Chris Nashawaty

Megan Leavey is one of those strong-arm soaps, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it has a certain secret weapon in the forced-waterworks department—an adorable bomb-sniffing German shepherd. All together now: Awwwwww.

Venom isn’t quite bad, but it’s not exactly good either. It’s noncommittally mediocre and, as a result, forgettable. It just sort of sits there, beating you numb, unsure of whether it wants to be a comic-book movie or put the whole idea of comic-book movies in its crosshairs.

Wilson has some deliciously awkward laughs thanks to Harrelson’s curmudgeonly, childlike performance, but it zips right along without ever landing any emotionally resonant blows.

Sean Penn doesn’t make movies very often these days. So when he does, you go in with certain expectations. Sadly, it’s best to leave them at the concession stand if you’re planning on enjoying The Gunman.

It’s the movie equivalent of a cake that’s all frosting.

A hot, strange mess that never quite comes together the way it should.

Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is a film that evokes complicated emotions. A month after seeing it, you might still be wrestling with whether it's powerful, profound, or propaganda.

Hart's exasperated dervish shtick has moments of real live-wire anarchy, including one priceless gag at a firing range. Will it be enough to make Hart a household name? Maybe. But both he and his fans deserve better.

There are a few spiky moments of sick, WTF fun (a bout of rough sex that ends with a Silly String climax; the first time a puppet drops an F-bomb), but mostly it feels like a promising idea poorly executed.

It seems to exist merely to spoil your appetite.

The ever-quickening half-life of pop culture has gotten so short that we’ve now officially entered the era of diminishing returns. It’s the new normal. What’s old is new again — but not quite as good as you remembered it. Aladdin is…fine, but it has no real reason for being beyond, you know, capitalism. A whole new world, it’s not.

Peppered with implausibilities and foul-smelling red herrings, The Commuter downshifts from a solid cat-and-mouse joyride to a ridiculous howler, insulting its audience’s patience and intelligence at every turn.

By the time the movie finally manages to get interesting, audiences may be too numb and their retinas too fried to win back.

A pretty average siege thriller. I’m positive there’s an audience for an Old West tale about fierce, independent women. I’m equally positive it can be done better.

The movie is more or less all premise. The rest is just an occasionally suspenseful, occasionally gory sci-fi riff on any number of earthbound creepy-kid thrillers.

With a cast as daring and quick as this one, Ghostbusters is too mild and plays it too safe.

An intermittently affecting, sanded-edge adventure that feels as if it trundled off the studio production line back when Eisenhower was in office.

Allen isn’t completely on autopilot here. There are a couple of sharp, sting-in-the-tail twists near the end, and Phoenix is at least interesting. But Irrational Man would be lesser Woody even if we hadn’t seen most of it before.

Despite all of the film’s retro-future eye candy, it never quite sweeps you out of your seat and transports you someplace new. It’s a squeaky salvage job that could have used a fresh dose of oil to make it hum.

Cop Car feels like a great short stretched into a mediocre feature.

Beyond is more fun than deep. It’s lightweight, zero-gravity Trek that is, for the most part, devoid of the sort of Big Ideas and knotty existential questions that creator Gene Roddenberry specialized in.

The Hateful Eight doesn’t have enough ideas. Set almost entirely in a snowed-in saloon, the story’s so spare it doesn’t warrant either its three-hour running time (including an overture and intermission) or his use of 70mm projection. It’s narratively and visually claustrophobic.

As the wisecracking voice of Pikachu, Ryan Reynolds deserves some sort of special citation for doing the best he can without Deadpool’s f-bombs (or a decent script) to lean on. But the main problem is that the film’s gumball-mayhem plot is so frenetic that it’s impossible to determine if it makes a lick of sense. Maybe that was the point.

As with most of his films (Madea-centric and otherwise), subtlety isn’t Perry’s strongest suit. He tends to hammer his audience over the head with canned sentimentality, lazy stereotypes, and easy uplift.

