Barbara VanDenburgh

When it reaches its boiling point, Les Misérables absolutely roils.

It’s an unnecessarily complicated puzzle-box construction that only serves to cheapen the story and diminish its impact

The writing and editing aren’t up to the task of retrofitting Alcott’s straightforward narrative with a sophisticated chronology and rob it of dramatic tension in the process.

A Hidden Life is less a story than an experience, a spiritual journey made accessible through light and sound. Malick doesn’t transcend cinema. He sanctifies it.

Queen & Slim is strongest when it lets the images and the acting do the lion’s share of the talking.

The report is important. Its findings and the attempts to undermine them and the investigators, shouldn’t be forgotten. That The Report tries to keep these lessons in a fickle public’s consciousness is a good thing. If only anything committed to screen here were memorable.

It adds up to a marginally more interesting experience than the first “Frozen,” but this sequel would have benefited from venturing a touch further into the unknown.

It’s behind the wheel with Miles that Ford v Ferrari becomes a well-oiled entertainment machine, a thrill ride with a driver’s-eye view of the world’s most exciting track. Everything that doesn’t work is just a distant speck in the rearview mirror.

All pleasures in Last Christmas are as slight. Like the Christmas shop and its baubles, it’s shiny and attractive and intermittently distracting, but it’s all just so much glitter on cheap plastic. It’s angling hard for holiday cheer, but there’s nothing more joyless than forced whimsy.

First Love might not ultimately mean much, but its wily mix of colorful elements – romance, organized crime, slapstick and ultra-violence – makes for a bracingly weird cinematic experience.

Brittany is funny and authentic, but she can also be prickly and stubborn, even hard to like. You know, the way real people are.

The Kitchen requires Scorsese levels of charisma to work, and only McCarthy comes close out of sheer professionalism.

Tel Aviv on Fire, like the soap opera that shares its name, doesn't attempt to grapple with the complexities of the conflict. "Is there nothing between bombs and surrender?" it asks, pleading for moderation. Moderation gets you a pleasant-enough comedy. But not much more.

Tarantino has always worn his love of cinema on his sleeve, fetishistic and in the form of homage. But here, that love is reverent.

While Midsommar is too overwrought to be a masterpiece, it’s also too entertaining in its abject lunacy and assured in its craftsmanship to be considered a sophomore slump. Aster is a filmmaker still defining his voice, and despite the growing pains, Midsommar is an intriguing step in its evolution.

The Proposal makes for a fascinating and not-a-little-morbid piece of artistic trolling.

“Last Black Man” pulses with undeniable energy and the promise of other, even better films to come. As director Joe Talbot’s first movie, it’s impossible to imagine it will be his last.

It’s ironic that a film about bucking formula is itself so formulaic. There’s nothing wrong with such inoffensive pleasantness, but if Late Night wants to advocate setting fire to the system in pursuit of more meaningful art, it should have led the charge.

It all has the air of a community theater troupe performing in a Disney parade, overeager in the exaggerated artifice. That's well enough for an amusement park, but on film it's embarrassing.

How do you make a legend as imposing as Shakespeare flesh? All Is True suggests you can't, if not even Branagh, Dench, McKellen, et al. can bring him down to earth. Maybe it's for the best that the real man is unknowable, that man is simply the work itself.

It doesn’t just maintain the momentum built in the previous chapters but further ramps up the emotional stakes and physical complexity. It’s like gorging on candy for two hours, only you get to walk away from the theater without a stomachache.

A cunning civics lesson about religious pluralism that will have civic-minded citizens throwing up the devil horns even if they’re not quite ready to proclaim mocking allegiance to Satan.

Movie-release schedules are set by studios months in advance, and many are the movie that had the misfortune to open at an inopportune time. But Hotel Mumbai is responsible for myriad other poor creative decisions that make a spectacle of misery.

What seems primed to play out like a by-the-numbers social message movie with a classic redemption arc becomes something much more sophisticated, and much more challenging for the viewer. Schoenaerts' performance deserves much of the praise.

