Barbara VanDenburgh

It’s clever. It’s also occasionally a chore to watch, true to the boredom you’d expect to feel listening to computer programmers hash out chess logistics.

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.

When the material falters, Sumpter and Sawyers suck you back in with their pitch-perfect performances.

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.

Dom Hemingway is a naughty good time while it lives up to the unpredictable bawdiness of its opening line.

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.

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.

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.

Paddington is a mostly smart update loaded with charm, and it preserves enough of the fuzzy feelings for purists to walk away with a smile.

That everything is held at such a remove is the artistry of The Assassin, but it comes at the cost of emotional investment. It’s so elliptical in its approach that there’s no love for anyone, or anything, outside of beauty. It can be admired — greatly, even — but it can’t be felt.

Civil-rights movements are never really over because they're never really won. She's Beautiful When She's Angry doesn't overtly make that case until its closing minutes, but when it does, it's made all the more powerful by the footage that preceded it.

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.

The children may tug at the heartstrings, but it’s the adults who give the film its heart.

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.

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.

Violette doesn't abandon that playbook, but it does a better job than most of putting the viewer in its artist's headspace.

Turns out You’re Next isn’t a slave to horror-movie conventions after all — rather, it’s having tongue-in-cheek fun with conventions while playing up to them, complete with a killer retro ’80s-horror synth score and a gruesome finale that recalls the excess of Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive.”

Wolf Totem doesn’t feel so much like fully formed narrative film as it does a trumped up National Geographic special on Inner Mongolia eager to make use of shiny new IMAX cameras.

For all of Cianfrance’s seriousness, the material proves too essentially melodramatic, hokey and self-serious to save. No gorgeous cinematography and no cast, no matter how A-list, can ultimately save this material from itself.

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.

To the film's credit, it knows it's ridiculous. It's aiming for ridiculous, and it hits the mark as precisely as the strippers groove half-naked to their beats.

The story is good enough to tell itself, and the filmmakers should have let it.

It’s an assured debut from a rising star that nails tone and pace. It would be a solid summer thriller were it not grossly undermined by its astonishingly regressive treatment of its leading lady.

The film really pops to life only when it gets a little messy, and it's never messier than when it loses itself in family dynamics.

It’s all very competent, containing all the separate components we ask of period pieces and literary adaptations: great actors, dramatic staging, lush scenery, elaborate costuming. It looks as pretty as a tightly cinched corset, and leaves just as little room to breathe.

There's a welcome lack of pretension to the proceedings. Stalwarts like Hurt and Ian McShane are on hand to class up the joint — everyone's got a British accent except for Johnson — while the predictable story bludgeons its way towards an inevitable conclusion.

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?

Although it brings nothing new to the con-artist fold, or even anything thrilling, Focus is a seductive enough rehash that benefits from the built-in pleasures of the trade.