I get that this mano a supermano story line is a sacred text among comic-book aficionados, but Dawn of Justice doesn’t do the tale any favors. It’s overstuffed, confusing, and seriously crippled by Eisenberg’s over-the-top performance.

We're treated to what's essentially a slick, airbrushed promo reel of a bunch of genuinely sweet superstars who can't believe their dumb luck. That's charming. But it's also a little boring. What it's most definitely not is a documentary.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s wild-card performance is the only reason to bother with "Dallas Buyers Club" director Jean-Marc Vallée’s manipulative downer.

The art-heist plot is pretty by-the-numbers, but Travolta nearly saves it with his doomed air of paternal helplessness. He makes you feel the weight of being at the mercy of forces bigger than oneself. At 61, he still possesses something rare, even in rote material like this.

Neither as satisfying as the remake of "Shaft" nor as objectionable as the remake of "Death Wish," the second coming of Superfly wants to tap into that same ’70s grindhouse allure and put a similarly slick modern gloss on it. The results are pretty mixed.

Yes, it’s easy to be impressed by the world that Shyamalan has created and now fleshed out, but it would be nice if we were also moved to feel something too. In the end, Glass is more half empty than half full.

There’s a provocative idea at the center of Oldroyd’s beautifully photographed film — repression exploding into madness and violence. But as the body count rises, Lady Macbeth loses its secret weapon: sympathy.

Sadly, director James Kent’s sappy and utterly unconvincing new film The Aftermath shows that even the most foolproof ideas wither in the face of turgid, overripe melodrama.

Like some nefarious KGB amnesia serum, Red Sparrow mostly evaporates from your memory five minutes after you walk out of the theater.

What starts off as a promising indie about a couple (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) trying to balance their own needs versus their partner’s quickly goes south in director Joe Swanberg’s latest meditation on aging-hipster malaise.

Written by Oscar-winning Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, the new film feels stagey, confusing, and didactically obvious. You can tell that it was written by a playwright (which McCraney was and is).

There are certain movies that you really want to like based on their ambition, or their weirdness, or their ambitious weirdness, and ultimately you just can’t. Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise is one of those movies.

Sadly, it isn’t a great movie. It’s a disappointingly mild period thriller that’s light on thrills. Even Paul Rudd, one of the most likable actors in Hollywood, can’t rescue it.

There’s plenty of drinking, bonding, and bickering. But none of the jokes feel as barbed-wire sharp as the material you know these brilliant comic actresses could have come up with if they tossed out the script and just ad-libbed.

Pitt, for instance, could've used a scene like Tom Hanks' in "Saving Private Ryan," where we learn something — anything — about his life back home and what he's fighting for besides the Stars and Stripes. Instead, Fury (the title comes from the name of the tank) just plods from one brutal, bloody combat scene to the next.

First, the good news. Justice League is better than its joylessly somber dress rehearsal, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Now the “but”…you knew there was a “but” coming, right? But it also marks a pretty steep comedown from the giddy highs of Wonder Woman.

When a sunset romance does come along, you can’t help but root for it. Which is why it gives me no joy to report that The Leisure Seeker is pretty disappointing.

With her sad, haunted eyes and ''plain as a tin pail'' looks, Swank is by far the best thing in the movie. More than most actresses, she seems unburdened by vanity.

A clever filmmaking experiment? Without a doubt. A satisfying one? Not so much.

After about 10 minutes, The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter feels borderline promising. After 80, it feels like a blown opportunity.

It’s both a bit confusing and a bit confused. Fortunately, it’s also loaded with some of the crunchiest action scenes since the John Wick movies thanks to Indonesian martial-arts maestro Iko Uwais.

Gyllenhaal’s Southpaw performance is great, but for reasons unrelated to his physique. He’s thrilling to watch and the only unpredictable thing in a two-hours-plus movie where you can count on one hand the number of moments that aren’t hand-me-downs from better boxing films like "Rocky," "Raging Bull," and "Fat City."

The setup has mysterious promise, but the film cheaps out on a satisfying payoff.

Falls victim to too many trite boxing-movie clichés and is in way too much of a rush to cover too much narrative ground. It sometimes feels like you’re watching it with a finger on the fast-forward button.

