Dan Callahan

The chief distinction of Replicas is how detached it often is from the expected sense of words and images.

Dolezal desperately tries to align herself with absurd terms like “trans racial” in order to try to find some way of making her way of life acceptable, but she always comes up short, and it is impossible to have any sympathy for her because she is so transparently a manipulator and a guilt-tripper.

Pacific Rim Uprising has zero emotional pull.

Wilson’s comic routines here set her apart from the others in the cast, and they more than amply hint that she should be set loose in her own vehicles far, far away from the other girls and all their “Glee”-like karaoke.

There is both too much plot in Just Getting Started and too little.

With fantasy material like this, we need to be made to believe in the inventions and the conceits, and we cannot do that if they are shot and staged in such a truncated and perfunctory way.

There are some movies that are misguided in a simple way, and then there are those rare unrelentingly awful movies like Flower that decide to go wrong in as many ways as possible in as short a time as possible.

Collateral Beauty is certainly a case of outright sentimental damage, not beauty, but of course the word collateral also means money that can be bargained with, and hopefully that’s what the ill-fated cast of this picture received in some abundance.

Nina, an infuriatingly amateurish picture about the great singer and pianist Nina Simone, is a new low for the musical biopic genre.

It isn’t comedy, and it isn’t drama, much less comedy-drama.