David Rooney

The film is quite well-acted and made with a stylistic imprint that's atmospherically tailored to the subject matter, if a little fussy and self-conscious at times. But it's an unrewarding downer.

The seductive fluidity of the camerawork, as much as the punchy performances and muscular writing, keep Malcolm & Marie compelling even when it risks becoming an extended exercise in style.

There's plenty of potential here to bring original insights to the immigrant experience, but not enough skill in the plotting or execution to tap into it.

A witty script and strong performances hoist Metroland beyond the confines of its rather standard, TV-style approach.

An absorbing character study, even if it's ultimately not one that justifies its much-vaunted technological advances.

This one is straight out of the old-school Sundance manual. Still, there's enough warmth, humor and heart in the very slick package, not to mention a gaggle of accomplished and well-cast actors.

If De Palma’s version was one part adolescent dream, three parts nightmare, with a sly streak of satire running through it, Peirce’s is a more earnest yet still engrossing take on the story that should connect with contemporary teens. At the very least it might send fledgling horror buffs scurrying to their Netflix queues to watch a vintage masterpiece of the genre.

Calling the movie an archival doc or concert film might be accurate but somehow seems almost reductive. Much more than that, it’s a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.

Result hovers a little uncertainly between dark comedy and urban drama, but remains compelling thanks to its gritty narrative texture, nervous energy and loose, jumpy structure, which fit well with the DV-shot production's no-frills approach.

Gritty and compelling as Monster is, the script's not entirely satisfying elaboration of the central relationship and Ricci's somewhat ungiving performance limit the material to that of a superior telemovie rather than something emotionally richer, like "Boys Don't Cry."

A fascinating process movie about acting and storytelling, but also a curious meta-contemplation of our own voyeuristic attraction to tragedy.

An action thriller that doesn’t know when to quit. For the most part, though, it remains preposterously entertaining.

Even if some of them are playing hackneyed gangster-film types, the strength of the actors makes it almost possible to forgive the formulaic plotting and artificially movie-ish developments. Candis and Justin Wilson's screenplay stretches credibility thinner and thinner as the story advances.

Stars Zellweger and McGregor are too knowingly nudge-wink in their performances, too much contrived constructs to become real characters, let alone fuel the romantic comedy engine and make an audience care much whether they end up together.

There’s much to appreciate in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it.

Wright seems almost constrained by a film that ends up neither as compelling nor as deep nor as wildly entertaining as it seems to believe.

Taking two of the most magnetic actors on the planet, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and transforming them into emotionally stunted virtual avatars for more than half the running time is the least of the miscalculations.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

Meyer aims to emulate the jagged freeform jazz that permeates his soundtrack, but this wan indie is strictly middle-of-the-road background music.

For a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

For some of us who look back with affection on John Guillermin’s lush 1978 screen version, there’s a nagging feeling throughout that Branagh, while hitting the marks of storytelling and design, has drained some of the fun out of it.

Too much lethargic, unclear plotting and saccharine melodrama mean the gentle film is seldom as intriguing as its premise, even if Kurosawa as always provides arresting visual moments and has a commanding way of building atmosphere out of stillness.

By the time questions are answered, not just regarding Polly but also the way in which her history intersects with Caitlin’s, the glacial pacing and lack of suspense have dulled the thriller’s hook.

The attention to character, group dynamics and emotional texture makes the film often feel more alive in its quieter moments than its fairly routine CG action clashes. But the depth of feeling helps counter the choppy storytelling in this new tangent in the MCU narrative

Day mesmerizes even when Lee Daniels' unwieldy bio-drama careens all over the map with stylistic inconsistency and narrative dysfunction, settling for episodic electricity in the absence of a robust connective thread. It's a mess, albeit an absorbing one, driven by a raw central performance of blistering indignation, both tough and vulnerable.

A richly textured drama with an angry poetic edge that gets inside the obsessive subculture of New York graffiti artists, Bomb the System signals the arrival of a talented filmmaker in NYU film graduate Adam Bhala Lough.

The thing about James Hawes’ film of the 1981 Robert Littell novel is that while it prompts raised eyebrows with the contrivances of its plotting and the seeming ease with which the underestimated protagonist outwits everyone, it at least looks and feels like a real movie.

An obvious labor of love, this hand-crafted film is beautifully made – photographed, scored and edited with a grubby lyricism that makes its shortage of plot momentum all the more frustrating.

There’s never enough tension to disguise its blandness. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, Bea and Ben are too clearly into each other to spark real conflict.

A drama that steadily succumbs to self-conscious artiness, drunk on its own sense of contrived poetry and cloudy existential reflection.

Meryl Streep gives a fully realized portrait of British Prime Minister Thatcher in a biopic that values character over context.

As riveting as she is, Roberts ultimately is ill-served by a film so studiously cryptic that it ends up just frustrating. To be fair, there are several electric confrontations, distributed evenly enough to ensure that After the Hunt remains absorbing. But even so, this is a date movie to be used in relationship sabotage maneuvers.

While the director's penchant for extended silences and stagy character positioning make it all seem rather studied, the drama nonetheless is compellingly unsettling.

Directed with contained intensity and sharp character observation by Matthew Saville, the brooding thriller covers familiar territory but does so with sustained tension and psychological complexity.

Directed with a workmanlike lack of style by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and written by Kevin A. Rice without the required ambiguities to feed the protagonist’s paranoia, this pedestrian wrong-place-wrong-time manhunt through Greece never really sparks. And the jury that’s still out over whether John David Washington is movie-star material gets shaky evidence to support that case.

