Dan Callahan

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.

Allen is too self-aware and cold a creative personality to create a genuine tragedy in Wonder Wheel. Instead, he makes a gesture towards a tragic situation.

Didion speaks very bluntly here, and sometime shockingly.

Tom of Finland is a film about a man who was famous for very dirty drawings, but it is unfortunately restricted by a dehydrated kind of good taste from ever being very dirty or very sexy.

Gaga is indeed sort of a mess in this movie, yet her grandmother’s emotional pragmatism is in there somewhere, too.

In spite of its flaws, this new It does capture the spirit of the book, and especially its metaphor for coming together as a group to combat evil.

The writing in The Wound can be conventional and overly explanatory, but this doesn’t matter because the subject is so fresh.

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.

It’s as if Reybaud wants to put in every scene and character he has ever thought of in one film, and so his two main characters get lost.

It succumbs to evasiveness and sentimentality at the end, but this does not extinguish the memory of the many funny, touching, and captivatingly odd scenes that have come before.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

Most of these guys want to be “guys” in the most conventional ways, but at its best, this is a movie about how deviations from that norm can still be taken in and accepted and even championed.

The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics.

Dabka winningly traces the ways that a callow American gets schooled in concepts like honor and sacrifice until he is considered an expert on a country and a people that he grows to love.

Chuck takes a small subject and turns it into a basic redemption story, and as such it has some merit. Not much, but just enough.

Aardvark is the sort of movie that gets by with its unpredictable where-is-this-going vibe for about a half-hour or so.... But it becomes apparent at a certain point that the set-up is pretty much all there is to this movie.

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.

What Coogan and Brydon are doing in these films is an acquired taste, but if they want to continue on doing them then they’re going to need to cut down and edit their interminable actor impressions.

This film is a real pleasure and surprise because it sees old emotions as things that can be replenished and renewed if you are open and not too rigid about the boundaries of your relationships with others.

The Circle takes a valid concern about lack of privacy in the Internet age and turns it into a hyperbolic and finally laughable melodrama.

The surprise here is that Rosefeldt has managed to deliver an intellectually-charged, cheeky, and very funny film that feels unruly and expansive in spite of its tight 12-day shooting schedule and its focus on just one performer.

The degree of difficulty here is steep, and Davies has not been entirely successful in making Dickinson’s milieu come to full and convincing life.

There is only one inventive action sequence here.

This new mainly live-action Disney version of the oft-told story directed by Bill Condon feels largely perfunctory. Where it flounders most is on the miscasting of several crucial roles.

The Freedom to Marry is a movie that discourages complex thinking or contradiction, but there are little hints here and there of something more frightening and unstable.

Oklahoma City is certainly well made and relatively searching, but it can only scratch the surface of its very disturbing and complex subject.

Instead of making us feel that these boys are meant to be together, God’s Own Country unintentionally suggests that Gheorghe should get himself to a city where his silky dark hair, bedroom eyes and developed aesthetic sense might be far better appreciated by others.