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.

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.

When executed with love and peopled with actors who breathe life into their characters, Hidden Figures is precisely the delight it aims to be.

Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.

The characteristics that make Evolution an intriguing piece of cinema also make it a not entirely successful one.

Bell lets the action onscreen tell a story that’s every bit as rousing as a Disney adventure.

The danger in making a movie like Coming Through the Rye is in the constant referencing and hero worship of bigger, better, towering works of art — you can only exist in their shadows and pale all the more for the comparison.

Relying wholly on good casting and the charisma of its actors, big and small, to elevate too-familiar material, the film’s stale humor hinges on two faulty premises: That the suburbs are inscrutable and that the people who live in them are clueless.

Burton reins in his worst impulses, bad habits that he’s been cultivating for over a decade, to make a wickedly dark children’s movie that is, finally, blessedly, fun to look at.

It’s a slight film, but one that hits all the tricky emotional and comedic notes without a hint of cruelty.

Storks is charmless with rote obligation. This is a kid’s film for hire, with none of the creativity, emotion and design that elevate the genre to art, or even simply a fun time at the movies.

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.

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

Koreeda makes thrilling the rich inner lives of four young women trying to navigate rocky emotional terrain in the wake of their father’s death.

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’s a zombie movie that, amidst the giddy bloodshed, allows room for philosophical questions about our fundamental responsibilities to one another. It may not be something we’ve never seen before, but it’s something we can benefit from seeing again.

It’s not the moms that are bad — it’s the movie.

It wouldn’t make the movie good, but at least a meteor strike would preclude the possibility of a sixth “Ice Age” film.

It’s a variation on a theme that Solondz has been working through his whole filmography, and when he’s successful, he convinces you to believe the worst in people and laugh at it. But when he’s not, the film can feel like punishment.

Even more than an expose of bad reporting and social hysteria, The Witness is an intimate exercise in grief and healing

It’s safe to say that Tickled is nothing like what its filmmakers set out to make. That's an artistic blessing.

“Raiders!” is as sloppy and imperfect as the kids’ shot-for-shot remake, but it has much the same charm.

The stunning character work is accented with moments of pure cinematic poetry. Audiard uses the camera like a paintbrush, composing lyrical interludes and disorienting transitions with the power to leave you breathless. It’s all so quietly brilliant — until it isn’t.

I predict that within a decade, Mother’s and Daughters will be mandatory viewing at film schools across the country. There are precious few such perfect examples of how not to make a film.

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.

The film’s focus is too easily distracted by celebrity and turns less documentary and more fawning love letter to an industry already in love with itself.

Cliff Curtis is staggeringly good as Gen.

Barbershop: The Next Cut embraces the societal changes and rifts of the past decade, from Chicago’s increased violence and the Black Lives Matter movement to Barack Obama’s historic presidency, making the film an even more heartfelt love letter to Chicago.

While its audacity is laudable, the film ultimately has all the thrill of watching someone else play a first-person-shooter video game.

There are brief bursts of hilarity, and they are all, without exception, owed to McCarthy’s innate charisma and comedic timing.

What it lacks in thematic innovation it more than makes up for with enough memorable characters and visual splendor to make Zootopia a perennial Disney favorite.

It’s a compelling journey into the deep, if a meandering one, guided by a moral compass that operates by a different magnetic field than our own, and often leads astray.

It’s ambiguity without engagement, art you can admire but not feel.

It’s a stumble down the catwalk not even Blue Steel can save.

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.

What grates is the lack of attention to details. There is a grating sloppiness to much of The Choice, both narratively and stylistically.

The cultural specificity and fiercely patriarchal setting sets Mustang apart. It’s a timely reminder that, even still, there are few safe havens in the world for a free spirit.

The same effortless chemistry that made the comedians such ideal Golden Globes hosts is on full display in this broad comedy, given extra oomph by a wise and glorious R rating that opens the floodgates of creative vulgarity.

When all the parts are sewn together, the end result proves as crude and slapdash as the monster itself.