An utterly formulaic but sweet movie that does what a crowd-pleaser is meant to do.

This utterly toothless, glorified Hallmark movie for Paramount+ proves the director is only as good as his material.

This is a laborious film that dulls the human drama at its core. Rather than pulling you into the protagonist's gradual acquaintance with his unfamiliar conscience, it shuts you out, leaving you bored and indifferent.

While it plays more like stage or TV sketch-comedy shtick than film material, this modest, visually unimposing production remains entertaining thanks to its ironic observations and winning sense of folly.

Critics will sniff, as they invariably do, about the familiar conventions of the music biopic. But the spirit of I Wanna Dance With Somebody transcends those conventions far more often than it gets weighed down by them. Anyone who loves Whitney Houston and her music will leave the film with that love reinforced — especially anyone who sees it in a theater with a wall-shaking sound system.

It's in the accelerating spiral of crime that the weaknesses of the script and direction become hard to ignore.

No one enjoys beating up on a film in which the writer has invested so much of himself and his pain. But Cayton-Holland and Duplass have somehow made an authentic tragedy feel phony and unaffecting.

An amusing, accomplished debut on its own modest terms, Next Door works best as tart meta comedy, becoming increasingly cramped in scope and setting as it spirals into an obsessive revenge thriller.

This supposed comedy of manners about Americans in Paris feels artificial at every turn, its characters so devoid of backstory and nuance their behavior often makes little sense.

But if you can check your brain and go along with the preposterous plotting of a mystery thriller as generic as its title, there's a certain baseline pleasure in watching the more or less wholesome young couple at its center swim in a murky cesspool of deception and death. Oh, and diamonds!

What makes Project Power entertaining is its canny combination of familiar ingredients in a textured real-world milieu that gives it fresh flavor. Well, that and the dynamic execution of co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their crack stunt and VFX teams.

This posturing, airless exercise is wearing rather than exciting.

When that visual leaves a more captivating impression than a baby elephant spreading its ears and getting airborne like a glider, something is definitely off in the balance. The new Dumbo holds the attention but too seldom tugs at the heartstrings.

All the talented women here are stuck playing types rather than characters, in a strained frolic in which both the verbal humor and the physical gags too often fall flat.

While Helen Mirren elevates the material with her usual aplomb and the events being depicted inevitably are stirring, this is a stodgy crusade-for-justice drama, directed and written with minimal flair.

Voracious genre consumers should get off on trying to decipher the densely textured film's murky ambiguities.

What might have been a cinephile's wet dream turns out instead to be seductive, stimulating and sodden, in that order, in the three-chapter reflection on love and desire.

The doc is slickly packaged, but it suffers from the pat reality-TV feel of manicured sound bites where greater candor and fly-on-the-wall observation might have been welcome.

Winslet’s mix of grace, gumption and private sadness is the chief reason to keep watching, but she deserves a more dynamic film.

Moland delivers a sharp-looking, well-paced movie with a moody score.

While it veers heavily toward pretentiousness, this striking metaphysical mystery is intensely compelling, conjuring a mood between European high-arthouse and the unsettling psychological horror of "Rosemary's Baby."

Aiming for unsettling atmosphere over character definition, the dawdling mystery thriller manages to flatten two protagonists that had far more depth in the novel.

While the systematic corruption of innocents under an outwardly benevolent protector makes for a disturbing scenario, Australian newcomer Ariel Kleiman dulls the unease with his studiedly enigmatic approach.

There’s no shortage of intensity or gore, not to mention brisk efficiency in the way the script isolates a fragile family unit before plunging them into lycanthropic mayhem.

The delicate drama is sweet and sincere but a tad thin to resonate.

All the conviction the actors can muster can't make this script feel less pat.

The Ballad of Wallis Island breaks no new ground, but it’s an unexpectedly pleasurable, funny-sad watch, full of sweet, soothing music.

Whatever the new movie lacks in originality, it makes up for in propulsive narrative drive, big scares and appealing new characters played by a terrific cast — even if they are mostly cut from an existing mold.

Sparkling entertainment, even with the little-person issues.

The film is well-intentioned but dramatically unconvincing, full of clichéd situations and on-the-nose dialogue about kids getting their shot and living their dream.

If ever a comedy cried out for tight 85-minute treatment that keeps the gags pinging fast enough to disguise the thin sketch material at its core, it's this hit-or-miss two-hour feature.

Somewhere along the line, the comedy turned from dark and playful to mean-spirited and sophomoric. A waste of the considerable appeal and comic talents of leads Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore.

A well-meaning but schematic drama about three generations of Chinese women in America.

Ultimately, this psychedelic culture-clash comedy-romance takes what was at heart a relatively simple story by Gaiman, which channeled bold sci-fi imagination into relatable adolescent experience, and overcomplicates it beyond repair.

The absence of a light touch here means that even the teasing banter and sexual tension between appealing leads Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt is a bit stiff.

Bart Freundlich's American remake of the Bier film flips the gender of the main characters, yielding predictably strong performances from Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams but otherwise removing the teeth from a melodrama that grows increasingly preposterous as it crawls toward its weepy conclusion.

Nyswaner and Grandage here let the lads get nude and sweaty, rolling around in a golden haze — lots of arched backs, hungry hands and eyes dilated in rapturous transport — that should at least set Styles fans’ hearts aflutter, albeit while remaining fairly decorous. But stodgy storytelling and clunky shifts between the drama’s two time periods dim the afterglow.

