David Rooney

Even if the film could be accused of lacking subtlety and overloading on whimsy, it spreads a sobering message in a lucid story that remains visually alive and inventive throughout — its aesthetic keeps constantly shifting yet remains fluid.

There's a lot going on in The Willoughbys, yet if you can get on board with its manic energy and accelerated plotting, the Netflix animated family comedy-adventure has an oddball charm that works surprisingly well.

Lapses into melodramatic self-importance and gratuitous stylistic flourishes that take the audience out of the action -- are outweighed by the steadily amplified emotional power of this ultimately moving drama.

Capturing that transitional moment when seemingly permanent adolescent ties suddenly appear uncertain, this is a melancholy drama laced with notes of anger and disquiet, but also resilience.

An emotionally charged account of the ongoing fight of the African-American community of Ferguson, Missouri, to be treated as equal citizens, the film, like the movement it documents, is stronger on impassioned conviction than organization.

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.

Ultimately, the film’s divided attention between its snapshot of a place stuck in time and its examination of the unsolved case that came to redefine it stops Last Stop Larrimah from being a first-rate true-crime doc. But there’s nonetheless a lot of flavorful material here.

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.

While death by bloodsucking is very much a factor, this is actually a subdued, contemplative drama about the lingering trauma of grief and the efforts of an introspective teenager to invent an invulnerable persona to shield and ultimately release him.

Harnessing the wizardry of 3-D IMAX to magnify the sheer transporting wonder, the you-are-there thrill of the experience, the film's payoff more than compensates for a lumbering setup, laden with cloying voiceover narration and strained whimsy.

Whether playing sexy comedy or hostility, raw emotional agita or hollowness, Chris Pine and Jenny Slate are so damn fine in Carousel that you keep wondering why we seldom get to see these gifted actors bite into characters of such substance and complexity.

Port Authority is a little fragile in terms of its narrative skeleton, at times tending to idle in place when it ought to be moving forward, but the film's characters and world are drawn with immersive engagement, and the mood is transfixing.

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.

While the slender idea feels stretched at feature length and fails to brings its themes of societal chaos together in a fully cohesive way, the film is fresh and lively enough to score further festival bookings, particularly at events devoted to new talent.

This is a fresh, spirited drama, charming and unpretentious. It mines a similar vein to recent Latino-themed pics such as "Raising Victor Vargas" and "Real Women Have Curves."

The film captures with enormous sweetness feelings probably familiar to many queer adolescents still figuring out who they are — of insecurity, questioning and giddy crushes on frequently unattainable objects of desire.

Gomes proves an engaging subject, whose dedication is as inspiring as the breathtaking grace and strength of his dancing.

The taut nail-biter is well-acted, crafted with skill and briskly paced, running a tight 95 minutes. It’s the rare breed of streaming original that can safely be called a real movie.

Those with the stomach for a forcefully acted representation of the gut-wrenching impact and long-range after-effects of sudden infant death will be rewarded with moments both powerful and affecting.

A big-hearted, exuberant, compassionate film with a wicked sense of humor and terrific songs performed by some preternaturally talented kids.

For both diehard and casual fans, Marshall's entertainingly packaged film delivers a nostalgic tour back over the decades that shines a deserving spotlight on the group's artistry, an element too frequently overshadowed by their phenomenal chart reign.

Will Ferrell graduates to his first solo leading role with flying colors in Elf, a disarming holiday comedy about a clueless innocent who saves Christmas and fosters a renewed sense of family in his reluctant father.

It's been made with genuine feeling and smooth professional craftsmanship.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t quite deliver on the sardonic promise of its catchy title, but its appealing cast and Verbinski’s flair for kinetic action set pieces make it a reasonably entertaining entry in the canon of gonzo sci-fi comedies fueled by existential dread about the dystopian techno-dominant reality we’re already trapped in.

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.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

As the stakes are heightened, the filmmakers too often short-change dramatic verisimilitude with movie-ish cliché, implausible plotting and cumbersome dialogue.

There’s pleasure to be had from Sandler’s nuanced work and from the ensemble’s ridiculously deep bench of gifted supporting players. But the director’s fourth feature for Netflix is mid-tier Baumbach at best.

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.

For much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.

