Bilge Ebiri

If in the end it doesn’t quite work — if its many fascinating pieces and ideas and odds and ends don’t ever cohere into a whole — lament not what might have been. Instead, be grateful that Ridley Scott has lost none of his ability to provoke, captivate and infuriate.

It’s somber and respectful, and even has a couple of genuinely powerful moments, but none of that’s enough to transcend its oppressive dreariness.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

Jonathan is good enough for us to want it to be better.

Bulgarian filmmaker Maya Vitkova's feature debut, Viktoria, is an impressive display of stylistic control and directorial vision, even if it doesn't always hold together.

El Chicano is often exciting, but don’t expect to leave the theater riding an action movie high.

Karia’s film is uneven, but, as with its aforementioned staging of “To be or not to be,” it tosses enough new ideas around to keep us watching.

Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

Anna isn’t as stylish or gripping as “Nikita,” but it does have its own demented charm, particularly in how it toys with structure, nesting competing narrative timelines within each other.

No matter how much they remind us that this is all based on a true story, at heart Tag is still a dumb, goofy Hollywood comedy with big stars running around making glorious asses of themselves. It’d be a pretty good one, too, were it not so afraid to embrace its essence.

Sea Fever teases out elemental anxieties that have been given fresh life by unfortunate reality, but the movie is worth seeing because, when all’s said and done, it gives us characters and circumstances we can care about.

There are certainly some real laughs as well as some groaners, but at times you want the film to just get on with it. Mainly because once you get past the shtick, there’s an intriguing story there, fun and rousing in its own right without need of additional silliness.

Rental Family might be a modestly likable, often uneven movie about a fictional American actor in Japan, but it’s also a thoroughly fascinating movie about a very real actor in the midst of one of the strangest careers I’ve witnessed.

So it's a good thing the film has that cast, and Stoll in particular. He’s the main reason to watch Glass Chin. And not coincidentally, he’s often quiet.

It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.

There’s little in Paul, Apostle of Christ that’s not predictable, but the film engages honestly enough with its ideas that at times it feels like a small…well, let’s not use the word miracle in this case. It doesn’t shy away from complexity, and for that we can all be grateful — believers and heathens alike.

If The Purge: Election Year is ultimately still engaging, it’s largely because of the irresistibility of the basic concept itself. But this new movie also makes a pretty good case for why the series should end here: Things have not only come to their logical conclusion, but you get the curious sense that the filmmakers have run out of ideas.

Clapin has made a film that leaves us puzzled but also curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he’s clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.

Appropriately pulpy — fuss-free and fast.

Like its star, Ryan Reynolds — and maybe thanks to its star, Ryan Reynolds — the picture occasionally seems aware of its limitations. At its best, it turns its cynicism into an asset.

Director Filomarino is onto something here. The warm intimacy of the movie’s early scenes is replaced by such shocking brutality by the end that the violence feels like an emotional correlative, a blood ritual of sorts.

It has an energy all its own, and Gondry’s voice is always welcome, and essential. Mood Indigo is somehow both unmissable and whisper-thin.

Amid the grit and the attempted emotional catharses and the sturm-und-drang, there is an actual Bond movie in there. No Time to Die is fun, but only when it dares to be.

General Magic is engaging, but there’s a tougher, tighter film in here struggling to get out.

Dom Hemingway is an uneven movie, to be sure — plot holes abound, and some of the aforementioned clichés can be distracting — but it’s still hard to resist. Because rarely have an actor and a part been so perfect for each other, and Shepard lets his lead run wild with this offbeat, contradictory character.

There’s a lot of great filmmaking in Novitiate, but there’s also quite a bit still missing.

While The Cat Rescuers movingly portrays the unique individuals committed to helping these cats, it doesn’t quite tackle the full complexity of this subject. Still, no animal lover should be surprised to find themselves holding back tears while watching this documentary.

It doesn’t always work as drama, but as a musical, it’s often fantastic.

Coming 2 America is both figuratively and literally a nostalgia tour.

The whole film feels a bit too careful: composed but also more than a little academic.

I never found myself genuinely wondering what was going to happen next; the moves are too familiar. Even the big fight, entertaining as it is, feels like it's there not because of dramatic inevitability, but because somebody behind a desk decided it had to be. It's just a bunch of stuff.

The fine cast keeps us engaged, even if the film sometimes loses the narrative thread.

Fantastic Beasts is often lovely to look at, at times even stirring, but there's very little to hold on to, story- or character-wise.

It’s a charming movie, with charming characters. Lillis is ideally cast as Nancy, often cheerfully undercutting some of her character’s more precocious proclamations, cracking smiles and reminding us that she’s still a kid.

For Sabotage, as good as it is in its first half, can’t keep it together.

