Calum Marsh

It’s fast, witty, and packed with clever punchlines, though it still finds time for several scatological gags.

The humor is over-the-top and often exaggeratedly juvenile, but like many nominally “dumb” comedies, it’s the product of a keen and deliberate intelligence.

The action in The Wrecking Crew is so good, its fights so brisk and its car chases so lively, that it makes you wish its muscular leads, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, had starred in more decent action movies.

It can be a preachy and po-faced movie, to be sure, but a handsome one.

Merrily We Roll Along is an OK movie of a good production of a great musical: on balance, another worthy addition to the Stephen Sondheim canon, which can always stand to be expanded.

Naturally, the guests are weirdos, though none are very memorable. And since Glover himself is the ultimate weirdo, it all feels a bit much.

The only serious liability is the script, which never quite goes far enough. The provocative questions don’t have provocative answers, and though the film gestures toward edginess, it feels altogether too tame, lacking a bunny-boiling moment that would really make you squirm.

Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.

Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: A Desert, if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.

Wolfhard and Bryk don’t relish violence or gore: Hell of a Summer is surprisingly tame, with most of its kills kept tastefully offscreen.

The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”

Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.

The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

The game itself is so good. I’m not sure the movie understands why.

If the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor.

Effort goes only so far, and The 4:30 Movie doesn’t surpass Smith’s usual limitations.

Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.

Only Howell truly embodies the spirit of the Old West.

I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying.

A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and Arcadian is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along.

With its rambling momentum and quick-witted, almost musical dialogue, it feels less like “Superbad” than a Robert Altman movie, sort of like a pint-size “California Split.”

The combination of finale and premiere inevitably feels lopsided.

Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show.

This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity.

The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.

While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.

Subject is at its clearest when interrogating the material conditions of documentary filmmaking, as during a segment about whether the subjects of nonfiction films have the right to be paid for their participation; it feels slipperier when glossing issues of diversity and representation.

Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.

While sometimes grating, the film is always appealing, with pleasing details, down to its Art Deco end titles.

Yoo was granted exceptional access to San Quentin, and when she depicts the mundane qualities of life there — inmates working odd jobs, writing letters, passing the time alone in their cells — the movie gains some of the penetrating clarity of one of Frederick Wiseman’s films.

Office Race, a ribald comedy from Jared Lapidus about an inveterate deadbeat reluctantly training for a marathon, understands one of the great unspoken truths about running: that it is a miserable, arduous, soul-destroying pastime, and also deeply, profoundly rewarding.

As the harried friends careen across the resort through a series of comical mishaps, the movie has the feel of a TV rerun. More compelling are the too-rare moments of plotless leisure.

With compelling verve, “Hall of Shame,” from the director Bryan Storkel, tells the story of Conte’s ignominious rise and fall.

And yet, even if the computer shenanigans look goofy, they’re more interesting than the movie’s run-of-the-mill spy thrills.

The director having fun is the presiding feeling here — which may account for why the movie is so frequently amusing, and occasionally delightful.

The flashbacks are well-written and add off-the-court dramatic interest, but it’s the basketball action that is the movie’s claim to excellence. Expertly staged and beautifully rendered using a combination of computer-generated imagery and traditional hand-drawn animation, it’s often so spectacular that I am eager to watch again.

In any given moment, the movie is either overstating the importance of its subject or trivializing it.

The documentary “Glitch” is slyer and smarter than some of its paint-by-numbers dramatized contemporaries, and the story it prefers to tell is more interesting and complex than the battle of two domineering egoists who came up with a novelty app.

In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.

These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

While it has a blatant shoestring sheen, Come Out Fighting isn’t arch or irony-laden; in fact, the tone is quite serious, albeit also seriously clichéd.

The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.

The film is at its most compelling when tackling this tension between care and resentment head-on — it has a ring of truth that’s sadly squandered whenever Huang reaches for easy laughs.

For all its gung-ho violence, the film never feels fraught or nasty enough: It never risks true offense or tastelessness, never takes a gamble on anything that could be interpreted the wrong way or that might sidestep expectations. Somehow it makes killing Nazis feel pretty tame.

This tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.

