Glenn Kenny

Until its climax, which clearly seeks to be congratulated on its restraint, Dark Night is not much more than an arty bore.

Director Rob Letterman, aided by writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and Darren Lemke and an energetic cast, rise to the occasion, delivering a movie that’s a lot of good creepy fun in spite of some dubious construction.

Jean Dujardin, who’s best known here for a still-controversial performance in Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” is utterly flawless as Picquart, maintaining proper military bearing even as he begins to seethe with indignation.

Everyone involved figured that sentiment trumps sloppiness. Original Soundtrack

Little Joe manages to exert a peculiar pull in spite of being constructed with material you’ve likely seen elsewhere.

The movie resolves into a relatively deft combination of message picture and suspense thriller.

None of this is particularly difficult to watch; the cinematic competence, the sincerity with which the clichés get served up, and so on, make a relatively smooth viewing experience. But they also render what would have been an at times harrowing real-life story into something safe and bland.

Pilgrimage is the kind of movie one fears is going out of style forever. A historical action drama, serious in tone and intent but also invested in delivering movie-movie thrills.

If Gifted works for you as it did me, it’s mostly because of the cast, but also the way the story unpeels.

While it doesn’t hit the highs of the very best movies based on the author’s works — those would be Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” two outstanding examples of American narrative cinema of the ‘90s—it’s also far less slick and ingratiating than the watchable but very Hollywood-processed likes of “Get Shorty” and “Be Cool.”

Accomplished and well-intentioned to the extent that one wants to accentuate the positive, but the positive isn't the whole, alas; for every moment in the film that evokes classic neo-realism, there's another that's commonplace or overly sentimental.

Anthropoid has one hell of a story to tell, a story that once again reminds us of a savagery that is not so far in humanity’s past that we need to stop being reminded of it.

Corbijn, as has been his custom in directing features, goes for mood and feel rather than narrative momentum, although his scope is clearly hemmed-in by the production’s budget; there’s not much here in the way of effective ‘50s-New-York evocation. But the actors and their exchanges ring true, and by the time the film reaches its lonesome conclusion, the resonances are eerie.

I like a good flying, fire-breathing dragon as much as the next fellow. Beowulf's excesses, though, are such that the film ought to carry the subtitle …But This Is Ridiculous.

The absurdist sectarian comedy gives way, as it inevitably does in this conflict, to tragedy, and death both human and animal. While Shomali resists easy cynicism while seeming to have almost every excuse to indulge it, he doesn’t try to craft a hopeful parable out of his material either.

Playful, poetic, shocking, saddening, and ultimately gratifyingly and honestly big-hearted.

Ms. Demeestere’s direction winds up frustratingly splitting the difference between thoughtfully detached and just plain vague.

This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.

Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.

In addition to serving up heaping helpings of suspense and action, “Fuze” abounds in twists.

Mr. Collet-Serra’s busy visual style, which uses a lot of fast-cutting, willy-nilly variations between slow and fast motion, and illogical but vivid point-of-view shots, seems at least somewhat apt under the exhilarating circumstances.

The movie, starring Zabou Breitman, Jacque Gamblin, Pascal Elbé, Sylvie Testud, and Tony Harrisson, has a more upsetting dimension than most suspense dramas as it’s based on a true story, a story that touches on issues still roiling France today.

The mode of humor is close to cliquish anticomedy, and viewers not attuned to it may feel like there’s a joke they’re missing.

It is reported that this movie’s scenario was inspired by the life of Schroeder’s own mother, and the film has a personal tone that is not always detectable in his other movies. It enhances a film that’s one of the most thoughtful in his body of work.

The superb cast provides mild pleasures, as do some aspects of the elaborate mystery itself. And that’s all, folks.

Despite the performance’s credibility, few things are more irritating, artistically and historically, than the stranger-in-a-strange-land interloper who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing.

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.

Lawrence is a consistently incandescent screen presence, and her role lets her run through her greatest performative hits, so to speak. She’s goofily sexy, poignantly wide-eyed and retains a beaming, you-can-deny-her-nothing smile.

Ultimately the results are eye-popping, sometimes almost confoundingly so.

The aggregate effect is like aesthetic insulin shock, albeit from an artificial sweetener.

We Own the Night can't sustain itself; as the stakes of the story get higher, Gray paints it in broader and broader strokes until there's almost nothing you can believe in it anymore.

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.

Replete with sometimes startling imagery...Suntan captures a set of very specific feelings: the exhilaration and embarrassment of falling, followed by the desperate denial that one has landed in a very bad place.

Although this installment is a beautiful stand-alone thang (check out how its chronology-juggling storyline creates a perfect circle, structure-wise).

If you can roll with it, the movie is both breezy fun and a pain-free life lesson delivery vehicle

A sweet, sunny, cinematic song of praise to simple '70s pleasures, Roll Bounce isn't any kind of life-changing picture, but it's breezy, good-hearted fun.

