Blake Goble

The presentation and little tweaks along the way make Sing far less grating than you’d expect. There are dozens of great moments, beats, and tunes.

Misdirection, tight spots, intimacy as danger. Allied is a paperback thriller’s greatest hits compilation. But the film’s plotting is lively and sincere, gussying up the staid tropes of intrigue into immediate pleasures and perils.

It’s damnable with faint praise. It’s too cheap to be thrilling, and too earnest to be all that offensive. Mired in clichés. Mostly flat. A weak Spy. Only Kevin James diehards need apply.

Hughes has seen his fair share of dramatizations on film (The Aviator, Melvin & Howard, The Hoax, even The Rocketeer), but Beatty delivers a fresh, idiosyncratic take, about the figure and the people in his orbit of oddity.

Army of One recounts Faulkner, through Quixotan whimsy and geo-political smart aleck humor, which amounts to a quick screwball comedy about a loveable fuckup.

This is another bad Perry film, but a curiously verbose one with jokes piled atop more jokes.

The film’s a fundamental fiasco of tone and timing.

Queen of Katwe shows that a film doesn’t have to give up on the tenets of genre, but has the potential to win big if it can enliven them in new ways.

Fuqua isn’t interested in pushing the genre forward so much as respecting and updating the model accordingly. The director focuses on establishing his gang of gunslingers sturdily enough that the action becomes easy to engage with, and even get excited about.

This Ben-Hur is closer to an ‘80s actioner about two men who once loved each other parting ways, only to reunite and settle their differences through vicious means.

The way Lowery observes Pete and Elliot’s relationship with nominal dialogue is beautiful. While it’s easy to deride the remake as commercially conceived, the film still feels as rare as the dragon it depicts, wholesome and heartfelt.

Here’s a documentary with plenty of courage in its convictions, and a teachable exercise about modern health problems.

Parents will nap, some kids will be amused, and the nerdiest viewers will have good reason to point out flaws in the movie’s not-so-intelligent designs.

Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is sturdy summer entertainment, at once a freaky comedy and an unexpectedly effective action film.

Jones slaves to make something of the material, and to his credit, or rather his profoundly large cast and crew’s credit, the craft is certainly visible in Warcraft. It feels rude not to compliment the hard work of the makeup, costume, production design, and visual effects teams.

At times amusing, at others analytical, De Palma is both an homage and a lecture.

A lot of fandom went into this, but Popstar is relentless to the point where it eventually becomes plodding.

Little Men is a summer breeze, with rich melodrama and an easygoing mood, built up around two great kids and their troubled families that says more than any after-school special. It’s an episode of actual experience, presented in lovingly natural, minimalist strokes.

It should come as no surprise that The Angry Birds Movie is a loud and dumb children’s film, but for what it’s worth, there are plenty of cinematic commercial ventures that are louder and dumber and so on than the well-meaning and slickly sold Birds.

Guided more by emotion and imagery than by any conventional plot, A Bigger Splash is a wicked, mysterious, ceaselessly sexy, and experiential carnal summer whirl.

Rio, I Love You is worth a passing look for its pot of talent.

The film possesses a quiet, considered tension that draws the viewer in.

After their muddled but well-meaning Tammy, McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone’s follow up is a superior mix of jokes, to the point that even when the film misses its mark, McCarthy and her crew wheel and deal to the bitter end.

Arnaud Desplechin delivers a thrilling reminiscence that romanticizes and believes in youth’s ungraceful but intense splendors.

Grimsby’s provocative, but not stupid. It knows what kind of humor it wants to achieve, and often scores big.

Fey delivers the performance like the super-capable talent she is, with range and authenticity. She’s a character with a fully expressed arc, foibles and all. She’s the dramedy’s best weapon.

The way Right Now, Wrong Then yields different results, moods, and beats as the result of minor shake-ups in the opening scenes is beyond fascinating, often charming, and at times amusingly uncomfortable.

Eddie the Eagle trips plenty, but Eddie, insufferable as he may be, represents the people that in spite of failure being visible at the bottom of a 90-meter ski drop, still take that leap.

Race is a film best enjoyed for its mild ambitions and accomplishments, which easily beat out its missteps.

Perhaps the film’s most striking quality is its restraint. Thematically and stylistically, it’s a film of quiet medium shots, long takes, and clear but evasive words. Every choice is tiny, but humane and usually deliberate.

Zoolander No. 2 invokes that old Simpsons headline: “old man yells at modern culture.”

A comedy of manners and femininity gets bisected by gnarly effects, and the two-tone approach works in its way.

"Jane" eventually comes alive, even if Jane never truly does.

Marlon Wayans is clearly getting off on the gags, but the lazy, hard humor, and elastic joke-making eventually has a numbing effect.

The Finest Hours is exactly that. Fine, while embracing its studio aesthetic and morally true heroism.

If for one second you forget the diverging script, the weak direction, and Efron’s limitations, there’s something to be amused by with De Niro’s flagrantly foul-mouthed, horned-up grandfather figure.

Shots are short, oddly made, and shoddily smashed together. There’s no spatial continuity, let alone consistency in time of day, or even a care for any kind of visual coherence. 13 Hours is just chaos. It’s unwatchable, unlikable, and unworthy of respect.

Phoenix is a death-defying melodrama of rare emotional obsession.

There’s a laziness to The Road Chip, what with its mostly stale or needy jokes and cutesy plotting.

Sisters is made of pure, frenzied comic momentum.

It’s a fierce, visceral vision with a superb cast, that one suspects was more focused on pumping up Macbeth than reminding people why it’s such a lasting cautionary tale.

Here’s a film with all the right ingredients and a few too many wrong moves, yet one that’s admirable for trying as hard as it does.

It’s not that funny, and feels like a ripoff of Animal House. Either way, The Wild Life is like the contractually obligated Crowe script that time forgot, his undisciplined id, playing with cheap thrills before he got a chance to express himself like a human storyteller in 1989.

Yellow Submarine is a journey to the very brightest spots of our imagination, and it’s a vibrant reminder of how joyful, inventive, and freeing animation can be.

Like Prince’s music, perhaps this film is best taken in for its sensation and not its literal output. That, and the dialogue is just ridiculous. But Prince looks cool, owns his story’s loose ideology of churlish change, and stages some marvelously ornate shots.