Holmes is a generous but indiscriminate director of actors: She has the tendency, not uncommon among actors turned directors, of extending a cast of inconsistent talent a degree of latitude better reserved for the heaviest hitters. (She doesn’t have this problem with her own performance, which is both compelling and well-situated in the context of the film.)

While the details are meticulous, the attitude is all wrong, trading the simple, unaffected charm that has served the character so well since his introduction in 1981 for a snarky and fatuous air that leans hard on winking humor and bland, hackneyed irony.

The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.

A funny and thoughtful high school comedy.

What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”

Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.

Between its old-hat story, flagrantly distasteful humor and lousy visual effects, Virtually Heroes feels as if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a lot longer than 10 years. It probably should have remained there.

While it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that The Old Way is woefully lacking.

It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.

It’s the sort of bland, innocuous trifle that will swiftly recede into the oblivion of a streaming service menu — a comedy without laughs and a family movie without heart, lacking any of the wit or charm of Kinney’s original stories.

That winsome charm and gusto is infectious, as in a Central Park-set dance number with some of the Technicolor verve of an old Hollywood musical, and it manages to sustain this unflagging exuberance across its fleet 72-minute running time.

Mostly it made me want to watch the original, which, as always, remains well worth revisiting.

If this is the standard we’re dealing with, I’d rather have amnesia.

While Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it.

Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.

Wadlow, a good horror director, seems hamstrung by the family-friendly context and struggles to develop tension in the absence of a plausible threat of violence.

"Lyle” has a brisk, whimsical momentum that is utterly infectious in the early going. Then it stops dead.

The film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes.

Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny.

We Are as Gods is a mildly interesting documentary about a very interesting man.

The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic.

The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be.

When the kids are just doing kid stuff . . . Secret Headquarters has the playful, mischievous air of something like “The Goonies.” When the kids acquire some of the Guard’s superpowers and start flying around and fighting baddies, it has the air of … well, of just another superhero movie.

Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material — of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context — that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame.

This brand of arch, inside-baseball riffing is a scourge on modern family films, present in almost every animated movie with an all-star cast. But it’s especially grating delivered by Johnson and Hart, who, despite the vocal talent they have shown in the past, give two of the least inspired voice performances in recent memory.

In The Man From Toronto, directed by Patrick Hughes, the vague sense of location is typical of a broader lack of effort. Although Hart, as the broadly comic version of the classic Hitchcockian Wrong Man, has a certain goofball charm, his frantic coward routine gets old quickly, with no appreciable change as the action-flick danger continues to escalate.

It’s not simply a movie about how Giannis became one of the most dominant players in the league. It’s about why Giannis is so lovable.

The result is a 103-minute vanity project I found utterly exhausting.

Although she is buoyant and cheerful, Nikuko is cast as oafish and uncouth, and she is always ultimately the butt of the joke. It’s a puerile, mean-spirited tendency that altogether spoils the otherwise exquisite imagery.

The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.

A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.

The three-part scope is ambitious, but Foxhole is a film made on a very small scale.

“It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall,” James Salter wrote in his mountaineering novel “Solo Faces.” The Sanctity of Space is at its best when conveying the power of that belief.

Sprouse plays it a touch broad, veering sometimes from endearing to goofy. But Condor is note-perfect, and Winterbauer directs with a light, playful touch, giving the movie an energy that’s nimble and vibrantly sexy.

The ensemble of children has a natural, authentic-seeming rapport, and Braff and Union, as the beleaguered but loving parents, have an easy, irresistible chemistry, buzzing with big-hearted charisma every time they share the screen.

The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel.

“Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance.

They/Them/Us finds sharp humor in more relatable friction: namely between Charlie and Lisa (Amy Hargreaves) as they attempt to reconcile their domestic responsibilities with their voracious sexual appetites.

When it isn’t fawning over roller rinks, “Goonies” posters, and Casio watches, 8 Bit Christmas (streaming on HBO Max) is a warm and refreshingly earnest holiday comedy.

A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.

In flattening everything into a single shade of funereal gray, “No Future” has none of the ineffable, multifaceted complexity of life.

I suppose it doesn’t cohere into anything more than the sum of its parts. But this is the first time I’ve felt the anthology horror format really worked, and gosh, the parts are really good.