Monster Hunt is not a movie that aims for narrative dexterity, or subtlety, or grace. It’s a blunt, bloated object, designed to bludgeon us with silly action and broad humor.

The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.

28 Years Later is choppy, muddled, strange, and not always convincing. But I’m not sure I’ll ever forget it.

Play Dirty wears its stupidity boldly, proudly, almost aggressively. It dares you to find anything remotely plausible or realistic or even insightful about it. You either get on its wavelength and ride with it, or you run screaming. I mostly rode with it.

The Color Purple is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. For both movie and play, it feels as much like a trip to church as it is a trip to the theater.

There’s a powerful austerity to Manglehorn the man’s tale that Manglehorn the film itself — well acted and touching though it often is — doesn’t quite match.

There’s style and skill to spare in Asphalt City, but the movie also feels like a victim of the very numbness and emotional emptiness it seeks to expose.

I walked away from this picture both moved and confused. Because it’s got Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in top form, The Mercy nails the emotion, but comes up somewhat short as a narrative.

Maybe this frivolous little movie reflects our own world back to us in more ways than we might wish to admit.

It’s disjointed, and cluttered, but it’s also entertaining in spurts. Is that enough? Just about, and not quite. Ant-Man and the Wasp overloads and underachieves, but it also never entirely squanders the first film’s good will.

Watching Ali and Cole (and, of course, Stewart and Maadi), we find ourselves wishing that they would genuinely get the chance to better understand each other. Do they, by the end? We’re not sure. On that score, Camp X-Ray remains admirably open-ended.

The film takes an allegorical, symbolic story and sets it within a milieu that suggests authentic life. But it never quite reconciles the tonal dissonance at the heart of this idea — there's great emotional potential here, but we experience the whole thing at a remove.

As seen in the film’s terrifying opening and its gruesome climax, Avery deftly orchestrates some grisly, intense set pieces. He delivers on the thrills, even if the story leaves something to be desired.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion.

As Li’l Quinquin seesaws between the horrific and the ridiculous, between the playful and profound, between control and chaos, we may find ourselves both frustrated and riveted. Something tells me Bruno Dumont wouldn’t want it any other way.

It’s a mess, whatever it is, but it’s not without its charms.

The American Meme can be fun, even informative, but there’s a bigger story here, and Marcus mostly fails to tell it.

A montage-happy, occasionally unpleasant film that’s still strangely watchable, The Other Woman is almost saved by a cast that’s … well, likable isn’t quite the word.

This is, indeed, a somewhat kinder, gentler Bad Boys: less proudly offensive, less extravagant, but still basically the same collection of stylish clichés made palatable by a duo of likable stars with good chemistry.

Clean, pleasant, and thoroughly unremarkable. It passes the time, but with that cast and that director, it should have been so much more.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.

Aside from the ingenious creation of Moretti and his occasionally unpredictable behavior, the film fails at creating interesting characters, deploying suspense, and even delivering some cheap thrills.

For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.

She’s Funny That Way often displays an old-school generosity and polish, and at least one breakout performance — but just as often, its moments of inspiration are tempered by miscasting and shrill attempts at humor.

The not-so-good news is that Mid90s never quite manages to make an impact, in part because it gives us so little to hang onto with the characters onscreen.

The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity.

The primary pleasure of James Marsh’s understated heist film is the opportunity to watch these icons go from mild-mannered pensioners to snarling, backstabbing hoods. That’s one of its shortcomings, too: We want more, and the picture never quite gives it to us.

As Jesse Owens, [James] mixes confidence, bewilderment, and subdued rage into a powerful whole. It’s not a big, show-offy performance. Quite the contrary: He’s surprisingly quiet, watchful. Everything seems to be submerged, but still present.

Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be.

The ultimate effect of this film, directed by actor Diego Luna, is curiously cold — it never transcends the hagiographic nature of its material, despite a talented cast and a compelling subject.

Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it plays like a series of scenes and notes for a longer, more fleshed-out movie.

If Cheap Thrills ultimately does carry us along, it’s due largely to Healy’s performance and presence. He’s a figure halfway between schlemiel and criminal, and the film effectively works that full range.

As a director, he’s always been more about conjuring a mood than telling a story, about immersion rather than suspense. Filled with large, empty rooms, great blank stretches of barren landscape, and forlorn glimpses of the lonely vastness of space, The Midnight Sky is a movie you’re supposed to lose yourself in, at least a little bit. And on a small screen — even on a really big small screen — that’s practically impossible.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

Mostly uninspired and insipid, but it rallies, and builds up enough comic steam by the end that you might find yourself amused.

It’s not a bad film, exactly, but it’s a jumbled, uncertain one, and it never quite makes a compelling case for itself.

It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances [Cumberbatch] has given. Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character.

The film ultimately overloads us with so much amazing nonsense that we sort of give up and give in.