An unusually compelling domestic drama with sharp ears, a sharp eye, and up to a point, sharp teeth.

The crazy fantasy world of this saga is plenty compelling and quirky.

Beyond the personal stories, the movie frames the tour and Truth or Dare as landmarks in the push for gay rights and awareness, and makes a convincing case.

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.

Strikes me as more of a thesis piece than anything LaBute has put his name to thus far. Its characters don't seem to be people as much as they are stand-ins for ideas.

The performers continue to exhibit those qualities forty years after the fact, reuniting in the evocative, sometimes puzzling, and sometimes moving Valley of Love.

Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing.

Suki Waterhouse does her best with what she’s given. But still. The movie’s commonplaces don’t serve its singular subject—love him or hate him—all that well.

I did find myself wishing that all films this narratively misguided were so directorially sure-footed. Makes getting through them a lot less painful.

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.

Lawrence’s riffs almost always land. They especially need to in the final quarter, when the movie sets the bar high for this year’s Dopiest Movie Plot Twist competition.

As social commentary, Joker is pernicious garbage. But besides the wacky pleasures of Phoenix’s performance, it also displays some major movie studio core competencies, in a not dissimilar way to what “A Star Is Born” presented last year.

As this pleasant but ultimately inconsequential movie’s narrative thins out, it emphasizes again and again that there is, as of now, only one operating Blockbuster store in the world. Luckily its proprietor is the warm and ingratiating Sandi Harding.

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.

Genre homage or not, trashy, assault-coddling sexism is a turn off — and worse. Perhaps the “roman porno” reboot project should have rebooted its sexual politics before calling “action!”

While Salomé isn’t anything but a mainstream director, he’s a good one, keeping the movie percolating up to its crowd-pleasing finale and coda.

The movie does pretty well as a treatment of identity and selfhood in a social landscape that grows increasingly alienating as it becomes more transparent. But it somehow fails to wholly satisfy.

The performances by Mr. Johnson, Mr. Hart and Mr. Black seem informed by the conviction that if they amuse themselves, they will also amuse others. They are not entirely wrong, but they are also not sufficiently right.

Even if you don’t need Beuys justified or explained to you, the movie is an exhilarating portrait of a unique truth-teller.

The movie doesn’t quite make it to two hours, but my patience was tried pretty much any point at which the movie went a long stretch without a song.

Directed by Silas Howard from a screenplay by Daniel Pearle, who adapted his own stage play, A Kid Like Jake is humane, compassionate and strangely detached, almost to the point of inconsequentiality.

Engrossing and a little moving. And Isaac is a very winning and effective messenger of Peter Malkin’s heroism and humanity.

That Jarhead is an impressive technical achievement is a given, but ultimately this picture is the last thing any war movie should be: innocuous.

In the shift from comedy to drama the movie goes wobbly.

This movie, as it happens, is a comedy, but it’s a frequently grisly one, and one that makes rollicking fun of a lot of dark Swedish preoccupations.

So far, so good, in the mismatched maybe-eventual-buddy-comedy department. But the movie, written and directed by Andrew Cohn, wants a deeper dimension, and in pursuing that, goes wrong.

This is a movie of head-spinning richness.

What Mr. Gibney uncovers is grave and shocking and could make a viewer concerned for the safety of the filmmaker. But its presentation is flawed.

Compelling and exasperating in pretty much equal doses.

The bad news is that, as movies go, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising barely qualifies as one.

The lens through which the movie views these kids is objective and balanced, but there’s an empathy at work that makes the viewer understand what each of the subjects is going through.

It was said by many after the 2016 election that the Trump administration would yield great satirical art. This is not an example of that.

Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness.

Remember this name: Aksel Hennie. If Pioneer, a mixed bag of a conspiracy thriller, works at all, it largely does so because of him. Hennie, now into his second decade as an actor in Norwegian film (he’s also written and directed a feature) gives a spectacular performance as Petter.

It’s a genuine achievement on an inexhaustible subject.

Grabinski has both wit and energy, and these qualities, along with a game cast, help keep “Happily” afloat for far longer than most made-in-L.A. dark domestic comedies. But the movie wants to do too many things, and grows diffuse.

A movie with which it is easy to find fault, and if you’re a particular kind of person, you’ll find fault with it without even trying too hard.

Not a call to action, River instead contents itself by being a sensational reminder of where it is we all come from.

These small events transpire in beautifully shot, unhurried scenes. This is Eastwood’s version of pastoral. Mike pieces his ruined life back together in a sense. He finds pleasure in being of service to a community. The professed agnostic takes Marta’s hand when she prays to begin a meal, and likes it. The simple sincerity about what’s worthwhile in life is the movie’s reason for being. Nothing more and nothing less.

Big Fish really is a big delight.

Hence, the movie lumbers its way from intriguing to frustrating. But Berham does manage to keep your attention, even as his vision tends to irritate in the wrong way.

