Blake Goble

Hillbilly Elegy does not bring out the best in its cast, and Howard fails to bring the intensity or depth that might make something meaningful. His approach is all after-school special, all the time.

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

Bohemian Rhapsody is another lame music biopic, and its failures ultimately lie in the poor creative choices, the gutless approaches to potentially explosive events in the life of this band. We’re not buying this new album. There’s no new material to be found in Bohemian Rhapsody.

This is a mild return to franchise form, which is like saying that one of the descending plane’s jets started working again. Despicable? No. Deal-able? Sure.

Gold is weakly written, predictable, and too placid to achieve any loftier ambitions. It’s just a soft-sold tale of a schemer’s paradise.

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.

In holiday gift terms, it ain’t coal, and it ain’t a new car. It’s holiday socks, with a big ugly candy cane and some wavy text on it. Noelle’s cute for a minute, but you’re not going come back to this thing after January.

A Cure for Wellness feels like a return to form for the director. It’s not hard to imagine how Verbinski might have come up with a baffling horror film about the pressures of work/health balance. His latest film is rich with invention, intrigue, and a mind-melting liveliness that’s impossible to ignore.

Yes, Irresistible is a farce about political theater, and an often painfully funny one, but it’s also a deeply unnerving manifesto on the pundit economy, campaign financing, and the narcissism, ego, and collective amnesia it all fosters.

The steam runs out fast with one generic chase after the next, forgettable gunplay, and gory violence. Its ham-fisted double crosses and half-baked moral dilemmas amount to little.

There are just enough goodies here for parents and well-prepared kiddies alike. The nifty VFX, performances, and modern updates are what make this remake an easy-enough treat.

Life of the Party exists in one of those unfortunate places where it’s easy to criticize, but McCarthy still makes you smile, and even laugh.

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

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

Freneticism like this isn’t for everyone. But as far as martial arts epics go, MK is a high-gloss geek show that repeatedly delivers.

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.

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

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.

The movie’s merely the latest A-list comedy of this sort, is happy to live in the middle, and yet it frustratingly outwears its welcome because of a lack of creativity and sloppy structure.

Mister America aims for the acerbic pitch of a ‘70s alternative political farce like The Candidate, but the parting feeling is that it’s just an overdeveloped ramble. It’s not ha-ha funny, which is fine in the world of a muted humor like this. But like Heidecker’s campaign, it’s not entirely convincing as a satire either.

Many shots fired, all of them misses. This is a film without quality, care, or any real decency.

The Week Of is the wedding you forgot you were invited to, weren’t all that stoked to attend, then wound up loving anyway because you had such a surprisingly good time.

Another lump of coal in Gibson’s rapidly declining filmography. Fatman has no gifts to speak of. It’s kind of cheap. It’s fairly cynical and/or mean-spirited. It’s not fun. No good. Lumpy in execution. Deeply archaic in its thinking. Ho ho ho-hum.

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.

Crass but quick, and agreeably popcorn-y, Unhinged could have gone off in far more risible fashion. Not quite a gas, but without crashing and burning entirely, Unhinged gets where it needs to go and fast.

IO is dull, it drags, and it’ll beg the question: When will this, all of this, be over?

Marwen is too much, not enough, and yet still deeply watchable. It’s admirable for the wildly different approaches it takes. Only a stylist like Zemeckis could try something like this. Take a real man’s witty, real-life therapy-based photography and attempt to spin it into a mo-cap circus with every genre tool he can think of.

Of course, there are still product placements, and lowbrow jokes, but there’s an empathetic streak in Sandy Wexler. And that’s something we haven’t seen from Sandler in a long time.