Dramatically, Child of God is hit or miss; some scenes are ferociously captivating while others are given clumsy handling, almost to the point of indifference.

The tragic dimension of a woman adored by the world, devoured by Hollywood and ultimately abandoned to her own despair in an ordinary little house in Brentwood resonates because we know Marilyn’s sad story. But it’s hard to ignore the queasy feeling that Dominik is getting off on the tawdry spectacle. De Armas holds nothing back in connecting with the character’s pain. She deserves better.

In the end, the most remarkable thing about Against the Ice is that a real-life story of two men at the mercy of the unforgiving elements, of hunger and illness, possible attack and encroaching madness, can be so curiously deprived of tension.

Despite its appealing performers and some tasty comic moments, Wilson overestimates our affection for a grating antihero only mildly warmed by Harrelson's ambling charm.

Overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements starts intriguingly as a snowbound deep-woods chiller, but gradually dissolves into a mess of other-worldly invasion and military counter-offensive.

It makes savvy use of the well-worn found-footage format, modulating its creepy scenario with considerable skill.

A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.

A flawed and overlong but ultimately affecting account of one man's struggle to regain control of his life.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a lot of movies inelegantly squidged into one — a zany screwball comedy, a crime thriller, an earnest salute to pacts of love and friendship, an antifascist history lesson with fictional flourishes. Those competing strands all have their merits, bolstered by entertaining character work from an uncommonly high-wattage ensemble

This is not only one of those cases in which a U.S. makeover adds nothing to a memorable foreign-language film, it's the doubly dispiriting variation in which the more commercially minded overhaul relentlessly drains everything that was distinctive, edgy and original about the source.

Provides powerful drama thanks to its trenchant core story and harrowing re-creation of the brutal chaos of war.

While it has about as much depth and nuance as the bubblegum Sino-pop tunes that pepper its soundtrack, Formula 17 is a fresh, sweet-natured affair with an attractive young cast that should play to the gay-teen niche.

An ultimately moving drama about a displaced people. But its emotional kick is muffled by long-windedness, sentimental overkill and an overpopulated character gallery.

Full of surreal occurrences and bizarre, sometimes overly precious humor that may make it too rarefied an exercise for wide acceptance.

The storytelling overall is less sophisticated, leaning a little too often on strained humor, but this is a slick, enjoyably playful entertainment.

It should be a pulse-racing account of knife-edge real-life conflict and valiant heroics, full of needling political questions. Instead it's merely another slack thriller with underdeveloped characters and sputtering dramatic momentum.

Working from a discursive screenplay he co-wrote with Jon Baird, Costner is not at his best as a director with this kind of multi-branched narrative. He struggles to keep all the story’s plates spinning, as characters are sidelined and resurface with too little connective tissue.

Live By Night is solid enough entertainment, but it lacks the nasty edge or narrative muscularity to make it memorable.

It’s not terrible but it’s far from great, instead landing in that dispiriting morass best identified as “passable entertainment,” designed to make critics grasp for new ways to say “Meh.”

While there's some novelty in using genre conventions to contemplate the sin of taming a wild frontier, the reverential film takes itself far too seriously; it ends up being neither sufficiently inventive nor revisionist to surmount its archetypal cliches.

A repetitious, borderline-silly vanity project.

Admirers of old-fashioned British war drama should find this passably entertaining, and the dazzling green Welsh countryside and seafront locations that stand in for England's Southeast coast are certainly pleasing to the eye. But handsome production values can't disguise shaky storytelling that relies almost entirely on composer Marc Streitenfeld's agitated orchestral score to stoke suspense.

It’s no sci-fi insta-classic, but there are worse things to be than a surprisingly entertaining post-summer popcorn bucket.

This ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story.

Already gasping for breath in its opening scenes, picture takes two bleak, unyielding hours to finally expire.

Starts out on an exhilarating high but gradually loses steam, Janice Beard 45 WPM tries hard to overcome its inconsistency with relentless whimsy.

While it zips along with pleasingly brisk economy in the expository establishing scenes, newcomer Evan Parter’s Black List screenplay indulges in too many movie-ish contrivances to offer a genuinely provocative spin on Beltway shenanigans.

What Ralphie goes through over the course of this absorbing enough but bludgeoning portrait of corrosive masculinity makes him both victim and monster.

As bloody, dumb shark thrillers go, it stays afloat, gaining some credibility from the natural disaster element.

Despite its shadowy visuals and insidious soundscape, it’s neither frightening enough to play like full-fledged horror, nor complex or curious enough to pack much weight as psychological drama.

A fairly sustained barrage of broad undergraduate humor and gross-out gags that should tickle young auds looking for unsophisticated laughs.

Wavering between wry humor and frank tenderness without fully committing to either, the film ends up stranded in an innocuously sweet middle ground. That’s a disappointment, especially since the movie gets off to an amusing start.

The whimsical ugly-duckling fable becomes more uneven as it proceeds, straining too hard to manufacture its quirky charms.

The high-concept, low-satisfaction psychological thriller marks an ambitious upgrade in scope for Wilde from the character-driven coming-of-age comedy of Booksmart, and she handles the physical aspects of the project with assurance. It’s just a shame all the effort has gone into a script without much of that 2019 debut’s disarming freshness.

Had all those assets been funneled into a movie with some tonal consistency and a script that built credible relationships, the result might have been a nasty bit of fun. Instead, it wobbles awkwardly between creeping mob menace and scrappy sitcom, inching toward a violent climax that still doesn’t acquire cohesion.