Mamet’s stark existentialism comes to a shudder-inducing yet mordantly satisfying head in this expertly rendered picture. The text might not be vintage Mamet, but it’s a real meal.

It’s a little surprising that these proceedings are led by the director Ron Howard, since this subject matter is more perverse than anything he has set his sights on before. The actors are up to the task, however.

It’s perhaps unfair to call this a turkey. It’s got some sweet moments, and the cast, as it did in the previous picture, enjoys itself at least semi-infectiously. But the action sequences are lifeless; the lessons valid but arguably stale; and the trimmings, mere bloat.

Fun, fun, fun. [July/Aug 2003, p.26]

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.

A moderately entertaining heist movie featuring an animated and reasonably diverting Eccentric Cage Performance.

Mr. Pearce is also well-versed in staging and shooting decent action scenes, and building suspense enough to keep Hotel Artemis diverting in its overstuffed ambition. Add to that Ms. Foster’s welcome return to big-screen acting after a five-year layoff and you’ve got a movie almost worth seeing.

Soderberg provides a cornucopia of fizzy, post–New Wave imagery, fitting for a picture that’s pretty much all about surfaces.

The character Ms. Émond and Ms. Mackay create is not likable, but is puzzling in an engrossing way. I am not sufficiently familiar with Ms. Fortier’s work to weigh in on how accurately this film represents it, but as an act of complex homage, “Nelly” gets to a few interesting places.

While Monday is not quite as bracing as Papadimitropoulos’s prior feature, “Suntan,” it’s a sharply observed, well-acted picture with a lot of tart detail and a few real stings in its tail.

Unfortunately the pace is so relaxed as to be meandering; and Jay Zaretsky’s screenplay is cliché-packed.

I have misgivings about Schreiber's use of the well-worn "I'll make you empathize with these Others, but first let's have laughs at their expense" approach, but eventually I was won over by his humane, moving road trip.

The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.

One thing Vollrath does well is create a credibly claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere. Then again, when you restrict your camera to the inside of a cockpit, you’d have to be pretty incompetent not to.

The whole cast (which also includes Oliver Platt as a simpatico family solicitor) sinks its teeth into the material, which is reasonably meaty.

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

For all the elaborate weaponry, production design and (eventually) frantic action offered here, this movie crackles most as a lively pas de deux between Taylor-Joy and Teller, who commendably take their material seriously no matter how seriously ridiculous it gets.

The result is a very creepy, suspenseful story that’s also a better-than-average character study.

But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.

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.

One casting wild card is the country singer Tim McGraw, and he's very solid in the role of Katie's horse-rancher dad, the kind of guy whose hard-headedness can't mask the size of his heart.

Lichtenstein's putative switcheroo on the Vagina Dentata trope is to play it as some kind of token of female empowerment, but it's pretty clear that the writer/director didn't think things through on any counts, contenting himself that the putative outrageousness of the concept could see him through.

Though two hours long, the movie moves as swiftly as a greased ferret through a Habitrail and delivers hallucinatory action highs for its extended climax.

If you’re a big booster of any of the lead actors (I’m something of a Cannavale partisan myself), this will be worth your time.

For a while Pearce does a very clever balancing act, taking everyday unpleasantries and grotesqueries of life and exaggerating them just so.

As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.

While White’s direction is atmospheric, the sense of tension never gets crucial; the movie’s got more of a mood of resignation than of conflict. For all its respectful and respectable qualities, it also suffers from a certain inertia.

Writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer is clearly a movie-mad soul, and if he can get a little further out from under his influences he may concoct something a more consistently geekily transportive.

It’s not every day that you can say, “Shaquille O’Neal was the best actor in that movie.” And yet that may well be true in the case of Uncle Drew, a genuinely unusual exercise in screen comedy.

Devoted Feifferites, not to mention fans of Mr. Rash and Mr. Koechner, who get to flex their muscles nicely here, will be well sated.

Anchored by a startling performance by Michalina Olszanska, the Czech film “I, Olga Hepnarova” is an austere, hypnotic story of sadness, madness and murder.

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

Instant Family isn’t a hellish movie, although it is very much a Hollywood one.

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.

Jessica Rothe as Tree is still an appealing presence. But the film is overstuffed with unfunny self-parodying gore slapstick, half-felt sentimentality and semi-meta sci-fi.

In its reliance on a conventional narrative through-line, it’s more reminiscent of “The Public Enemy” than “Goodfellas” in spite of its stylings of contemporary cinematic realism.

The movie is sloppy.

There’s some grim stuff here, but very little of Willeford’s mordant humor. A small and potent quantity of this quality is delivered by the larger-than-life rock star Mick Jagger in the role of Cassidy. Jagger shows a refreshing lack of conventional vanity by allowing both Bang and Debicki to tower over him.

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

Band of Robbers just plain doesn’t work, to the extent that I’m almost regretful that the attempted schoolroom bans on Twain’s work weren’t more effective over the years, as they might have spared me watching it.

