Glenn Kenny

Although McDormand's performance is consistently focused -- one would expect no less from the actress -- the movie itself can't settle on whether Miss Pettigrew is Mary Poppins minus the sugar spoonful or just plain Carrie Nation.

For all of its failings, the movie sometimes manages to bring a scary whiff of the street into its sounds and images.

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.

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.

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.

Only trouble is, none of the elements — the scary stuff, the psychological drama, the family-dynamic crises — really deliver the wallop necessary to provide truly memorable horror fare.

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

The double-crosses are depicted by the director Andy Goddard with better-than-average craft, but the more the movie leans into old suspense conventions the more interest it loses, alas.

I admit, I laughed. I was also charmed by Bridgit Mendler as Meredith, Ben’s feisty hometown love interest.

While the movie is ultimately more of the same old same old, it is at least not as appallingly sexist and culturally insensitive as “The Ridiculous Six,” Mr. Sandler’s dreaded 2015 Netflix Original western “spoof.”

The talented Morano, whose work on the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” shows a knack for shuddery grim realism, sometimes seems to want to subvert the espionage-action genre by bludgeoning the pleasure out of it.

The cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered.

Birth of the Dragon is ambitious: it wants to be a character study, an explication of martial arts philosophy and an action picture.... But the film never really gets fully juiced until the climax.

The movie becomes less fizzy once DeCillo decides to make A Statement (a rather incoherent one at that).

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.

The acting is good all around but that, too, improves in the quieter moments. Monroe, best known for her work in “It Follows,” is tough and committed, and Jennifer Garner’s portrayal of a mad housewife sprinting to a meltdown is acute, even if its does require her to tamp down pretty much all of her engaging life-positive qualities.

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

This is, among other things, something of a fatty movie. It goes out of its way to hit “beats” that it presumes will be satisfying to a mainstream audience.

When the movie can stay out of its own way, it delivers some powerful scenes, including one in which Blomfeld faces down a would-be assassin (Nandiphile Mbeshu, superb) in a prison shower room. But beyond that, the movie offers conventional gratifications and no surprises.

Despite its best efforts, Tanna drifts into a mode of exoticism that renders it an ultimately frustrating experience.

While much of the movie was shot on an actual ship, there is a lot of C.G.I., and a good deal of it is not entirely convincing. “Greyhound” also feels like a movie that was conceived as an epic but could not quite muster the necessary force. As such, it’s ultimately one of Hanks’s most perfunctory pictures.

An angry movie that’s angry about the right things. But it's so angry that it gets a little crazy about it.

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.

It's too bad that the movie induces eyeball-rolling almost as much as it does armrest-clutching.

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.

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 moments of charm and fun are few.

The movie also falls back on a lot of boogity-boogity docu-clichés. Skittery editing, ironic music cues, that sort of thing.

The shooting is picturesque, the acting overbaked.

Everyone involved figured that sentiment trumps sloppiness. Original Soundtrack

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 Runner squanders at least one great performance (Fonda’s) and delivers a dispiritingly inert cinematic experience.

None of the proceedings are sidesplittingly funny, but they grow increasingly sweet-natured. The most remarkable aspect of this movie is its perhaps unwitting gentleness.

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

Wants to be at any given moment--wrenching, thought-provoking, surprising, heartbreaking--all it ever is is tastefully lifeless. It’s been beaten into a coma by its own scruples.

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).

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

The only thing worse than hot garbage is elaborately lukewarm mediocrity, and for too much of its running time, the new comedy Stuber is just that.

All of these nuances, as well as whatever satirical social commentary the movie wanted to make, are lost in the climax, a press conference staged with a threadbare quality that’s sadly typical of too much original Syfy fare.

De Niro is game throughout, and sometimes amusing in that way he can be. But Walken is the funniest performer here.

The adult viewer, reflecting on the idea that this is “just” a kid’s movie, might conclude that kids deserve a little better.

Never as giddily awful as Gotti, this movie suffers more from a case of what film critic Andrew Sarris called “Strained Seriousness.” Except the ostensible seriousness here never runs particularly deep. Lansky is for Keitel completists only.