There’s more than a whiff of the didactic in Difret, a film overly earnest in spelling out its cause in more-than-occasional exposition. But it is otherwise an affecting drama that is honest and clear-eyed about Hirut’s trauma, and the ongoing struggles she’ll face even if she’s freed, without ever treating her abuse in an exploitative manner.

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.

It’s an admirable film, though not a particularly memorable one.

Despite its sparseness and haunting photography, the film proves to be little more than a home-invasion thriller low on thrills.

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.

The strength of Peace Officer is that it doesn’t attempt to pit the viewer against the police. Its target, rather, is the system.

Though polished and image-conscious, offering too little insight into the physical and psychological trauma suffered in the bullet’s wake, the film is nevertheless moving without resorting to saccharine overtures.

A great soundtrack can go a long way in smoothing over a decent movie’s rough patches, and Northern Soul’s is fantastic.

Oyelowo and Mara try to bring humanity and tension to the testimonial thriller of two lost souls finding their way together, but they only succeed in bursts, hampered by marketing copy masquerading as dialogue.

Without a buttress of cleverness, Cooties is mere freewheeling idiocy.

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.

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.

It would be unbearable if it weren’t so completely self-aware.

That American Ultra works as well as it does is a testament to its two lead performances.

Marielle Heller’s debut directorial effort is incisive and universal, despite its very specific and detailed setting.

Inexpert execution, lazy attention to detail and a lackluster lead performance conspire to render a juicy mystery rather boring.

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.

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

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.

The Tribe is that rare breed of film so masterful in execution it requires watching once, yet so devastating you may never be able to stomach seeing it again.

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.

It's the Walmart of feel-good family films: accessible, cheaply made, useful in a pinch and full of American flags.

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.

That it chooses to waste a capable cast of mature actors by trotting out tired sex jokes as the enfeebled old men plot the world's most needlessly convoluted bank heist solves the mystery of why it took the film two years to limp its way to American cinemas.

There is nothing brave about Bravetown, a film so paint-by-the-numbers bland that its efforts to piggyback the sacrifice of American servicemen and women for emotional depth is downright craven.

Despite the bumpy ride, the final destination reveals a weirdly daring comedy with the familiar, but still necessary, lesson that being popular isn't all it's made out to be in the movies.

The whole range of human emotion — love, lust, anger, jealousy, despair, grief — is felt through Plympton's animation. It's just a shame that his boundless creativity doesn't extend to the narrative.

Although it's enjoyable, actor Chris Messina's directorial debut is somehow less than the sum of its parts, wading only through the shallow end of familiar human conflicts resolved too conveniently to satisfy.

Monkey Kingdom is a delightful gambol, visually stunning and educational without feeling like it, with a propulsive drama about escaping one's lowly social class at its core that inspires reflection on some uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

"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.

The film itself begins to feel like Gray, a pretty bird in a gilded cage with nowhere to fly.

For all its energy, razzle-dazzle and whiz-bang technology, it doesn't know how to tell a simple story or cobble together three-dimensional characters, and that's a problem not even the best of 3-D glasses can fix.

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.

It's asked in the film, "How many new lives can we have?" The answer, it turns, is however many we want. And as long as Dench, Smith, Nighy and Imrie stick around, the same probably is true of "Marigold" movies.

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.

As tiresome as those live-action sequences are, they are more than outweighed by laughs — some riotous, some groaning and some very, very befuddled, but none predictable.

Black or White is more remarkable for what it isn't than for what it is. For example, it isn't ripe with drama. It isn't a thoughtful exploration of racial identity in America. It isn't a compelling look at judicial bias and class conflict. It is, instead, a movie that's every bit as oversimplified and obvious as its title.

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.

Director and co-writer Jeremy Garelick doesn't even reach high enough to pick the low-hanging fruit, opting instead to gather half-rotted, fly-infested jokes off the ground and expect Kevin Hart to make them funny by virtue of being Kevin Hart. Only grudgingly will I acknowledge that he sometimes does.

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.

It is not hyperbole to say Oyelowo is a revelation. The British actor brings phenomenal humanity, grace and torment to a historical figure who once seemed to loom too large a legend to make flesh on screen.