Hirsch is his usual reliable self, trading in on the warmth and trust he generated as a shrink in “Ordinary People” to keep the audience off balance as to whether he’s going to turn out to be a savior or a monster. He’s the most distinguished player here, keeping the movie grounded when its plot mechanics and/or O’Nan’s histrionics threaten to throw it off the rails.

“I want to make abstract art that’s funny, happy, energetic, joyful,” he exclaims at one point. That he did. This movie is a good introduction to it.

The director carries out his ultimately banal aims with commendable dispatch, and it’s always interesting to see Moreno play a character who’s not a living saint.

Amiably anecdotal, the movie gets wry results from Dolan and other players, including Rob Brydon as a would-be ladies man and Tamsin Greig as a “hipper” mom than Sue.

Where The Wall excels is in the creation of an extra-untantalizing desert atmosphere. The dust is practically inhalable, the sunlight glaring, and the characters grow ever more sand-gritted with each mishap.

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

The movie quickly establishes itself as a revenge narrative, and each bad guy goes down in a way designed to suit the viewer’s justified bloodlust.

The first English-language film from Norwegian director Eric Poppe is a conscientious and beautifully shot movie that ultimately bogs down in its own disinclination to come to any kind of dramatically useful conclusion about its subject.

Wyman narrates throughout, and his innate common sense can be persuasive.

The insights offered from the almost two-dozen show biz luminaries are not always commonplace, and Gottfried is always an interesting screen presence, even when he’s far removed from his persona.

A dynamite thriller.

Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance.

Ritchie reveals crucial story points with clever time-juggling editing, and keeps up the tension well into the movie’s climax, which delivers exactly what the viewer will have come to hope for.

Salvador's movie wants to penetrate something elemental in the viewer; if you can give in to its vision in good faith, it might just do that for you.

From my perspective, the film's anti-Semitism is implicit rather than programmatic, and, in the film's current form, a little sneaky.

It certainly doesn’t help that Tobias and Elin are entirely banal characters with nothing to define them but their loss.

Its climactic highway shootout, and much else in the picture, is rendered in the best Paul Greengrass manner that Hollywood money can buy. But where Greengrass pictures aim to keep one on the edge of one's seat throughout, the tension here, such as it is, is designed to stoke audience bloodlust. If that's your kind of thing, The Kingdom certainly satisfies.

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

A tart, funny, moderately over-the-top hijinks-and-snafus yarn.

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

Taking on a novel that’s already been adapted by two of the greatest filmmakers of all time should give any contemporary director pause, you would think. But Benoît Jacquot shows no signs of intimidation in his Diary of a Chambermaid.

The movie gives pretty good showbiz lore but not much depth.

The film moves from detective story to courtroom drama with nicely sketched character studies as a bonus.

This unabashedly crowd-pleasing movie gets to its uplifting but also somewhat disquieting conclusion and coda (which, as is the custom these days, introduces the audience to the real-life miners) with its integrity intact.

All this stuff is enacted by a better-than-reliable cast (Griffin Dunne, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine O'Hara, Roger Rees, and more), so Game 6 is never a bore. But it's not much more besides never a bore.

Corsbie has filmmaking energy to spare but also makes many undergrad errors.

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is a challenging, sometimes poignant engagement with the man and his work.

It’s a lazy, vulgar celebration of White Male American Dumbness—one that only put an African American in the cast to camouflage just how much of a celebration of White Male American Dumbness it is.

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

Director Julie Taymor's gargantuan all-Beatles-songs musical is that rarest of animals, the perfect disaster that fulfills expectations by defying them.

Shame is a welcome reminder that sex is sometimes too ridiculous to take so seriously.

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.

I’m not the only one who was at least slightly taken aback, though, by a persistent quirk in the movie’s casting, which is that not one of the Lions of American Literature in this picture was played by, well, an American.

The most interesting thing about Ibiza, not to get too highfalutin, is its positive treatment of female desire.

It plays on your knowledge of/expectations about generic horror movies and then either delivers the goods from an unexpected angle or pulls the rug out from under you.

The movie asks a lot of the viewer, but to this viewer, it gave back more.

The movie builds up enough steam, and has a sufficient supply of jolts, to make Old Man stick to the ribs at least a little by the time it’s over.

Just when you think you’ve got the movie pegged, it pulls a daring switch of perspective. While the thrill of that little coup is short-lived, it suggests that Mr. Williams may come up with something more substantial with his next feature.

River of Fundament is often a commanding, engaging and certainly challenging experience. Nevertheless, by the end of the piece I felt deliberately alienated, and to a nearly infuriating degree.

The picture sometimes plays as an amalgam of Soderbergh’s “Che” and Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” only—and this is the crucial point—with the volume turned down from 10, or 11 for that matter, to about 4.