Tharlo instead opts for fleeting charm and shaggy humanism, until the narrative takes a grim turn that’s both trite and sexist. The bottom drops out of the movie, leaving its interest almost exclusively ethnographic.

Too-laborious meditation on life and death.

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.”

Director Jonathan Sobol has an apt if not avid eye for gritty and colorful locations, and when the movie is at its most loose-limbed it’s a pleasure to watch. But around the time the director resorts to a trunk-point-of-view shot that’s turned into a not-terribly-flattering imitation of “Pulp Fiction,” The Padre begins to take itself more seriously than the wafer-thin back stories of the opposing characters should allow.

I cannot lie, though. As cranky as much of the movie made me, Pastoll, Blaney, and especially Bolger all contrive to deliver as satisfying a climax and dénouement to this saga as one could hope for. So there is that.

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.

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

Meet the Robinsons is a mess -- a sometimes fun but mostly frustrating mess.

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

The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over.

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

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.

And it mostly doesn’t quite work, because Fred, as written by MacBride and played by Dylan O’Brien, just isn’t a compelling character.

Movies made over fifty years ago by the likes of Max Ophuls were more animated, more angry, more radical in their critiques of such injustice. So watch "Letter From An Unknown Woman" before you even think of checking this out, is my advice to you.

The movie is a pointed reminder that Ms. McAdams is one of cinema’s most accomplished and appealing comic actresses. It’s almost heartbreaking to contemplate how amazing she would be in a new comedy that was more than intermittently O.K.

Okeniyi has a strong presence that conveys a genuine moral authority.

The issues presented in When Two Worlds Collide are so crucial that it feels churlish to characterize it as a dutiful, and ultimately pedestrian, documentary. There is something evasive about it as well.

It's the sourest and most borderline misogynist picture the Farrellys have yet made.

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.

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.

This is a movie that is too frenetic and basic to make a substantial impression. I appreciated a kernel of observation here and there, but not enough for me to give it a whole-hearted embrace.

Not unlike an expensively tattooed panhandler, the couple elicit only a skeptical kind of sympathy.

The scenes that leave Ms. Mara and Mr. Mendelsohn alone are, tellingly, the most interesting and effective ones. Their performances are tightly focused and unflinching; too bad they are surrounded by a lot of heavy-handed, poorly aimed cinematic showing off.

The attractiveness of the scenery, and a quiet, dignified performance by Ms. Peña in what could now be her last movie appearance, wind up being the main redeeming values here.

Since John Wells is a director of some conscience and screenwriter Steven Knight is in fact capable of first-rate work, Burnt packs some minor surprises and attractive details along its way.

We Are the Flesh, its abundance of repellent imagery notwithstanding, has an air of the academic about it.

Much of the movie, from its attempts to capture the confusing exhilaration of youthful experience to its predictable progressive character dynamics, is labored.

The Happytime Murders isn’t so much interested in immersing you in a comedic world so much as it is in having its puppets do the most outrageous things you’ve never seen or heard puppets do in a movie.

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.

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

The filmmakers might have cleared up suspicions about their motivations and ethics had they worked them into the narrative.

“Blizzard” is almost immaculately shot and edited, but its good-taste approach to warfare, along with its treacly music score by Lolita Ritmanis, underscores what seems its main reason for being: a relentless “Go, Latvia!” agenda — which has extended to its marketing here.

Lead actors Byrne and Deen do grounded, stalwart work, and director Mitu Misra occasionally succeeds in making the characters’ milieu’s register with force. But the storytelling is rickety.

it’s a surprisingly O.K. addition to the genre.

Ultimately, the ingratiating eccentricities of Venom aren’t enough to really distinguish the movie from its superhero-movie brethren as it devolves into the usual expensive orgy of sound, fury and wisecracking.

As Feral — directed by Andrew Wonder from a script he wrote with Priscilla Kavanaugh and Jason Mendez — moves forward, it doesn’t always do a great job of splitting the difference between a raw depiction of harsh reality and ostentatious deck-stacking.

