Brian Lowry

There’s a difference between “long” and “epic,” although in movie terms the two frequently get confused. Martin Scorsese delivers the former but not the latter with Killers of the Flower Moon.

While the movie remains a dazzling experience in terms of what the animation achieves, it indulges in what feels like sensory overload, seeking emotional heft in ways that slow down the action. The movie also falls victim, somewhat, to the blessings and curses associated with the multiverse, which offers infinite possibilities but also the occasional sense that there are so many permutations none of them matter all that much.

Best in its small moments, the movie should find receptive gal pals congregating for the mother of all viewing parties.

The Green Knight's sheer originality makes the film worth considering for anyone with a taste for such material.

As much as the movie appears to yearn to jump-start the franchise, it seems to have forgotten to bother with a coherent script, leaving one to wonder how a film with this much action somehow manages to be so boring.

The Pursuit of Happyness is more inspirational than creatively inspired -- imbued with the kind of uplifting, afterschool-special qualities that can trigger a major toothache.

The net effect isn't necessarily bad assuming that expectations are modest, and there's something to be said for a more understated, small-scale approach to horror that doesn't confuse body count with scares. Yet considering where the story starts, the place where Antlers winds up doesn't leave much to hang one's hat on.

The film turns out to be a fun but thin construct, fostering a sense of itchiness to see how and if it's going to pay off.

Designed to showcase Jennifer Lopez playing a character that could hardly be called a reach, Marry Me trades in the "meet cute" rom-com formula for "meet dumb." Lopez still gets ample opportunities to sing a hummable soundtrack, but even within the genre's parameters, the silly premise deals the movie a blow from which it never entirely recovers.

Director/co-writer Robert Eggers ("The Lighthouse") has sought to make the definitive Viking movie, and while the film issues a guttural cry for theatrical viewing, it is built around such a basic revenge plot as to blunt those simple charms.

As a first film, this movie would have surely been hailed for its promise. Held up against a debut that garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination and honors for best original screenplay, it's easy to come way thinking that "Us" doesn't merit all that fuss.

The latest installment is insanely weird, gruesomely violent, and features incredibly hammy roles for Ralph Fiennes and “Sinners’” Jack O’Connell.

Despite its beauty, several of those narrative touches don’t fully work, leaving behind a movie that’s aesthetically lovely but narratively uneven.

The dramatic height difference between the leads accomplishes a great deal of work in “Priscilla,” visually conveying the power disparity between superstar Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu, who he began wooing when she was just 14. Unfortunately, writer-director Sofia Coppola’s version of this oft-told story moves at a snail’s pace, offering fine performances but little to set one’s soul – or anything else – on fire.

Intermittently amusing and surely interesting, "Lebowitz" falls victim to the classic faux pas of overstaying its welcome.

The film simply lurches loudly from one mundane action scene to the next.

A more-is-less epic that showcases the dazzling stunt work for which the franchise is known while piling on the action to near-exhausting extremes.

While it’s worth watching, what clearly aspires to be the definitive telling of the story ultimately isn’t.

Unlike its protagonist, there’s a refreshing lack of guile or pretense here about what this modest but breezy movie is and wants to be.

Writer-director Sam Levinson spends a good deal of time in Malcolm & Marie complaining about critics, which feels like a boxer leading with his chin. Pairing Zendaya and John David Washington, the movie -- quickly and stealthily shot during the pandemic -- wins points for ingenuity, then loses them with its shrill tone and the uneven hairpin turns of its writing.

Amy Adams nimbly steps back into the role of an animated princess trying to adapt to the live-action world, in an epilogue to “Enchanted” that has moments of magic without completely delivering on the premise.

The off-the-wall comedy of Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow leaves a mark on the script, but it would require a talent of Peter Sellers' magnitude to conquer this material, and he's not around.

Genial but slim, picture is certainly a light-hearted alternative to weighty year-end awards bait, but the conceit isn't realized fully enough.

It's possible to admire the performance and still come away feeling director Pablo Larrain's fictionalized movie doesn't significantly add to a story many of us already know in exhaustive detail.

Thanks to Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway it's mildly watchable, but mostly an artifact that might look better after a few years in the Covid time capsule.

Shirley was clearly intended for the film-festival circuit, offering a narrowly pitched story where it's easy to admire the performances without feeling like the journey adds up to much. While Moss captures the complexity of Shirley's personality, the movie sheds scant light on the underlying why of it all.

