Glenn Kenny

It’s an earnest account of a religious movement that still resonates — Whitefield’s practice was instrumental in the growth of the Methodist church, and his sermons and lectures are still in print today.

“Hockey will teach you what you need to know about life” is a cliché, and while Underwood’s delivery of the line almost redeems it, James’s work makes you believe it.

There’s a reason that “Road Trip” is premiering in the middle of Black History Month. While expansively anarchic to a fault, the movie’s anger, and its pride, is convincing.

Besson doesn’t build up the romantic emotion he apparently aspires to with his efforts, but “Dracula” gets by on the power of his (and Landry’s) conviction.

The spy-versus-spy scenario set out by the screenwriter Ward Parry isn’t going to give the maestro Mick Harron (“Slow Horses”) any sleepless nights. But as a vehicle for Statham’s bone-breaking escapades, it’ll do. And the story avoids some of the expected clichés.

The movie, written and directed by Hailey Benton Gates, wants to be a lot of things at once, including a satire and a dark rom-com. It bites off more than it can comfortably chew. However, the cast, also featuring Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny and Channing Tatum, is charismatic and at times piercingly funny.

Curtis shows up late in the picture, and her grounded presence helps Powter’s hard-luck story resonate more sympathetically. The documentary ends not with the promise of a comeback, but with a resolution to restore some, well, sanity to Powter’s life.

The energetic and arguably strenuous performance by the lead actor, Riccardo Scamarcio, is something of a flex, to be sure.

No matter its flaws, Truth & Treason is very well acted.

While the movie’s production design has considerable mojo — the trappings of a “Bachelor”-style reality show are sharply drawn, and the swimming hole on Trey’s ranch is practically Edenic — the anodyne writing reins in whatever satire one might have expected.

Even as they find themselves running out of things to do, each actor hangs on to his or her charisma and manages to land a line every now and then.

It’s loud albeit harmless japery, best appreciated with your air-conditioning cranked to movie theater levels.

The movie acknowledges its many antecedents.

Despite the best efforts of the cast and technical crew here, The Kiss winds up in the land of “meh.”

Watching this largely misbegotten movie (which seems to fulfill all of its aspirations with an utterly tacky ending), then, sometimes brought to mind the sardonic Steely Dan tune “Show Biz Kids.”

If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.

While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much.

Ultimately, this is one of those movies where it seems okay if you like this sort of thing for a while, but after it crosses the 90-minute mark, it seems irretrievably a little much even if you like this sort of thing.

The movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.

Marcello Mio, written and directed by French filmmaker Cristophe Honoré, and starring Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and a host of other European artistic luminaries, is a cinema in-joke elongated beyond all reason.

While it speaks well of Nelson’s integrity as a performer that he doesn’t make much effort to render Buck as ingratiating, the result is that the character can be a bit of a drag. His affection for his wife, Margaret (Annabel Armour), shows his softer side.

It’s hard to settle on what’s more bombastic: Carrey’s admittedly virtuoso double act, or the teeming computer graphics gadgetry of death and destruction spilling out of every corner of the screen.

This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.

Despite Brosnan's best efforts, this is a movie with its heart in the right place and its head somewhere substantially other.

The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.

In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad.

Berry is drained of glamour for her role here, and she performs with fierceness; the two boys are also stalwart, but what the movie asks these child performers to do doesn’t add up to effective horror — it’s just opportunistic and gross.

The action choreography is better than passable, although Perry adds grindhouse-movie levels of gore and dismemberment in a dubious effort to up the thrill quotient.

It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.

Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.

Although the milieu of “Coup!” speaks allegorically to the pandemic of our own century, it does so softly; the movie is ultimately more a tale of class warfare than public health.

Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark.

Too often this muddled movie, which never really settles on a tone, plays its espionage plot points with a dour seriousness that’s at odds with a teen comedy.

As the movie progresses, its story grows convoluted and belabored.

Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.

King is not exactly outclassed by Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates and Zac Efron. But the movie’s script, by Carrie Solomon, puts her at a disadvantage.

This is a confounding movie. Its pace is leaden, its structure lopsided, and while Dunham and Fry are both first-rate performers, their respective personae — both public and on-screen — are difficult for them to fully transcend.

Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, Reverse the Curse moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.

This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to.

All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.

While the action and suspense set pieces are executed with typical Ritchie bravura, the movie falls flat a lot of the time in between.

Kim’s Video, co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin and narrated by Redmon, is less a retail history than a shaggy dog story. One that actually appears to be true. Go in knowing that and you might get a kick out of it.

Despite its bona fides, the movies narrative and characterizations practically gorge on clichés.

Land of Bad, directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically.

In the end, Migration moves along at jet speed while often feeling labored.

Burr is skilled at this, for sure. And Woodbine and Cannavale, who are better actors overall, slide into Burr’s mode with ease. The results will prove satisfactory and maybe cathartic for his fans.