In terms of brutal spectacle, elaborate period reconstruction and vigorous set pieces requiring complex choreography, the sequel delivers what fans of its Oscar-winning 2000 predecessor will crave — battles, swordplay, bloodshed, Ancient Roman intrigue. That said, there’s a déjà vu quality to much of the new film, a slavishness that goes beyond the caged men forced to fight for their survival, and seeps into the very bones of a drama overly beholden to the original.

Ambling drama shows an exasperating lack of economy and a weakness for diatribe dialogue, but becomes progressively more involving after a laborious start.

As an eco-political inquiry, the film is compelling even if its grounding in scientific fact could be more solid.

A bigscreen feature executed with a cookie-cutter small-screen sensibility, this often charming but untextured fact-based period piece is buoyed along by the redoubtable Judi Dench.

This is a handsomely produced, solidly acted thriller that’s certainly watchable, though the perplexing subtitle is not its only issue. Unlike its riveting predecessor, it’s absorbing but never quite gripping.

There's still a lot to love. Gadot remains a charismatic presence who wields the lasso with authority, even tethering lightning bolts in some arresting moments. However, I missed the more hand-to-hand gladiatorial aspect of so many fight scenes in the first movie.

An interrogation of Australia's history of racial violence that also takes on gender, identity and domestic abuse against a backdrop right out of an archetypal high country Western, the engrossing thriller is admirably ambitious but choppy, at times eluding the director's grasp.

While it tips its hat to screwball comedy, Puccini for Beginners owes more to contemporary sitcom. It also has way more in common with "Sex and the City" than "The L Word." None of that is entirely a bad thing in a film that never really soars but has enough breezy humor.

There are simply too many characters jostling for attention and too many competing plot strands in a not-quite-seamless marriage of hard-edged social realism with a lyrical novelistic overlay. That said, the film is rich in poignant moments and negotiates its frequent shifts from violence to gentleness to sorrow with sensitivity.

The material is at heart an intimate allegorical fairy tale about rarefied philosophical concerns.

While the film carries no writer credit, the accompanying voiceover commentary from all five band-members feels canned, short on off-the-cuff spontaneity and hindsight perspective. Still, even if it has not much more depth than a VH1 Behind the Music special, the doc holds ample pleasures for '80s cultists.

Nothing if not true to its title, this frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun. But at two hours-plus, it becomes unrelenting and wearisome.

While the filmmaking is raw, undisciplined and groaning under a cargo of self-conscious quirks, it scores points for originality and wacky creativity

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.

Middleton's polished writing and amusing observations about the anxieties most people encounter when definitively farewelling their youth help compensate for her standard-issue direction.

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

Despite a nagging tendency to milk sentiment from wrenching subject matter that requires no manipulation, the film is notable for its admirably inclusive perspective.

While the filmmakers' control of mood, menacing atmosphere and unsettling spatial dynamics remains arresting, their story sense grows shaky in a chiller that starts out strong but becomes meandering and repetitive. ... Still, this is classy, intelligent horror.

The non-linear structure works extremely well, making the drama a bracing emotional roller coaster of feel-good/feel-bad turns.

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.

The film offers up more mysteries than it solves. Still, riveting work from Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux as performance artists whose canvas is internal organ mutations will draw the curious.

The pacing slackens a bit in the midsection as Adam shuffles between immersive art happenings, sex parties and karaoke bars in scenes that don't always have as much bite or humor as they could. But the cast is appealing; the visuals are crisp and colorful, with a textured feel for the Brooklyn milieu.

Director Chris Columbus has pasted the grungy "La Boheme" update onto film with slavish respect for the original material but a shortage of stylistic imagination and raw emotions.

While it's well acted and has strong moments on a scene-by-scene basis, the film lacks an emotional center, keeping the impact cool and diffuse where it should be affecting.

The storytelling goes haywire, to the point where you’re unsure what the Australian writer-director wants to say, though her game lead, Midori Francis, keeps you watching.

While it becomes slightly padded and repetitious in the eventual reunion of the six surviving dancers, the smartly assembled film makes points that resonate in a world where fame is increasingly ephemeral and life after the celebrity window closes can get awfully cold.

Daniel Levy has made a first feature that’s a glossy drama of love and loss and the restorative power of friendship. But it’s more earnest than affecting.

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

There's definitely a tighter, more disciplined movie trapped in here begging for a more rigorous edit. Like a head full of split ends, it needs trimming.