Ultimately, The Ice Road veers uneasily between immersive tension and a variety of you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me howlers on the level of both plot and dialogue.

They make you wish Haggis would put away the Great Themes, the belabored dialogue, the forced narrative dynamics, and just figure out a way to scale down his scope and tell smaller stories. Maybe it’s not all as connected as he thinks.

In order for the film’s stylistic conceit to work, the protagonists need to pop more. We need to want them to break free of their grief and find ways out of the darkness.

It doesn’t entirely earn its twists, in part because it botches both the whodunit elements and the psychology of its characters.

There’s a lot jam-packed into this movie, but it’s in such a rush to get through it all and to not bore us that it … well, it bores us. We’re lost, and we’re clearly not supposed to be.

King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy.

Cinematically speaking, this is all low-hanging fruit. Maybe such unimaginative choices wouldn’t stand out so much if Huppert were herself not such an inventive and riveting performer. She is, and Mama Weed doesn’t really deserve her.

The film never quite reconciles the banality of this love triangle with its far more interesting depiction of the rest of these characters’ lives.

It feels like overkill. It is overkill. But then again, isn’t that what the Deadpool films are all about? Once Upon a Deadpool, in that sense, feels very much of a piece with the overall series. It’s a sick, dumb joke that you can’t help but laugh at. And as soon as you do, you feel bad about falling for the gag. I wish I could f-[bleep] this movie.

Transporting, well acted, and occasionally powerful. It’s also a rushed, maddening mess.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die serves as passable entertainment. But one does miss the gonzo action spectacles of yore, which this franchise once embodied.

Our New President merely scratches the surface, and in its own weird way, comes to embody the plague of shallow spectacle it purports to fight against.

Rarely have I seen a horror-comedy as joyless as Little Monsters. Which feels like a weird (and sad) thing to say, because rarely have I seen a horror-comedy that is also so insistent in its humor, so determined to try and entertain me, as Little Monsters. It’s fast, loud, and impossibly shrill — except when it quiets down, which is when it briefly, belatedly comes to life.

Spirit of Vengeance is so focused and, as a result, so impoverished that you actually feel bad for Cage. The actor tries to bring the weird (though at this point one wonders if he can even do anything else) but the film more often than not leaves him high and dry, saddling him with standard-issue action hero lines and boilerplate action set-pieces.

The Age of Adaline, for its part, delivers the twists and turns of its fantastical plot with elegance and confidence. Here, the weak romance threatens to bring everything down.

The picture is dedicated to Hutchins, and its brooding elegance, its rich shadows and evocative close-ups, demonstrates her achievement: Visually, Rust is often astonishing — which of course reminds us all over again of the dark specter hanging over the film.

Unfortunately, for every scene in which The Protégé seems to know exactly what it is, there’s one in which it seems to think it’s a lot smarter than it is. Given the level of talent involved, that has to count as a disappointment.

Wan is coming off the world-conquering success of his wildly entertaining automotive action sequel Furious Seven, and he sometimes seems to be trying to bring the splashy cacophony of that movie into a world that thrives on sparseness and focus. It doesn’t work.

Jolie’s commitment to the part is admirable: She gives this Maleficent a real emotional urgency. But the rest of the movie lets her down.

Nobody ever feels like a real person in this movie, but we’re pulling for them anyway. The same could be said for the film: It’s not particularly good, but I selfishly want it to be a hit anyway, just so we can bask in the genre for a little longer. The world was a better place when rom-coms roamed the land.

For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.

It all mostly works, but you can’t help but wonder at times if it could have been a lot funnier if it had just a bit more edge.

The Longest Ride is actually one of the more competent Sparks films in some years — a far cry from the creaky noir of "Safe Haven," the awkwardly backloaded melodrama of "The Best of Me," or the phony brooding of "The Lucky One." It goes down smoothly, if blandly, like an air-flavored milkshake.

The boy is but a shell; it’s the men and women around him who truly come to life in this chaotic, awkward, and sporadically moving film.

M3gan 2.0 is a baffling movie, relying less on the conceptual humor of its predecessor and more on occasional quips and a few genuinely silly gags.

Ben Affleck makes for a pretty good jerk, but he can’t pull off outright villainy. That’s probably the main problem with the crime thriller Runner Runner.

All that bravura filmmaking — the elaborate camera moves and colorful images and unexpected angles — is fascinating from both technical and aesthetic standpoints, and it certainly held my attention. But don’t be surprised if you start to suspect that, for all the film’s ornamentation, it might not be leading up to something revelatory.

This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.

See You When I See You grapples with serious subjects, and everybody involved surely meant well. That’s just not enough.

The glue that should turn these individual moments into something resembling a unified cinematic experience just isn’t there. The Commune feels like fragments of a far more interesting film, haphazardly stitched together.

