Gary Thompson

As we watch this safely-under-the-speed-limit parade of lumpen suburban regularness, though, we begin to wonder if director Greg Berlanti (TV’s Arrow and Riverdale) has emphasized sexuality at the expense of personality. This kid makes Ferris Bueller look like a dangerous radical.

Leisure Seeker leans heavily on the charm of its two veteran leads. Sutherland and Mirren work hard to establish John and Ella as a couple worth pulling for, even as we begin to suspect that what they want is to go out on their own terms.

The actress had legendary power to charm men and women, and we suspect one of them may be Bombshell director Alexandra Dean. Early on, we hear biographers and fans tell us about something that “probably” happened, or that “may be apocryphal,” but it all becomes part of Bombshell‘s print-the-legend approach.

Finley ends with a poetic epilogue that draws themes into focus, and gives voice to them. I’m not sure the movie fully earns it, but it does grab and hold your attention, thanks to the frighteningly good rapport between Taylor-Joy and Cooke.

It’s a tough two hours, but director Zvyagintsev invites engagement by giving us more than a chronicle of dysfunction — he’s searching for its source.

A wishy-washy exploitation movie, which doesn’t show any real verve until the climax.

The movie is swimming with ideas, but it values concept over character to a problematic degree. The Cured maps out an increasingly elaborate set of internal rules that govern its characters without defining or deepening them.

The movie’s distinguishing feature is its inclination to lurid violence. Every so often, a depraved Russian hit man shows up to murder and torture one of the characters, mostly to allow director Francis Lawrence to show yet another naked and brutalized woman splayed on a shower floor, or in a bathtub red with blood.

Game Night is not the greatest comedy in the world, but it has a great grasp of the ingredient that makes comedy work, identified centuries ago as brevity.

Graham has crafted some decent monologues for her characters.... But, even at a hair over an hour and a half, the movie would benefit from a good trim, one that might give the movie’s parallel romantic stories more shape and snap.

Potter has assembled a good cast that gives the claustrophobic material some air — the theatrical drama is set in just a few cramped rooms, including the loo. Potter also chooses black and white, suggesting stark contrasts that blend, like the viewpoints of the characters, into shades of gray.

Garland’s alien biodome is a trippy mixture of tactile old school hardware and computer-generated images. It combines to give his brightly ominous new world a sinister sheen, especially when showing how it has consumed/subsumed the old seaside community it has displaced.

Black Panther sticks to Marvel orthodoxy, and yet does so with a nearly all black cast (Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis have small roles), and with strikingly Afro-centric production design. In the process it freshens and enlivens the Marvel brand.

Stories about the way men and women negotiate sex, power, money, work and relationships — Anastasia ends up working for a company Christian owns — should make the Fifty Shades trilogy relevant and exciting. They are, somewhat mysteriously, the opposite of that.

The movie is often whimsical, a tone augmented by clever use of special effects and sudden flourishes of animation. Offbeat soundtrack selections and effective music by composer Andrew Harris help set the mood — ultimately genial and hopeful, and the movie is short and sweet.

The incident on the train accounts for just a few minutes of screen time — for another 90 minutes they’re in a flatlined buddy movie, without much help from Eastwood (he insisted they not train as actors) or the screenplay.

What Kruger does is remarkable — showing Katja paralyzed with grief, but doing so in a way that does not paralyze the story.

The animators have figured out horses and falcons and snakes, but human body movements are stiff, awkward, and mechanical.

There is enough space for Bell and Bening to do some good work, particularly Bell, who has more to chew on here than anything he’s done since Billy Elliot.

Director Wes Ball allows nearly every scene to overstay its welcome.

Gudegast is using the Heat homage the way a magician uses a flourish — to distract you from the other story he’s telling. I confess to getting a kick out of watching it play out.

In essence, it shows that what the “horse soldiers” did was pretty remarkable — efficient, daring, effective.

The movie also trumpets hometown values, and makes fun of the way Liam’s wealth and fame have insulated him from simple pleasures of small-town life (underlined by director Bethany Ashton Wolf’s cozy visual presentation). The movie pokes fun at his materialism, when it’s not indulging in it.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a cockeyed love story that starts as weirdly as it ends.

Spielberg and Co. are obviously excited to be making The Post, and that palpable enthusiasm makes the movie feel so unusually lively for a big-studio movie. It’s nimble, crisp, passionate, full of verve and invention.

What is Cooper after here? He seems to want us to gasp at the naturalistic horror of it all, drawn from history and accompanied with the sober denunciation of actual frontier massacres (Blocker is a veteran of Wounded Knee), but the parade of grotesque violence (murders, rapes, suicides) suggests something more surreal, less literal.

Aaron Sorkin’s entertaining new film is a tough, smart look at the way some Hollywood heavyweights treat women. Spoiler: not well. But it’s also more than that – it touches on broader legal and labor issues and systems that disadvantage women everywhere, in different ways.

Williams and Plummer are fine, yet for all their efforts the movie endures a strangely listless first hour. The kidnapping and subsequent investigation feel under-plotted, highlighting Wahlberg’s curiously inert presence in the movie.

Chalamet and Hammer map this progression expertly.

The movie is a pitch-black comedy, told with a wink and a smirk by unreliable narrators, who include Harding, her mother, and her husband — all presenting self-serving versions of the truth, often standing in arch contrast to the images we are shown.

Although the sci-fi trappings of Downsizing make it seem like a big departure from Payne’s previous work — The Descendants, Sideways, About Schmidt — it is the same in important ways. It’s a movie about a man suddenly separated from people he’s loved, trying to learn how to live again.

The Jumanji reboot Welcome to the Jungle is a happy surprise — a movie that turns out to be good (almost clean) fun, and is much more interested in character and comedy than special effects.

