Chris Nashawaty

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.