Gary Thompson

His script is good-natured, more genial than funny, though director (and Philadelphian) Charles Stone III does get some good work from star Irving, who proves surprisingly adept at playing low-key comedy.

Damsel is designed to be a deliberately out-of-joint comedy about a woman forced to endure an exasperating ordeal. After two hours, I could relate.

Sheridan leans toward the lurid, but with the blood is a marrow you don’t get from other movies, where action is increasingly tied to fantasy. Soldado bludgeons its way into touchy border politics, and maybe lucks its way into a story focused on the moral imperative of protecting a single child.

The opening sections has a feel of a competent if familiar effects movie, but the film changes mood and tone when story movies the foreboding castle — perhaps a nod to Mary Shelley, among the first to warn us of the hazards of scientists who interfere with the natural order.

Gotti ends up feeling like a kitschy assemblage of other directors’ ideas.

Hearts Beat Loud (despite is gooey title) has a bittersweet tone that tells us that Frank’s dreams are mostly wishful thinking. In that way, Hearts is of a piece with other movies by writer-director Brett Haley, wherein the art has the power to ameliorate rather than transform.

Jack-Jack turns out to be a jackpot. The movie is frankly slow to get cranking, and we don’t really know what we’re missing until the unsupervised infant goes to war with a mischievous raccoon.

It is a portrait not of grinding earnestness but of a penetrating sincerity, the kind that reduces the cynical, the skeptical, and the callous to tears.

I’ve never seen anything like it, and I would have found it persuasive had I not read the 2007 Vanity Fair article based on interviews with the young men in prison.

There’s nothing especially striking about the movie’s visual presentation – the Artemis is threadbare and creaky, a purposely anachronistic blend of the future tech and throwback furnishings. The actions is competent, the performers game.

Chemistry among the women is smooth, maybe excessively so. In movies about hustlers and confidence games, there is usually the scent of underlying treachery, the possibility of dishonor among thieves. In The Sting, for instance, we wonder: Is Redford conning Newman? Is the movie conning us? That kind of tension is missing here.

Writer-director Ari Aster excels at making these old-school horror movie moves (he gets great mileage out of seance scenes), and the intensifying atmosphere of dread is thick. And he layers on effective, original ideas.

A spare, meticulously crafted movie.

It’s a funny concept, helped by Marshall-Green’s blended look of pleasure and consternation at being the vessel for an invincibility that he enjoys but cannot control.

There is the potential here for an engaging adventure/survival tale, wrapped in a story of a woman finding her self-confidence by drawing on untapped reserves of strength. But Kormákur fails to find any shape in the narrative of Tami’s actual or psychological journey.

Bening is great fun to watch here, even when she’s just watching.

Solo eventually finds its feet, and the movie gets better as it goes, but we feel throughout the tension between conflicting visions of Howard and original directors Lord and Miller.

Suffice it to say, there is a good deal for Buckley to do, and she does it. In a year of memorable and unnerving female characters, she makes Moll stand out.

A Man of His Word...is not a lecture. It conveys the pope’s concerns, certainly, but it also conveys his charm — his gentle, personal manner, his sense of humor (he quotes from the St. Thomas More joke book), his “charisma.”

There are also Photoshopped aggregations of Bergen, Fonda, Keaton and Steenburgen, and though they were never actually grouped together when young, they register reasonably well here as lifelong friends. The movie rides entirely on their charm, not so much on the strength of the writing or the jokes.

Here, Leitch uses brevity to do for witty action what it famously does for wit alone.

Half the movie has a game McCarthy starring in scenes that live up to the promise of the movie’s title (’80s dance off! Bust a move!), and yet there are major plot points built around this same woman’s fear of public speaking. It has you longing for the narrative consistency of Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School.

While the movie serves as a pleasant piece of nostalgia, it’s not very deeply felt, and mostly serves to remind us of other, better movies that have covered similar territory, like Adventureland.

Brisk and informative.

The doggedly serious Disobedience might have been a more engaging movie if it had allowed itself to be governed by its own melodramatic passions.

It’s barbed, bighearted, and brave.

It all adds up to a bicultural comedy that is good-natured if not especially or consistently well-written. The movie takes too long to get moving, stays a tad too long, and efforts to retrofit the movie as a vehicle for Derbez come at the expense of Faris, a talented comedian who has very little to do here.

The Endless works on its own modest spooky-kooky terms, and also as a rumination on life’s ruts and patterns, best considered over a couple of beers.