As the psychodrama of a lonely woman with a score to settle acquires seriousness it saps the misanthropic sense of mischief and madness, causing the movie to lose its way.

For all the movie’s quite credible conjecture about technology rendering nature obsolete and procreation becoming the privilege of the wealthy, The Pod Generation never fully hatches.

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.

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.

Spirited owes its buoyancy primarily to the lively rapport of Ferrell and Reynolds, ultimately playing out the movie’s most convincing love story.

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

A stylishly made but unyielding drama.

Even when it veers into familiar territory, I Am Woman remains entertaining and sharply packaged.

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

The feeling arises more than once that De los Santos Arias is cluttering up a captivating story with obscure distractions, random shifts between color and B&W and constant shuffling of the film’s style. And yet, the slow accumulation of pathos exerts a grip.

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.

The package mixes existential creepiness with black comedy, demonic carnage and a Satan's spawn scenario, and while it's uneven — as these combos invariably are — genre enthusiasts looking for a female spin will want to check it out.

To Be Takei follows multiple threads without pulling any one of them satisfyingly into focus, making it amusing and even poignant, though not quite the window into its subject's life that it might have been with a more penetrating observer.

Fennell is adept at pastiche, and at least she goes for sources worth plundering. But this is a movie that’s all surface cleverness, with nothing terribly insightful to say about its rarefied milieu and those gazing in longingly from the outside. Even so, Saltburn is juicy stuff, a revenge thriller that’s often wickedly funny and wildly enjoyable.

Although The Weight is low on excitement, it ends on an affecting note that makes you wish the sluggish movie had been given more lucid storytelling, as well as more dramatic and emotional power.

It's the kind of plush, pleasurable comfort viewing that goes down as easily as a favorite artist's hits compilation.

This is the first feature for Gordon and Lieberman and there’s little evidence of a visual sense, even if the rough edges are part of the appeal. But perhaps due to the elements of improvisation, the comic timing is uneven and the material tends to be more often cute than uproarious.

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.

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

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."

It lacks infectious magic. Any promise of originality fueled early on by the amusing sight of unicorns sniffing through suburban trash quickly dissipates as the siblings' journey gets under way, their progress marked by slapstick gags, predictable close shaves, encounters with characters that often feel like plot padding and standard life lessons writ large.

[Marquardt's] film sustains tension and is arrestingly lit and shot, exhibiting a sharp eye for expressive compositions and a persuasive feel for the sheer alienating physical density of New York City life.

Despite some hazy plot points, the tough, compelling drama comes together quite satisfyingly, standing alongside 1996's "The Funeral" as perhaps the most controlled and cohesive of Ferrara's uneven work of recent years.

Ambitiously structured in non-chronological fragments that form a fascinating puzzle, this raw drama about grief, guilt and redemption becomes ultimately overextended and overwrought in its final stretch.

Starts out bracingly but gradually loses focus. Ecuadorian writer-director Sebastian Cordero's screenplay trades in underdeveloped conflicts and blank characters, hinting far too early at the killer's probable identity.

The movie — like the performances of its small ensemble — works best when the director gets out of her own way, forgetting her aversion to clean, conventional narrative and giving the material breathing space to resonate.

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

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.

The thriller starts out with a firm footing in horror and becomes less distinctive as it shifts into more psychological and sentimental terrain. Still, the confident storytelling keeps you watching, as well as strong performances from Mamoudou Athie as a widowed amnesiac and Phylicia Rashad as a brilliant brain specialist playing God.

This is a sizable step up for the Boukherma brothers from the smaller-canvas genre films they have done up to now and they bring a satisfying cinematic sweep to the material that feels more Hollywood than French — for better or worse. Their sensitive direction of the intimate exchanges is sharp, even if scenes veer at times from melodrama into soap.

Strikingly crafted but rather empty drama.

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.

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.

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.

Made with the same jewel-like meticulousness and very Gallic sense of style that set Tran’s debut so far apart from other Asian offerings, the new feature again boasts boldly creative craftsmanship in every frame. The film is disappointingly compromised, however, by needlessly convoluted, often pretentiously enigmatic plotting, placing a considerable blight on its commercial potential.

Working from a diligently researched screenplay by his late father, Jack Fincher, the director has made a high-style piece of cinematic nostalgia that's a constant pleasure to look at but only intermittently finds a heartbeat.

