Christy Lemire

Blake Lively gives it her all in The Rhythm Section, but the movie only meets her halfway.

If The Turning leaves you screaming, it’ll probably be out of frustration over its abrupt, unsatisfying ending and not the actual frights that precede it.

While the performances are stronger and the narrative is more coherent than you’d see in a “Madea” movie, for example, Perry’s latest still features many of the auteur’s trademarks: dizzying tonal swings, awkward blocking, drab lighting, jarring edits and a mixture of the salacious and the puritanical.

Like A Boss is a movie written and directed by men which bears very little resemblance to how women actually relate to each other.

The ways in which the pigeons work wonders as a flock — to the point of becoming playfully weaponized in the name of good — is consistently inspired.

It’s all weighty, serious material with huge stakes — emotionally, culturally and financially. But Roach, working from a script by Charles Randolph, finds a tricky balance of portraying these events with a sprightly tone while crafting a steadily building tension. Bombshell is both light on its feet and a punch in the gut.

It ultimately results in a cold, unsatisfying experience.

The Report is also surprisingly free of tension, given the subject matter; if you’re going to experience any anxiety, it’ll probably come from a sense of worry over whether all of this is going to be on the final exam.

Of course, the clothes are great: racks of shimmery, sequined knockouts and rows of fierce pumps. And it wouldn’t be a “Charlie’s Angels” adventure without a variety of wild costumes for the ladies to don for their undercover assignments as well as an assortment of high-tech gadgets.

Playing With Fire tries to be tasteless and crass but also treacly and cheery. It wants to you go: “Ewwww …,” but also: “Awwww ...” You’re more likely to groan, then look at your watch again.

Hamilton deserves better. So do the other strong women who make up the film’s trio of warriors, fighting to protect each other and all of humanity from technological destruction. Again.

It may seem ironic that a movie about electrifying the United States should ultimately be so tedious and forgettable, but such is the state of the delayed and troubled drama The Current War: Director’s Cut.

Black and Blue is a B-movie through and through — and that’s actually a compliment.

Zombieland: Double Tap is more of the same, but also much less. The cast is larger, the carnage is gnarlier and the comedy is even more meta than before. But while individual moments and action sequences might be amusing, the endeavor as a whole feels like a tepid retread.

You may realize there’s not much to Harpoon as it sails off into the sunset, but that’s OK. This is one of those movies where the journey truly is the destination.

For better and for worse, Bliss truly makes you feel as if you, too, are suffering from a narcotic-induced, hallucinatory freak-out—one that leaves you physically exhausted, mentally spent and ultimately wondering what the hell just happened to you.

Midnight Traveler might have carried an even greater emotional wallop if we had a greater understanding of the feelings of the filmmaker whose work has endangered the lives of the people he loves most.

Hustlers as a whole is a blast.

It Chapter Two can be a sprawling, unwieldy mess — overlong, overstuffed and full of frustrating detours — but its casting is so spot-on, its actors have such great chemistry and its monster effects are so deliriously ghoulish that the film keeps you hooked.

Before You Know It shifts seamlessly from quirky to sad to mysterious to wacky to surreal within just the space of a few days, so much so that you’d never know it’s director Hannah Pearl Utt’s feature filmmaking debut.

While the premise eventually grows thin and the jokes turn repetitive by the third act, the chemistry between the movie’s three stars is both lively and substantial enough to keep the antics enjoyable.

I am here to tell you that you will be shockingly entertained. Dora and the Lost City of Gold manages to ride a fine line between being true to the characters and conventions of the series and affectionately skewering them.

Playing Banks over the course of more than a decade, Hodge consistently makes the movie compelling, even when it veers toward a safe, faith-based uplift.

Diane Kruger is as inscrutable to us as she is to her fellow Mossad agents and the asset she seduces in The Operative, a solidly crafted if forgettable espionage thriller.

What Skin optimistically suggests is that if someone so deeply entrenched in hatred can turn his life around, maybe there is indeed hope for others. It’s a nice idea.

The documentary This Changes Everything synthesizes all that data along with interviews from a truly mind-boggling array of A-listers both in front of and behind the camera to create a damning portrait of Hollywood’s systematic sexism and discrimination. In between, we see clips from both movies and television that illustrate the film’s points in amusing and often striking ways.

A dark comedy that’s equal parts amusing and disturbing. Stearns is ambitious in the tricky tonal balance he aims to strike here – shocking us in detached, deadpan fashion – and his story wobbles a bit by the end, but the points he’s making couldn’t be clearer or timelier.

While writer/director Lulu Wang’s film is obviously personal and culturally specific, it achieves a universality and a resonance through its vivid depiction of a family in the midst of crisis.