The film arrives with both too much and too little to say. It comes at us in choppy bursts of brilliance and dopiness. That is at once its great charm and its great curse.

The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well-acted, and merely tedious.

A comic-tragic-sentimental genre hodgepodge that wants to make you feel all the feelings amid all that action spectacle. It doesn’t entirely deliver, but at times you can’t help but admire its strangeness.

It starts off great. But then it goes on. And on. And on. And takes itself ever more seriously at each turn. By the end, any buoyancy has disappeared into a familiar wasteland piled high with corpses and exploding heads.

The film suffers from the one thing that Spielberg films almost never suffer from — stasis. He’s made, essentially, a "hangout" movie, one in which we’re supposed to luxuriate among the characters, but Spielberg isn’t a director who thrives in that kind of environment.

The problem with Godzilla vs. Kong is that the filmmakers seem to think they’re delivering characters and human drama when all they’re doing is irritating the shit out of us.

It’s a half-assed premise, given a half-assed treatment that makes Wayne’s World look like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The performances are loose and self-aware, the filmmaking strictly at the level of sketch comedy, the jokes amiably predictable, and the story a mess.

You spend a lot of the movie confused, but the great big reveals of its finale don’t feel very shocking at all. Yet it’s not a complete wash and, given the circumstances, that feels like an accomplishment.

Jumanji: The Next Level, represents the version we might have dreaded, the tired and only modestly funny one that just coasts on its proved, no-longer-novel premise.

Wolf Man is a blunt movie, but it also feels like only half a movie.

Their story seems genuine, but the filmmaking can make it all feel premeditated, in part because directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina are determined to hit every plot turn at the most obvious points.

The more turns Jason Fuchs’s script takes, the more monotonous everything feels. And because Vaughn never drops his fantastical, cartoonish style, “reality” ceases to have any true meaning within the context of the film; he keeps trying to up the stakes even as what we’re watching becomes less and less consequential.

If you’re going to remake Poltergeist without the whole TV angle, "Insidious" already kind of did that. To be fair, this new Poltergeist isn’t anything special, either. But it’s not a travesty, and that feels like cause for brief celebration.

Luckily, there is a movie you can watch instead that will give you both fascinating context and awesome dancing. It’s called "Planet B-Boy."

Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that’s not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement.

There’s a perfectly good melodrama to be made from the plot of Regretting You, which on its surface isn’t so much a twisty-turny soap opera as it is a multicharacter wallow in uncontrolled emotions. It’s how this specific movie presents all the wallowing that made me feel like I was hallucinating.

For all its efforts at wild humor, The Rise of Gru never quite builds up a comic head of steam. It’s filled with laugh lines, but they feel like placeholders — a lot of middling bits about the time period plus a tired assortment of anachronisms.

In the end, The Man Who Knew Infinity never allows itself to transcend the sad irony of such biopics — that people known for thinking outside the box are always given film portraits that refuse to do so.

It doesn’t help that the characters in some cases have been rendered with such realism that they have lost all human expression on their faces. Maybe that’s the idea — to not anthropomorphize them too much and to stay grounded in zoological authenticity. But they’re still talking, and singing, only now their faces are inexpressive; it’s a weird disconnect.

You wind up with a movie that plays like a low-rent "Logan’s Run" crossed with a UNICEF commercial.

The film doesn’t offer many huge belly laughs — Atkinson has never been one for big comic climaxes — but it does deliver a fairly steady stream of pleasant chuckles, many of them mixed with generous doses of humiliation comedy.

There are bits and pieces of Lift strewn throughout that hint at the better movie it could have been with some inspiration and discipline.

Perhaps seeking not to sensationalize or to Hollywood-ize a story set in a drab, mundane world, Sollett shoots without any frills. That’s usually a good thing, but here it helps to suck the life out of the material — in part because Nyswaner’s screenplay seems to have settled for the most direct, speechifying way of dramatizing the issues at hand.

However you cut it, with all that talent, Charlie Countryman feels like a sad, wasted opportunity.

Look, Dear Mr. Watterson is a nice movie. Calvin & Hobbes fans may get a kick out of it. But it falls squarely into the promotional genre of documentary filmmaking — the same way so many music docs nowadays seem to be just movies about how awesome the director’s favorite band is.

You wish Rio 2 had the smarts and the inventiveness to match its scattered bursts of ambition.

It puts the same characters into a vaguely familiar situation, with diminishing, tepid returns. They should have just called it 2.

This one never quite decides if it wants to be a big, boisterous epic or a solemn retelling, and it nearly disappears into the crack between the two.

Cronenberg is transmitting to us from the borders of death, behind the enemy lines of inconsolable grief. And the man’s mind is still so alive that it seems churlish to ding this movie for being so — God, this isn’t the word I want to use, but I must — lifeless. Sadly, the inertia eventually gets to us.