Twisters gets the job done in terms of whipping up life-threatening tornadoes that leave a trail of wreckage in their wake. But the extent to which all this is conjured with a digital paintbox lessens the pulse-quickening awe of nature at its most destructive.

Mostly, Valley Girl succeeds because it doesn't take itself too seriously, instead offering a fun return to the rollercoaster peaks and valleys of first love while reminding us that the experience can change young lives without necessarily defining them.

It’s windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it’s also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity.

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

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.

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.

Its simplistic observation of romantic love in its purest form colliding with political, religious, familial and societal intolerance seems designed to speak clearly to teenage audiences experiencing similar struggles between identity and oppression. Those well-meaning intentions only take the film so far, however, and mature audiences will be left wishing for greater narrative complexity.

Bong’s adventurous new film barrels forward with chaotic plotting, as is often the case with the director’s work. But thematic coherence remains frustratingly elusive.

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.

Even if some viewers might grow impatient with Simon’s passivity in the face of endless microaggressions, there’s enough tenderness, heart and ultimate self-realization in Solo to keep you watching.

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.

Writer-director Maïmouna Doucouré's captivating but structurally shaky first feature is stronger on setup than development or payoff, becoming less controlled as its opposing forces of tradition and rebellion collide.

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.

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.

Sensitive direction and a touching performance from Emile Hirsch in the title role help counter some dramatic naivete and awkward, at times unintentional, humor in The Mudge Boy.

If it’s going to be the last we see of one of the most consistently entertaining franchises to come out of Hollywood in the past few decades — a subject about which Cruise and McQuarrie have remained vague — it’s a disappointing farewell with a handful of high points courtesy of the indefatigable lead actor.

Frequently hilarious but ultimately is a protracted one-joke affair that strays into undisciplined chaos.

The film goes more and more off-kilter, with its jumble of black comedy and bloodshed and its mild-mannered protagonist embroiled in violent crime making it an unsophisticated foray into Coen brothers territory.

Nutcrackers is not exactly robust as uplifting family comedies go, but for audiences willing to get in sync with Green’s free-flowing groove, the emotional payoff will be affecting.

Balagov is indisputably a filmmaker with his own distinctive vision, ideally matched with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s glowering score and with Fray’s nimble shooting style, which often takes its cue to get in close from the knotted bodies on the wrestling mats. Story-wise, however, Butterfly Jam is too diffuse to measure up to the brutally transfixing Beanpole.

Despite Everett's command in the central performance and a script liberally sprinkled with amusing bons mots, The Happy Prince generates only faltering dramatic momentum and a shortage of pathos.

The intense, uncomfortable drama’s downbeat nature is offset to a degree by the sensitivity of its observation, but the film serves primarily as a showcase for the emotionally raw lead performance of Rory Culkin.

Regardless of the film’s shortcomings, it’s a thrill to have this giant of an actor back on a movie screen, hopefully next time with a more satisfyingly fleshed-out screenplay.

There’s little that’s unpredictable in Miguel Sapochnik’s unabashedly sentimental sci-fi road movie, which could almost have been assembled in a robotics lab from the durable parts of countless movies past. But darned if I wasn’t misting up in the melancholy climactic scenes.

Engrossing enough but also a bit meandering and underpowered.

What holds the film back is the familiarity of its elements.

Driven by a compellingly internalized performance from Teresa Palmer as the conflicted prey, this is a case of expert filmmaking craft applied to a familiar story that becomes unrelentingly grim and drawn out after its masterful setup.

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.

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

The late-’60s and early-’70s production and costume design, by Bob Shaw and Amy Westcott, respectively, are rooted firmly in an evocative sense of time and place, enhanced by a soundtrack of pinpoint needle drops. But The Many Saints of Newark is more of a diverting footnote than an invaluable extension of the show’s colossal legacy.

Nothing on either side comes close to the trenchancy or grim poetry of Jones' harrowing odyssey, which is as it should be. But there's also no reason for all the political obstructionism and journalistic frustration to be so windy.

As a glimpse of a distinctive world and what happens when a young man who thrives within it gets uprooted, the film will yield low-key charms for patient viewers.

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

At its best, the movie is kind of like The Stepford Wives meets Rosemary’s Baby, with side orders of Cronenberg, J-Horror and Lynch.