Thematically diffuse, tonally inconsistent and blighted by an inauthentic feel for its story’s time and place, it sits awkwardly between sober human drama and lighter dysfunctional-family turf, constantly striving for unearned emotions.

A pedigree cast elevates old-fashioned material and lackluster screenwriting.

Does Cronin’s film have the sharp narrative lines or control of those predecessors? Not even close, but it has enough style and scares, breathless energy and even fiendish humor almost to justify the grandiose inclusion of the director’s name in the title.

performances from Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Nixon keep Stockholm, Pennsylvania intense and absorbing, but Nicole Beckwith's initial impulse to tell her confinement story as a stage play feels as if it might have been a sounder choice.

It's involving but seldom deeply affecting, with the core drama continually shoved aside to examine more commonplace matters of parenting, abandonment and broken families.

With less pedestrian writing, there might have been some genuine uplift in the outcome of a family reinforcing its bonds while taking on future missions as a unified team. But Secret Headquarters is mostly just meh.

Made with love and acted with great empathy by a cast led by always dependable pros Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, Jimpa is nothing if not sincere. But to be brutally honest, it’s also kind of a cringey bore, like being stuck in a room with a bunch of oversharers from queer studies class.

The script here just doesn't have sufficient smarts to pull off Elle's political triumph. But Witherspoon again makes a valiant show of selling it.

Paltrow shows a capable hand with the actors... However, the characters only intermittently engage our interest.

Newton, Sprouse and the delightful Soberano are all more appealing than the sloppy package and undercooked characters deserve.

Newcomer Luca Guadagnino deserves credit for his choice of an unconventional model, by Italian standards, for his English-language debut feature, but it's a model in which approach and material are at odds. [22 Nov 1999, p.87]

Humor is inconsistent, and the film suffers from lack of shape and fluidity, playing more like a series of disjointed sketches. But there are more than enough high points to compensate.

The movie is technically accomplished, well-acted, atmospherically unsettling and certainly watchable. . . But as genre material, it’s generic.

This buoyantly funny comedy offers lip-smacking entertainment that will surprise many with its skewering of both sides. Not to mention the news media that devours the Red vs. Blue war with an insatiable appetite.

The humor is sometimes strained, and Lellouche doesn't always demonstrate the lightest of touches.

Writer-director Yuval Adler connects the dots of the convoluted plot with reasonable clarity, but The Operative only intermittently builds suspense.

As both political satire and noirish murder mystery, this Newmarket pickup may be too meandering and unemphatic for wide consumption.

What makes the film work is that this potentially lurid material is treated at all times with sensitivity and probing psychological seriousness.

I would love to have seen what a boldly idiosyncratic fantasist like del Toro could have done with this story. But there's plenty here for audiences looking for family entertainment that balances darkness with a buoyant sense of mischief. At the very least, it's a lively step up from Zemeckis' last two films, "Allied" and "Welcome to Marwen."

The film’s wistful hope for the future of cinema and its healing power ends up being too self-satisfied to register as an expression of collective faith.

With nary a likable character in sight until the late arrival of some unearned emotion in the closing scenes, this is a posey, abrasive drama, though one that's stylishly made and acted with more conviction than the script merits.

Brit filmmaker Sue Clayton's muddled feature bow is full of intriguing ideas and incidental charms that fail to come together into a cohesive whole.

The warming affection that the director has bestowed on so many of his best characters is largely missing. In fact, he seems barely engaged.

The bad news, however, is that after an intriguing opening stretch, and despite Jeremy Irons' potent lead performance, the overlong film becomes repetitive, flat and often dull.

Earlier films like Sightseers and Free Fire suggested Ben Wheatley might have the mordant wit to tackle a work forever associated with sardonic genre maestro Alfred Hitchcock. But in place of atmosphere and suspense, he delivers blandly glossy melodrama.

There’s no shortage of stylish craft here and much to enjoy in the performances, but ultimately, Rosebush Pruning is too glib to work, leaving only an acrid aftertaste.

In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now.

The resourceful actor (Depp) invigorates Secret Window with a playful personality and wryly humorous aplomb not front-and-center in the script, making the psycho-suspenser more compelling than it might otherwise have been.

As in most of his roles since The Departed and The Fighter, Wahlberg shows little charisma, particularly when he’s flanked by an actor with the irreverent verve of LaKeith Stanfield, who steals every scene without even breaking a sweat. That’s not to say Wahlberg is the movie’s sole shortcoming. Not by a long shot.

Capone is definitely an unconventional take on the twilight of a notorious gangster. Alas, it's not an interesting one, although the borderline self-parodying Method madness of Tom Hardy's performance does kind of demand to be seen.

A bland road movie running on empty. It's depressing to see a deluxe cast wasted on such by-the-numbers material -- from predictable plot to fabricated Hallmark sentiment to strenuous milking of warm-and-fuzzy laughs from the irrepressible spirit of three women whose youth is behind them.

Not sufficiently compelling.

The uneven drama remains reasonably engrossing thanks to affecting performances from Boyd Holbrook and Elisabeth Moss.

Gaga is a compelling live-wire presence, splitting the difference between affinity and obsession, while endearingly giving Arthur a shot of joy and hope that has him singing “When You’re Smiling” on his way to court. Their musical numbers, both duets and solos, have a vitality that the more often dour film desperately needs.

The unapologetically derivative sci-fi outing doesn’t have the scripting muscle to deliver on its early promise. But the solid cast keeps it reasonably gripping nonetheless.

The movie won’t carve a spot in the classic action-comedy canon, but it’s easily digested fun, which is no bad thing.