As 86-minute kids’ movies go, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is shockingly padded. It’s the same old dogs with no new tricks.

Of course, there’s a sort of comfort in familiarity, especially around the traditions of the holidays. But Daddy’s Home 2 never manages to really catch you off guard and crack you up the way the best comedies should.

Just when you think you know where Burnt is headed, there’s an underhanded twist about halfway in. And it’s almost enough to set the movie right.

No one can argue that Mary Magdalene isn’t a well-intentioned film. It’s just that while Mara convinces you that Mary deserves a more contemporary reappraisal, she also lays bare the fact that she deserves a better movie in which to accomplish it.

Noah is a movie about big ideas (environmentalism, heavenly obedience versus earthly love) and even bigger directorial ambitions (how to tell a personal story on the grandest of grand scales). But, in the end, it's also a disappointment. Maybe not one of Biblical proportions, but a disappointment nonetheless.

The sequel still manages to walk the tightrope between clever and crass. For a while, at least.

It’s never pushed far enough. Instead, Dark Places just becomes an overstuffed, low-simmer potboiler with too many improbable detours and overly convenient twists.

As a film, Under the Skin is hauntingly freaky and ultimately frustrating. But as a movie star's gamble to be seen as more than just a moneymaking member of the Marvel universe, it's a home run.

While it’s nice to see Cusack and costar Samuel L. Jackson downplay rather than go big, Cell has a been-there-done-that quality that winds up feeling a bit disappointing.

Its intentions are noble. Its gaze is harshly realistic. But it’s also overly melodramatic. Bettany has the makings of better director than screenwriter.

The supporting cast includes Nick Nolte, Christine Lahti, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Hailee Steinfeld, making the movie’s greatest accomplishment the fact that it was able to squander so many interesting actors.

Unless you’re Billy Bob Thornton, old furniture just isn’t all that scary.

It’s a diabetically sappy big-screen self-help seminar that should have been titled The Book of Schmaltz.

There’s a seed of an interesting, Twilight Zone premise here — what would you do if you were the last two people on earth? But Bokeh doesn’t seem to know what to do with it besides have its photogenic Adam-and-Eve leads take long nature walks, play board games, and upgrade their living conditions.

Since the film’s last-minute rewrites, casting switcheroos, and musical chairs behind the camera are irrelevant to the actual quality of the movie, I’ll avoid rehashing them here, save to say that the disarray shows on screen.

A hypercaffeinated first-person action flick that teeters somewhere between gonzo insanity and a nausea-inducing endurance test.

A so-so meditation on historical amnesia. It’s also so weighted down with mysticism and metaphor it forgets to quicken your pulse or whiten your knuckles.

Honestly, I’ve seen more narratively ambitious Mad Libs.

Welcome to the Jungle isn’t a bad movie. It’s a diverting, mildly amusing, competent bit of big-budget studio product. And maybe those are the stakes we’re now playing for these days.

The only saving grace is Chris Pratt as Vaughn's deadpan best friend.

It feels like Smigel and Sandler just shot the first draft of their script without fine-tuning or polishing any of the jokes.

The title isn’t the only thing about the film that has an exclamation point; every scene comes with one – and also seems to be in blaring, buzzing neon. The movie doesn’t know when to stop.

This tone-deaf misfire can't decide whether it wants to be a broad comedy doling out raunchy slapstick laughs or a serious drama about our porn-saturated age of sensory overload.

With so little backstory and character depth, it’s nothing more than a pointless exercise in brutal, nasty style.

The problem with the film’s buckshot “this-happened-and-then-that-happened” storyline is that Connolly keeps hurtling ahead from scene to scene trying to touch every base in Gotti’s life of crime without every letting any one moment breathe long enough for it to resonate.

A lazy hash of cheap geezer gags and spoon-fed sentiment.

Look, no one is expecting much from a movie called Happy Death Day 2U. Certainly not air-tight logic. But this chapter feels phoned in. And unless you’re really, really desperate for a new horror movie to check out, you might want to think twice about accepting the charges.