For all its thematic and behind-the-scenes innovations, cinematically Captain Marvel feels like a step backward for the MCU. Fresh off the heels of the all-or-nothing bombast of “Avengers: Infinity War,” the righteous representation of “Black Panther” and the giddy lunacy of “Thor: Ragnarok,” Captain Marvel is a retreat into a bland formula.

Even if your veins pump with more popcorn butter than blood, Alita: Battle Angel can get a bit too stupid to bear, like watching a pair of 13-year-old boys play a very expensive video game they designed themselves.

The problem isn’t that it pokes fun at romantic comedies, it’s that it itself isn’t a terribly good one.

While it necessarily lacks the joy of discovery the first movie brought, “The Lego Movie 2” is still a breathless romp, landing enough jokes a minute to discourage over-analysis. It’s a good time at the movies, which is all a Lego movie really owes us for the price of admission.

Destroyer frequently zombie-shuffles into unintentional hilarity, confusing darkness for depth, ugliness for complexity, convolution for smarts. It is just too self-serious to take seriously.

It’s clear from the opening shots that a physically and psychically savaged post-war Poland is impossible ground for love to flower, and it’s a testament to Pawel Pawlikowski’s talent that this fatalism makes us more, not less, invested in the romance.

Landais certainly brought little cinematic verve to The Aspern Papers, telling the story largely in turgid literary voiceover lifted directly from the original source material.

To put it in terms Charlie would dig, “Bumblebee” is like an 80s mixtape that’s all hits, no deep cuts. Nothing here surprises save the perspective. But that’s enough to save it.

The House That Jack Built is more than just an epic piece of cinematic trolling; it’s von Trier taking a microscope to his creative process in all its obsessive ugliness, creating a sophisticated meta-commentary on his art and daring the audience not to be entertained by his extreme indulgence in all the predilections for which he’s been roundly criticized.

There is the occasional cool visual and clever world-building detail, like jellyfish couture and eye-popping underwater physics, but Aquaman never fully commits to its lunacy.

It breathes youthful life into a tired franchise and makes the smartest transition yet of characters from the comics to the big screen with clever animation and thoughtful storytelling.

This is not a flat and lifeless biopic in which a creation loses a bit of its wonder in the dissection of its inspiration. “Becoming Astrid” sidesteps that pitfall by focusing on the writer’s painful passage into womanhood, telling an intimate and unhurried story of quiet triumph over pain.

Green Book is not unthoughtful in its crowd-pleasing. It’s just that such crowd-pleasing feels inappropriately quaint for 2018.

The result is too well-meaning and sincere to truly dislike, but too frictionless and manufactured to do right by the complicated scenario.

Widows works best as a slow-burn thriller, a masterclass of patient reveals and cleverly withheld information (which, as any fan of her knows, are Flynn’s hallmarks). But Widows has more to say, touching on the topics of generational power, the dynamics of race in politics and marriage, the institutional racism present in police violence.

A delicately balanced, mature drama, What They Had portrays a family devastated by Alzheimer’s with accuracy, empathy and respect, capturing both the heartache and unexpected tenderness of caring for a loved one coming slowly undone and the familial bonds that are tested and forged in the process.

Despite its ostensive seriousness, Galveston is a tepid crime drama without talons sharp enough to sink into the audience.

What we see onscreen instead is mere competence, handsomely shot but bereft of purpose. One gets the sense that it was remade for no other reason than because more tolerant 21st-century content standards mean you can spill a man’s guts onscreen.

Perhaps the problem isn’t one of too little ambition, but of too much. The Spy Who Dumped Me is, after all, trying earnestly to be about half a dozen different things: a buddy comedy, a spy drama, a raunch fest, a thrilling action film. It’s just that it doesn't have the focus to do any of those things particularly well.

What elevates this sequel are stakes.

Hotel Transylvania 3 is a harmless enough excuse for a couple hours of air-conditioned entertainment, which is all some people ask of a kid’s film. But there’s something bleak about its banality.