Exquisitely produced, immaculately acted, and thoroughly uninvolving, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a perfect nothing of a movie.

It’s hard to untangle the film’s many bizarre indulgences, which at times seem intended to titillate as much as disturb, and yet somehow do neither. It’s all a bit too ludicrous to be sensuous or unsettling, or ultimately all that insightful.

There’s a lot of good stuff here, but the movie often seems more interested in ennobling rather than dramatizing.

Transcendence never quite succeeds at telling a story of scientific overreach. And it doesn’t really click as an action movie either. But as a human tragedy of man and monster, of beauty and beast, it has just enough genuine pathos that you wish it were better.

It’s a transcendent performance, somehow both a miracle and the kiss of death. It is good enough to almost elevate the entire movie above its many awkward shortcomings. And yet it also crystallizes those shortcomings.

Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

A mixture of mild pleasures and deep disappointments.

As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.

Cold Pursuit ultimately winds up being about how unsatisfying films like Cold Pursuit can be.

Haneke has delivered the Haneke film that Haneke-haters see in their heads when they think of a Haneke film: a series of disjointed, narratively oblique episodes showing people being inhumane to each other.

Tusk is not a particularly good movie, but the vivid anxiety dream at its heart makes it one of the most personal films this writer-director has ever made.

Pokémon obsessives will want to check it out, but the movie is mostly an uninspired slog, not committed enough to work as a demented genre picture, and not funny enough to work as a goofy, lighthearted comedy. You chuckle, you go “aww” a couple of times, and that’s it.

Everything has been watered down: the intensity of the hero, the sense of sexual danger, the violence.

Hateship Loveship is in no way a comedy, but Wiig's enormous presence threatens to make it so. She can't disappear into the void, so the drama onscreen becomes hard to take seriously.

While the imagery in this retelling is impeccable, the story is strangely lifeless.

The amiably bland family comedy The War With Grandpa genuinely surprises with how un-special it is. It’s the kind of film that seems to vanish from the mind even as you’re watching it.

The film’s elegant compositions themselves are painterly, with the actors carefully posed; and the atmosphere is theatrical, with crisp line readings and sparsely populated frames. Those elements, plus a meandering story line, may not make for a particularly involving narrative experience. But it sure is nice to look at.

All in all, one walks away from Rustin enchanted with Domingo’s performance, while feeling that a character as larger than life and momentous as Bayard Rustin surely deserves a film less dutiful and more inspired.

Based on the popular video games, this is a movie with breathtakingly visceral racing scenes, and they are matched by a breathtakingly, breathtakingly terrible script.

The movie's not bad but it doubles down on its least-interesting and potent elements at the expense of those that actually work. In the end, the film is as forgettable as the dime-store philosophy that fuels it.

It looks and feels familiar, and in an era where studio filmmaking has increasingly become an extension of brand management, that should make a lot of people happy. But I can’t say it made me particularly happy.

Faucon has built his story around very gentle, glancing blows. But this is not the focused austerity of a Robert Bresson; the director’s level distance and jaded eye lead more to lifelessness than a revealing simplicity of expression.

The critic seems less interested in the scares and the suspense — a shame, since IT is filled with them — and more in the kids themselves.

Disney’s new Haunted Mansion is a hot mess, but it’s a sporadically entertaining one.

Schumer remains likable, and the film has its moments, but there are so many excellent opportunities here for poignant cringe comedy that more often than not I Feel Pretty feels like a missed opportunity — and a slow, ponderous one at that.

If only Crowe brought the same subtlety to his direction that he brings to his performance.

Let’s Be Cops has its moments, but it in no way distinguishes itself.

Instant Family is a surprisingly foul-mouthed, filled-to-bursting roller coaster of a comedy-melodrama that tosses you in eight different directions before leaving you a teary, conflicted mess. And when it works, it’s genuinely funny and moving. But when it doesn’t, hoo boy, it’s atrocious.

I was never bored by Normal, but I’d also be lying if I said I was ever excited by it. Maybe it’ll help you forget your troubles for an hour or two, but there’s also a good chance you’ll forget the movie itself in even less time.

As a result, the mystery itself eventually becomes tiresome and shrug-worthy, even as the film breathlessly racks up the revelations. In the end, this twisty thriller just winds up twisting in the wind.

It replicates the template and the atmosphere of the original, but it lacks invention and emotional investment.

Somewhere inside the 128-minute Live by Night is a reasonably solid 168-minute movie struggling to get out. No, that’s not a typo: You can sense the contours of an absorbing story as writer/director/star Ben Affleck’s slapdash and fragmented assemblage limps along. Most of the pieces are there, but they remain pieces.

It’s a case of diminishing returns: gorgeous, occasionally evocative, but, in the end, mostly dull.

