Chris Nashawaty

Reed and Rudd's film is proof that no matter how silly some ideas sound at first, good things often do come in small packages.

The biggest problem with the new Hunger Games movie is right there in the title: Part 1. Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins' best-selling YA trilogy, wasn't conceived in two parts.

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.

Murray, of course, can play a redeemable misanthrope with one hand tied behind his back. Unfortunately, that's exactly what he has to do here because writer-director Theodore Melfi reins in his leading man with a script that doesn't know when to stop troweling on the sap.

When the lights come up, you don’t want to feel like you’ve watched a ­better Cliffhanger. You want to understand the tragedy you’ve just watched. Yes, you want to be entertained, but you also want the icy, whipping wind of reality to sting.

Cedar has created a classic cautionary tale in Norman, and Gere flawlessly turns his tragic hero into someone who’s sympathetic and human.

Never mind the director’s still-prodigious work ethic, the big-screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s giddily overstuffed, ’80s-saturated best-seller is, in a way, a movie that couldn’t be more bespoke to Spielberg. After all, so many of that decade’s most indelible touchstones poured directly from his brain. It’s the perfect marriage of fabulist and fable.

It's both exhausting and laughable in its eagerness to shock. That's the bad news. The worse news is that Volume II comes out next month.

Engrossingly intimate documentary.

It’s one of those rare puzzle-box mysteries where, even if you can’t work it all out, you trust that it all makes sense. And when you do finally solve it — for me, around the fifth viewing — it fills you with the giddy sense of accomplishment you get from polishing off a stubborn New York Times Sunday crossword.

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

Young & Beautiful, with its barrage of fairly graphic sex scenes, is a throwback to the erotically charged, envelope-pushing Euro art-house films of the '60s and '70s such as Blow-Up and Last Tango in Paris.

It's Bale, and his almost biblical quest for justice, who burns his way into your soul.

Whether he’s washing the feet of prisoners in America, visiting sick children in Africa, or praying with hurricane victims in Asia, Pope Francis doesn’t merely preach empathy, responsibility, and accountability, he lives it.

Director Jesse V. Johnson sprinkles in enough cruel twists of fate and melancholy-laced flashbacks to prevent Avengement from becoming just another disposable exercise in action sadism on a budget. The real credit, though, goes to Adkins, who one of these days will hopefully get called up to the Hollywood big leagues and wind up surprising a lot of people — and grin while he’s doing it.

Clocking in at a lean and very mean 81 minutes, writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s follow-up to his grim 2016 black-and-white arthouse chiller "The Eyes of My Mother" is a sick-joke psychological cat-and-mouse game with just enough twists to keep you on your toes.

The pounding ’80s soundtrack (New Order, Depeche Mode, Ministry) couldn’t be cooler, the ultraviolence is relentlessly brutal, and Theron’s guns-and-garters wardrobe is sexy as hell. So it’s a shame that apart from the gender flip, the plot is so derivative.

The film has a stunningly hypnotic look thanks to Zach Kuperstein’s crisp black-and-white ­cinematography. It feels like a waking nightmare. It’s just enough to make you wonder how a film that’s so ugly managed to look so damn good.

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.

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.

Ari Folman's meta-commentary on Hollywood in the soulless digital age starts off promisingly, like a Charlie Kaufman mind scrambler. But then it spirals into logy animated nonsense.

Of the film’s two stars, it’s LaBeouf who seems especially well cast here. Until now, the actor has never seemed to measure up to the potential that he promised early on in his career. But there’s something about playing McEnroe that brings out the sort of unpredictable subtlety he’s always been capable of.

If you’ve always believed that the climactic Mexican standoff in "Reservoir Dogs" should have been the whole movie, then you’ll love Free Fire.

Speaking of Glover, it’s no spoiler to say that the Atlanta star is easily the best thing in this good-not-great movie.

He doesn't seem too interested in his actors — they're more plodding than their reptilian costars and you don't care about a single one of them — but Edwards does know how to fashion some serious monster mayhem.

Despite its sharp feminist sting, Big Eyes never loses its light touch. Maybe the lesson here is that Burton should venture out of his dark, creepy comfort zone more often.

