Chris Nashawaty

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.