Like the symmetrical word that supplies its title, the mordant comedy-drama recovers ground to become a boldly intriguing if not entirely satisfying subversion of American family values.

Juiced up with nods to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and to classic David Cronenberg bug-outs, much of it set to insidious techno beats, this is commandingly creepy psycho-horror, even if its forbidding narrative loses momentum.

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.

Adams is reason enough to see it anyway in a performance that gives us intimate access to her character’s fears and anxieties.

Shot in a woozy handheld style and laced with fussy visual affectations, the story mixes ripe sensuality with brooding menace in a tranquil pastoral setting. It’s not uninteresting but too self-consciously arty to rank Decker as a mature filmmaking voice.

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.

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.

Modest but engaging.

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

Audiences’ staying power for this meandering existential exploration of personal, professional and national identity — as tragicomic as it is rueful — will vary, depending on their interest in the artist or their appetite for the film’s aesthetic beauty.

Anya Taylor-Joy is a fierce presence in the title role and Chris Hemsworth is clearly having fun as a gonzo Wasteland warlord, but the mythmaking lacks muscle, just as the action mostly lacks the visual poetry of its predecessor.

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.

The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.

A lot of solid craftsmanship has gone into Spaceman, and there’s a disarming guilelessness to the solemn storytelling that has some appeal.

Director Sean Byrne doesn’t lean hard enough into the trashy pleasures for maximum fun, unlike some of the more preposterous recent shark movies. (Give me The Shallows, Under Paris, The Meg.) But he dishes up plenty of lurid chum and puts a kickass heroine in peril.

Rebecca Hall’s admirable refusal to soften the brittle edges of her recently widowed protagonist in The Night House makes her a compelling variation on the usual woman in ghostly peril.

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

While it's uneven, and at times seems almost artless in its craft, the story has an idiosyncratic charm that pays off in an unexpectedly touching ending.

There’s much to appreciate in Noah Baumbach’s alternately exhilarating and enervating attempt to tame Don DeLillo’s comedy of death, White Noise, not least the daredevil spirit and ambition with which the writer-director and his cast plunge into the tricky material. But little in this episodic freakout hits the target quite so well as the wild end credits sequence.

If The Nightingale doesn’t quite fulfill the high expectations for Kent’s sophomore feature, it still shows a director with a muscular handle on her craft, though in this case she could have used a script collaborator to address the weaknesses.

As compelling as the life-and-death situation is, it becomes a bit of a drag in a movie pushing two-and-a-half hours that could definitely benefit from a tighter edit.

It may not rank up there with Skyfall, but it’s a moving valedictory salute to the actor who has left arguably the most indelible mark on the character since Connery.

This puzzler with neo-Gothic trappings, while it gets off to a promising, very funny start, becomes too clever and convoluted for its own good. That becomes apparent almost as soon as the investigation gets underway and the movie starts losing its fizz.

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.

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

The film's transitions between periods are not entirely seamless and its discourse often becomes didactic. However, the depth and intelligence it brings to issues of black politics and sexuality could help carve an appreciative theatrical audience in upscale gay and/or urban niches.

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.

There’s a core of authentically devastating family experience and personal investment that saves Suncoast from its unskilled handling, giving this grief drama, coming-of-age combo a heart to counter its predictability.

While it's uneven, A Perfect Day builds to a nice melancholy conclusion. It underscores with gentle strokes the frustration and disillusionment of self-sacrificing workers confronted on a daily basis with feelings of futility in the face of corruption and compromise.

It’s a pleasurable enough watch — nicely acted and with a gentle rhythm tuned to the main characters’ searching paths as they drift in and out of each other’s lives over 30 years — though ultimately, it lacks weight.

A dynamic breakout performance from Gina Rodriguez helps this rap-infused drama about a young Los Angeles Latina overcome its patchy storytelling.

Audiences willing to tune in to its blend of surreal fantasy, droll comedy and poignancy will be rewarded.

The Japanese director has no shortage of ideas — chief among them the potential for advanced robotics to bring closure to the bereaved. But too few of those ideas yield satisfying conclusions, resulting in a drama that becomes treacly and insubstantial, reaching for a profundity that remains elusive.

Karim Ainouz has always been more attentive as a filmmaker to the creation of atmospheric and emotional texture than to story or character, and that bias inhibits this visually seductive drama from fully engaging beyond the aesthetic level.