It’s an exercise in watching someone have the world’s slowest revelation.

The plot, stretched thin even at just 90 minutes, is extremely predictable, and therefore boring, and the film doesn’t do enough with its high-concept shock-therapy conceit to feel fresh or novel.

Papushado’s flamboyance feels cocky and indiscriminate, as if he’s simply trying really hard to make every image seem cool.

The cast can only do so much with thin material, and Waltz, duping and swindling grandly, isn’t equipped to make the long con interesting.

Tender and exuberant, it includes set pieces modeled on “Footloose” and “Grease,” and feels closer to those films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This is the kind of movie that vibrates with the energy of the people who made it, whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen.

This is a film about the devastation of Inner Mongolia and the systematic annihilation of its migrant workers, but it is no mere coup d'œil of righteous advocacy. It is a work of film art.

This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.

This is a masterpiece not because it culminates in some redemptive catharsis or clinching argument for social change, but because, by disavowing such facile ends, it meets the mess of life on its own clear and true terms.

The stories have an almost dreamlike sweep and imaginative energy, and the film never exhausts that exuberance. More extraordinary still is its emotional depth.

However you enjoy its nearly four hundred minutes, I expect you'll be held rapt till the last second by a film of abundant wit and generous heart.

Just as it seems on the verge of yielding a nuanced view of the Holocaust’s emotional and psychological fallout, Anita B. recedes into platitudes and cliché.

Diliberto has managed to make a political comedy that seems at once tremendously funny and intensely serious — a provocative, and perhaps even important, combination.

The faults and merits of the free-school movement are elucidated with a steely, journalistic rigor. More surprising is that this candid glimpse plays as exhilarating drama.

Martin and Peranson, a savvy pair, appreciate their outsider status here, and they remain uncommonly sensitive to even the subtlest ways that ignorance and entitlement may manifest themselves — both in art and in our relationship to it.

The Barefoot Artist, co-directed by Yeh's own son, veers too close to hagiography, and as a result makes Yeh look not so much like a well-meaning global citizen as a bona fide saint.

The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.

Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.

Story of My Death is a singular work, and its originality is apparent in every frame.

Greene seems fascinated by the contradictory identities — each a kind of real-life performance — that Burre endeavors to reconcile, and he is profoundly sensitive to the emotional truth these performances describe.

An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.

Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.

The most charitable thing you can say about This Is Where I Leave You is that it is resolutely innocuous — a nothing of a movie, neutered and sanitary.

The film mounts a compelling case on behalf of what was, perhaps, a sort of genius — a rare gift for identifying talent in others and nurturing it, even amplifying it.

What ultimately holds the film back, I believe, is its tendency to err too far on the side of that sweetness — it indulges too often in the hallmarks of the mediocre indie, the stuff a press release might call quirk, to level its more substantial points with real seriousness.

Without Shepherds is all sprawl, a loose mélange of talking heads and landscape b-roll.

Beneath exhausts the appeal of its thinly sketched characters almost as soon as they're trapped together in the mine's emergency bunker, and it isn't long before Ketai, tiring of human drama, turns instead toward the supernatural.

The story proceeds with all the flighty unreality of a film unconcerned with real-world scientific rigor... but Cahill manufactures enough conspiracies, coincidences, and extraordinary turns of plot to keep his thinking audience too busy to care.

[Aja] has outfitted Horns with enough talent that the film is rather easy to admire aesthetically. The problems are more foundational, even conceptual—and they are thus harder to reconcile.

Bertolucci, despite his obvious affection for Lorenzo, can't help but seem out of touch, and his hero looks and sounds less like a modern-day teen than an old man's wistful idea of one.

Certainly, a lot of blood is spilled in the name of laughs. There's only one problem with its broad attempts at grotesque comedy: Jackpot simply isn't funny.

Norte tells a big story on a grand scale, but its emphasis, moment by moment, is on the quotidian. It's simplicity that resonates most deeply of all.

This attention to the personal crises of Segerstedt comes at the expense of a broader and more elusive subject, namely, the war. We know what Segerstedt did, and Troell tries to ask why. What he ignores are the implications.

