Emily Yoshida

It’s so insistent that this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Peter Rabbit — while, again, not straying from the original character design all that much — that it feels like the animators are at war with the writers, and the loudest of the two groups tends to win out at every turn.

This is the sort of action film where the bad guys often hold their fire for no discernible reason, and are terrible at dodging things, but if one suspends one’s disbelief long enough, they’re rewarded with a rollicking, highly competent popcorn movie.

The film starts to feel like it’s more invested in selling the idea of the series rather than a film in and of itself.

The script is frantically trying to build a whole world when a modest house would do.

All other films hoping to become the official cinematic standard-bearer of #TheResistance, take a seat. This is the most damning political narrative of 2017.

It’s a gorgeous-looking, sensitively edited film to be sure, but never finds a dramatic foothold, no matter how many manic arguments and drug overdoses it throws our way.

What Men Want is a wildly uneven stretch of a movie that’s more of a flail than a romp.

This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

As many times as I tried to get onboard with its proposed brand of breezy fun, it kept kicking me off, if only because I found myself running up against the very foundation of its premise.

There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.

Musicals are inherently fake — they can be ecstatically, transcendentally fake — but this is a whole other level of disingenuousness.

Tight, fun little thriller.

The plot-engine joke — that Schumer’s character Renee hits her head and wakes up convinced she’s gorgeous — is nothing if not well-intentioned, but veers into cheap and easy enough times to be misinterpreted. When it’s good, though, and when Schumer’s fully locked into her take-no-prisoners charm assault, it’s pretty undeniably delightful stuff.

While 3 Generations certainly has some worthy explorations, it’s too vain not to sugarcoat itself, visually or otherwise.

The whole film feels slightly grubby and low-res, like it’s been languishing in private mode on the filmmakers’ pre-HD YouTube page since 2008.

The problem isn’t Reiner taking dramatic liberties with the facts, it’s that his toolbox for doing so hasn’t changed since the mid-’90s.

Gringo is a slightly above-average crime farce with a way above-average protagonist — both in terms of writing and performance, and especially given the genre. It’s a surprising high point in Oyelowo’s already distinguished career.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters when it could be spending it with, you know, the giant shark.

That more or less is The Upside in a nutshell. It’s a film that contains complicated, sad, interesting ideas rarely expressed on screen — even Kidman’s scold character unfolds into a more intriguing person, full of contradictions — but whose package is fundamentally unsuited to showcase those ideas, like a sweater with the holes in all the wrong places.

The contemporary nostalgia for romantic comedies is understandable (even if I do not personally share it), as is the nostalgia for Jennifer Lopez, movie star. Unfortunately, Second Act is a strange, scattered attempt to cash in on that longing, and it doesn’t seem to know what its own deal is aside from a rushed vision board collage of Things Women Are Probably Worried About.

Levin’s dialogue is relentless. Every line and retort is a punch line, and every punch line more or less amounts to Lindsey and Frank telling each other how much they stink.

It gallops along quickly enough to keep us entertained, but not so quickly that we can’t see the seams of its creaky American Hero setup.

I’ll give Flower props — in an age when so many teen movies are grasping so desperately for message-y topicality, it does the impossible, and manages to be about nothing at all.

I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.

It’s bright and fun and doesn’t look like any climactic fight of a superhero movie in recent memory.

This is a low-stakes, no-frills, point-A-to-point-B crime thriller, taking inspiration from every parent’s worst nightmare, and pretty much nothing else.

The fundamental ironic juxtaposition — ultraviolence meets corporate banality — is a bludgeon that never feels fresh no matter how many times it’s driven into our aching skulls.

Like all good YA fantasy, it’s rooted in earnest adolescent anxieties, and dresses them up with the same level of earnestness.