As the movie explores Nye’s family history, we do see just how intertwined the threads of thinking and emotion can be.

Churchill, by way of Darkest Hour, hands the actor some of the best speeches of his career, and Oldman brings them vividly to life.

Del Toro somehow manages to keep the deeply weird mash-up of ideas and images coherent, unified by style and mood.

These sequels trade directly on the emotional legacy of the originals (The Last Jedi makes some leaps into sentimental hyperspace, particularly in the way that it handles Fisher on-screen), and the more of the aged Luke and Leia we see, the more we chip away at the mythic power of characters as Lucas left them: Young, strong, immortal.

A very sloppy piece of work, apart from the cinematography, which is pretty, and the Mills Brothers songs, which are fantastic.

The Disaster Artist really hangs on James Franco’s performance. He’s an uncanny mimic of Wiseau’s legendary accent and mannerisms, but what he really nails is Wiseau’s complete lack of self-awareness.

A movie that could have been about loss and defeat becomes something else — a testament to spiritual stamina, to the power of family bonds and their importance to homes, to streets, to neighborhoods and to cities.

What does work is Washington’s subtle, authentic, meticulous work as a walled-off, neurodiverse man.

The movie is antic, bouncing frantically from one story element to another, and poor Stevens, looking electrocuted and sleep-deprived, plays Dickens like the Man Who Invented Meth.

It’s a remarkable performance by McDormand, matched by Rockwell.

In general, Coco is the kind of first-rate technical production you expect from Pixar. On the other hand, it often feels more frantic than exciting, and it counts on moments of humor that often do not materialize.

Cowriter and director Dee Rees (Pariah, Bessie) does a skillful job making us feel these inequities as they take place over time and become the fabric of lives, the basis of the assumptions people make about race and culture — the way things are.

Last Flag Flying lacks the casual, lived-in realism you usually find in a Linklater film. You don’t buy the men as long-separated pals, and so you don’t really buy the premise — the connection that caused Doc to seek out these men is not visible on screen.

There are a few fearful moments when you think the movie will be a collection of affectations. But the characters are too real, Gerwig’s eye for the adolescent lives of young women too keen.

A movie that succeeds as a tearjerker, if you can withstand those pushy moments (and there are a few) when it kind of makes you want to hate kindness.

Flash provides some comic relief...Aquaman some terse tough guy laughs, but the jokes land stiffly, and Wonder Woman, recently the star of her own blockbuster movie, is back to being part of a superhero tag-team, taking turns in the end at beating on Steppenwolf.

Cathleen’s arc, initially front and center, starts to feel outweighed by the all-in performance of Oscar-winner Leo.

Branagh the actor finds a nice balance between Poirot’s colorful flourishes and his moral seriousness. Branagh the director gives the movie the same balance, and wants the audience to have as much fun as the actors, which is true more often than not.

The movie also runs 2 hours, 20 minutes, which is a lot of dead samurai. The violence is often numbing, and the translations — the movie is subtitled — are sometimes as deadly as the swordsmanship. On the other hand, Blade of the Immortal is flat-out gorgeous. Widescreen, lush, beautiful.

Lanthimos is not Euripides, and not capable of — or interested in — staging a tragedy. And his aim to make something horrifying or at least excruciating out of this scenario gets lost in the iciness of the presentation.

Fans can best enjoy the movie the way the bad moms make the best of the holiday: lots of alcohol, lots of forgiveness.

It’s a good, quiet performance by Teller, and also by Bennett — her Saskia is welcoming but wary.

Wonderstruck, for all of it’s child-in-danger plotting, has a warmth that points (along with the title) to a safe and sentimental conclusion.... When it arrives, though, it lands with a curious lack of emotional impact — perhaps inevitable, given the nature of a story that seeks to connect characters who are rarely and sometimes never on screen together.

It all feels flat-footed and pretentious.

Forster does some interesting visual work here to suggest the perspective of a person who is (legally) blind, but in general, when your thriller requires the heroic intervention of an ophthalmologist, you’re in trouble.

A few actors with limited range are asked to do too much. Still, it doesn’t stop the momentum of this engaging, humane little movie, which builds the moment when its internal worlds finally collide — Moonee’s self-willed magic kingdom, her mother’s less hopeful reality.

The Snowman is reminder that movies are hard to make, highly collaborative, often chaotic, and hundreds of things can go wrong. Here, everything did.

I give Goodbye Christopher Robin credit for presenting audiences with a Pooh origins story they might not want to see, but having settled on this subject, the movie seems uncertain how to proceed.

Only the Brave has a respectful and heartfelt regard for its characters, and something more — an unusual sense of their spiritual lives, abetted by the movie’s impressive visual presentation.

The movie works reasonably well as a thriller but falls apart in other areas.

Marshall overcomes some early stiffness and flat-footed storytelling and evolves into an engaging courtroom drama, where witness-stand theatrics and Perry Mason flourishes give the movie needed narrative momentum.

As usual, Hall is awesome. She has an effortless way of projecting ferocious female intellect, and we see why her character captivates Byrne. When Hall is on screen, the movie works.

One of the movie’s goals is to grant neurodiverse subjects their full measure of humanity, and to that end, Dina is candid on the subject of sex, where the movie also finds its loose narrative arc.

The actors make the most of Baumbach’s lively script.

While the movie initially adheres to the Chan brand — emphasizing athleticism over violence — it turns grisly and vicious in the closing scenes.

Lucky, written as a tribute to Harry Dean Stanton, ends up being a fitting cinematic eulogy to the late actor, who died last month.

The chemistry between these two attractive people and fine actors is unaccountably bad.

It is often a captivating visual marvel, using newfangled special effects in ways that aspire more to the poetic than the kinetic.