David Lewis

My Salinger Year, which is basically The Devil Wears Prada set in the literary world, is a film that feels like it’s ready to take off at any moment, but stalls every time it tries to do anything.

Though Michelle’s transformation into a family-loving gal is hardly convincing, the film still moves along quickly, and McCarthy has some memorable moments in which her comic chops are on full display.

Still, Silk Road remains watchable because both Robinson and Clarke are interesting screen presences. And there’s some humor, which consistently lands better than the thrills.

Director Ben Lewin has crafted a biopic spy thriller, kind of, but the script has neither the character shadings to be a biopic nor the pacing and twist and turns to be a spy thriller.

As one might expect from a Christian film, Miracles From Heaven centers on faith — and a major miracle — but it’s also a decent family drama about a mother’s tribulations in caring for her sick child.

JT Leroy is on safer ground when Albert and Knoop are matching wits, mainly because it’s a pleasure to watch the perfectly cast Dern and Stewart on the screen. It’s easy to understand what attracted these fine actors to these roles, but the script allows them to only scratch the surface of this maze-of-mirrors story, where the truth remains deliciously elusive.

The film is a reasonably entertaining trifle, though it’s overstuffed with battle sequences and peripheral characters that often consume the main story line.

Even if it has B-movie trappings and the tension wanes in the second half, it’s a stylish psychodrama.

Regardless of how one might feel about its inherently icky subject matter, Dark Crimes needs more narrative momentum. The cast is game, the production design is impressive and a few surprises await — but even as things heat up, the film somehow remains cold.

Though the ambitious Outlaw King doesn’t always fire on all cylinders, moviegoers deserve this chance to see it on the big screen, before it starts showing on a laptop near you.

Monsoon, an offbeat story about a man’s cultural dislocation in Vietnam, is more of a slow drip than a torrential downpour. It’s a lovely film that suddenly and magically can wash over you, then lose you in its opacities.

In the end, the whole enterprise comes off as too clever for its own good, a social satire without a clear target. It’s a movie that you admire more than you like.

A movie that moves slower than it should and that keeps us detached for long periods of time. Most of the problems can be traced to the script, which does a poor job of establishing the characters and giving us a sense of how they relate to each other.

Apocalypse also doesn’t excel in the teen angst department, because the characters are not fleshed out enough. The love triangle is not convincing, and except for Anna and her father, we don’t care a whole lot about what happens to the characters, perhaps because we didn’t get enough time to know them in the beginning.

Almost Christmas would have been less clunky if it had focused more on the family’s loss of its matriarch, and allowed the comic elements to naturally arise as the characters struggle with the new family dynamic. Instead, we get too many slapstick set pieces and extraneous subplots that bog down the proceedings.

In the end, though, the movie’s superior craftsmanship can’t overcome its aura of joylessness.

A B-movie with a few thrills and plenty of inane dialogue.

The technically elegant Voyagers, about a space colonization trip run amok, is easy enough to sit through, but it’s a story in need of more rocket fuel. There isn’t a bad scene in the movie, yet there isn’t a really good scene, either. It’s a quiet psychological thriller, even when it’s trying to stir mayhem.

Eventually, the plot feels more perfunctory than palpable, but Watkins is careful not to drag things out. All in all, we don’t mind being taken along for the ride, yet in the end, we’re ready to disembark.

As we watch these four pros in action, we find ourselves wanting fewer flashbacks and more time with all of the folks in one spot. That would have been a satisfying meal in itself.

The most refreshing thing about the movie is having a more mature woman at the center of the action, and August knows not to overreach here. She is dryly funny, but also subtly affecting, and it’s a pleasure to watch her heart and mind slowly but surely open up to life’s possibilities.

Quintana brings a stunning visual flair to his film, and Sheen has a fine moment when he ponders the thin line between miracles and tragedies. But we keep waiting for the film to wash over us, and it never quite does.

Your enjoyment of the movie will depend on whether you can suspend your disbelief — and confusion — and let the magic of misdirection wash over you.

Jessica Tuck gives an emotionally raw performance as Morgan’s mother, and Amanda Plummer’s turn as a trailer park resident sheds more light on Jordan than all the other scenes combined.

The unconventional Joseph Beuys, one of the pillars of the modern art movement, gets an unconventional tribute in Beuys, a zigzagging documentary that is both illuminating and opaque.

Take Every Wave remains entertaining because of Hamilton’s awe-inducing skill on the ocean, and his determination to ride the waves as long as his body will allow.

In the end, it’s left to Shaye to carry the film, and she does so with aplomb. The “Insidious” franchise may be running out of places to go, but Shaye appears to be just getting started.

By the time the credits roll, we don’t achieve a much deeper sense of who John DeLorean really was — only a better understanding of why this complicated figure continues to befuddle screenwriters. DeLorean probably would have preferred it that way.