Its lively finale is heartening, given the patience that Laaksonen was obliged to exercise before he could live his life out in the open. But the insights of the movie are too scant for much of a real impression to take hold of the viewer.

Little Accidents is quietly earnest, handsomely produced, and too dramatically inert and dogged by the commonplace to make much of an impact beyond conveying the dreariness (as opposed to the dread) of life in a coal-mining town.

The period spy thriller The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is only intermittently engaging and amusing, and those portions of the movie that succeed are also frustrating. Because they’re cushioned by enervated, conceptually befuddled, and sometimes outright indifferent stuff.

An intense New York-set thriller that manages to be both commercial and contemplative, kick-ass and quietly, disturbingly insinuating.

As exceptional as the acting in the picture is, and it is wonderful — Whitaker and Keitel are as inventive and surprising as they’ve been in years, and the supporting roles played by the likes of Ellen Burstyn and Stan Carp are well-sketched — it can’t entirely lift the movie from the rut it has all but plowed into by the end credits.

Boss Level compensates for its overstuffed scenario and relentless derivativeness—actually, it makes you stop caring about its relentless derivativeness—with concentrated fast pacing and breakneck action.

It’s only after the supposedly central mystery is solved that The Pale Blue Eye fully commits to its actual business, serving up in full a tale of loss and wrong-headed resolution. Bale’s characterization, subtle and slightly enigmatic throughout, here blooms. And eventually sears.

This plot sounds like “The Beguiled,” right? Trust me, this movie is NOTHING like “The Beguiled,” For one thing, it’s not nearly as plot-driven.

The movie’s quirky setting pays off dividends where you least expect them. At such moments, the movie’s humanism finally seems unforced, and everything is the better for that.

Add to this a “What Are The Odds?” plot twist that’s so preposterous it’s practically offensive and you have a movie that seems fit to go off the rails. And yet. Arterton, Mbatha-Raw, and the child actors — Lucas Bond as Frank and Dixie Egerickx as his school chum Edie — bring such commitment and integrity to their characterizations that one is inclined not just to hang in there but to root for them all.

Jodorowsky’s patients express gratitude and relief. But there has to be an easier way to alleviate stuttering than rubbing red dye on your genitals, putting on gold lamé hot pants, being body painted and walking the streets of Paris talking to oneself.

Will Smith’s performance as Omalu is lovely: small-scaled, precise, imbued with righteousness but not tritely pious.

The drama Dom Hemingway explores involves a vicious lout finding a form of redemption, and while that's an all-too conventional scenario, Shepard's movie plays it out in a brisk, inventive fashion and delivers a moviegoing experience that's almost equal parts stingingly sharp and genuinely sweet.

Mr. Chan is in his early 60s, and he doesn’t deliver the action pizazz here that he used to. Nor, frankly, does he summon enough gravitas to be persuasive in the role of a grief-maddened father. For what it’s worth, Mr. Brosnan, as Quon’s nemesis, sells the angry-all-the-time requirement for his character.

The best thing about Emily is that she’s played by Evanna Lynch. Lynch, who played the charmingly abstracted Luna Lovegood in some of the Harry Potter pictures, has grown into a young woman who looks like a rougher-edged Saoirse Ronan.

Despite the hardships endured by the characters, nearly every shot seems dappled with nostalgia. The music score is sentimental, with shimmering pianos and trembling strings. But the writing and its attendant characterizations have an undeniable integrity, the particular historical detail offered by the story is not common in films about this era, and the lead performers are moving.

Anchoring it all is the ever-great Moss, who is also a co-producer on the picture. The actress is always heartbreakingly good playing character forced to endure a lot of humiliation, and in this scenario, she gets it coming and going. She illuminates the serious mess that this farce is about, underneath it all.

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

The family comedy-drama Almost Christmas is an often disarmingly entertaining picture, in spite of its being a not particularly well-thought-out cinematic contrivance.

The tale is a jolting one, and the superb players do justice to the emotional distress of its characters. But a surer directorial hand might have yielded a more resonant experience.

Persistent sentimentality — manifested most in the music score by A.R. Rahman — undercuts Beyond the Clouds at almost every turn.

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.

This picture reminded me of one of the things I like best about "All the President’s Men": It doesn’t give a good godd--- about Woodward and Bernstein’s personal lives.

Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here.

With its galloping pace and strange criminal bedfellows, this funny and engrossing film sometimes feels like the droll capers of the Ealing studio (maker of “The Lavender Hill Mob” among other small classics). But Arcand packs in a lot of pointed social and political commentary.

The proceedings are not entirely unamusing in their lurid way, but they’re also not nearly as clever as the filmmakers believed or hoped they would be.

Too bad the movie was assembled by Hollywood types -- Joel Schumacher directed, Jerry Bruckheimer produced -- who like to have things 15 ways at once. Hollywood types don't like journalists, so while they're lionizing Guerin, they go out of their way to make almost every other journalist depicted in the picture despicable.

Such a muddle right off the bat.

