Barbara VanDenburgh

Our teenage years are so overwrought with emotion; not to put them in play at all makes Brandy feel like little more than a cipher for Plaza’s deadpan dark humor. And that’s pleasurable enough for a quick fling, but hardly the foundation of a lasting relationship.

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.

The film spends more time lingering on Emma's love affairs than it does in making sense of them; her declarations of passion and despair lack both.

Attractively staged and spiced through with raunch, About Last Night is still a pleasant enough romp, even if you have no intention of returning its phone calls.

"I didn't hate it" isn't a high watermark for praise, but when it comes to most Sparks adaptations, it's practically as good as winning an Oscar.

What spares Learning to Drive is an awful lot of comedic talent and artistic good will. Clarkson and Kingsley imbue average material with easy charm and wit, clicking onscreen with the smooth platonic chemistry of old friends.

There’s a limit to how much patience one has for spending time with terrible people living large. But for all the lackluster familiarity of the film’s style, the story is too interesting, too baffling to deny.

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 not a fascinating (or even particularly interesting) character study — the film never lets you get close enough to its leading man to understand his damage — but it's nevertheless an intermittently moving one.

Scenes go on too long. Jokes outwear their welcome. The plot, though perfunctory (it’s no more complex or intriguing than the average hourlong television crime procedural), gets muddled. Even though McCarthy keeps the laughs coming, The Heat doesn’t really pack enough.

The zombification of Austen’s material is frequently funny and sometimes clever, but the film stumbles hard when it loses sight of just how ridiculous it is.

The intentions are noble, but the film’s eagerness to honor Mandela instead shortchanges him. Mandela was a man who broke the mold; “Mandela” is a film content to nestle very neatly into it.

In spite of the compelling raw material in the lives of its ostensible subjects, it strikes out as an act of storytelling.

Ornamented heavily with creative visual pleasures, the film is bogged down, not just by weighty thematic issues — death, divorce, bullying, unfairness — but by professions of its own grandeur.

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

As far as missteps go, Prince Avalanche is at least an interesting one, which is better than Green has done in awhile.

Nothing fresh is being brought to the table, but it's a sufficient bit of fun for anyone who longs for the days of Brosnan's spy swagger.

Less obvious is how his parents will react should Ravi break ways with tradition and confess his true feelings. Their struggle to maintain their sense of cultural identity in a rapidly changing world is far more moving than any grown man’s commitment issues, even when that grown man is as ingratiating as Ravi.

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

If you have a yen for martial-arts action, Man of Tai Chi could do the trick depending on how seriously you take Reeves’ performance. At the film’s worst, it’s empty yet still attractive (much, it can be argued, like Reeves).

Props to Bad Milo for its fearlessly pulp approach in exploring well-worn characters and their ho-hum dilemmas, but you know you’ve got a dull story on your hands when not even a butt monster can jazz it up enough.

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.

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.

Mostly, it's fine. The acting is fine. The writing is fine. The story is fine. There are a few laughs. And that should be fine enough. But with material as rich as Leonard's serving as the foundation, just fine is a disappointment.

It’s never a boring film to look at, but it is often a tiring one. Running over two hours, the film is bloated with portent and repetition, each story taking too long to get to its inevitable moral.

All the glossy, kinetic animation and inventive action sequences get lost in the gag machine. The film throws jokes out like a tennis-ball machine on the fritz: gross humor, slapstick pratfalls, bizarre non sequiturs. The randomness does land a few laughs, but it's also exhausting.

Southpaw is all about the fist. There’s no delicate footwork here, no lingering grace notes. It’s a film played entirely in power chords.

Good for its uncommonly level-headed characters, less so for viewers watching a movie in which not much happens.