Far more interested in stunts than story, Extraction is a simple-minded action vehicle for Chris Hemsworth that should benefit from providing a theatrical-style adrenaline rush when the spigot for such fare has closed. Basically, Netflix is serving up an old-fashioned B movie, at a moment when the A-list blockbusters have been postponed.

The Rhythm Section can't quite get its act together. Featuring a solid performance by Blake Lively, it's not bad exactly, but plays like a malnourished Jason Bourne wannabe, crossed with the grittier side of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

Other than skewering Trump, both personally and politically, this is obviously a rather slim construct. And while Depp throws his all into perhaps his hammiest role since Jack Sparrow, it probably would have benefited from a bit less length and a tighter focus.

The world-class pairing of Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen is the only calling card that The Good Liar needs. Yet even these two knighted performers -- in a rare star vehicle for a pair of senior citizens -- can't elevate this adaptation of Nicholas Searle's book, which clearly wants to be twisty and Hitchcockian but never quite gets there.

It’s a strange and intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying stew.

Energetic and sporadically funny, it’s a passable effort to jump-start a comic-book franchise that has enjoyed a long if uneven crawl across the screen.

Built around a predominantly Asian-American cast, it’s so determined to be crude and edgy that while its friendship dynamic lingers, its initial cleverness gets left in the rear-view mirror.

A self-conscious effort to build a spy franchise around Gal Gadot, Heart of Stone plays like a poor woman’s “Mission: Impossible,” mostly thwarting even its star’s Wonder-ful charisma. Despite solid action moments scattered over its two hours, this Netflix movie plays like an inoffensive but lifeless addition to the “You might like” feature that, alas, you probably won’t.

The movie’s earnestness can’t wriggle away from the pretty powerful temptation to tap out.

The heartbreaking aspect of Robin's Wish lies in the fact that Williams died without knowing what was happening to him, while there's uplift in Schneider Williams' determination to set the record straight. How well that works translating that specific mission into a stand-alone documentary is, to some extent, another matter.

The Fall Guy is too flat in the early going to fully meet that challenge, rallying toward the end without reaching the heights required to make a really big splash.

Deliver(s) adrenaline-fueled thrills, before fatigue creeps into the unrelenting mayhem about halfway through.

Given the frequent weeping captured from her die-hard, singing-along fans, 4DX would really be the killer app, approximating the spray of their abundant tears of joy.

Think of “Jay Kelly” as a taller and better-looking version of Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories."

“Ferrari” doesn’t click on all cylinders, featuring a miscast Adam Driver as the automotive mogul, in a Michael Mann-directed movie with some arresting moments that add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Overall, News of the World is a solid if unspectacular film, presenting a familiar story against an interesting historical backdrop. It just doesn't deliver quite the much-needed escape from their troubles to a contemporary audience that Kidd promises his crowds.

Crude, sophomorically homophobic but frequently funny, pic also overstays its welcome a bit and indulges in some juvenile excesses. All told, though, The 40 Year Old Virgin delivers enough belly laughs.

Fire Island primarily wants to be fun, not necessarily profound, so it needs to be consumed on those terms. Austen adaptations clearly never go out of style, but this latest variation reminds us that alone doesn't mean they pack enough accessories to completely validate the trip.

Both in its cultural specificity and the passage of time, Society of the Snow delivers a credible take on a remarkable story – augmented by the prolific Michael Giacchino’s score – while hampered somewhat by the limitations imposed by how those events unfolded.

Pixar movies have a habit for finding simple truths and tugging at the heartstrings, and Luca accomplishes some of that deftly enough before it's over.

The thrills don’t look cheap, exactly, but the whole thing feels a bit cheaper, as if this were the pilot for an anthology series titled “Tales of the Predator,” charting periodic visits through history.

Thanks to the power of the subject matter and Day's knockout performance, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is worth seeing. But the film is generally at its best when watching, and listening to, the lady sing.

A Quiet Place Part II manages to be perfectly fine, and unsurprisingly, a more generic affair -- one that offers less for audiences to cheer, quietly or otherwise, beyond the renewed sensation of being frightened in the dark.

The Outpost manages to be both harrowing and less than completely involving, a movie that can be admired for its visceral portrayal of war while leaving the characters underdeveloped.

It feels ready-made fodder for streaming’s “You might like” tier.

A solidly made animated feature, but one more notable for the height of its aspirations than its consistent ability to deliver on them.

