Chris Nashawaty

It’s a ridiculously raunchy and very, very sweet comedy about staying connected to the most important people in your life.

It's the latest male weepie cast from the same Disney mold as "The Rookie and "Miracle," and it's essentially "Jerry Maguire Goes to Mumbai."

What keeps the film humming along as smoothly as it does is the chemistry and charisma of its leads.

No Footloose. But its synthy soundtrack, heated dance-offs, and Day-Glo leg warmers are guilty-pleasure pay dirt. A mouthy 14-year-old Shannen Doherty doesn’t hurt either.

Once again Neeson is a straight-faced secret weapon. With his lion's roar and can-do fists, he grounds the film's more preposterous moments and makes them feel excitingly tense. At a certain point either you'll fasten your seat belt and go with Non-Stop's absurd, Looney Tunes logic or you won't.

The early-’60s styles are chic, the Euro locales are swank, and the music cues (including a nod to Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West score) are fantastic. Too bad the plot and the lead performances are so lifeless.

It’s a smart, sharp spitball of a film, but it would’ve been better with a smaller, subtler hammer.

The British illustrator’s process of creating his surreally deranged, truth-to-power cartoons is fascinating, but the rest of the film lacks the same mad spark.

Shannon’s intensity is the best thing Frank & Lola has going for it. And it’s almost enough to make it work.

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.

Hard on the heels of January’s god-awful "Serenity," we’re now treated to The Beach Bum — a shambling, self-indulgent inside joke about a perpetually stoned holy fool from the Florida Keys named Moondog. I’ll give you one guess who plays him.

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.

2 Guns is a much-needed reminder that the best summer surprises can come when you least expect them.

I never entirely bought the flirty détente between the two or believed in the rapturous power of a perfectly cooked sea urchin to solve the world's problems. But for two hours, at least, I swallowed it with a smile.

Wan, a director who’s proven himself to be a can’t-miss ace regardless of genre (from the horror formulas of The Conjuring and Insidious to the big-budget tentpole mayhem of Furious 7) seems to finally be out of his depth. He’s conjured an intriguing world, but populated that world with dramatic cotton candy and silly characters, including a hero who’s unsure if he wants to make us laugh or feel — and winds up doing neither. Pass the Dramamine.

The one bit of good news is that the first Gambler is currently streaming on Netflix. Do yourself a favor and watch that one instead.

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.

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.

Michel Hazanavicius’ new film, Godard Mon Amour, tackles that period in Godard’s life on and off the screen — and does it in a dismissively light-hearted way that I’m sure the auteur himself loathes.

While it's breezy and funny and perfectly pleasant, you probably won't remember this particular gift by the time the next birthday rolls around.

In the end, Walter Mitty is a film about acting out our dreams. But Stiller never quite shows us the soul of his dreamer.

If you lower your sights a few pegs and go in looking for a solid, tight B-movie that builds right until the final shot, there’s a lot to like.

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.

The biggest problem is that the film, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, never makes a convincing case for why Valli the man or the singer matters beyond the music in the way that "Ray" and "Walk the Line" did for Ray Charles and Johnny Cash.

The film’s packed with messages in invisible ink, secret staircases, and corpses in cauldrons of pig’s blood. And since ? Connery’s bald as a cue ball, that means no distracting Hanksian haircuts!

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.

For a movie produced by red-meat action maestro Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Thor himself as the face of camo-clad vengeance, 12 Strong somewhat surprisingly manages to fall (just barely) on the nuanced side of the scale. Even if you can feel the film’s director, Nicolai Fuglsig, battling with himself to get it there.

Draft Day is "Moneyball" Lite. And if that sounds like a slight, it's not intended as one.

The harmless high jinks all go down easily enough without being particularly memorable or pushing the art form past the expected.

It’s a film that lazily whistles past the graveyard as it brings that graveyard back to ravenous life.

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.

The film’s no great shakes; it’s a Down Under Goonies wannabe about three wisecracking kids shredding on their bikes as they’re chased by bungling bank robbers. But the baby-faced Kidman is easily the best thing in it.

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.

It's a Marvel spectacle that manages to deftly balance razzle-dazzle, feel-it-in-your-gut slingshot moments of flight and believable human relationships. There's psychological weight to go with all of the gravity-defying, webslinging weightlessness.

It’s just another three-hankie teen weepie, albeit one with the saving grace of another excellent Haley Lu Richardson performance that gooses the film just past serviceable into the realm of slightly better than average.

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.

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 takes a promising premise loaded with white-knuckle, things-go-bump-in-the-night possibilities and proceeds to do surprisingly little with them over the course of its slim 87-minute running time.

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

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

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

While the film has an undeniably sexy glow, it’s too earnest and sappy by half. Fortunately, Frank Langella and Glenn Close drop by as Brian’s disapproving parents.

