Chris Nashawaty

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.

Gere, an actor capable of great nuance, hams it up so mightily you’d think the film was sponsored by Boar’s Head.

It isn’t until the wonderful Gladstone comes along with her aching tomboy heartache and sad seeking eyes that the film finally burrows below the surface and finally hits a dramatic nerve. Unfortunately, by then, it’s too little too late.

If you enjoyed 2013’s Pacific Rim but secretly wished it was more like a vapid Transformers sequel, then you’ll love Pacific Rim Uprising. Everyone else can give this heavy-metal howler a hard pass.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Its lack of both originality and any real memorable moments feels shameless and lazy. Adding insult, the movie ends on a cliffhanger, guaranteeing that Insidious: Chapter 3 will soon be coming to a theater near you.

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.

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.

Is it possible to be an enfant terrible when you’re 55? Unrepentant French provocateur Gaspar Noé pushes that question (and your buttons) to the breaking point with his latest transgressive import, Climax.

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.

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.

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.

Pretty light on scares and only hangs together with the thinnest (and hokiest) of narrative threads.

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.

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.

Zoolander No. 2 is embarrassing, lazy, and aggressively unfunny. The only good news is that at the pace the franchise is moving, we won’t get Zoolander 3 until 2030.

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

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.

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

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.