Chris Nashawaty

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.