Much of the film plays awkwardly, its tone veering undecidedly between volatile drama and contemplative psychological study.

The Watchers, sadly, is less disturbing than dull, less harrowing than hackneyed.

An appealing female cast gives the hollowly formulaic Mona Lisa Smile more dignity than it perhaps deserves, yet it's Julia Roberts in an ill-suited starring role that represents one of the film's chief shortcomings.

An enjoyable throwback to the occult psychological horror-thrillers of the late 1970s. While it flirts often with campy excess, the film remains compelling thanks to its chilly mood, stylish visuals and polished production values.

This is Jackman’s movie. He makes Peter’s helplessness intensely moving as he keeps trying, against mounting odds and false breakthroughs, to communicate with a child who remains out of reach. Sadly, that goes for The Son, as much as the son.

The fragile film’s bid for poignancy is so aggressive and its sensitivity so studied that it eventually drowns in syrupy banality.

A bland romance that suffers from choppy development, dramatic overload and dearth of personality.

While the premise has possibilities for some creepy, pulpy fun, writer-director Robert Parigi brings too little style or humor, instead going a more obvious, overwrought route.

Land gives the drama some poignancy, revealing the pain, anger, envy and longing of a girl burdened by life's imbalances. But her character exists in a vacuum, surrounded by stock figures and unconvincing actors.

The actors are all likeable enough, especially the gamine Demoustier, but they are stuck with limp material that’s more twee than captivating.

A thoughtful, melancholy story of love, loss, pain, betrayal and the lingering after-effects of tragedy, The Door in the Floor is an intelligent, impeccably acted, unsentimental drama.

Matt Sobel’s overhaul tones down the cruelty and eliminates the more grotesque touches, resulting in a chamber drama that never gets under the skin.

Despite its crude, willfully naive style, this comedy of transgression, judgment and revenge becomes steadily more appealing as it progresses.

This exceedingly long-winded but classy drama could appeal to the same strain of infrequent, regional moviegoers looking for righteous entertainment that flocked to "The Passion of the Christ."

I’ll take this JLo as “nobody fucks with me or my daughter” killing machine, discovering her long-hidden maternal instincts, over those grimly generic rom-coms she cranks out once a year, which might as well be direct-to-inflight movies.

As gratifying as it would be to report that the effortless touch, the livewire rhythms and the sparkling wit remain in evidence, those qualities prevail only intermittently in this strained though mildly enjoyable ensemble comedy.

Walker's story no doubt is grounded in a very real milieu that reflects the grim existence of countless Americans returning from active duty to a country blighted by economic downturn, shrinking opportunity and substance abuse. But the only reality Cherry reflects with numbing insistence is that of co-directors getting high on their own high style.

It's the actors who keep things compelling even when the plotting gets untidy.

It gets the job done and is sure to pull solid numbers. It doesn’t hurt that Gadot has appealing chemistry with co-star Jamie Dornan.

While Second Best is mildly engaging thanks largely to an appealingly self-effacing turn from Joe Pantoliano, writer-director Eric Weber's script could have used an extra polish or two.

The film is saved to some degree by the unstinting commitment of Ronan and Mescal, sweating it out in an environment that’s stifling both physically and psychologically. But the screenplay becomes so overwrought that it smothers any emotional connection to them.

A sad demonstration that what was once considered outrageous, transgressive and anarchic now just seems crass, tired and witless.

The conflicts feel just a tad too routine and the characters too thinly drawn to get the blood flowing.

Whatever its shortcomings, The Old Guard 2 is a better-than-average original streaming feature — well acted by a highly capable cast, peppered with enough action to satisfy most appetites, and underscored with a melancholy vein of introspection about the conflicted roles of superheroes.

It takes chutzpah to borrow from comedy maestros Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards, and Nia Vardalos would seem an unlikely candidate to get away with it unpunished.

A gay auto mechanic comes out to his straight buddies in Fourth Man Out, but the shortage of dramatic texture, psychological insight or credible sexual tension in this toothless brom-com means he might as well be telling them he has a cold.

While it's stylishly designed and shot in startling colors on digital high-definition cameras, this feels like yesterday's futuristic news, and it's more likely to surface as a video/DVD curiosity than a theatrical draw.

For high-concept melodrama that's low on complexity, this very solemn film takes itself way too seriously. But it's not entirely without interest, thanks to sleek visuals and decent chemistry between alluring leads Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart.

The movie morphs from sluggishness to confused ludicrousness, as it turns into a thrill-deprived thriller.

Jolie is even hotter, faster and more commanding than last time around as the fearless heiress/adventuress, plus a little more human. The less welcome news is that most of the same shortcomings that cramped the first installment are still dogging the sequel, which delivers on action but dawdles through downtime.

A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.

For all its aggressive energy, The Current War is an uninvolving bore, making it unlikely to measure up as the kind of Oscar-baity prestige entry The Weinstein Co. obviously had in mind.

This stiflingly restrained French dirge about morality, guilt and atonement is chilly and constipated, mistaking ponderousness for intensity.

An affable but undernourished romantic comedy that fails to match the freshness of the actress-producer and writer's previous collaboration, "Miss Congeniality."

The light touch, the structural economy and lyrical voice that buoyed the gentle four-character piece on stage become cloying and strained in this clumsy expansion.

An all-access pass to an artist embarking on a new path, this is entertaining stuff – funny, disarming, even poignant. It's also jammed with terrific music.

The movie aims to make Daphne's journey raw and real, but mostly it's just insipid.

