Chris Nashawaty

A violent, grungy, Peckinpah-lite action thriller that’s worth checking out just to be reminded how powerful an actor Mel Gibson continues to be even—if the parts aren’t coming like they once were.

If your kids can get through the first five minutes of Pete’s Dragon (which rank right up there with the shooting of Bambi’s mother on the Disney trauma-o-meter), then you won’t find a sweeter family film for the waning days of summer.

Writer-director David Ayer (End of Watch) skillfully sets up the film, introducing each of the crazies with caffeinated comic-book energy. But their mission...is a bit of a bust. The stakes should feel higher.

Beneath all of its hard-R partying, rebellious debauchery, and profanity, it taps into something very real and insidious in the zeitgeist. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year—and one of the most necessary.

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

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.

Like a dog that endlessly chases its tail in circles, Pets is amusing for a while, then it just tires itself out.

If, on the other hand, it’s sleazy kicks you’re after, you’ll be in exploitation heaven. Because writer-director James DeMonaco’s third chapter in the thrill-kill vigilante franchise is the best and pulpiest Purge yet.

Disposable and shockingly inept.

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

Parents looking for a 21st-century E.T. to share with their kids are bound to be a bit disappointed even as their eyes are dazzled.

In Wiener-Dog, Solondz just keeps telling the same dark joke over and over again—and it just keeps getting less and less funny. It’s a dog.

The film is maddeningly uneven. Just as it starts to settle into an inspired groove, it uncorks a couple of gags that fall lethally flat, making for half of a great comedy.

The Shallows could have been a really fun B-movie. And in a lot of ways, it is. There’s no denying that it has some great jump-scares and scratches a certain summer itch we all get this time of year. Too bad it’s a bit too watered down.

Tim Skousen and Jeremy Coon’s new documentary, Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, isn’t the kids’ finished film. It’s a film about the making of their film — and it’s amazing.

David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s documentary Tickled is so crazy that it feels like a hoax. Only it’s not. At least, I don’t think it is.

As De Palma shows us, whether he’s got two more films left in him or two dozen — Holy Mackerel — what a career!

It’s not Toy Story or Inside Out or even Nemo. What it is is a perfectly enjoyable family film that’s comforting, familiar, and a bit slight, like one of those serviceable Lion King spin-offs that Disney used to ship straight to DVD back in the ‘90s.

It’s soulless, incoherent, Renaissance Faire hooey. And since the latest iteration of game series that inspired it, World of Warcraft, already peaked years ago, even the timing is off.

The film doesn’t seem particularly interested in grappling with any of those issues beyond the most superficial level.

There are some solid scares (Wan is too gifted in the dark art of gotcha manipulation to not make you leap a few times), but there’s nothing on par with the first film’s brilliant hide-and-clap scene with Lili Taylor. If there’s going to be a Conjuring 3—and this movie is just decent enough to suggest there will be—our heroes should be a little choosier about which case they dust off next.

The film will feel familiar to anyone who’s sniffled through "Love Story" or "The Fault in Our Stars." It’s better than both.

If this soap opera wasn’t real, you’d never believe it.

Gosling and Crowe have a surprisingly fizzy, ferret-and-bull chemistry, and the hedonistic Me Decade setting is groovy.... But the one-liners and shoot-outs feel a bit threadbare, handed down from older, better Shane Black movies.

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.

If you’re willing to surrender to his singular vision, you might just walk out of the theater seeing the world in a new way — which is probably more than you can expect from the new Kevin Hart comedy.

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.

There are some stretches of the film that are frankly a bit boring and wouldn’t be missed if they were cut.

Based on a real-life rash of teen suicides in Wales, Danish director Jeppe Rønde’s 2015 Tribeca winner feels like the sort of slow BBC America procedural you’d quickly give up on.

It seems to exist merely to spoil your appetite.

Despite its stars-and-stripes title, Marvel’s latest billion-dollar-blockbuster-to-be, Captain America: Civil War, is essentially a third Avengers movie – it’s also the best one yet.