Novelist-turned-director Leigh's dryly efficient style is perched between the matter-of-fact and the impossibly arty.

The lax, lame A Walk in the Woods is a road movie without a road, a journey of self-discovery without discovery, and a tale of friendship without any chemistry.

The sequel, Planes: Fire and Rescue, is still a DisneyToon production, but it does aim higher, with a visual zip that was lacking from the first. It is, in almost all respects, a better movie. It’s still not particularly good, though.

One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane. Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle.

Sinister 2 is far from perfect, but it has a nobility that’s rare in much modern horror cinema.

Showing the allure and gradual corruption of power through the eyes of a third party — sort of a mixture of "The Great Gatsby" and "Scarface" — is a solid conceit. But Andrea Di Stefano’s underbaked film doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

Kill Your Darlings wants to be a young man’s movie, but it’s all “cinema du papa,” as the French New Wave used to call it. The philosophical disconnect is downright cosmic.

By the time the film works up to its finale, what secrets it wants to reveal to us have become fairly obvious. But they still carry a dark charge; Diablo’s ultimate grisliness is impressive in its own way. And it might have worked, had the film not asked entirely too much of its young lead.

Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.

If Profile has value, it’s not as a tale of terrorist recruitment or of amorous delusion, but of how power works in the extremely online world.

In some ways, it encapsulates the director’s best and worst instincts. It might be his most personal film, a genuine effort to understand the connection between two of his key obsessions, spiritual faith and human impulse. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that the film wants to outrage us into a response, but its supposed transgressions often feel tired and pro forma.

Rogue One's creators clearly want to move us deeply — several major plot developments should pack an overwhelming emotional wallop — but they haven’t given this talented cast enough to work with. It’s fast, loud, even lovely — and not terribly engaging.

The real-life story behind When the Game Stands Tall sounds amazing. But for all its exciting sports scenes, the movie version falls flat as drama.

A mostly disposable, occasionally quite funny bromance distinguished at times by its earnestness.

This is so often the problem with this genre — scary setups, followed by dopey resolutions — that you sort of want to give the movie a pass. But given its distinguished forebears, Insidious: Chapter 3 doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

Watching the movie is at once electrifying and maddening.

This is an atmospheric, well-acted film that leaves us mostly cold.

As a bare-minimum action flick, The Marksman is mostly serviceable.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.

The Intern degenerates into a series of monologues about ambition and relationships and having it all. As the speeches pile up, our goodwill dissipates, and so does the film’s magic.

As a tribute for the awesome destructive power of the teenage libido, the house-party-gone-apocalyptic flick Project X is pretty compelling...Think "Girls Gone Wild" meets "Black Hawk Down." Unfortunately, it also appears to want to tell a story, with characters and things, and on that level it pretty much completely falls apart.

Delivery Man feels more unformed, as if nobody’s bothered to give it that extra coat of slick Hollywood paint to cover up the patchwork beneath.

Alan Partridge awkwardly tries to wed the episodic spirit of the character with the feature-length demands of a theatrical experience. The result is a mess, but it’s got some choice bits. Even if you forget the film itself, you might find yourself quoting parts of it for years.

I laughed way too hard at too many points in Stuber to entirely dismiss it, even if, as a movie, it doesn’t really hold together.

When it succeeds, it’s impressive. But it also can’t hold a candle to Wilson’s original, and it can’t reconcile the fundamental tension between theater and film.

The Gunman passes the time, but it never quite reconciles its conflicted nature. It’s not smart enough to be a paranoid thriller, nor fun enough to be a blood-soaked action flick.

Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it.

Ortiz’s film does have its charms.

Infinitely Polar Bear is a good example of how a film that looks on paper like a mess of indie clichés can be redeemed by fantastic performances … even if, ultimately, it remains a mess of indie clichés.

We know where it’s going, and it doesn’t take long to get there. There are some good jokes along the way, a few of them blandly off-color.

In 120 frames a second, both Alwyn and Stewart came off as hopelessly stilted; at 24 frames, they breathe with life. But lose the flicker, and you lose the spell.

It’s a strange spectacle: a horror film that spends as much time dismantling suspense as it does building it.

The best thing about the new 300: Rise of an Empire is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it. And the worst thing about it is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it.

Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.

While there aren’t any genuine belly laughs in the new movie, there are plenty of modestly likable, chucklesome ones. That ain’t nothing in this terrible, terrible world.

This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.

There’s no mystery, and the action is thoroughly disposable, but what works this time around are the interactions between Reacher and Turner, mostly thanks to the efforts of Smulders, who brings an impassioned frustration to her character.

It’s too cursory, too frivolous to make a case for the show’s importance as an American institution, even though it insists on it.