Signals a talented newcomer in writer-director John Simpson and boasts a gripping central performance from popular British comedian Lee Evans.

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.

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.

Arctic is elegantly shot, crisp and unfussy, and seamless in its near-invisible use of digital effects, creating a persuasive you-are-there feeling that's rare in these days of flashy CG thrills. And it's the very old-fashioned movie magic of an expressive face that keeps you watching even as the storytelling ambles.

An appealing cast and slick period production values make this an entertaining enough retro bloodbath.

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

The heart of this complex material for too long remains elusive to Assayas, and he locates it too late to give the choppy drama cohesion. That's not to say Wasp Network is dull or uninvolving.

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

Set over the course of a single harrowing night and driven by a performance from Vanessa Kirby bristling with raw nervous energy, hunger and searing inner conflict, Netflix’s Night Always Comes is more compelling than the average original streaming movie even if it could use an extra shot of emotional power.

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

David Frankel’s sequel hits familiar beats that fans will eat up and deftly reconfigures the core trio of women into new adversarial positions, even if it ultimately lapses into cozy sentimentality. The movie is best when it sticks to fluffy, fun nostalgia rather than shooting for substance.

The film is absorbing on a scene-by-scene basis. But it connects the dots of Raymond’s life in a perfunctory way, without locating a fluid through-line or gaining emotional access to its elusive subject.

There’s enormous heart behind Justin Chon’s drama, and wrenching performances full of feeling from the writer-director and his co-star Alicia Vikander. But those strengths don’t obscure the problems of an overdetermined screenplay, with too many plot points competing for focus and too many moments of strained melodrama.

Even if it takes itself a tad too seriously, it delivers enough nail-biting stress and terror to justify a trip to the multiplex for action-thriller fans.

Sure, there’s some fun in all that meta-playfulness. But there’s also a facetiousness that wears thin and intrudes on the killing spree, making me often wish I was watching any one of the superior movies being referenced.

Carax’s trademark bonkers magic elevates many of these scenes, to be sure. But there’s also a nagging naiveté, even a silliness to the storytelling that kept bumping me out of the sluggish drama.

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.

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.

What keeps it reasonably engaging...is an appealing central performance from Alex Lawther.

It's pleasant enough, but lacks the vitality to be more than mildly funny as comedy as well as the insight to build emotional heft as drama.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.

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.

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.

As lethargic as the characters it portrays, the film requires greater staying power than many audiences will possess.

This third collaboration between writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale (following Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) is far stronger on gothic atmosphere than suspense. It’s capably acted and visually effective, with lots of mist-shrouded woodlands and chiaroscuro interiors, but the storytelling is stilted and uninvolving.

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

The doc is stuffed with great archive material. But it largely squanders an ideal platform through which to reaffirm the subject’s vital place in pop music history and reclaim disco as a genre whose influence has never waned.

Charlotte Rampling gives an emotionally rigorous display of bruising internalization, without an ounce of vanity, in the title role of Hannah. But although the lead performance commands admiration, the overall impact of this unrelentingly dour account of a woman struggling to carry on with her life after her husband's imprisonment is dulled by its distancing approach.

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.

A moderately successful attempt to ape the standard Hollywood teen movie.

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.

While Murphy coasts along on charm, his material is just not sharp enough to generate big laughs.

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.

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

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.

There are amusing moments reminiscent of the original, but in terms of tone and coherence, the movie loses its way.

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.

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.

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

Although the storytelling conveys deep compassion for the plight of persecuted peoples, and Hussein’s unflinching performance speaks volumes, mostly without words, there’s a grim inevitability to The Survival of Kindness that becomes wearing, making its 96 minutes feel longer.

Fun is banished from Aja’s latest, which starts out mildly intriguing and chalks up a few bracing jump scares before running out of juice.

The bigger problem is that the movie leaves itself nowhere to go but deeper into biblical doom and gloom, with an unwavering sense of purpose that highlights Shyamalan’s able craftsmanship but also exposes the pointlessness of this claustrophobic exercise.

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

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.

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.

This is a self-satisfied exercise that's only occasionally as much fun as it thinks it is.

Not quite a documentary, it's more like a musical travelogue that doesn't quite sustain feature length and seems ideally suited to a shorter TV version for music webs.

