Gary Thompson

Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

In Framing John DeLorean, Philadelphia-based documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (The Art of the Steal) mix fact, drama, and speculation to draw an ambitious portrait of the fabled automaker, but within the frame, key questions remain unanswered.

The plot particulars are flimsy and laughable by design — this Shaft has been put together by folks with an instinct for comedy.

No neuralizers needed for Men In Black: International — you’ll forget you’ve seen it not long after walking out.

Dark Phoenix has a cast of lame-duck actors wearing expressions that say, “Check, please,” and the movie has the kind of knotty, suspenseless plotting that makes the veins in your head throb.

Much rides on the actors’ ability to connect as they brush aside the obvious credibility obstacles, and the movie’s pop genericism doesn’t help — half the movie’s running time feels like it’s a pop music montage of the fetching young couple kissing, nuzzling, holding hands, so it often feels less like an ad for Invisaline.

Not long into Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, it becomes clear that the movie is never going to make what you might call sense.

If HGTV and Lifetime had a TV channel baby, it would produce movies like The Intruder.

Fast Color is disciplined and restrained, yet feels a few tweaks away from being the rousing origin story it aspires to be.

As Knightley and Skarsgard wrestle with this material and each other, the movie around them goes plot crazy.

This movie has nearly as high a body count as "Us"...Is this satire? Homage? More like the desperation of a director who’s supplanted “vision” for emotion. The story leaves Dumbo without meaningful links to the human characters, and the scattered story of Farrell’s cohering family falls flat.

In the end, a coherent tone eludes Elba, but he shows promise as a scene-setter, and the movie displays an effective use of color.

Though fact-based movies are often guilty of bending truth to improve a story, Finding Steve McQueen goes in the other direction, downplaying strange-but-true elements that might have helped its saggy narrative.

I wonder if Noe is familiar with the work of Three Dog Night, and their 1970 rumination on a party gone bad, “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” Its lyrics apply here: “I’ve seen so many things I ain’t never seen before. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want to see no more.”

Years from now, chances are that when people sit around and talk enthusiastically about that movie with Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the subject is most likely to be Kong: Skull Island.

In conceptual terms, the movie has more in common with Scream, in that it’s an examination of genre clichés (in this case romantic comedies) that both satirizes and embraces them.

The remake, directed by Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke, makes substantial changes — taking the bare bones of the story and turning into a sort action-fable about female empowerment, starring Jane the Virgin headliner Gina Rodriguez.

At least Aquaman has a different palette, and new shapes to work with. It’s still ultimately silly and dreary, and will test the endurance of fans who then must withstand an even longer credit sequence to get a whiff of the next DC story wrinkle.

Robert's relationship with Elizabeth is actually one of the film's better features – it is here that Pine's low-key charisma is put to its best use, and his chemistry with Pugh is useful in establishing the emotional foundation of their resilient marriage, which held together during the times of defeat, separation, and victory.

The movie seems even longer – replacing Argento's splashy colors with dull, chilly greys, and lengthening the story (Argento clocked in at 96 minutes) with layers that feel over overwrought and overthought.

It finds the right harmonized note of melancholy and humor in its closing moments.

As a symbiote, Brock/Venom is sometimes funny, and for a while the movie finds a rhythm that seems to suit director Ruben Fleischer, best known for Zombieland.

All of this is in Hart's wheelhouse, and Night School might have fared better if it had surrendered completely to random comedy one-offs. It keeps coming back, though, to the desultory story of Teddy's strained romance, the least-compelling feature of the movie.

A Heathers meets The Purge meets Russ Meyer free-for-all that takes elements of the Salem witch trials and transposes them to the age of the internet. That's a lot to take on, and there are diminishing returns by the time the movie reaches its bloody conclusion.

Waters' novel was content to let the evil within Hundreds Hall remain shapeless and nameless. Director Lenny Abrahamson's (Room) movie wants to give it definite shape, and even a name, though the movie is not better for it.

Kin positions itself as a B-movie cobbled together from sci-fi favorites of the past, and so we grant the movie wide latitude to be goofy. It's meant to be out there. Even by those lax standards, though, Kin tries the patience.

The action is frantic and brutal, and the movie itself has an ugly tone.

Greenfield makes an ambitious attempt to tie all of these things together as symptoms of capitalism gone wrong in Generation Wealth, although her thesis is weakly argued, and thinly sourced – the movie often turns out to be a curiously insular polling of family, friends, and high school and college classmates.