You can't get close to Bennett — not because he's a morally ambiguous character, as the movie would have you believe, but because he never puts anything on the table. He struts through every consequence, a man with nothing to lose because he never had anything worth losing in the first place.

There's a surface elegance that might play as depth in smaller doses, but at feature length, the stylistic flourishes seem to be covering for deficiencies rather than servicing the material.

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.

Point and Shoot is a fascinating, frequently frustrating documentary.

As an exegesis on tortured creative genius, Harmontown proves wanting. It's in the exploration of how "Community" fandom formed its own distinctive community of outcasts that the film excels.

You'd learn a lot more if you went out and, well, actually met a Mormon.

Aside from Dance and some hazy views of impaled bodies, the film is low on shock and gore. It's aiming more for sweeping historical epic, but it doesn't work on either level.

How disappointing that a movie about challenging authority should be such a slave to convention.

The Zero Theorem feels like Gilliam's keen intellect chasing its own tail.

It's adorable. It's also very thin. There's a disconcerting literalism to the songs' dramatic representation that chokes the drama.

Life lessons are learned, children do some growing up, nothing too terribly upsetting happens, and the corniness is, mostly, kept to tolerable levels.

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.

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.

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.

The brutally sparse documentary Rich Hill removes poverty from the realm of the abstract and makes it personal.

There's a purity to the experience of watching a film so naturalistic, like living in someone else's life for two hours.

The film is less effective, and less focused, when it switches into activism mode. Not that its heart isn't in the right place — we all know about the appalling state of institutionalized elder care. Which is the problem with those segments: We all know this already, and the filmmaking feels like perfunctory, necessary padding.

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.

There's nothing surprising or fresh about these people, their problems or their pairing, each character fitting snugly into his or her familiar archetype.

For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.

The found-footage approach loses its shine quickly.

The film ricochets between Tammy being an oblivious cartoon goblin and a textured, sympathetic human being who just wants to be loved. Perhaps if the film had catered a little less to McCarthy's comedic gifts — the curse-word fugue states, the slapstick humor, the non sequiturs — the end result would have felt more balanced and rewarding.

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

It's the PG-13 version of "The Hangover," and more than anything, that's just boring.

It's a well-written rom-com with rascally charm, a modest story of an awkward Brooklyn girl making a go of life. It's irreverent and rough around the edges with an imperfect protagonist, blue language, scatological humor and rambling confessional stand-up monologues, sometimes about bodily fluids. The laughs are frequent and ribald.

The script feels structurally inept, building up scenes and characters then cutting them off, never to be revisited. The end result is a film that feels full of staircases that lead nowhere.

The plain facts, presented without commentary, are an effective plea for a more compassionate immigration policy.

Blue Ruin is a movie about revenge, but it reaches far past the bottom-shelf titillations of fantasy to tell a richer, character-driven story with a protagonist who's less avenging angel than ghost.

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

Particle Fever does an excellent job of laying out what's at stake as it documents the creation and fine-tuning of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

For a film about art forgeries, The Art of the Steal is itself something of a forgery, a painstaking, brushstroke-by-brushstroke re-creation of masterworks dreamed up by better artists. And like a good forgery, it's enjoyable on the surface, but loses its charm a bit once you do some digging.

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

It's more thought experiment than film, and although it's laudable for its daring to be unlike any film you’re likely to have ever seen, it ultimately doesn't have more meaning to import than a well-photographed daily affirmations calendar.

It fails to offer as single compelling character as a sacrifice to the angry volcano.

It’s a spectacularly wrong-headed, chemistry-free romance, and too dumb to know how sexist it is.

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.

Farhadi again burrows deep into his characters to tell an achingly intimate story, spinning grand tragedies out of minor lives in which the past lingers in the air, a perfume that haunts long after its wearer has left the room.

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.

For a film that purports to love dinosaurs, this bigger, flashier Walking With Dinosaurs sure doesn’t trust them to be interesting enough to carry five minutes of a movie without the copious aid of slapstick and bathroom humor in a screenplay so rote it makes creatures that have been dead for 65 million years feel less fossilized than the jokes.