If it sounds like Hologram is basically about a middle-aged white guy getting his groove back in the Middle East, well, yes, it is that. But if you squint hard enough, it’s also a little bit more.

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

Part of being in a punk band involves having to play some pretty hostile venues. But the one in writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s new white-knuckle thriller, Green Room, makes the typical mosh-pit dive look like a kindergarten run by nuns.

The Jungle Book is a tender and rollicking fable that manages to touch on some grown-up themes about man’s destructive power and the loss of youthful innocence without losing sight that it’s first and foremost a gee-whiz kids adventure.

Kusama ratchets the story’s tension masterfully, building to a final shot that’s as chilling as it is perfect.

While Byrne is solid (as always) and Eisenberg is restrained (a relief after his manic Lex Luthor), it’s newcomer Druid whose scenes pack the most power and force.

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

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

There’s Glen Powell as Finn, the endearing loquacious smoothie; there’s Juston Street as Jay, the psycho loose-cannon fireballer; and Wyatt (son of Kurt) Russell as Willoughby, the older, sage-like stoner who quotes Carl Sagan after ripping bong hits.

Farhadi’s intrigue doesn’t feel like the stuff of a Hollywood thriller. It’s more realistic, more pedestrian than that – which gives it a real ring of low-key emotional truth.

It’s a small, modest film, but its impact is anything but.

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.

A lot of us have really missed Pee-wee, and seeing him go through his fun-house morning regimen at the outset of the film is a giddy treat. It’s like catching up with an old friend. But nostalgia gets you only so far.

As father and son speed toward some doomsday reckoning, Nichols keeps us guessing in a way that evokes "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Midnight Special is a more modest, more enigmatic film than that one was, but it’s no less gripping.

Creative Control is a much more modest film (both visually and thematically) than something like Her or Ex Machina, but it never feels hamstrung by its limitations. If you go with its future-shock flow, it will cast a spell that feels like something between a dream and a nightmare.

For a rookie director, Trachtenberg appears to be a real craftsman, even if what he’s crafting doesn’t add up to as much as you hope it will.

Zootopia delivers the genre’s requisite barrage of quick-hit puns and pop culture riffs.

It’s a shame the rest of the soap-opera story doesn’t measure up to its stunts.

A shoddy special-effects howler that makes a hash out of both Egyptian mythology and human logic.

With his crudely drawn stick-figure body and big, round Wiffle-ball head, Cuca is a bundle of jitterbug energy and boundless imagination. Like Riley’s in "Inside Out," his noggin is a wondrous place to spend an hour or two.

The most impressive thing about Triple 9 is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and incoherent at the same time. Well, that and the fact that it manages to make half a dozen good actors look really lost.

While its strange rhythms may not be for everyone, it does provide something unusual in today’s movies: a truly original experience for the mind and the soul.

What makes this chillingly creepy little black-magic folk tale work so beautifully is its evocative sense of time and place.

It’s utterly demented, slightly terrifying, and most of all hilarious. It’s also one of the giddiest and most stinging political satires since Thomas Nast took on Tammany Hall.

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.

It doesn’t have the most adrenalized action sequences or the deepest origin story. What it has is the balls to mess with the formula and have some naughty, hard-R fun. It’s a superhero film for the wiseasses shooting spitballs in the back of the school bus.

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.

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

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

Del Toro’s low-key resignation gives the film what power it has, but the female characters (played by Mélanie Thierry and Olga Kurylenko) are disappointingly thin.

Visually dazzling and morally devastating.

It’s obvious that Kaufman has always seen the world differently from the rest of us. And even if it takes a little time to settle into Anomalisa’s disorienting, herky-jerky groove, Kaufman ends up bewitching us with his fresh take on the oldest and most hackneyed of cinematic themes: boy meets girl…and anxiety ensues.

Where to Invade Next is so heartfelt and sincere, it’s tempting to say that Moore’s mellowed with age. But beneath its innocent-abroad optimism, the film has a stinging truth that’s hard to ignore.