Despite its sharp visuals and evocative sense of place, the unevenly acted film never quite builds enough atmospheric dread to distract from its characters' somewhat implausible behavior.

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.

Even if the immediacy of the director's approach gives the material an electric charge, 100 minutes of it becomes monotonous.

The whole spirit of rebellion, passion and protest that should be a driving force for the characters plays more like a cultivated affectation.

An elegant but empty and frustrating meditation on desire, obsession, love and possession, The Captive intellectualizes those subjects almost beyond the level of art-film parody.

The movie is a one-joke premise, cute and colorful but unsatisfyingly fleshed out.

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.

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

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.

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

Without a more psychologically insightful script and less predictable story developments, Our Son shows that gay couples’ problems can be just as uninteresting as any other couples’ problems. Welcome to post-marriage equality humdrum!

As capable as the actors are, I can't say I cared much about any of the characters, which made the emotionally uplifting climax feel underpowered. The scope for which this handsome but bland film strives so hard is present mainly in the wide-open spaces of its picturesque locations.

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

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

That exciting crash sequence — from initial turbulence through to catastrophic Pacific Ocean landing — is where high-stakes action specialist Harlin is most firmly in his sweet spot.

Saddled with an excess of voiceover and a shuffled flashback structure that keep the characters at an emotional distance, All Day and a Night feels familiar in both its bleakness and its ultimate offering of hope.

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.

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.

As a character study of a man with good reason to wean himself off the very basic human instinct of hope and teach himself, even at some personal cost, to care for no one and nothing, Sundown gains texture from its stark setting in a seaside playground stained with blood. But of all the director’s films to date, this might be the most airless.

It's a testament to the complexity of the subject and her positivity even in the face of the most culturally entrenched caveman attitudes that we come away from this flawed, chaotic film with a warm appreciation for her achievements and her indestructible generosity of spirit.

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.

While it's well-intentioned to a fault, and driven by deep convictions, the film also is diffuse, lethargically paced and short on thematic trenchancy, building powerful individual moments but seldom sustaining a compelling narrative thread.

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.

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

Even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

Fluk doesn’t have a firm enough handle on the material to make that story interesting. And the uneven division of the Keith and Vera plotlines makes Köln 75 a movie without a narrative center.

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

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.

While it’s not without entertainment value, Motor City feels like it wants to be Don Siegel meets Michael Mann meets Walter Hill with a dash of John Woo, but ends up an ersatz version of all their work.

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.

The film lacks the accompanying media spotlight that boosted the Moore release and therefore appears unlikely to reach beyond a liberal audience with an already vehement aversion to Fox News' partisan coverage.

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.

If you come to this film looking for a brisk overview of his achievements in couture, you might find High & Low more than serviceable. . . But if you’re expecting the definitive closing leg of the redemption tour, it’s unlikely you’ll find this a persuasive argument for separating the art from the a-hole.

This visually impressive yet emotional frigid fable could perhaps more accurately be tagged "The Bipolar Express."

The insanely self-indulgent running time of two hours and 40 minutes and the tendency to undercut tension with fussy dialogue that continually draws attention to its cleverness make Zahler’s third feature a lot less fun than it seems to think it is.

Ridley Scott’s film is a trashtacular watch that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. But it fails to settle on a consistent tone — overlong and undisciplined as it careens between high drama and opera buffa.

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.

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

After a compelling first hour, the director can’t seem to get to the dramatic and emotional crux of the epic story, which runs a bloated three hours. When he finally does get there it’s in the dreaded Big Speech, which even an actor of Rogowski’s generous gifts can’t make into anything but a teachable moment.

It’s watchable enough, but ultimately has the counterfeit feel of a filmmaker dabbling in a genre that’s not a natural fit and finding little joy in it.

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.

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.

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

Whatever valid points are being explored are hopelessly clouded by the film's unwavering earnestness as it descends into silliness and excess.

Sanders and DeMicco’s script doesn’t have the robust plotting, consistent wit or flavorful character development of the best family animation. And some of the voice actors have too little to work with.

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

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

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.

Justice regurgitates information that was largely already in the public sphere, so its main purpose will likely be as a for-the-record summation, albeit a workmanlike one puffed up here and there with generically ominous music to suggest murky machinations at the highest levels of government.

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]