One wishes the movie had a little more heft to it. It's fine, even welcome, to see a superhero exult in his abilities, and on that level, "Shazam!" is generally fun. Even so, that lightning symbol notwithstanding, the film only occasionally conjures the spark of magic that gives the title its meaning.

Technically impressive but rather flat and languid storywise, Richard Rich's first feature since leaving Disney only serves to reinforce the stranglehold his old studio still has on the animation market. While a perfectly serviceable confection for small fry, "The Swan Princess" will likely have its neck wrung commercially by all the high-profile competition aimed at the children's/family market this holiday season.

Frankly, I’d begin with having future me warn the present-day version to skip this.

Nightmare Alley spends too long spinning its wheels before getting to the more pertinent twists about the dangers of conning the wrong people, as well as the shadowy motivations of all concerned.

There's a good movie to be made about a woman wading into late-night TV's headwinds -- both in front of and behind the curtain. Despite solid moments, Late Night isn't consistently it.

The Current War is a fascinating story, badly told.

Despite the can't-miss subject matter, Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal makes a near-fatal misstep, heavily using dramatic recreations in a way that leaves this Netflix production somewhere between Lifetime movie and documentary. The salacious aspects of the scandal still earn a passing grade, but due to the unwieldy hybrid format, just barely.

Written and directed by Lee Cronin, the wit and humor that Campbell brought to past incarnations (including a Starz series revival) is in relatively short supply here. The film rather relies upon lots of jump scares and gruesome makeup effects, as well as the prospect of Ellie’s possessed form trying to do in her kids. That includes her very-young daughter (Nell Fisher), a semi-distasteful element even by the standards of the genre.

Greta Thunberg's inspiring children's crusade on the climate-change crisis receives dutiful if somewhat sluggish documentary treatment in "I Am Greta," an intimate portrait of the teenage activist that at its best conveys her courage and spirit, before bogging down in what becomes a somewhat repetitious call for action.

Despite flashes of nudity, crudity and mockery of women's raging hormones at the first sight of a trousseau, at its core it's just a big pushover with the heart of a chick flick.

Opening up about her bipolar disorder is surely a service, but the six-year span encompassed by this intimate Apple TV+ presentation labors to flesh out its revelations into a documentary.

For an actor known for having led his crew as it boldly explored humankind’s final frontier, “You Can Call Me Bill,” somewhat disappointingly, takes its extensive access to Shatner and doesn’t go much of anywhere.

The producers, obviously, are good storytellers, and there is something to be said — touched on here — about their shifting roles as TV has embraced an auteur quality. Still, the resulting doc finally feels like less than the sum of its anecdotes.

Oyelowo's film delivers its simple message to appreciate the people you love ably enough, without leaving the intended ripples in its wake.

While it’s fun seeing “The Breakfast Club” as they near “The Early-Bird Dinner Club” years, this is one of those projects that would have benefited from a more journalistic tone.

Despite a glittering pedigree, the result is an earnest film deficient in the inspirational qualities of its subject matter.

The Idea of You will likely be most satisfying for those who choose not to sweat the details, enjoying the scenery and fantasy wrapped up in it. Think of it as one of those movies that really reinforces the adage there are no new ideas, just fresh versions of old ones set to different beats.

A "Rashomon"-like tale that tells its story from different perspectives, this fact-based adaptation of Eric Jager's book is muddy, bloody and grim but too drawn out in filtering 14th-century feudal norms through a modern prism.

Neither the disaster one might have suspected nor a fully realized madcap farce; rather, Steve Martin's foray as Inspector Clouseau exhibits bursts of wild-and-craziness, but hardly enough to sustain even its relatively brief running time.

Ant-Man is a somewhat ironic choice for a very, very big job: Kicking off the next phase of Marvel movies. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania works on one key level, establishing Kang the Conqueror as a truly formidable and worthy villain. Yet with its plunge into inner space, “Ant-Man” comes up short in almost every other way that matters.

Tesla even more aggressively incorporates documentary-style techniques and weird anachronisms into the drama. His story is essentially narrated by Morgan's daughter, Anne (Eve Hewson), in a way that gives the movie a decidedly off-kilter spin. At one point, Hawke even sings a few bars of the 1980s song "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," recorded decades after Tesla's death.

