story buried somewhere in The Aftermath, an intriguing but ultimately disappointing story.

Song to Song is a painful movie to watch, not only because it’s so dithery and overlong, but because it reveals Malick to be a filmmaker far more interested in surfaces than his vaunted intellectual depth would suggest.

Overplotted, undercooked and extremely well-dressed, The Dressmaker has style to burn, but it has a mean streak as wide as the Outback.

Bad Hair is a good idea buried within a scattershot, ultimately mediocre movie.

Like so many recent films — “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Belfast,” “The Fabelmans,” “Empire of Light” — Babylon wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn.

Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play is a murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

A lugubrious cloud of mediocrity sets in early in Freeheld, a dreary dramatization of a pivotal gay rights case that paved the way for marriage equality.

As is true with so much of Haggis’s work, Third Person suffers from an airless, too-neat lack of connection with organic life.

Snyder tries to up the spectacle ante with ever more explosions, crashes, thermal blasts, topological realignments, gunfire and mano-a-mano fistfights. But the result is a punishing sense of diminishing returns and a genre that has finally reached the point of mayhem-induced exhaustion.

In “Quantumania,” sprightly pacing and lighthearted humor have succumbed to the turgid seriousness that plagues so much of the comic book canon.

Both assaultive and tiresome, A Good Day to Die Hard barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.

Knight of Cups may want to be understood as the portrait of a man plunging beneath the veneer of modern life, but it can just as easily be perceived as the self-portrait of a filmmaker in his own Versailles, letting himself eat cake and having it, too.

What starts out as a slick, streamlined delivery system for mayhem, carnage and quippery finally finds its inner Agatha Christie. For all its supercool posturing, casual cruelty and lurid overcompensation, “Bullet Train” was a cozy all along.

A movie that’s not a disaster, but not particularly distinguished; a movie that, in the end, will wind up being as forgettable as its own bizarre publicity.

Safe Haven is one of those Valentine’s Day confections that satisfy your sweet tooth until you get to their weird, off-putting center. The problem with movies is that you can’t put them back in the box.

Vanessa Kirby delivers a bravura performance in Pieces of a Woman. In fact, her performance is so commanding, uncompromising and far-ranging that it often threatens to swallow this otherwise uneven and frustratingly thin movie with one voracious gulp.

We don’t expect a James Bond film to be deep, but at least we should be dazzled by the seductive gloss of its surfaces. Aside from that stunning opening sequence, this installment feels overcompensating and dutiful.

Although Lee briefly engages in some fascinating ideas linking the vampire’s existence to cultural empowerment, preservation and survival, he squanders that potential in leaden soft-core cliches that usually wind up with him ogling the female form.

This calculatingly adorable coming-of-age tale has its delights — chiefly in a modest, endearing lead performance from Anton Yelchin and an amusing two-handed turn by Glenn Close and Frank Langella as his parents — but feels more constructed than lived.

Curiously flimsy and forgettable.

The Zero Theorem doesn’t fully earn the elaborately conceived scaffolding on which its relatively tame ideas are hoisted.

Even at its lamest and most entitled, this sequel will most likely please fans of the first installment, chiefly because Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are, admittedly, often very funny together.

Although her charisma is still undeniable, there’s also no denying that McCarthy is capable of much more than she’s allowing herself to do here. There comes a point when every force of nature starts to look just plain forced.

Rebecca is nice to look at, inoffensive, competently executed and utterly unnecessary when once, it was so much more.

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

With Elvis, Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.

A film of admirable ambition but vexingly uneven execution.

Unfortunately, The Columnist doesn’t live up to its initial promise: What might have been a trenchant cultural critique couched within poisonously playful genre exercise becomes an indulgence in undifferentiated rage for its own graphic sake.

A pulpy grindhouse B-picture tricked out in art house pretensions, counting on the siren call of sex and violence to fleece the rubes. Choose your own adventure. And maybe bring a barf bag.

Things happen in On the Rocks, but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition.

Southpaw may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those faults lie in its star. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he’s in.

2 Guns feels like it’s all been done before, whether by John Woo, Michael Bay or any number of their CGI-happy clones.

A movie that, despite its strenuous efforts to appear hardened and sexy and sleek, is unforgivably phony, talky and dull.

Bullock and McCarthy and the chemistry they generate are far more compelling than the movie they’re in. Too often the sketches go on too long, and the coarse, abrasive tone quickly begins to feel repetitive and off-putting.

White House Down never quite seems to decide what kind of movie it wants to be, although by firepower alone it qualifies as this summer’s most cartoonishly bombastic exercise in sensory overload (so far).

Welcome to “The Batman,” yet another lugubrious, laboriously grim slog masquerading as a fun comic book movie.

The absurdism wears gratingly thin in The Dead Don’t Die, whose deadpan tone gives way to tiresome, grindingly repetitive inertia.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells its story with sympathy, but too many quirks and try-hard flourishes. In the welter and spin of tics, voice-overs, set pieces, images, flashbacks and dream states, the man himself gets as lost as a kitten in the rain.