My dad took me. He was a film critic and he’d already seen it for work, but then he took me opening weekend and fell asleep while I watched it. He did that a lot. But I think he liked it. I guess he wouldn’t have gone to see it again if he didn’t. What kind of idiot does that?

It’s a lot more like the movie we were worried the first one was going to be: baggy, bloated, and only sporadically engaging.

The Alto Knights is a movie whose ambition has passed. It feels like the husk of something that might have been great once.

It allows Crowe to have fun with the part of Father Amorth, but the film forgets to have fun along with him.

It’s not that this new movie has forgotten the fleet-footed charm of the original MIB films; it’s just that it doesn’t quite know how to conjure it again, so it confuses levity with listlessness.

It's stocked with clichés, but they're arranged in such weird ways that the end result is both predictable and certifiable. If only any of it actually went somewhere.

In his latest, In the Grey, Ritchie takes this compulsive, hyperanalytical love of preparation to comical levels. Intentionally, but maybe not productively: As the screen fills up with lists and the narrative overloads on data, we may find our attention drifting.

The Moment, directed by music-video wunderkind Aidan Zamiri, feels like a half-hearted hybrid of a real concert doc and a This Is Spinal Tap-like satire. It’s a little too afraid to go too far in either direction, and the end result is pure brand management.

There’s nothing wrong with subtle or contextual humor, of course, but here, frankly, it feels like a waste of a pretty great concept.

A misguided attempt to mix together social realism, children’s adventure, and political thriller, Stephen Daldry’s Trash never sits still long enough to be any of those things.

There’s a debilitating cheapness that keeps this picture from reaching its true potential. I have no idea what the budget was — for all I know, it could have been bigger than the original film’s — but it feels at times like we’re watching a mock-up of what a movie called The Old Guard 2 might look like.

Trumbo is a film that at times can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. At its worst, it’s musty and awkward; at its best, it’s irreverent and funny. Unfortunately, it settles for the former more than the latter.

The real problem is that Get Hard’s very idea of edge is itself pretty stale. It feels like a bunch of off-color jokes the filmmakers have been trying to tell for years, and they’ve crammed them all into one film — with tiresome results.

The problem with Strange Magic isn’t so much its derivative story as it is the odd, half-complete way it unfolds. You can sense the weird mixture of tones, influences, ideas — as if the whole thing were still in its planning stages.

This film really doesn’t know what to do with itself, except to show us the difference between Jerry’s happy world and his dark world as if it’s some kind of revelation; it’s the one move the film has, and it does it over and over again.

Trolls World Tour is ruthlessly simple, rushed, and obvious.

Like most corporate cinematic endeavors, Space Jam: A New Legacy tries to have it both ways, proclaiming to be on the side of the angels while doing the work of the Devil. It criticizes shameless, money-grubbing attempts to synergize and update beloved classics (as LeBron himself puts it, “This idea is just straight-up bad”) … all the while shamelessly synergizing and updating beloved classics.

This is a movie that can’t decide on the story it wants to tell, and can’t seem to tell it particularly well, either.

The Devil All the Time is an antiseptic slog, too streamlined to make us care and too literal-minded to pull us in. We never really get to know any of these characters aside from their villainy and/or victimhood. They’re paper fish in a cardboard barrel.

Him impresses as a stylistic exercise, a gonzo spectacle of macho phantasmagoria, but it’s hollow inside.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies feels thoroughly inconsequential — a bloated, portentous mess that, in a just world, should not exist.

Ferrell and Wahlberg previously paired up in "The Other Guys", one of the great comedies of the millennium, but put aside any expectation that their latest collaboration might even come close to that sublime masterpiece.

Chaos Walking retains a tiny bit of its comic spirit, but one does get the sense that maybe, in some distant rough cut or interim screenplay draft, it was a much funnier, more engaging picture. Instead, what we now have is a movie that seems determined to run away from itself.

You have to admire the effort — even as you survey, mouth agape, the calamitous results.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t demonstrate any kind of interest in, or affection for, its characters. They’re cardboard cutouts, there to represent postures rather than evoke our sympathy or humanity or even curiosity.

The jokes are witless, the emotions artless, and the film joyless. At the same time, there’s also little to repel or offend, which, after all the truly idiotic culture-war battles fought over the Ghostbusters franchise, probably counts as a win. Maybe one day we’ll get an actual movie.

Lila & Eve is an awkward movie, though sometimes by design.

Largely indistinguishable from any number of bloated superhero spectacles that have already graced our screens. Your kids may not mind it, but it’s more insistent than it is fun.

Into the Storm is at once one of the dumbest films you'll see this year and one of the scariest.

The heist itself, shot mostly underwater, is actually lots of fun.

The trouble is, lazy, opportunistic writing can be distracting in its own way, and there’s way too much of it in Ted 2 to fully ignore.