Long Shot is a movie somewhat at war with itself, seeking to combine political satire with crude (in the mode of many Seth Rogen movies) romantic comedy. Both elements work in fits and starts, but they tend to offset each other, yielding a film more enjoyable for individual moments than any sort of cohesive whole.

Although it's nice to see the show's creative team afforded one final swing, it's too bad they don't knock it out of the park.

The result is a humanizing look at a woman often reduced to cartoon caricature, while occasionally feeling too conspicuously like a licensed product.

Thanks to the cast (which also includes Ben Mendelsohn, near-unrecognizable as the villainous De Guiche), Cyrano is worth seeing, either now or later. But it's a relatively modest addition to the title's storied history, one where the music subtracts at least as much as it adds to the story's inherent poetry.

Pretty easy to tune out.

Do Revenge isn’t about stretching conventions but rather simply finding another wrinkle on what has become an established formula. It does that, but for a movie where the characters speak often about their Ivy League aspirations, creatively speaking it lands more in the safety-school category.

A respectable but watered-down heist movie that, given the Los Angeles setting, either owes a debt to director Michael Mann or suggests an unusually violent and action-packed episode of "Entourage."

Still, the madcap nature of the exercise -- and narrative road map that the earlier movie provides -- can't help but make this incarnation feel less inspired, for all its colorful irreverence, before rallying a bit at the finish.

A vehicle with roughly the weight of a stiff breeze.

With Bette Midler and her onscreen sisters shamelessly hamming things up, it looks as if those involved in making this inoffensive flight of fantasy had more fun than anyone over 12 will have watching it. Still, the blend of witchcraft and comedy should divert kids without driving the patience of their parents to the boiling point, leaving a chance to conjure up a little box office magic among that contingent before the pot tips over.

Park and Wong are both innately likable, which makes the movie pleasant enough to watch, but also a bit of a slog given the ostensible inevitability of where it's heading.

What really makes The Truth About Cats & Dogs special in places however, is Garofalo's dry, self-effacing wit and Thurman's ditzy, old-style Hollywood glamour.

This is an especially limp star vehicle that delivers a few widely spaced moments of frivolity before what should be a quick mop-up trip to the DVD aisles.

"Elvis” has entered the theaters, but in a package that often recalls the excesses associated with his Vegas-residency years: Looking bloated, gaudy and at times bordering on self-parody. Those missteps, courtesy of director Baz Luhrmann and an ill-used Tom Hanks, squander Austin Butler’s brilliant moments in the title role, which deserve a much better movie.

Africa's enduring sorrow is ripe for drama, but Blood Diamond is, finally, a fitting metaphor for the gems: Potentially brilliant from a distance, but upon closer inspection, one likely will see the flaws.

Wispy at best, this romantic comedy from a first-time director and screenwriter feels as if whole chunks have been left on the cutting-room floor, with what remains mustering intermittent charm thanks to the attractiveness, if not chemistry, of Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker.

Stallone (who looks fit but mostly keeps his shirt on) has no intention of bogging the action down, but it's still a notably cheerless exercise, without knowing winks or stabs (pardon the expression) at humor. It is in all respects, rather, a completely workmanlike effort.

Loaded with the usual barrage of irreverent, politically incorrect and virtually non-stop gags. Director Peter Segal and writers Pat Proft, David Zucker and Robert LoCash succumb to occasional bouts of toilet humor, but there’s also some extended hilarity in a scene set around the Academy Awards.

While the film traffics in thoughtful ideas as well as spectacle, it doesn’t complete the vital emotional connections between its head and its heart.

Strums the genre for considerable laughs, with John C. Reilly playing the title balladeer from teen to senior citizen, generating enough goodwill to offset the flat sections and a decidedly juvenile streak.

The story plays like a rather tired excuse to redo the first story with a few cosmetic tweaks, hoping to tap into adult nostalgia while potentially attracting a new generation of kids.

The biggest surprise, frankly, might be that the funniest person here is frequently Manganiello. Indeed, the mere visual juxtaposition of the towering “Magic Mike” star and Reubens in the same frame together is practically a special effect in itself.

A full-throttled, technically superb adventure — with more bite than most Disney live-action fare — that offers some winning moments but, ultimately, isn’t as involving as it needs to be.

More an examination of human nature than a thriller, the space-faring movie deals with weighty issues but doesn't possess much pizzazz or gravity, making Netflix the logical home for its launch.

“Scoop” juggles so many timely balls it’s a bit of a shame the film doesn’t accomplish that task with more dexterity.