Hiddleston and Larson are especially let down by the script, which wants to be jokey in the way that something like Predator was, but can’t pull it off. The same lack of care goes into the period-specific song choices that have as much imagination as a Time-Life Songs of the ‘70s set.

Clever, funny, and wonderfully bloody.

With the exception of maybe two scenes, you’ve seen everything in this movie before.

West is a talented director and knows how to build suspense. But here’s a case where the truth wasn’t only stranger than his fiction, it was scarier, too.

Entourage, the show and the movie, is about five insanely lucky knuckleheads who have each other’s backs in a town that’s more likely to stab you there.

As a faithful update of a cherished classic, the new Dumbo will get the job done for restless kids on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Still, we’ve come to expect more magic, more bizarro pixie dust from Burton. Maybe that’s why the second marriage between the director and Disney feels more like an uneasy corporate alliance than a union of artistic passion.

Cranston is utterly hypnotic as a certain kind of American male on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Annabelle: Creation isn’t a terrible film. Not exactly. The set-up is promising, and it offers some decent early jump scares. But eventually the thinness of the material becomes overwhelmingly obvious.

The two leads have chemistry and a rebellious sort of charisma. Too bad they’re given such wheezy clichés to work with.

Netflix feels like a proper home for a film this idiosyncratic. After all, you’ll know within 30 minutes stumbling onto it whether you want to keep following its unsettling descent into blood-soaked madness or pick up your remote and head over to the relatively sunnier and safer comforts of "Broadchurch."

While the first hour is evocative and suspenseful, the second doesn’t quite muster the depths of paranoia and doom you’re led to expect.

Davis Guggenheim’s latest documentary is a forceful and exquisitely made piece of advocacy journalism.

There may be no honor among thieves, but Triple Frontier certainly makes watching them pretty entertaining.

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

It's still plenty hilarious in a reheated sort of way.

The feverishly paced film is hell-bent on making the audience feel like they just snorted a Belushian mountain of blow. You can practically feel your teeth grinding to dust. As with any high, though, it also doesn't know when to stop.

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

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.

There’s something about the movie that makes it all feel as though it’s being presented under glass. Nureyev is more of an idea than an actual flesh and blood character. The only time The White Crow truly shoots off sparks is during its dance sequences. For those brief, beautiful moments, you can almost feel what it must have been like to witness a one-of-a-kind artist at the spellbinding height of his powers taking flight. But then the spell is broken, and the crow falls back to earth.

The film loses some of its fizz by giving in to a so-so caper plot that unintentionally proves the axiom they were just satirizing.

Petzold walks the tricky tightrope of being both timeless and timely, the performances (especially those of Rogowski and Beer) are chillingly good, and the ambiguous final shot is damn near perfect. In Transit, the past is prologue… and it’s devastating.

It’s a cliché to say that they don’t make movies like this anymore — nasty, nihilistic, nicotine-stained ‘70s death trips. But thank goodness that Zahler’s doing everything in his power to prove that cliché wrong.

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.

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

Buoyed by some nicely nuanced performances (especially by Pearce and Amy Ryan as his dream-dashing wife), Breathe In never quite rises above its predictable potboiler premise.

It delivers. The Perfection is a pure hit of twisted, absurd camp catnip.

There’s something decidedly old-fashioned about the new Brad Pitt-Marion Cotillard spy thriller, Allied. And that ends up being a good thing.

A surprisingly well-made mash-up of old-fashion war movie tropes and proudly disgusting horror-flick shocks. It’s a ton of fun.

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.

All of the highlights are dutifully hit, as in a made-for-TV movie (albeit a lavish, gorgeously photographed one). Unfortunately, they're hit with a sledgehammer.

No matter how shaggy and self-indulgent it is, or how anticlimactic its big so-what of an ending ends up being, I was never bored. More than that, I kind of dug its sheer swing-for-the-fences insanity.

In the end, what should be a three-hankie, ugly-cry tearjerker feels unnuanced, overplotted, and mechanical. Frank and Mary deserved better.

Berg has made a powerful film and an important reminder of what really happens when we send men and women off to war. It's just too bad that subtlety isn't a stronger weapon in his arsenal.