Persuasion is sufficiently bold and consistent with its flagrant liberties to get away with them. It also helps that the novel’s long-suffering protagonist, Anne Elliot, has been given irrepressible spirit and an irreverent sense of irony in Dakota Johnson’s incandescent performance.

Clearly, all this is designed to provoke adverse reactions. But what if instead of outrage and indignation, the response was a numb shrug? Don't get me wrong — The House That Jack Built is definitely something to see. But what's most surprising is that it's just as often inane as unsettling.

Green has made exactly the kind of witless, worthless sequel that bled the franchise dry in the 1980s and ’90s.

Suburbicon is just too obvious in its satirical depiction of the dubious morality and social inequality behind the squeaky-clean façade of postwar American life, though it's watchable enough, and a distinct improvement for Clooney on his last directorial outing.

The glue that holds the sweet teen-fantasy together is star Anne Hathaway, who continues to evolve into a luminous young lead.

The broad comedy is somewhat strained and obvious, and the hyper-real atmosphere encourages the cast to slice the prosciutto a little thickly. But the film's sweet-natured ingenuousness proves reasonably contagious.

The jittery storytelling and indifference toward illuminating character or plot detail would already be tiresome even without the gratingly actor-y performances, the director herself being the main offender.

Hardy brings sufficient charm (and witty voice work) to his symbiote-inhabited character’s internal battle between id and superego to make each entry diverting enough, even if they leave little aftertaste. And so it goes with Venom: The Last Dance, which caps the trilogy by going gleefully out on its own.

There's just too little wit here amid all the cutesy misunderstandings and farcical mayhem to make Love Wedding Repeat anything but tedious froth.

The result is a solid entry in the Clancy screen canon — gritty, briskly paced, laced with vigorously choreographed fight scenes, explosive weapons action and twisty political intrigue that seems prescient as it taps into the most strained period in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War.

Dowd's graciousness and enthusiasm, and the enormous respect afforded him by industryites on record here, make this a thorough and satisfying acknowledgement of one man's unique contribution to popular music.

Although amusing as often as not, the material remains more comedy-sketch fodder than a fully developed feature.

The execution is so amateurish and the script so witless the filmmakers appear to be having a far better time than the audience.

Australian theater and film director Simon Stone’s blandly glossy, capably acted adaptation, co-written with Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, is mostly a pedestrian affair that waits until the denouement to crank up the suspense and show some teeth.

What's most remarkable about this big, dumb exploitation movie is how carefully anything approaching psychological texture appears to have been peeled away.

As lowbrow comedies go, it pretty much delivers.

A strong cast and tightly focused direction make The Unforgivable an engrossing enough redemption drama, though this Americanized feature adaptation of British TV writer Sally Wainwright’s 2009 miniseries, Unforgiven, doesn’t always benefit from its condensed plotting.

This sub-Hallmark dreck made by a bunch of hacks that don’t deserve to be named is the first film out of Lohan’s Netflix deal and her first feature in three years. Not to beat up on a former child star who has overcome more than her share of demons, but if this is the best vehicle she could find, waiting another three might not have been a bad idea.

The problem is that all the various strands — the parallel tales — dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions.

Beneath gets capsized as much by its knuckleheaded script as by its somewhat risible giant flesh-eating fish.

As much as it’s a joy to watch Statham slinging explosive harpoons from a jet ski, Meg 2 offers only scattershot pleasures. It’s too ridiculous to muster serious scares and too tonally uncertain to convince us that it’s consistently in on the joke.

Restrained and elegant to a fault, this first feature from co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams is too muted in its catharsis and too overcrowded with superfluous characters to be fully satisfying, but the delicate central performance keeps it watchable.

If you must make another entirely predictable comedy about an unapologetic old white curmudgeon who steamrolls all opposition, you can't do better than draft the redoubtable Shirley MacLaine to keep audiences in her barbed corner while we wait for her inevitable bittersweet humanization.

While the direction is a little anonymous and could use some verve, the comedy-drama gets by thanks to a solid script, witty dialogue and engaging performances.

It’s all quite watchable and not without suspense, but the characters reveal too little emotional depth or complexity to make us care much about either their losses or their hard-fought victories.

Superficial but entertaining new pic offers equal parts freshness and kitsch appeal set to a pulsating Latin soundtrack.

There's neither topicality nor bite in this bland pseudo-thriller, which lathers on composer H. Scott Salinas' high-suspense score like shower gel after sweaty sex, yet rarely musters an ounce of genuine tension.

Disney's attempt to wrestle E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 story and the perennially popular Tchaikovsky ballet into a fairy tale with a modern attitude is like one of those big, elaborately decorated, butter cream-frosted cakes that looks delicious but can make you quite ill.

Despite the director's frequently stated mission to liberate the poetry in his material by excavating what he has described as "ecstatic truth," this is a literal, rather flat epic that keeps telling us in voiceovers of its spiritual dimension, without actually generating much evidence of it.

For a movie covering such an expansive passage of American life, Here feels curiously weightless. It’s no fault of the actors, all of whom deliver solid work with characters that are scarcely more than outlines.

Unlike Green’s Halloween trilogy, which served up diminishing returns with each new installment, Believer condenses that downward trajectory into the first chapter.

But behind its slick veneer and the glibness of its preposterous premise and dark twists, there's a yawning absence of charm or substance in this London-set love triangle, as well as a lack of chemistry between its three leads.

This is a shallow snapshot of First World problems and feeble conflicts that makes you despair for the state of gay-themed drama, perhaps even more so because it's capably acted and assembled with a slick sheen.