While the settings may indeed be beautiful, every frame here has been location-scouted and dressed to a fare-thee-well that sucks all the life out of every image—the viewer might also rest easy at the near-certain prospect that The Unfortunate Events will be conveyed as antiseptically and tastefully as possible.

While the supporting cast is replete with performers we like to see — Debi Mazar, Larry Pine, and Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, as a feminist artist — the script, in the end, does little to support them.

“That is the meaning of tribute. Not showing myself at all. There is no ‘me’ to begin with,” Sakurai, who is now 59, says at one point. This is a terrifying notion, but the movie doesn’t choose to run with it.

The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.

In the Company of Rose is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to.

Wright’s lean, long face is sometimes all hard angles, and she enacts the largely stoic mien of her character with weight. If Surrounded had carried through its overdetermined premise more assuredly, she’d have made a compelling hero/heroine here.

The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales

I’m all for a juicy, action-packed Gerard Butler movie. A Gerard Butler movie that wants to have its geopolitics taken seriously is a different matter. And honestly, it’s an even more different matter when the movie is not particularly juicy or, you know, action-packed.

Alas, in less than an hour and a half of running time (the director Laura Terruso does orchestrate the proceedings with a palpable sense of dispatch), the movie demonstrates how quickly “amiable and inconsequential” can shift to “hackneyed and labored.”

The movie is, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient enough in delivering its crowd-pleasing bits that truly starving suspense genre hounds, at least, won’t necessarily mind.

There’s subtlety, and then there’s deliberate evasion. In pursuing the former, “Chile ‘76” only achieves the latter.

If there’s one thing this movie demonstrates, it’s that whatever the actual function of said monarchy, it does give Britain’s taxpayers their money’s worth in drama if nothing else.

It’s a movie with its heart in the right place and its sense of drama nowhere in sight.

Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.

Whatever the truth of Ono’s manipulations in this affair — and Pang’s claims, including that Ono asked Pang to look after Lennon in an especially personal way, are at times hair-raising — they tinge this saga with a resentment that’s off-putting.

This movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.

A repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.

The movie strives for a knowing, amiable tone. It achieves a cutesy, slight one instead.

In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey. The movie toggles between those two states throughout.

The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is a reasonably well-constructed non-hero’s journey that may resonate with you if you’re not already sick of movies set on anatomizing the Crisis of White Masculinity in These United States. This reviewer finds the topic tiresome, tiring, aesthetically unappealing, and banal.

The result is dramatically wonky — and eccentrically thought-provoking.

This film, relatively modest in scale but broad in ambition, offers three stories of music makers and devotees. It’s a mixed bag, alternating conventional homily with genuine, substantial analysis.

If The Locksmith offers anything new, it’s in neutering the genre.

Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. . . . But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.

A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.

Even if you can sense the fun Crowe is having with the camera setups in certain scenes, Poker Face is simultaneously a lot and not all that much.

The movie’s generic quality is spruced up by eccentric plots points (go-go dancers who also serve as undercover eco-activists, a nice Andy Sidaris-like touch) and kooky dialogue.

Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

It’s all pretty predictable . . . This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.

Three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough.

The movie has an aura of indie navel-gazing that kept me at arm’s length.

Since the audience is in on the scheme from the start, what we get is excruciating, uncut. But not too excruciating, because Franklin is such a drab cipher it’s hard to work up much empathy for him.

A twist whipsaws the movie into a darker place, one in the vicinity of Patricia Highsmith. But no murder takes place, and the movie’s resolution confirms what one may have suspected all along: Its dominant room tone is kinda-sorta that of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”

The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.

As a director, Louis C.K. puts several feet wrong.

Amiable and colorful as it is, the movie is also spectacularly inconsequential.

There are certain varieties of whimsy that either click with you or don’t. I point this out because what didn’t click for me in “Brian and Charles,” a new comedy directed by Jim Archer, might do something for you.

Mueller’s direction is patient and sensitive, the cast is accomplished and committed, and the picture’s comedic aspects sometimes earn a chuckle. But Small Town Wisconsin is not sufficiently distinctive to rise above the standard-issue cinematic contemplation of the arguably poignant state of the white male American screw-up.

The movie is nothing if not relentlessly focused on Dinosaur Jr. itself. The band is a noteworthy one. But this treatment feels skimpy.

It’s all so anodyne that the also-obligatory girl-gets-mad-at-hunk plot turn before the love-conquers-all finale feels like being shaken awake during a dream of drowning in butterscotch sunsets.

Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.

Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists.

The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching.

This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.

“Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair.

It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry variety.

Clean has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.

While keeping a stalwart female perspective, Simple Passion follows an arc so standard it could be called banal.

There’s some comedic value here.

The movie’s depiction of age — specifically, age as it affects movie stars — has real potency. This extends beyond its ostensible message, delivered by Kal: “We live and die by the stories we tell each other.” The stronger statement Last Words ends up making is that we die no matter what.