All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

This film feels like a pile of prefab story ideas occasionally enlivened by brief flashes of earnestness and invention.

The movie is imprisoned by its Cage’s stiffness. All he gives us is strained, robotic seriousness. I’m not sure he even gives us any rage.

The real problem is that the film doesn't know what to do with its depiction of life in the interconnected age. It’s a nothing movie.

What was once a lazy, crazy, charming afternoon daydream of a movie is now a frantic, insistent, often unfunny sci-fi comedy. It might distract young children with its hyper, family-forward story line, but most of the magic has vanished.

We're left with an idea of passion instead of a real depiction of it. And a movie that can't stop wallowing in its own emptiness.

The result is maybe more interesting than we might have expected, but it’s not particularly funny.

Where to Invade Next shows Moore at his cheapest, while also affording glimpses of the filmmaker he once was.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t unwatchable. It’s competent, uninspired swill, undone largely by the fact that it’s following up a superior first movie.

I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy.

In the Heart of the Sea isn’t a bad film, necessarily. It has some genuinely effective passages in its first half, and Howard is nothing if not a dutiful, check-the-boxes kind of director. But a story like this – one of horror and madness, which helped give birth to an ornate masterpiece of obsession – needs to go a little crazy. And this director doesn’t do crazy.

A hodgepodge of relationship movie clichés occasionally redeemed by a game cast.

Because it’s darker and a bit more intense, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a slight improvement over the first film, which seemed to mistake family-friendly restraint for abject lifelessness.

A thoroughly boilerplate bayou actioner, with one notable feature. It’s got good villains – nasty, delirious, stupid villains, among them Franco and Ryder – and for that it’s almost worth seeing. Almost.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday (which is out now on Hulu) wants to be a history lesson, but it’s at times so one-note and inert that it loses any sense of authenticity.

It’s both thin and overstuffed, filled with intricate, at times dazzling set-pieces peopled by characters we don’t care about, and an irreverent sense of fun that nevertheless leaves us cold. It tries so hard… and ultimately achieves so little.

Though often beautiful, this is an emotionally paralyzed film about emotionally paralyzed people.

Their movie has its moments, to be sure, and the target evangelical audience may well respond enthusiastically, but, unless your own salvation is riding on it, the film is mostly a slog.

Like so many of today’s action films, The Legend of Hercules is too busy peddling slick, stone-faced portent to ever bother making us laugh, or engaging us in any way.

I found parts of The Sacrament more effective than anything else he’s done to date, as it’s probably the least genre of his movies. But don’t tell West that; I’m pretty sure he still thinks he’s made a horror flick.

Even when it comes to life, Jason Bourne offers very little that could stand on its own; its best scenes remind you of even better ones in the earlier films. There's a greatest-hits quality to the movie, only the band is tired and its heart isn't in it.

For all the goodwill generated by its early scenes, by the time The 5th Wave lumbers to its conclusion, you realize you’re not watching a movie but an act of crisis management.

The kind of movie you keep wishing would just cut loose and go off the deep end. Nobody goes to these "Fatal Attraction" retreads anymore for serious drama. But this one is a movie torn — too grim and self-important to go truly nuts, but too silly and slipshod to work on a more somber level.

There are moments of welcome tension amid the inchoate lunacy, but these in turn merely highlight why the rest of the film doesn’t work.

The pleasures of Bones and All wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting — an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there. The film, as a whole, never quite hangs together, because even as it goes through the motions of both the road movie and the romance, it never really finds an animating energy to drive it along.

It’s not just the action and the magic that flop. Even the film’s more intimate moments fall flat.

It’s inert where it should be fast, and cluttered and choppy where it should be rousing. Which is a shame, because Hellboy, as conceived, is one of the more interesting comic book heroes we have. He deserves better than this.

Stupid, stupid, stupid — and it certainly knows it. You might even chuckle contentedly at its knowing silliness — that’s sort of what this low-rent franchise is here for — but you’ll also miss Jason Statham, whose deadpan self-awareness somehow legitimized the ridiculousness of the previous films.

Part of the fun of movies like this is the opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the procedural minutiae of these worlds, but there’s precious little of that here. Everything is so empty, so incomplete. Blacklight feels like a synopsis waiting for a story.

The concept promises us a melancholy kind of dread, and there are bits and pieces throughout of the movie The Forest could have been. But any compelling sense of unease is ultimately undone as the film gradually settles for tedious schlock.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

It succeeds sporadically as a corrective anti-myth, but as a story about people, it fails to come to life.

Writer-directors Àlex and David Pastor have come up with a tantalizingly evil idea, but they’re not cruel enough to see it through to its conclusion.

Iñárritu has a flair for the cinematic, for bold and striking images, but he is not an experimental filmmaker. He doesn’t have that kind of deft touch, that willingness to throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, and — most importantly — move on.