Tobia approaches comedy in the same way that John Cassavetes did, which is to say that he embraces the absurdity of human behavior at the same time that he recoils from it.

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face conjures the aura of Goldin's halcyon days with the ease of diaristic reminiscence, and for that it proves a valuable record. But on the subject of her cultural significance the film remains oddly quiet.

The director, Nicolas Mercier, has failed to grasp how repellent his own protagonist seems to us. By the end, he's tipped his hand, and what seemed an incisive portrait is revealed as oddly skewed.

Much has changed in the two decades since the release of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down, but, as The Angriest Man in Brooklyn flatly reminds us, the grievances of America's petulant middle-class men apparently have not.

At its best, this descent into madness plays out like a millennial stoner's take on Jacob's Ladder. More often, it recalls a sobering truth: Nobody likes listening to someone ramble while high.

You can sense the director, Sarah Smick, gearing up to make a point. It proves rather obvious: Real connections are meaningful and too much Facebook is bad. But isn't the real problem more insidious?

We all have childhoods to remember. Art needs to do more than just remind us.

None of the reliably irritating qualities of the social issue documentary gall quite so acutely as the tendency to venerate mere awareness.

Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.

It is amazing, given the modesty of its scope and means, how much Manakamana is able to achieve.

Little more than an exercise in sustained contempt, a petty little missive directed at anyone who dares to wield a pen.

Just a Sigh's day-long liaison sustains interest largely for the appeal of Devos and Byrne, its accomplished leads — they share what is known in the rom-com lexicon as "chemistry," and this quality invigorates their time together, in bed and out.

At its best, the film does the job of the albums lost to the floods: It captures a town's history.

Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.

the film's occasional fits of comic inanity — locals ranting about aliens, conversations about two-headed dogs — are certainly embarrassing. But its attempts at melodrama are outright repugnant.

For all its comic panache, A Fantastic Fear of Everything too often feels forced rather than funny — the strain evident in the setup is rarely worth the payoff, and the result simply proves exhausting.

Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.

The Double taps into a deep reservoir of psychic turmoil even as it navigates the script’s abundant jokes, and the nightmare of the heart of the film is doubtless universal.

This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.

It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.

This is a guy who seeks to mock idiocy? Physician, heal thyself.

White Reindeer concedes that much about Christmas is funny — its notions quaint, its fixtures cliched. But it proposes that beneath this sometimes lurid veneer lay something to cherish all the same.

Resoundingly terrible.

Gentle has its charms, and August's vision of the world, archaic though it may willingly be, is appealingly urbane .

The awe incited by the world is enough — no pontificating necessary, man.

The result is a pleasure, perhaps as much for audiences as for Polanski; it's a chance to luxuriate in the atmosphere of world-class Formula One, here a lavish free-love party interrupted now and again by a few laps on the track.

Refusing to think small, Lonergan cannot help but fail big.

Poetry refracts life; this film can only reflect it, and tritely at that.

Fixed cameras lend themselves well to dimly lit effects and shrewd obfuscation, and McGinn proves a fine hand at stock-horror misdirection.

Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.

Good design rests at the intersection of function and beauty. Design Is One, alas, has far too little of the latter.

Part of what’s so invigorating about A Touch of Sin is its refusal to betray the depth of its intellectual ambition, deferring when needed to generic convention and relishing the entertainment which follows.

Rather than thrilling, the courtroom sequences seem only enervating, nudging us toward a quiet outrage.

The film is starved for the kind of nuance Kore-eda wields effortlessly elsewhere. What’s left without it is something merely schematic.

Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.

Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.

The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.

The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.

The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.

Perhaps the richest of Resnais's recent efforts.

The film articulates this dimension of the story, regrettably, in little more than biopic platitudes and daddy-issue clichés...But it's not all bad. Badgley delivers a nuanced performance of such ferocity he almost singlehandedly makes a conventional film seem loose and improvisatory.

Many Hollywood films are founded on privilege, but few are as open and nasty about their racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

When The Angels' Share suddenly transforms, in its final act, into a kind of farcical heist picture, that fleeting slapstick tendency wins out, regrettably diminishing the film's social consciousness in the process.

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.

Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal.

Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.

Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.

One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.