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.

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.

A sobering look at the bureaucratic trials and life-and-death decisions rookie doctors face on their daily rounds.

What sets it a notch or two above rote familiarity is its cast, featuring a charismatic, white trash-with-a-heart-of-gold turn from a mulletted Matthew McConaughey and a naturalistically low-key performance from newcomer Richie Merritt.

It's moving, admirable, and occasionally exhilarating. What it's missing is the one thing that could always be counted on with Jolie as a star: the spark of danger.

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.

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.

Like everything else in Jackson's Tolkienland, the buildup to the climactic melee stretches on too long. But when it comes, it's a doozy.

Even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love.

By the time the climactic act of violence finally arrives, there’s barely enough patience left in the viewer to feel any real sense of catharsis or liberation. Just exhaustion.

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

Jurassic World is a blockbuster of its moment. It’s not deep. There aren’t new lessons to be learned. And the film’s flesh-and-blood actors are basically glamorized extras. But when it comes to serving up a smorgasbord of bloody dino mayhem, it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do beautifully.

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.

It’s the psychological duel between the terrific Isaac and Kingsley as captor and prisoner that delivers the film’s most charged jolts of electricity.

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 Highwaymen is a leisurely ride with a pair of actors who know how to do a lot by not doing too much. It won’t reinvent cinema the way that "Bonnie and Clyde" once did. But it’s a ride worth taking nonetheless.

The Mule fits the 88-year-old Eastwood perfectly. Not just because there probably aren’t many roles for actors of his age out there, but also because its lack of judgment makes sense for a star who’s always been as willing to play anti-heroes as heroes.

Jeff Bridges seems to be the only one having fun, playing a videogame designer who gets sucked into a Day-Glo world of his own creation. It’s like Alice in Wonderland acted out on a kids’ Lite-Brite toy.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn’t quite have the same frayed-wire electricity as "Nightcrawler," but what it does have on its side is Denzel Washington.

As a result, the movie comes across like a bunch of “bits” when it really should be getting at deeper emotions and truths. Then again, Woody Allen, another comedian-turned-writer/director, ran into that same problem back at the beginning of his career. And he ended up doing okay.

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.

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.

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

Death Race 2000 isn’t the sharp satire Corman thinks it is, but it’s fun.

Fortunately, directing duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer get everything absolutely right in their bone-chillingly effective new remake.

It seems to exist merely to spoil your appetite.

There aren’t enough laughs here to goose it past formulaic. It’s harmless and mild and likable, but it’s also a toothless comedy that should have had some bite.

You more or less know what this soft-drink-sponsored movie is going to be as soon as the lights start to dim. What makes it worth recommending is that it ends up being just slightly more than that by the time the lights come back on.

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."

At its heart (and it’s a big corny heart, for sure), the film’s message is one of unconditional love and embracing family wherever you find it. It’s hard to argue with. Especially when it’s served up with such spiky laughter-through-tears sweetness.

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.

The first two-thirds of The Maze Runner are a clever feat of fantasy world building. It's thrilling, twisty, and as mysterious as the mammoth Skinner Box environment the film takes place in. But the promising set-up raises so many puzzle-piece questions that when it's all finally explained in the final reel, you can't help feeling a bit gypped.

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

It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, but that doesn’t stand in the way of it goosing its bloodbath set pieces with irreverent, off-kilter gallows humor.

Black, no surprise, steals the show, manically hamming it up like Harry Houdini on laughing gas, while Roth tries to keep the breakneck pace of his phantasmagoria going. As someone who was growing bored with Roth’s gory shockfests, I say: “Welcome to the kiddie table, Eli.”

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.

Viper Club is an earnest and often engaging film that’s undeniably heartfelt. It’s capital-I important and timely. But without its star’s passionate, nuanced performance, it would run the risk of being a bit generic and forgettable.

Blaze isn’t a flashy movie, which seems about right since Hawke’s closest mentors and collaborators (Richard Linklater, for example) aren’t known for their look-at-me personalities. Like the real-life Foley, they’re storytellers and yarn spinners first and foremost, fame and fortune be damned.

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.