There were times watching this movie when I felt I was being force-fed 30 pounds of crème brûlée. Which isn’t to say I choked on every minute: I chortled heartily at the thread about the comeback of the washed-up rock star (Bill Nighy).

Hobbled by weak argumentation, a character who winds up a complete muddle, and Sayles’s inclination to romanticize Latin American revolutionary types, Casa is as mixed an effort as the filmmaker has essayed in some time. [October 2003, p. 18]

The title Military Wives is plain to the point of blandness. This good-hearted comedy-drama, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, deserves a little better.

The result is by far the most original comedy of the year. Russell might alienate some audience members here--but it’s possible they literally won't know what they're missing.

If it makes anybody feel better, one character in the picture does point out that the whole "extraordinary rendition" concept originated with Clinton. So there's balance for you.

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.

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.

It’s very colorful, for sure, but the dialogue is lead-footed at best.

The story of this fight is fascinating, and the repercussions of this case are still being felt today. But the cinematic treatment of the story is confused. The movie often seems to have a hard time making up its mind whether it wants to be “The Insider” or “Mean Girls.”

It has a solid story to tell, and tells it with no winks and few, if any, frills. It’s involving and ultimately exciting.

The moviemakers craft a satisfying narrative while leaving the viewer with some questions; this is a movie that manages to be disquieting and entertaining simultaneously.

The movie’s main feature is a group of long-take, moving-camera action scenes that I guess might have been more engaging had the characters on the run and in battle been figures you wanted to spend any time with. They’re not.

Depends on how you're feeling about Tom Cruise--as opposed to the character he's putatively playing.

The clichéd story line pursues turgidity with a relentless determination.

The movie goes for grin-and-cringe-inducing, and instead achieves “excruciating.”

A derivative, irritating thriller.

"Where do these people get their money,” I wrote in my notes as Leif and his dog set out for a long drive at the film’s fade-out. Doesn’t matter. Nor do the multiple clichés. In Ride the Eagle, the laid-back vibe is all.

This is part of the movie’s problem. Aside from it being another how-I-made-out-in-an-“exotic”-locale narrative. The film means for us to delight in Jay’s flouting of conventions.

Making good absurdist cinema is a lot tougher than good absurdist cinema makes it look. This movie, a stab at absurdism that results in a swampy wallow in affectation, testifies to this fact with sad eloquence.

Life struck me as several cuts above “meh” but never made me jump out of my seat.

The gloom is practically enveloping. But, in the end, is it really all about hope? Black Crab is more than sufficiently gripping to make you want to see it through and find out.

The script by Nicole Jefferson Asher toggles between sharp observations about wordcraft and some “Dynasty”- or Tyler Perry-level soap operatics. RZA’s direction lacks visual personality, but he keeps the narrative moving and elicits strong performances from his cast.

A classic, and classically lamentable, good-news/bad news proposition. In the good news department, it’s largely a sturdy, enjoyable domestic comedy drama.

Hands of Stone...is absolutely a boxing movie. A corny and sometimes clumsy one, it scatters pleasures here and there, Mr. De Niro’s alert performance among them.

Though Melinda is no masterpiece, it’s also an Allen film that requires almost zero special pleading.

The whole enterprise is so fundamentally good-natured and fluffy that it’s sometimes hard to stay annoyed by it.

Uncle Kent 2, directed (for the most part) by Todd Rohal from Mr. Osborne’s script, is a funnier and more imaginative film than its predecessor, but it’s still what you might call a niche proposition.

Over the next 90-plus minutes, the canines drop as many F-bombs as Pacino did in “Scarface.” Then there are the scatological jokes, each one more outlandish than the last, none bearing the slightest tinge of wit or joy.

Once the mercenaries start tooling around wearing actual Ku Klux Klan outfits, the pretenses to allegory have gone out the window. And yes, it is salutary to see guys with pointy hoods getting blown away by righteous African-American avengers. But the cinematic cost of getting there was not, for this viewer, worth it.

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.

There are times in which Wasp Network feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.

What We Did On Our Holiday, written and directed by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, is replete with zingers, a quality not to be disdained in a family comedy of miscommunication.

Strickland’s film is a daring, atmosphere-soaked piece of kink hypnotherapy that pays explicit homage to the films of Franco, down to the casting of former Franco regular, formidable femme Monica Swinn, in a sinister role.

My Son finds its cinematic footing in a committed, steady, realism, and that creates a high-wire act of tension and suspense that’s refreshingly clean and consistently effective.

Complications culminate in epiphanies and brief triumphs, as is customary. But this genial, well-intentioned movie never quite lands a real emotional punch.

The lessons are so treacly, and their delivery method so single-minded, that the Valley Girl phrase “gag me with a spoon” springs to mind. But you have to give the movie credit for sticking to its lack of guns.

It's the stuff of not quite dreams, and it's rendered with such accuracy and hilarity that I am tempted to call Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters the most successful full-on surrealist film since Bunuel and Dali's 1930 "L'Age d'Or."