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.

The storyline is so rote that the idiosyncrasies of the scene don’t register with any power.

Good-hearted stuff, to be sure, but mainly of interest to lovers of cinematic comfort food.

Nowadays it seems when European filmmakers want to make pictures in North America, it’s always some gritty backwoods blood-drenched drama or thriller. Same with young actors like the Fiennes fella wanting to play black-eyed scruffy snotty miscreants. Is this some wayward pursuit of a kind of authenticity? Because what it is, ultimately, no matter how much competence is brought to bear to such exercises, tiresome.

The full-on goofiness is not reliably buoyant; this is an intermittently enjoyable but often choppy comic ride.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.

As a delivery system for a newly minted and reasonably engaging if not always laugh-out-loud comedy team — Reese Witherspoon and Sophie Vergara — Hot Pursuit works.

“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.

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.

While this latter-day noir never builds up the froth of lurid delirium that brings genre pictures into a headier dimension, it’s got enough juice to hold your attention.

I suppose there are some who will get off on this movie’s competence and uber-sincerity, but I found the premise one or two bridges too far. Sam Elliott junkies, too, are sure to be delighted.

The goings-on are grim, grueling and, eventually, grisly. Mensore shoots them with a sharp eye for maintaining coherent spatial relations, which enhances the suspense. It’s a sometimes bracing simulation.

The moviemakers are accomplished enough to make something coherent out of this tonal mishmash, but I was left with a "was this trip really necessary" feeling for all that.

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

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

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 pretty frustrating to watch a close-but-no-cigar movie like this.

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.

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

Grant and Kurzel’s conceptions of the characters are so one-dimensional they seem to defeat the movie’s talented cast.

For the first half-hour or so of Eternal Beauty, Roberts and Hawkins take an unusual and intermittently illuminating approach to depicting mental illness. . . . But the movie doesn’t keep up its good work.

This movie is often pretty slack in matters of story construction and direction.

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

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.

There are a lot of dark corridors, and the characters do quite a bit of ducking and crouching. Mr. Young handles it reasonably well, but I was struck by an unavoidable truth: These scenes of suspense and scare excel on a large screen, in a reasonably crowded theater.

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

While Watts is reliably vulnerable, it’s Judah Lewis as her son Chris who does the heavier emotional lifting.

The movie’s prime mover, Rogen, is a doge of stoner humor, and he shows incredible discipline in this film by saving the first weed joke for twenty minutes in. I commend him for that.

Better than I expected but still not entirely convincing. As a cautionary tale for demimonde-sters, though, it has its useful points--never argue about money while you're in a K-hole, that sort of thing.

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

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

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.

The movie becomes more involving as it finds its focus.... Ms. Hale does an excellent job portraying a popular overachiever understandably resisting the inevitable.

Instead of maintaining an effervescent fizzle, Phantom Boy too frequently sputters piffle.

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.

What exerts an odd fascination here is that each character heartily embodies a different variety of solipsistic creep; you start feeling sorry for the creators of the movie for having to live among such awful people. Then it dawns on you that the film’s creators don’t find these people awful at all — they find them normal. Terrifying, really.

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

For what it's worth, The Legend of Tarzan is several unpretentious cuts above the pompous, leaden "Greystoke" of over thirty years ago.

Idiosyncratic to the point of alienation.

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

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.

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.

It’s frustrating to see such a sophisticated cinematic apparatus used in the service of such muddled half-ideas.

The movie’s impersonal, conventional telling of a reasonably standard male coming-of-age story almost tends to make the punk milieu it depicts beside the point.

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.

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.

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

Expertly acted throughout...the movie’s raw facts are sufficient to rouse viewer indignation. But the material arguably calls for a more proactively provocative approach.

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.

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

A well-meaning and sometimes interesting effort written and directed by brothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist.

As relatively handsomely mounted as this movie is, it’s also kind of a shambles. Had I not read a press release about it prior to attending its New York screening, I would not know who the damn thing was even about until a whole half-hour in.