The imagery is romantically period, with textured scenes staged in handsomely lit smoke-filled rooms, its newsreels and baseball stadiums suffused with charming Americana. But you can’t root for set design or feel empathy for colored filters. You need human beings for that, and The Catcher Was a Spy keeps its heart under lock and key.

You’ve heard this song before and can predict all the emotional high notes before they hit, but sometimes that’s all you need from a summer bop.

It’s a film entirely lacking in pomp, but there’s a certain bravado in its delicate reservation. A tender and spare meditation on family unfurls in the stillness of a sleepy, sun-soaked Spanish summer.

It’s befuddling that such a barrier-breaking filmmaker would make a biopic about a woman who shares similar daring qualities that’s so … ordinary. To make boring the revelries of 19th century literati is no mean feat, but it is Mary Shelley's chief accomplishment.

On the whole it’s a remarkably controlled exercise. It’s to the film’s credit that Moll is the center of attention from start to finish, and not even a romantically damaged bad boy can steal the spotlight from her barely contained wildfire of emotions.

Yes, it recalls “Turner and Hooch,” a movie Show Dogs references so many times you start to feel nostalgic for it. And when you find yourself longing for “Turner and Hooch,” things are very bleak indeed.

Breaking In is a shallow nod to female empowerment, not the embodiment of it.

The case is a gut punch to the American dream, and yet Little Pink House is a tepid viewing experience, in part because it rarely invites us into these homes so we can lament their loss.

For a film that atonally screams praises of the destructive power of punk rock, The House of Tomorrow is disappointingly, if crowd-pleasingly, textbook. The pedestrian narrative still makes for a winsome coming-of-age tale, buoyed as it is by a talented cast and visually striking setting.

The ways in which Love After Love is successful at portraying the grief process is also what makes it at times wildly unpleasant to watch.

Pfeiffer may be stripped of her luminosity, but she is vivid onscreen.

Beirut is inoffensive in its familiarity, a handsome enough thriller to pass the time. What it’s lacking are stakes.

Foxtrot is far too interior to be called flashy, but there’s something striking in director Samuel Maoz’s visual confidence, the way he translates his characters’ states of mind into images.

For 90 minutes we’re presented with idiot characters who do terrible things to themselves and each other, and in its final gasp the movie tries to retrofit them into heroes.

It’s disheartening that it took until 2018 to get a gay version of this adolescent staple from a major studio. But at least it was worth the wait.

Andrea Pallaoro’s frigid portrait of a woman in crisis is more a calculated exercise in formalism than an achievement in storytelling. His well-composed images of loneliness are cerebrally satisfying but lack emotional heft.

The film doesn’t need to make a case for Marina’s basic humanity and smartly avoids clichés of persecution storytelling, instead ceding the floor to Vega’s magnetic presence and soulfulness. She is a marvel, and if one doesn’t come away loving her as Orlando did, it’s no shortcoming of the film.

For anyone familiar with the original Peter Rabbit, it’s a little depressing to see its storybook charm reduced to slapstick. You can only see a person get electrocuted so many times before the gag wears thin, and with it the movie’s welcome.

That Freak Show is not the joyous gay party it aspires to be is a testament to squandered opportunities. For all the aces up its sleeve, Freak Show never quite lets its freak flag fly.

The narrative is so diffuse that putting together the pieces is beside the point. You feel no closer to knowing or understanding the Laurents, and their collective unpleasantness gives one little reason to want to. It’s a skilled ratcheting of discomfort – but to what end?

Paddington 2 is a winsome confection. More than just a movie, it’s a necessary mood corrective, a temporary escape hatch from negativity. The world does indeed feel right in the company of this kind and polite little bear.

The title Acts of Violence has less to do with the storyline of the movie it graces and more about what’s perpetrated against the audience watching it.

The dialogue is agony.

Thelma treads the line between the psychological and supernatural, gracefully at first, and then with increasing abandon.

For all its heart and beauty, The Breadwinner sputters a bit to a close. Its themes are undeniable — one walks away feeling angry and empowered. But with the story’s soft focus, one soon forgets why.