In Profile, the images mix real documentary footage with fictional social media and news organization posts. And meaning is elemental—a simplistic rush meant to induce viewer panic. While also being incredibly on-the-nose.

Mr. Lawther is sympathetic and appealing as Billy, but Ms. Styler seems to mistake broad strokes for stylistic daring, and her colorful but diffuse movie never jells.

While Nemes’s near-subjective technique can generate genuine tension, it more often yields anxious tedium.

Choudhury is excellent here as a fraught matriarch — as good as she was as a young rebel three decades back. And Maskati’s performance is a slippery mix of suave and menacing, which helps sell the farthest-fetched elements of this story.

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling Sympathy for the Devil godawful.

One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.

The result is oddly schizoid, but also so insubstantial that to call it oddly schizoid suggests a weight it doesn't have.

Blame is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it’s overdetermined and often overplayed.

The filmmakers seem less concerned with telling a story than in convincing the audience (and maybe themselves) that they can handle this provocative and potentially exploitive material they’ve contrived with what’s conventionally considered “appropriate” sensitivity.

The Signal continues to get weirder, and creepier, and to bring up unusual questions for the viewer.

Vacancy could have been some sort of satirical masterpiece had this whole scenario been finally revealed as an extreme form of couple's therapy designed to get Beckinsale and Wilson back together.

The scenes of Dracula befuddled by a mobile phone were familiar; those in which the vampire’s garlic “intolerance” preludes a flatulence joke predictable. Returning a third time as director, Genndy Tartakovsky lends his usual graphic savvy, providing a not-quite-saving grace.

Smushes together “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (the novel, that is), “True Believer,” and “Eyes Wide Shut,” only it does so without being nearly as good as any of the aforementioned.

This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.

“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.

The dénouement of The Artist’s Wife, wasting compassion on a character who has earned only the minimum, winds up fully validating an ideology and morality that is complicit in women’s oppression.

What to make of it all? Hard to say. Just to take in the fact that its soundtrack is made up of music by both J. Spaceman and Sun City Girls is to understand that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended.

Ella Enchanted seems squarely aimed at 12-year-old girls, or, I don't know, maybe 8-year-old girls.

This picture is not as ridiculous as a “Sharknado” movie — Harlin is out to make a genuine nail-biter, and he largely succeeds, maintaining interest even as the two-hour mark approaches. But it’s not enough to make you genuinely afraid to go into the ocean this summer.

This ABCs of Death is, either as a result of a surfeit of artistic freedom or just my own narrower-than-the-producers’ strictures of taste, as much of a hit-and-miss affair as the first, which came out in 2012.

Greenfield wraps up this compulsively watchable movie with observations of family love and some of its characters striving for redemption and/or an honest living. But she doesn’t quite dissolve the bitterness of the pill. Because it really can’t be.

Weinstein Co. honchos Bob and Harvey are chasing some of the old "Pulp Fiction" magic--and failing not only miserably, but kind of disgustingly.

What’s striking in this movie, apart from an ostentatiously glitchy screen distortion that occurs whenever a denizen of the “dark web” appears on one of the screens within screens, is how credibly its extreme trolling plays.

It does move along at a nice clip, and delivers exactly what belligerent action fans on both sides of the political aisle want -- a wholly admirable figure blowing up a lot of bad s---.

The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.

I don’t quite cherish Thackeray’s novel, but a can-do feminist, multicultural contemporization of it strikes me as, well, unnecessary.

What could have been Solondz's most complex and challenging film winds up being a bit on the flat side. Still, the life-forms skittering over its surface are fascinating to behold.

I can’t say how many liberties Penn, working from a script by Jez Butterworth and his own brother John-Henry Butterworth, took with their source material, but the way much of it plays out here feels movie-familiar rather than real-life familiar.

By the Grace of God is a rarity: An important film that’s also utterly inspired.

To tell you the truth, The Better Angels, as pictorially beautiful and emotionally evocative as it is, is so bereft of conventional narrative momentum that you have to consider it a miracle it got made.

Knock Knock ends on a not entirely satisfactory note, but delivers a pretty mean genre wallop getting there (with almost zero gore).

Despite the fantastic premise and the ostensibly comedic bits of business Honoré strews throughout (pay attention to the changing marquee of the cinema on the street where both Maria’s apartment and the hotel are), the movie’s treatment of its themes still too often lists toward a near-ponderous solemnity.

It’s a cogent expression of the proper spirit of resistance—that it should be based in love, but expressed in action. Direct, effective action.

What follows is all handsomely shot and not without some general interest — but the movie’s only really going to play for you if motorcycles and those who ride them are subjects to which you’re somewhat sympathetic.

Dog Eat Dog is a movie that wants everyone off its lawn, but only after they’ve had time to appreciate that said lawn is way more nihilistic than their own.

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.

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.