This is a modestly-scaled and exceptionally crafted independent film that is genuinely invested in its characters.

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.

Unfortunately, for this viewer, the formal constraint foisted upon him by writer/director Jeremy Rush in Wheelman went right up his nose and stayed there, resulting in a little less than 90 minutes of annoyance.

There are intimations of “Tales From the Crypt,” “Final Destination,” “The Game,” and other older, better films here; this movie never catches a fire like any of those did, and even its twist coda feels dreary and pro forma.

I wonder if there was a point in the making of this film at which Hickenlooper might have realized he picked the wrong subject. [May 2004, p. 18]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some striking scenes notwithstanding, this movie doesn’t achieve the delirium it aspires to. It’s often flat and tame, and obvious in the wrong ways.

The movie’s approach is gratuitously grandiose.

I suppose this went down easily enough for me because I grew up with this kind of stuff, and can surrender to it as a kind of cinematic comfort food. But still. For those not so inclined, the entertainment value could conceivably be derived from the brisk, no-nonsense direction by Michael Apted, and the talents of what they used to call “an all-star cast”.

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.

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.

Yes, the computer-generated colors, overseen by the director Cal Brunker, are bright, the pups have soulful eyes . . . and the story line . . . is, um, a story line.

A more finely focused treatment would have made a much better summation of, or introduction to, Mr. Naharin’s work.

This handsomely mounted film, in its cute ADD way, soon forgets its half-hearted attempt to make History Relevant to What Is Going On in the World Today and morphs into a sort of Classic Comics on acid, or, as a friend so brilliantly put it, "the longest Eurythmics video ever made."

While the viewer can intuit that Hanish has a strong clear story to tell, the director too often tricks things up.

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

Whether I should call this movie a “passion project” or a “vanity project” is something I’ve thought about, and since it appears from the evidence of the fight scenes in this film that Mr. Flanery could render me unconscious within half a minute of being introduced to me, “passion project” is the way to go.

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

There’s some intriguing social commentary in the Chinese comedic melodrama I Am Not Madame Bovary.... But appreciating it, and the other points of interest in the movie, requires a perhaps unusual amount of patience, or even indulgence.

A documentary that wants to appear inventive but too often comes off as affected, directed by Jeffrey McHale.

It goes very far south, with two plot reveals that are among the most ludicrous that I’ve experienced in quite some time.

A consistent—almost catalog-like, you might say—array of pictorial wonders, Medeas, the debut feature from the Italian-born director Andrea Pallaoro is also a work of considerable daring. This plain, almost minimalist narrative presents itself from a position that neither talks down to nor attempts to cozy up to its audience.

Along the way there’s a scene of a secret meeting in a parking garage that’s more realistic, maybe, than the shadowy one in “All The President’s Men,” but not nearly as gripping. This problem persists throughout.

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

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.

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.

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.

If mid-level dank atmospherics attending well-replayed semi-dystopian “dark” mechanics are sufficient to hook you into a genre movie, you’re all set. If you demand better, this won’t do.

Outlandish as its action often is, The Captain is based on a true story. Schwentke’s film, though, has an allegorical/satirical axe to grind, and it more often than not frames the narrative in dark archetypal terms.

A figure as unusual and distinctive as Fields certainly deserves a commemoration. The bad news here is that he deserves better than what Danny Says serves up.

The particularly outstanding cinematography is by Dante Spinotti, the craftsman who also shot the likes of “Heat” and “L.A. Confidential.”

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

The kitchen action here is pretty diverting -- everybody involved seems to have boned up on their Bourdain and Buford, and having done so, sanitized what they've gleaned with Hollywood polish.

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

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.

Ramshackle one minute, pointlessly deliberate the next.

The first English-language film from the Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven (her 2015 movie “Mustang” was a foreign language Oscar nominee) is well-acted across the board, and contains more than a few outstanding, unpredictable scenes. But in tying its story to this particular moment in American history, the movie bites off more than it can coherently chew.

The information here is compelling and frightening, but the movie is ham-handed.

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.

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.