Now a miscast Claire Foy adopts the hacker vigilante’s black leather and badass avenging-angel attitude for The Girl in the Spider’s Web — a disappointingly safe, by-the-numbers action-thriller.

Moretz, who is 16 now, can't manufacture the same that's-so-wrong jolt she managed the first time around. Back then, it was hilariously taboo to see a little girl spout arias of profanity. Now, she's just another teenager swearing. Like the rest of the film, what was once shocking now just elicits a shrug.

Schwarzenegger, for one, seems to be having a hoot.

The Green Inferno is less a riff on spaghetti splatter flicks like Cannibal Holocaust than a desperate-to-shock pastiche of guts and gore served with a wink to audiences with strong stomachs. You know who you are.

On paper, writer-director Oren Moverman’s The Dinner has all the ingredients for what should be a four-star feast. But from the opening course, it’s clear that something has gone wrong in the kitchen. Moverman, the chef, has tried to make his creation too clever and complicated.

The only one having any fun in this dead-on-arrival noir is Robert De Niro.

It's no coincidence that Winter's Tale is being released on Valentine's Day, when our resistance to schmaltz is at its weakest. But do that special someone in your life a favor and splurge on some flowers and a nice heart-shaped Russell Stover box instead.

The Vatican Tapes is basically “Exorcism’s Greatest Hits” played by a schlocky cover band.

The one thing Mute has going for it is Jones’ vividly imaginative sense of world-building. Like Ridley Scott with "Blade Runner," he fills every corner of the screen with something cool to look at.

With Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce now in the roles once occupied by Johnny Depp and the late Jean Rochefort, Don Quixote turns out to be a pretty typical Gilliam film: whimsically daffy, frantically overstuffed, and art-directed to within in an inch of its life. It’s often transporting, but even more often exhausting.

It’s little more than a handsome snooze that even the Masterpiece Theatre crowd may find a bit too snoozy.

Knock Knock is a pretty flimsy erotic thriller, but thanks to Reeves’ oaken obliviousness it’s also got a few moments of deliciously trashy fun.

The whole thing feels like the pilot episode of a third-rate comic-book vigilante TV show.

The Space Between Us attempts to take young love to literally new heights before crash-landing into an earthbound hash of schmaltzy clichés and romantic absurdities.

Apocalypse feels like a confused, kitchen-sink mess with a half dozen too many characters, a villain who amounts to a big blue nothing, and a narrative that’s so choppy and poorly cut together that it feels like you’re watching a flipbook instead of a movie.

Watching it all unfold and slowly go off the rails, you can't help but wonder what Pfister's mentor, Nolan, might have done with the same material. My guess is he would have sent the script back for a Page One rewrite for starters.

For a movie about the importance of objectivity, Truth feels like a biased and sanctimonious op-ed column.

Anderson's film is something to be experienced, like a psychedelic drug trip where the journey trumps the destination. Unfortunately, his journey just didn't do it for me.

Corbet doesn’t seem as interested in the answers to the provocatively glib questions he raises as he is in creating a cynical riddle cloaked in style. No doubt some will find all of this to be a deep meditation on the pop-industrial complex, but from where I was sitting, it just felt like empty camp.

While Hudson's and costar Mary J. Blige's soulful, stirring musical numbers are absolute dynamite, the rest of the film's story is larded with enough soap opera twists and heavy-handed schmaltz that you'll feel like you're being bludgeoned with a hymnal.

The goal of any manifesto is making its aims as clear as possible. But it’s never clear what this Manifesto is aiming for besides a cheeky roll call of intellectual camps. Ph.D.s in art theory will chuckle knowingly as everyone else eyes the exit.

Like its predecessor it’s an unremarkable placeholder until the next "Mission: Impossible" flick comes along.

Some, no doubt, will find Lowery’s playfully surreal experiment (a ghost story told from the POV of the ghost) haunting, lyrical, and moving. Others (ahem, guilty as charged) will just find it maddening, inscrutable, and alienating. Check it out, then take your side in the debate.