Instead, the story is largely told from Dahmer’s perspective, and we know too much about where he ends up to feel anything like sympathy for him. It’s still a morbidly fascinating peek behind the blood-stained curtains.

Despite its familiarity, A Bad Moms Christmas is a touch better than the first bacchanal.

The Snowman is like if aliens studied humanity and tried to make their own movie in an attempt to communicate with us. This simulacrum contains all the requisite pieces of a movie, but humanity got lost in translation.

Goodbye Christopher Robin is an emotionally layered story about failures in parenting that gave rise to one of our most enduring joys.

It’s all joyous silliness, as a My Little Pony movie should be, packed with clean humor and pony puns.

There’s daring in the film’s slow unfurling. The problem, though, isn’t one of patience but of payoff. Woodshock is beautiful but it’s all chassis, a root-dead tree that crumbles beneath the ax.

Rebel in the Rye is Hollywood regular Danny Strong’s feature-film directorial debut, and it fumbles for a voice in tracking the life of a writer renowned for his.

Crown Heights is soul-shaking only in the abstract. In execution, it’s deathly dull.

For every crisis there’s a line of homespun wisdom, in every failure a universal lesson to impart. The film highlights each symbol, making explicit that which would be stronger left implicit, until Rex’s glass castle becomes an overbearing metaphor.

City of Ghosts isn’t merely about the personal sacrifices of these men, but a testament to the necessity of a free and open press the world over.

No, Atomic Blonde isn’t lacking in sex appeal or swagger. But what it is in want of are stakes.

In many ways Lady Macbeth is remarkable for what it isn’t. It isn’t a staid period drama. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t predictable. And it certainly isn’t comfortable.

At its best, it hits the gut with the free-fall feel of a theme-park ride. But it’s a long and winding path back to the gate, and “Valerian” loses its way many times, however beautifully.

There is no substance, legal or otherwise, that can make this tolerable.

Despite the seriousness of the subject matter and the characters’ complex emotional journey, the film turns into something of a thriller with twists that, given the context, beleaguer believability.

The real power of Beatriz at Dinner is that it isn’t about politics but the human heart. Beatriz and Strutt are not arguing legislation; they’re arguing two visions of the American dream, two visions of the human soul.

Cars 3 doesn’t have enough velocity to escape that lesser tier. It does, however, offer a course correction for the franchise with a kinetic and emotionally resonant sports film that’s big on character – and blessedly light on Mater.

3 Generations feels focus-grouped into existence, like its every development was fine-tuned to be as inoffensively on-message as possible in its treatment of trans issues. That’s good for take-home pamphlets and afterschool specials, but deadly to dramas.

Director Terence Davies dispenses of any gaudy romantic trappings and makes something much more beautiful in A Quiet Passion, a delicate and measured drama that plumbs the depths of the poet’s strange heart and the agony of her intelligence.

Doesn’t plumb the depths of adolescent emotions and high-school politics so much as skims the surface in a psychedelic dinghy.

This cartoonishly violent exercise in cinematic hero worship comes at the audience with chambers loaded and fires off rounds too rapidly to worry about how vapid it all is.

This fully animated reboot embraces the Smurfs Saturday-morning-cartoon roots and creates a sprightly, brightly colored, age-appropriate adventure for young children fresh to the little blue woodland creatures.

Ghost in the Shell sidesteps questions of humanity and the effect of technology on the human spirit and opts instead for boilerplate sci-fi spectacle, eschewing existentialism for predictable plot and the glittery trappings of its 21st-century carapace

This isn’t a war movie; it’s an after-the-war movie. But the battle lines are still drawn, and every ragged breath the film takes braces for an explosion.

Its real accomplishment is that, with so much money behind it and a true visionary at the helm, it manages to feel so dated.

It just feels desperate.

The laughs don’t add up. There’s no dramatic arc. Jackie doesn’t grow or learn from his downfall, so much as bumble his way out of it to an unsatisfying conclusion.

The film is packed with moments of rank idiocy.