The premise here is not unpromising but the execution—indeed the whole aesthetic—is something like The Grifters-Lite.

The movie has some pleasures, but can be heartily recommended only to those who like their entertainments equally inoffensive and inconsequential.

The performers get their jobs done without leaving much of an impression. In terms of who or what Footnotes can win over, I think only hardcore Francophiles will find its charms genuinely compelling.

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.

The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise

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.

It’s heartening to see Mr. Chan, who plays the avuncular leader of the guerrillas, demonstrating that he’s still game, but you wish his energy were being expended in more consistently enjoyable pictures.

One thing’s for sure: In Staying Vertical, every character has sex on the brain, all the time.

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

Particularly in its portrayal of Thurman, who here isn’t so much misunderstood and unloved as he is dumber than a bag of rocks, this sequel actively devalues the compassion-on-the-knife-edge-of-misanthropy that distinguished the original in favor of a mainstream gross-out cartoon. The market demands nothing less, apparently.

This consistently ridiculous movie, written and directed by Leo Zhang, does offer Jackie Chan mixing it up at a magician’s rehearsal (he pulls a rabbit from a hat) and Jackie Chan kickboxing at the top of the Sydney Opera House.

If the movie’s looseness lets in an excess of dead air, “Nobody’s Fool” is still dotted with pleasures besides those Haddish brings.

Such a hit-and-miss mess that it makes the wild-and-crazy-to-the-point-of-sometimes-flailing tenor of “Anchorman” and other such Ferrell vehicles feel like finely-tuned Logitech vehicles.

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

In my cut of the film, it ends after Jones opens the parcel from his son that's been sitting on his kitchen table since shortly after he left. I recommend viewers leave the theater at that point. You won't be sorry that you did.

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.

While hardly perfect, a movie that frequently displays surprising sensitivity and sensibility.

What the viewer is not left short of is a whole lot of yelling and cursing in various languages as Christo’s collaborators and helpmates confront practically each and every crisis in a truculent panic. Art isn’t easy, we all know that. But does it also have to be this crazy?

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.

I hold Soderbergh in high esteem, but as handsome a technical achievement as it is, The Good German plays to me as a failed experiment.

It’s an amiable misfire. But Brie Larson sure can light up the screen, and she does so here — she’s a pleasant singer, too — and that’s enough to raise this from a one-and-a-half star movie to a two.

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

The movie gets so drunk on its stylistic affectations (and unfunny attempts at cerebral comedy) that by the time it sobers up to take James’s mental health seriously, it’s too little, too late. And also too bad, as it’s only in the last quarter that the viewer gets to appreciate the range of the movie’s appealing lead players.

The movie’s structural dynamics make it play like a cross between “Nocturnal Animals” and “Sleuth.” But the stagings are stilted; the relations between the conflicted characters never catch fire.

On the whole, this picture, which could just as well be titled “Dog, Actually,” is sweeter-than-average treacle.

The story is as predictable as they come, played out at such a low emotional temperature as to be practically ignorable. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it offered something else worth paying attention to. Something else besides the endlessly watchable lead actress, that is.

Some scenes in this film, directed by Jon Kauffman, put across the perversity of prison social ecosystems. But the picture’s gender and race dynamics, not to mention its forced star-crossed lovers theme, are sufficiently commonplace to register as hackneyed.

The big problem with the movie isn’t the muddle, but the strain.

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.

The movie is not boring as such, but because it is a chronicle told almost entirely by the people behind the space (Mr. Conboy being one of them), it is relentlessly personal — there’s no genuine cultural critique.

One wonders why “Whitetail Deer Hunter” chose such a relatively toothless route, but one doesn’t wonder too long, as it’s the kind of movie you forget about 20 minutes after seeing it.

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.

While it’s generally a pleasure to see stalwarts like Cromwell, Weaver and Jack Thompson (as one of the old gang) at work, one also wishes they had found, well, better work.

Most of this movie, which is almost entirely in English, is taken up with tone-deaf humanist tales.

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 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.

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.