Still, with everything working against him, the Duke manages to be an old-school badass and stick it to those fancypants Brits.

Skip it, and you'll be depriving yourself of one of the summer's most satisfyingly stupid pleasures.

Occasionally, Mann shows flashes of the sort of springloaded action set pieces he was once hailed for, like a shoot-out during a religious parade. But mostly they just come off as warmed-over parodies from a onetime master aping his own style.

Yardie is a sprawling drug-world saga, but whatever narrative flaws it has are helped out by an infectious selection of dub-heavy reggae tracks and an authentically gritty sense of period and place.

Frost is a likable bloke with a deft physical grace to match his rat-a-tat one-liners. But all the sequins and silk shirts in the world can’t disguise the film’s too-familiar formula.

As far as cheap warm-weather junk food goes, it will suffice. It will have to.

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.

Is it possible to sit through a movie, mentally cataloging its absurdities, and still walk out dazzled? Because that pretty much sums up my experience watching Ridley Scott's eye-candy spectacle Exodus: Gods and Kings, an over-the-top Old Testament epic that's essentially Gladiator with God.

The new comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me, is a mirthless, dead-on-arrival dud.

The film coasts on its time-capsule fetishism and affable supporting turns from Susan Sarandon and Lea Thompson, but it never achieves the emotional punch of like-minded comedies such as "Adventureland" and "The Way, Way Back."

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.

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.

With his latest film, the mawkish and melodramatic Labor Day, Reitman has done an unexpected about-face: He's ditched Wilder for Douglas Sirk. And the swap doesn't do him — or his fans — any favors.

Howard, thankfully, gets more to do than the last go round (and in combat boots, no less!), Pratt busts out his Indiana Jones cocktail of can-do heroism and deadpan jokiness, and Bayona and his screenwriters (Trevorrow and Derek Connolly) test the laws of incredulity with varying degrees of success. At least, until the final half hour when forehead-slapping absurdity finally win out. Up until then, Fallen Kingdom is exactly the kind of escapist summer behemoth you want it to be.

Top Gun has always been more than just an action flick about a cocky young fighter pilot who feels the need for speed.

The twists in Close aren’t very twisty and its thrills aren’t particularly thrilling. But if watching women getting smacked around by cartoon bad guys before finally getting payback is your thing, by all means, have at it.

Predictable, corny, and mild.

During the film’s intoxicating first 30 minutes, for example, I couldn’t decide whether what I was watching was brilliantly bonkers or total folly. Then, as the story went on, it came into sharper and sharper focus: Valerian is an epic mess.

A classed-up B-movie riff on "The Most Dangerous Game." Call it “Tex-Mexploitation.”

No one churns out big-budget action mediocrity these days as regularly as Dwayne Johnson. So now, just three months after his giant gorilla-a-go-go Rampage, we have Skyscraper — a film that suggests what would happen if you took The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and stripped them of the qualities that made both work.

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

James Caan is underused as the crusty coach who needs a championship season, but he is supported by good turns from the highly angst-ridden quarterback (Craig Sheffer) and the straight-from-the-streets rookie running back (Omar Epps).

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

As for the new Papillon, it wisely doubles down on high adventure, but it’s still as lifeless as its predecessor. Just in different ways.

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

Apart from the film’s occasional spasms of rousing, lightning-choreographed ultraviolence (a confrontation with an apartment full of date-raping finance bros is particularly great), the film is too enamored with its own morose righteousness to be very engaging.

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

Heartwarming, mildly funny, and occasionally thrilling without ever being anything more than just fine.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Aside from one gag in particular, the scares lack any real mechanical knack. The one thing the otherwise forgettable film has going for it is Shaye, who over the course of the Insidious quadrilogy has miraculously created a real flesh-and-blood character with Elise.

Neither scary enough to be a horror film nor funny enough to be a comedy.

Stalingrad is a 3-D epic that's one-dimensional.

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

Son of a Gun becomes a somewhat predictable but excitingly twisty heist film involving a double-dealing Russian heavy, a desperate femme fatale, and a fortune in gold bars. It has just enough muscle and style to make the familiar feel fresh.

The film comes to crackling life during the planning and climactic execution of the raid. And Padilha, the Brazilian director behind 2007’s "Elite Squad," knows how to stage these white-knuckle sequences, especially when he cuts back and forth between the on-the-ground tactical assault and a modern dance performance featuring one of the commando’s girlfriends.

What makes the film more than just a dusty Grisham retread is that the case (as compelling as it is) is merely the backdrop for a more emotionally engaging story about fathers and sons played, like a duet, by two virtuoso actors who give the film not only all they have but probably more than it requires.

The Predator isn’t a dumb movie exactly. But it’s not a smart one either. What it is, is something uncomfortably in between: a satire of a franchise that was already in on its own macho joke.

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