Anyone nostalgic for the director’s more memorable work might get a kick out of seeing him reunite with past collaborators Kavner and Albert Brooks. But almost everyone here is trying way too hard, with the exception of Mackey, who’s appealing and natural even when stuck in a phony world full of phony characters.

The film leaves itself open to accusations of making Michael a saint, which will not sit well with the cancel crowd. If you are unwilling to separate the art from the artist, this will not be a movie for you. But for lifelong fans who cherish the music, the movie delivers. Simply as a celebration of Jackson’s songs and stagecraft, it’s phenomenal, shot by Dion Beebe with visual electricity in the performance sequences. The music has never sounded louder or better.

While the intriguing setup pulls you in, this gentle American heartland story peters out into an unsatisfying payoff.

The film is affecting, because it outlines the saddening end of an adored American icon. But for all its promises of unheard insights, it seldom goes much deeper than an E! True Hollywood Story.

May not quite gain entry to the hallowed pantheon of interstellar cheese of a "Battlefield Earth," but it's not far behind.

Largely overcomes key cast weaknesses to deliver a jazzy, darkly textured rendering of the ghetto pulp of late African-American ex-con author Donald Goines.

The characters are uninvolving, the emotional stakes never fully take hold and the physical action invariably promises more than it delivers.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

Exhaustively tracking the five-year battle to overthrow California’s ban on same-sex marriage, they distill the dense legal process into a lucid narrative while illuminating the human drama of the plaintiffs, and by extension, the countless gay men and lesbians they represent.

Hampered by thinly developed characters and pedestrian plotting.

Everything is spelled out literally and at a stultifying pace, in a story that might have worked onscreen as either heightened melodrama or farcical comedy. Instead Fontaine, who is not exactly blessed with a light touch, opts for misplaced sincerity.

This oddball tale of a small-town gangster's troubled girlfriend hovers uncertainly on the edge of an absurdist universe.

Solid performances are undercut by lack of storytelling integrity in this plodding biopic.

A staggeringly flat sequel that trades filmdom for the music bizbiz and could hardly be less cool.

Hoge shows no particular directorial style, bringing a bland, anonymous look to the generic Southern California suburban locations.

This tonal mess rarely puts a foot right as comedy and makes only marginal improvements when it turns poignant toward the end.

With less than five minutes of screen time but with more humor and sassy attitude than the remaining cast combined, Missy Elliott separates hip-hop royalty from riff raff in the otherwise lackluster Honey.

Sadly, there’s no trace here of the authentic fondness for his characters that illuminated Hill’s directing debut, Mid90s. Just a load of solipsistic L.A. brain rot trying to pass for satire.

You can’t argue with the muscular marquee value of headlining Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot in a slick, fast-paced action thriller laced with playful comedy, even if it’s an empty-calorie entertainment like Red Notice.

Only God Forgives is a hypnotic fugue on themes of violence and retribution, drenched in corrosive reds.

In the end, Demonic is all simulation, no real scares.

After an intriguing setup that takes its time building atmosphere and characters, declining to rush the first death, the film becomes progressively more overwrought and hokey. It also loads up on derivative tropes that worked better everywhere from Ringu through The Conjuring Universe.

The story rarely gets fired up to "maximum thrust," to use the rocket-speed parlance of its heroes.

Choreographed by long-term Li collaborator Corey Yuen, the martial arts confrontations supply plenty of spark, though they lack the more exhilarating stylistic flourishes of those in "Romeo."

Underproduced and compromised by an uneven script and a tendency to descend into melodrama, the DV-lensed feature nonetheless is well acted and directed with confidence.

The plotting here is so hopelessly tangled, clichéd, and bereft of psychological complexity that it's difficult to care what happens to any of these people.

Plays like an aggressively heart-tugging, exceedingly vanilla Disney telemovie.

The brisk pacing and capable cast still can't quite mask a certain routine feel in a movie without much heart.

Sleek and engrossing, though awfully drawn out and short on psychological complexity, this is a straight-up police action thriller that adheres to a very familiar Hollywood template.

The film rings false at almost every turn despite its naturalistic performances. Lacking emotional substance, it comes off as far too studied in its subdued intensity.

Stardust is a mostly listless odyssey, its lack of excitement compounded by the absence of Bowie's music.

It’s just a shame this opening salvo takes itself too seriously to have much fun with the mayhem, despite the potential in Smith’s devilish turn for amusing interplay between the antagonists.

Punishingly dull.

Dripping with floridly phony dialogue that no actor should be forced to speak, this paternity mystery uses the Bosnian conflict as the manipulative backdrop to a preposterously overwrought and overlong melodrama.

Despite Barrett's careful attention to creating an unsettling mood of existential horror by loading the soundtrack with ambient dread, and his depiction of New York as a breeding ground for overstimulated instability, Brain on Fire just sits there, inert and uninvolving.

Fletcher conducts the high-speed chase more than competently, but it’s the sparks generated by de Armas and Evans that keep it buoyant.

This is a high-concept, CG-saturated bore that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it huffs and puffs its way to a little poignancy in the end.

This obsessive love story about a guy seeking closure after being dumped by his Latino boyfriend awkwardly juggles screwball and noir elements with macabre black comedy in a mix that calls for a far lighter, more stylish touch than the obvious one at work here.

For all its honorable intentions to address sensitive issues that still sting, Kings is an unconvincing tonal patchwork.