Guest of Honour, a knotty memory play and character study that, not unsurprisingly, screened at last fall’s Toronto fest, is a gratifyingly solid work that benefits from first-rate performers and a knowing location nose for the scruffier corners of Hamilton, Ontario.

Most of all it shows how DeJoria’s passion for doing good extends into a head-spinning variety of walks of life.

At any rate, Keaton and Gleeson are mostly a pleasure to watch as they enact the Inevitable Stations of the Romantic Dramedy, which include the mandatory misunderstanding that leads to breakup before inevitable reconciliation.

It is well-intentioned, conscientious and competent in its filmmaking craft.

This movie, which Balagov, a Nalchik native, states in an onscreen text is based on a true story, has a whole lot of “slow” and one very nasty burn.

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

Though not without its entertaining moments—the cast, led by Sandra Bullock, is energetic, sharp and gets a fair number of juicy bits to rock out with. But as a whole, Our Brand is Crisis is a messy affair that sputters along when it should be humming with assured cynical momentum.

The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material.

Proves more irksome than moving.

Singleton’s film is, in fact, pretty enjoyable if you look at it as the B-movie it really ought to be, rather than the E-ticket major studio release it actually is.

Eventually, the fact that the characters are all aware of the multiple clichés they’re uttering — an exchange between Brian and a young editor (Olivia Thirlby) is particularly excruciating in this respect — doesn’t redeem or excuse the clichés.

Tucci is wonderful, but Timlin comes close to eating him up almost as thoroughly as her character does his.

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

Directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, it’s a predictable comedy of reconciliation. But it boasts substantial pleasures, largely on account of the performers.

My Old Lady is pretty compelling viewing, mostly thanks to Kline, who gives a career-high performance here.

These days, Ritchie’s films are all about fabulous looking people causing a ruckus and blowing a lot of stuff up and taking out less good-looking bad guys in the bargain. “In the Grey” not only delivers these goods but goes into copious detail about just how Sid and Bronco get their ruckus up to speed.

Perpetually wide-eyed and mega-snarly bedraggled, Christina Ricci prowls through Black Snake Moan looking like something the cat dragged in. If you're anything like me, you'll be very grateful to the cat.

As a meditation of American life, Greendale is anything but coherent, but it is fluidly free-associative and shows bizarre wit, as when Young himself shows up to play Wayne Newton. [March 2004, p. 27]

What Moby leaves out of his account is as revealing as the tales of homelessness and addiction he puts in.

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.

Though this new Hills is both scarier and smarter than 95 percent of the other horror product out there, it's also indicative of everything that's wrong with horror movies today.

Each of these stalwarts bring more than charisma to their roles, and when the writing itself displays some snap (which admittedly isn’t that often) the performers bite right into it.

Most radically, this is a Poirot with heart. This interpretation is a dumb idea, but Mr. Branagh, an actor of prodigious skills, can at least pull this one half off. It’s not the only dumb idea in this film, which nevertheless bounces along in a way that’s sometimes almost entertaining.

Coogan brings his usual comic reliability to his characterization, as does Isla Fisher as the rich man’s predictably estranged wife, and they wring laughs from the material.

The roomier scenario of this remake has the potential to yield a decent thriller, but Superfly too often prioritizes showy sequences for dubious reasons.

For the most part, Murphy is pitching somewhere between "American Beauty" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"; indeed, the characters Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow play in Scissors are, in a sense, inversions of their roles in Beauty and Tenenbaums, respectively.

The movie dilutes its impact with lackluster direction of samey scenes — people in hotel rooms speechifying — and a distracting nighttime soap subplot.

Guerra aestheticizes everything to an extreme.

It’s a satisfying cast all the way down.

Gondry might have been better off keeping his movie on theoretical/slapstick grounds, because, quite frankly, his attempts at sincerity just don't make it.

The director is Michael Sucsy, who is not always up to the challenges of the knotty material — we live in a world of mainstream movies with clumsy edits, but this one has more conspicuously bad cuts than most.

That it's so flat as an action movie probably has a lot to do with why people might prefer to jawbone over its putatively controversial aspects--there's really not much of a “wow” factor to revel in.

Ghosts is one of Forman's most ambitious and daring films; would that all of its ambitions were fulfilled.

For every lively moment, there’s a reminder that the franchise is tiring.

Here’s the thing: The Intern, while having its share of silly moments, is the most genuinely enjoyable and likable movie that Meyers — a longtime writer and producer before taking up directing — has put her name to since, oh, I don’t know, 1984’s “Irreconcilable Differences.”

This is a movie that’s annoying in part because it doesn’t care if you’re annoyed by it. It doesn’t need you, the individual viewer, to like it. It just needs a crowd to see it. Whether you’ve been entertained or enlightened is immaterial. It’s Barnum time. You don’t like it? This way to the egress.

The Neon Demon is hot garbage that dares you to call it offensive. In addition, it’s offensive.