Connie Ogle

Absolutely Fabulous works best consumed bite-sized; there’s not enough here to warrant a full-length movie. Too much feels like padding.

Gerwig and Hawke are outstanding reasons to see this movie, but your patience — just like Maggie’s — will be tested before it’s over.

Me Before You is a sugar-coated romantic bauble, not a gritty documentary. Giving into its pleasures is not for everyone, but its message — live boldly, as the movie’s hashtag encourages — is an admonition that’s awfully hard to argue.

Watching Beckinsale evade and persuade and charm and infuriate is an utter delight. You might not want Lady Susan in your home, but she’s a force of nature in this amusing film.

Scafaria — who wrote and directed "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and co-wrote "Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist" — elevates the material with a terrific eye for detail, an understanding of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships and a generous sense of humor.

Carney gets everything right here: Sing Street hums with authenticity.

Fey is a good fit with the material, and her co-stars are all solid, including Billy Bob Thornton as a laconic general; Martin Freeman as a boozy, charming Scottish journalist; Alfred Molina as a local politician with a crush on Kim; and Christopher Abbott (Girls) as Kim’s fixer and translator (he tries to keep her out of trouble).

The Lady in the Van doesn’t give in to platitudes. It’s unnervingly honest about its subject.

Director/screenwriter Peter Landesman builds a solid dramatic story around this premise, and Smith delivers a terrific, award-worthy performance as Omalu, nailing his Nigerian accent, his intelligence, his determination to do what he knows is right.

What the film truly reveals is something else entirely: how Jennifer Lawrence can elevate any material, any time, even middle-of-the-pack fare like this.

With compassion, a touch of melancholy and a sense of wonder, Brooklyn reveals the profound truths in a simple, familiar story, ending on a note that’s achingly bittersweet, no matter where you’re from.

Some of the developments feel a bit predictable — shot in the dull hues of gray that match Maud’s life, Suffragette occasionally turns hard truths into platitudes — but the story is inspiring, buoyed by a fine cast, a pointed, important examination of the price paid for a shot at equality.

The real trick, of course, was casting the perfect child actor to carry the heavy load, and Tremblay is a wonder. The smart camera work helps highlight Jack’s perspective, but Abrahamson has also coaxed a genuine, marvelous performance out of the kid that’s key to the film’s emotional weight.

Gerwig, not surprisingly, is a marvel: mercurial, thin-skinned, haughty, desperate, funny, warm, a magnetic presence who mesmerizes the audience in the same way she attracts Tracy.

Well-acted and sincere, Testament of Youth is chastely romantic in its treatment of the relationship between Vera and Roland, but the film doesn’t hold back on showing the horror of trench warfare.

In the end The Overnight promises more than it can deliver: Some of the supposedly provocative material ends up being juvenile, and the movie ends just as the situation gets truly, weirdly interesting. It’s too tame a resolution to a film that suggested the capacity for more.

Even Greg’s tattooed and charismatic history teacher (Jon Bernthal) is more interesting than the self-absorbed kid we’re supposed to care about.

The film never allows any of its characters to fall into stereotype; they are complex creatures, full of anger and disappointment and passion, and even the weakest among them is not bereft of honor.

Blanchett manages to project the idea that there’s more to this woman than mere banal evil. Cinderella may well be the heroine of this story, but if you wanted someone to have a few drinks with, you’d pick her stepmother in a heartbeat.

You can’t shake the feeling the script is trying too hard to please, upping the drama despite the fact that what made the first film so enjoyable was its relative simplicity.

Focus is a shiny, stylish shell game of a film that, much like its protagonists, relies on breezy chatter, a good sense of humor and a lot of misdirection to succeed.

Despite what you might fear, the movie is not torture. And even if it doesn’t inspire lust, you will breathe a warm sigh of relief, thinking: This could have been so much worse.

There are some who may lament Aniston’s choice to step out of her comfortable comedy shoes and little black dresses, but the decision was sound: The best reason to see Cake — the sort of film that makes your life look pretty good in comparison — is to watch her deliver her best dramatic performance to date.

The bigger problem is that neither Jolie nor the script bothers to flesh Louis out as a fully formed person with faults and fears and regrets, which keeps the film from ever capturing you emotionally.

Wild may sound like a film about redemption, but it’s more about learning to live with what you can’t control — and accepting what you can control, which is sometimes just as difficult.

Filmed around stunning County Sligo on Ireland’s west coast, Calvary is a thoughtful, atmospheric movie despite the awkward parade of suspects and the fact that everyone seems a little too conveniently hostile.

A trifle bland, but with enough virtues to make it palatable to audiences who want comfort food, not a challenge, when they go to the movies.

The concert scenes in this biographical picture are some of its best moments — you’ll wonder just how long the actor had to practice to perfect all those splits — and Boseman’s charisma is irresistible.