Sure, it's a kick to see Stiller and Wilson back in the shoes of these camera-ready cretins, but for every joke that sparks there are several that just lay there.

The result is a passably entertaining diversion, glossy and decently acted but devoid of any kind of edge.

A slapdash comedy with an embarrassment of misused talent.

David Duchovny scores considerably higher as director than as screenwriter.

Putting aside the grating performances, the clumsy direction, the visual ugliness and the haphazard development of story, character and relationships, the movie is hobbled by its intrinsic unsuitability for contemporary retelling.

It's almost unfathomable that this one made it through all the preliminary production meetings without someone sensibly calling a halt to the process by saying, "Wait a minute, those kitties are damn creepy!"

The clear ambition here is to recapture the raw, explosively violent atmosphere of such hallmark 1970s shockers as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes." Nice try, but no cigar.

While director Martin keeps the film moving, its implausibilities turn from holes into canyons.

As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.

This artless, unpolished venture adds a heavy sex-and-skin factor to a poorly defined game show, lurching awkwardly between exploitative voyeurism, maudlin confessions and self-consciously risque titillation.

If you’re going to make an ultra-naturalistic, two-character, walking-and-talking romance that tips its hat to Before Sunrise, the film that began Richard Linklater’s exquisite trilogy, then it’s best to avoid a script loaded with contrived situations and overwritten dialogue.

Action scenes are serviceable enough but rarely exciting, pumped up with Snyder’s usual tool kit of speed-ramping and slo-mo. But there’s a grimy aesthetic to the movie that becomes ugly and tiresome (the director took on the DP role himself), and the episodic plotting seldom builds enough steam to stop you thinking about other things.

Josh Gad takes a valiant stab at landing some mostly groan-worthy humor, and Judi Dench has clearly put in a lot of hours scowling at green screens while wearing pointy ears and eye-catching emerald-green leprechaun army regalia (hey, at least it's not a cat suit). But this big-budget fantasy adventure from Disney is busy and exhausting.

The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing.

For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.

This one offers plenty of lurid fun and some genuine scares. But the grounding in dark spirituality that made the previous entries focused on the Warrens so compelling gets diluted, despite the reliably dignifying double-act of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson.

This kind of episodic chain of interlocking encounters has become a formulaic favorite in American indie cinema, and Mattei's take on the genre is narrow and schematic.

This derivative smoothie appears to have been made by putting Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and the Coen Brothers into a blender along with Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths. The brash result squanders a talented cast, sharp visuals and spectacular locations on a grisly trail of mayhem that rarely yields much mirth.

The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.

If the resulting drama, Stonewall, seldom escapes its cliches or cookie-cutter characters, it also recounts a political origin story in relatable, often affecting terms.

This is a uniquely tiresome slog — madly over-plotted, thuddingly derivative, insanely overlong and slathered in a big symphonic score that strives to infuse momentum into a saga with minimal emotional stakes.

Young male auds should warm to its cool criminal ethos, sharp dialogue, charismatic cast and wry humor.

A Lifetime movie on crack, The Quiet dredges up every lurid cliche from the well of teen hormonal havoc in a tale of dysfunctional family meltdown that seems unsure whether to push for suburban-Gothic psychosexual excess or tongue-in-cheek malevolence.

Michael Polish (Big Sur, Amnesiac) directs with his foot nailed to the accelerator, but all the manic energy in the world can't stave off the boredom of Cory Miller's script, which is a deadly combination of convoluted and thin.

Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

It falls short on character definition, emotional involvement, narrative drive and originality.

There’s scant emotional, aesthetic or intellectual gratification in this grainy, flat-looking portrait of the artist as a young nut job.

The unapologetic sentimentality doesn’t make this bittersweet comedy-drama any less touching or insightful in its observation of spiky family interactions when end-of-life issues and questions of inheritance cause sparks.

The lure of Halle Berry as the leather-clad feline should help this mangy misfire claw out a decent opening before a quick slink to DVD.

Though it's decidedly for perverse palates, some kind of cult audience seems assured for this one-note onslaught, which exercises a bizarre fascination despite its excesses.

Cluttered, unfocused script attempts too much.

Roth’s messy storytelling is so anxious to get to the next blast of rote action — amped up by Steve Jablonsky’s hard-working synth and orchestral score and lots of shoddy CGI — that the characters have scant opportunity to form real bonds.

Utterly lacking in imagination or suspense, this inane effort is strictly for hardcore Argento cultists.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

Audiences who enjoy smiling through tears, and don't mind having their buttons pushed in the most obvious ways, could probably do a lot worse.

Despite a lot of admirable aims, such as creating layered roles for the Latino acting community and spending production dollars in areas that could benefit from the economic boost, this grim bloodbath feels too routine to be of much interest.

It’s contrived at every turn and talky like a French film, though 100 percent American indie in its earnest conviction that it’s saying something of substance about the unpredictable roller coaster of life and love.

Washout. Lacking the mojo even to be offensive in its stereotypical view of gays and women, this excruciating cocktail of sitcom plotting and gross-out humor makes a clunky cheesefest like "The Love Boat" look like breezy, sophisticated fun.

[A] stunningly self-important but numbingly empty cocktail of romance and insulting refugee porn.

A mildly diverting farcical caper... stretches a thin idea even thinner, but it offers enough puerile fun and well-executed gags to lure fans of the 1989 predecessor back to theaters before a more robust future on homevideo.

The unfocused writing makes the film increasingly less convincing as it stumbles toward an awkwardly structured resolution -- closing on a conga line that makes "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" seem cutting-edge.