It’s the rarest kind of moviegoing experience: an absolute masterpiece.

The ending he’s come up with for The Force Awakens feels so perfect it’s hard to imagine it any other way. In an age when we’ve all become binge watchers, we feel as if it’s become our right to immediately roll right into the next episode, the next sequel. And when The Force Awakens ends, it’s bittersweet because you so badly want to head right into the next chapter.

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.

Howard’s film, for all of its storytelling skill, technical polish, and rousing high-seas sequences, never quite casts the spell it should. It’s too polite to give us a real feeling of life or death. Its sense of danger is watered down.

I suppose you could call The Big Short a comedy. It’s very, very funny. But it’s also a tragedy. Behind every easy drive-by laugh is a sincere holler of outrage.

Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu’s savage endurance test of a film almost works better as a series of stunning images and surreal sequences than as an emotionally satisfying story.

As it is, Youth is hit-and-miss, beautiful and frustrating.

The film’s raw performances get upstaged by Kurzel’s medieval shock-and-awe palette. The text has been streamlined to make room for more brutal mud-and-blood battle sequences, hauntingly shot by Adam Arkapaw.

The best part is getting to hear both men talk about their art in exhaustive, almost fetishistic detail. If you’re a classic movie buff, this is a must-see.

It feels like a movie that’s been lovingly crafted and put under glass in a museum. And I kept waiting for it to move me more than it did.

While the story attempts the moves that a Pixar film typically makes—nonverbal storytelling, death, a bittersweet ending—most of The Good Dinosaur’s punches land soft, made worse by the disconnect that exists between the overly cartoonish style of the characters and the photorealistic landscapes.

Engrossingly intimate documentary.

The heist in Heist is pretty pedestrian, and the film turns into Die Hard-on-a-bus with a couple of so-so twists and serviceable spasms of action. If that’s what you’re looking for, rent Speed instead.

In the best scene, which comes late in the film, James holds his dying mother and shares a vision of their future that they both know she’ll never get to see.

In the end it’s a movie about legacy, and it more than preserves the Rocky franchise’s. It reminds you why it was great in the first place.

Like "Far From Heaven," Carol mines society’s narrow-mindedness and the dangers of living a double life. But what was true more than a half century ago remains true now: The heart wants what it wants, society and propriety be damned.

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

Ronan, who’s made a habit of giving us sparkling turns since she was a kid in 2007’s Atonement, delivers a dazzlingly mature performance.

In this passionately nostalgic documentary, actor-turned-director Colin Hanks brings that era back to life, tracing the rise and fall of Russ Solomon’s retail music chain, which first opened its doors in Sacramento in 1960.

Directed by Holbrooke’s son, David, the film balances poignant political insight with a heartfelt narrative about a man trying to reckon with his absent father’s legacy.

The film is undercut by long metaphorical stretches that dampen their impact.

Tautly directed by Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), the film hums as a tense shoe-leather procedural and a heartbreaking morality play that handles personal stories respectfully without losing sight of the bigger, more damning picture.

It’s possible that Skyfall created expectations that were too high for Spectre to match. But with all he’s done for the franchise, Craig deserves to go out with a bigger, smarter bang.

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.

The comedy here isn’t very funny and the drama isn’t very sharp.

It’s 85 minutes of grim abyss-gazing with no hope of salvation. If Silverman’s going to bare her soul this nakedly, she deserves a better film to do it in.

It’s a shame that, despite some excellent performances, this urgent, well-intentioned film feels so conventional and stolid.

I doubt there’s a huge audience for a movie like Bone Tomahawk, but those who find it may turn it into a new cult classic.

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.

Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that’s so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

As horror comedies go, this one sadly winds up somewhere between Scary Movie 4 and 5.

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

Room is more than the title of one of the year’s most powerful movies — it’s a state of mind that’s unbearably tense and as claustrophobic as a straitjacket