Although The Other Woman nibbles around the edges of revealing truths about relationships, it leaves most of that potential behind, instead pursuing easy, exhausted cliches about zip-less marriages, upper class suburban drudgery, cynical careerism and dumb-but-sweet blondes.

If "Road House” were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor. But it doesn’t aspire to much more than mining the intellectual property catalogue for a quick-and-dirty cash grab.

The director tries to infuse Shock and Awe with the taut procedural drama of “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight” or “The Post.” But he winds up demonstrating just how difficult it is to make shoe-leather journalism entertaining, much less artful.

Structurally, Vice is a mess, zigging here and zagging there, never knowing quite when to end, and when it finally does, leaving few penetrating or genuinely illuminating ideas to ponder.

There’s no doubt that Aniston deserves more roles like this one but, with luck, in less maudlin, more surprising movies.

The Hateful Eight never lives up to its intriguing opening minutes and provocative premise, its wide-screen canvas wasted on a talky, claustrophobic chamber piece that descends, in due Tarantino fashion, into a mean-spirited slough of bloodshed and mayhem.

What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

At times, Unfriended really clicks — but ultimately, it’s a drag.

Although there are genuine moments of humor, they’re at odds with the increasingly ghastly measures taken by the three protagonists, as they succumb to power-hunger, paranoia and overkill.

Reiner assembles a square meal of rom-com pleasure points, but it’s bland, by-the-numbers and not particularly memorable.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is belabored, pretentious and often willfully opaque. [25 Jun 1999]

A grisly, often cynical piece of work whose joyless, aggressive spirit is made even less appealing by its soulless visual style.

9 Songs inadvertently proves just how limited experimentation for its own sake can be.

Sloppy compendium of filthy jokes and lowbrow sight gags.

Sylvia plays it safe, and in doing so it becomes little more than just another domestic melodrama devoid of life and, of all things, poetry.

A stunningly inert piece of cinema, a movie that basically boils down to serial shots of people talking to each other.

Whether it's the sight of Reynolds squeezed painfully into a football uniform or the endless footballs-to-the-crotch and tired gay jokes, The Longest Yard has the feeling of mutton dressed as lamb.

Most of the humor in The Pink Panther derives from Martin's silly French accent, especially when he tries to pronounce the word "hamburger." But zat joke, she ees not funny. And The Pink Panther ees, how you say, ze real dog.

Regardless of the cute little hats and clam-diggers she wears, it's impossible to believe Kidman as a breathless ingenue; that relentless drive and steely Kidmanesque determination keep jutting through the cotton in flinty, sharp-edged shards.

A movie that sags and drags under the weight of poor pacing, execrable writing and largely unlikable characters.

In reality, Eros is a letdown, a collection of bagatelles that, with one exception, fails to live up to its promise.

A boilerplate melodrama whose good guys and bad guys are so baldly drawn they could have been conceived by Friz Freleng.

An inert, sloppily written melodrama as grim and featureless as its frozen Midwestern setting.

At once listless and overheated, giddy and utterly zipless, the current incarnation lacks not just the savoir-faire of its stylish predecessor but also the sex appeal.

The loudest, trashiest, stupidest, cheesiest celebration of ritualized male aggression of 2004.

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

Sadly, the filmmakers haven't given viewers enough context or information about their protagonist to know whether he's utterly free or utterly unmoored -– or to care very much either way.

Viewers anticipating side-splitting guffaws will be disappointed: Stuck on You is a strangely lackluster, flaccid string of fitfully humorous episodes.

Shockingly inert.

The question is why the time, talent and treasure of such energetic and even gifted artists have been marshaled in such a disgusting and trivial genre exercise and what viewers are supposed to get out of it. Isn't life hard enough?

The fact that there's nothing wrong with it -- that there's nary a scenic detail or scrap of dialogue or performance that isn't utterly on the nose -- is precisely what's wrong with it.

Pride and Glory would be risible if it weren't so reprehensible.

It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.

It winds up being tuneless, unfunny and, despite its strenuous efforts, not terribly sexy.

Bland, workmanlike and instantly forgettable.

The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.

In a summer of surprisingly self-serious comic book movies" Lara Croft "stands out as being particularly humorless.

Traffics in nearly every trite cliche of the "colorful" South one can think of, from its pseudo-Gothic aesthetic to its overripe dialogue.

What it possesses in heart and goodwill, it sorely lacks in narrative skill and artistic depth.

Rarely has an actress exuded such blank nothingness as Simpson, a one-woman vapid delivery system who sucks the energy and joy out of every scene she's in, like some freakishly well-endowed black hole.

So cheesy and cheap that it almost attains high camp.

Watching Thurman's character "triumph" in a context as joyless and self-referential as Tarantino's is a soul-deadening experience, one that over two hours takes on the same dreary monotone as the cheapest pornography.

Not good enough to qualify as classic Gothic horror, not nearly fun enough to qualify as great B-movie camp.