It’s a Fellini-esque carnival of humanity on display, a more debauched phantasmagoria reminiscent of “La Dolce Vita.” But “La Dolce Vita” created the paparazzi; The Great Beauty takes place in a world where the paparazzi have existed for decades.

Delivery Man means well, but it’s innocuous to the point of non-existence. In trying to please everyone, the film runs the risk of pleasing no one.

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

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.

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).

It’s a powerfully sensual movie, gorgeously lensed colors and textures conveying its characters emotional states while thoughtfully exploring the range of human sexuality through Adenike’s experience.

If there’s any social commentary being made here, it doesn’t come through in performances so wooden you can’t tell if the actors are that bad or the characters that vapid.

The characters aren’t the only things painted in broad strokes. Sweetwater is rife with gauche symbolism and imagery.

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.

It makes for a unique sort of concert film, but also a weaker one. It would have been better if it had dispensed with the frail narrative or else committed to being completely bananas. But as die-hard Metallica fans well know, a little buffoonery is worth weathering for the main attraction.

It’s aggressively charming, and competitions and training montages are filmed with kinetic whimsy. The film’s chief triumph is in spinning something remotely thrilling out of something as inherently dull as speed typing.

Except where “The Conjuring” invigorated horror-movie tropes with inventive application and strong characters, Insidious only wallows in them.

The Patience Stone largely functions as a one-woman play, with Farahani’s character soliloquizing over her husband’s body.

Riddick aims much lower than the stars and still doesn't quite hit its target. But when you consider a summer overstuffed with disappointing prestige pics that cost the GDP of several island nations to produce, Riddick's more modest (and less expensive) stumbling doesn't seem so bad in comparison.

The resulting portrait is nothing short of a tiny filmmaking miracle. It’s guaranteed to make you feel something — hopeful, probably, for Grace and her wards. And maybe even for the future of indie filmmaking.

The end result is as dour and unilluminating as British weather.

Austenland plays out like an overly elaborate excuse to have people act silly in corsets and bloomers.

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.”

Paranoia is ostensibly a thriller, but there’s nothing remotely thrilling about it. This slick, plodding bore is as exciting as watching somebody else tap out text messages.

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

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.

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.

It's an unpleasant way to pass a couple summer hours.

20 Feet From Stardom is frequently sad and frustrating. But while there’s heartbreak aplenty, the film doesn’t function as a pitying paean to unmined talent — it’s ultimately a celebration of the unsung.

Redemption doesn’t have the chutzpah to let loose and be as dumb as it needs to be, so it instead bores the audience comatose with long stretches of sad-face Statham putzing around an apartment to justify the too-brief bursts of giddy bone-breaking.

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.

It’s predictable. It’s saccharine. It’s silly. It’s also, thanks to the consummate talents of Stamp and Redgrave, occasionally a joy.

A by-the-numbers thriller that wouldn’t even have made for a particularly good hourlong episode of a weekly crime procedural, never mind an honest-to-God feature-length movie.

The film wraps up too neatly to be believed, not leaving questions unanswered so much as failing to ask them.

Even if its stunted ambitions come as a disappointment, Pieta nevertheless is an expertly crafted thriller and a fine addition to East Asian revenge cinema.

The ambitious visual stylings don’t do enough to buoy a film that lacks a certain soaring spirit. If the adaptation is serviceable, it’s also dull — a disappointing fate for a story that’s anything but.

Mira Nair has crafted a handsome but clubfooted film that lurches through predictable hot spots. It most disappoints as a thriller, the flashbacks and voiceovers and romantic entanglements so dominating the proceedings you forget that someone is bound and gagged in real time.

There’s a certain kinetic charm to the first half of the movie, a freewheeling silliness to these outsized characters that makes you curious to see just how wrong things will go. But as the weightlifters’ plot spirals out of control, so does the movie’s.

It’s a juicy story squandered by the poor telling. It’s got all the trappings of a good ol’-fashioned Merchant Ivory pic — lush locales, exotic period trappings — but none of the soul.

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