There’s a nearly astute satire of the app-driven life bubbling under the meta high jinks. And the movie throws so many gags at the screen that several jokes actually stick. But the purposeful sensory overload mostly yields head-spinning stupefaction, leaving a viewer feeling like Wile E. Coyote after hitting a mesa wall.

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.

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.

“A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation.

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.

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

The movie is relentlessly fluffy.

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.

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.

Body eventually goes for ["Very Bad Thing"'s] brand of cheap irony in a less blackly comedic register, and unfortunately achieves it.

The movie, directed by Myles Desenberg and Paul Dugdale, frequently counts down to the Hollywood Bowl show as it chronicles rehearsals and other tour stops, but there’s no real suspense, because the footage from that show is interspersed throughout the movie from the very beginning.

Baptist’s approach, treating his subjects like characters in a drama, is ultimately frustrating.

Ms. Olson’s images are often captivating, but too often undercut by the aforementioned aspiring-to-the-dialectical voice-over, which is awkwardly written, and delivered with a lack of affect that grows tedious over the course of an hour.

It’s not good, but it could pass muster among midnight-movie enthusiasts or curious stoners.

Marauders lays out a scenario in the first 40 minutes or so that, oddly enough, makes you think “this is not an entirely uninteresting premise for a thriller.” But after that, things devolve into “this is extremely far-fetched” and, finally, “this is goofy.”

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.

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.”

Whatever feminist angle the film might have once aspired to is lost in its listless shuffle.

The filmmakers, who made “Leviathan,” the striking 2012 immersion into commercial fishing, seem to be arguing that Sagawa needs to be understood beyond moralistic preconceptions. Caniba did not make the case for me. I consider Sagawa repellent, and the movie an exercise in intellectualized scab-picking.

While the killings (replete with beheadings, dismemberments and more) are zestfully depicted — the director Adrian Grunberg has a way with pace and bloody impact to be sure — the picture overall is rote, mechanical.

The depredations of the Nazis are depicted in a way that will make viewers want to declare war on Germany anew. But Come What May is also too pretty of a movie. It is often sentimental and, worse, schematic.

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.

This movie is, it happens, easier to sit through than the 2014 film. The 3-D action, overseen by the director Dave Green, is not wholly incoherent. The production values (showcasing new mutants and many gear-heavy extra-dimensional machines undreamed of in any actual engineering philosophy) are ultrashiny. And there are even a couple of amusing, albeit unmemorable, sight gags and one-liners.

The movie’s actual entertainment value rises considerably during the dialogue-free sequences.

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

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.

Mr. Schumacher’s movie is more a failed tone poem than a horror picture, and to its credit, this new version, with a trickier script by Ben Ripley and hyper-competent direction from the Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev improves on it — by making it behave like a horror movie every now and then.

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

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

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.

The movie’s vagueness wants to appear purposeful, reflecting Jean’s disorientation, but it’s mostly confounding. Brosnahan, when she’s not playing panicked, largely enacts Jean as an irritated cipher.

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.

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

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.

The movie’s ambition is the good news. The bad news is that it is a hash, choosing to jumble the historical record and frame a Churchill bout with depression against the D-Day invasion of France by Allied forces.

Between predictable, commonplace plot turns and characterizations of music business types that are even more obnoxious than the norm, the movie’s straining for effect is less than ingratiating.

The movie is sloppy.

This is a movie of bits, enacted by varied comic luminaries. McCarthy’s “who me?” winsomeness, running neck and neck with her quick-witted cheekiness, is familiar. A new dynamic is added by the inspired Brian Tyree Henry.

As cinema either theatrical or televisual is concerned, The Kissing Booth is negligible. It is fascinating, though, as a study in the semiotics of the high school movie, especially in the ways it’s been recodified since “young adult” became a real genre.

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.

"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.

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.

One feels the filmmaker trying hard to work out the inner struggles of his sad but largely unsympathetic characters. But his movie is as miserable and ultimately confounding as it is earnest.

Because Mr. Hill is still, in most respects, Mr. Hill, a lot of the movie is more watchable than it has a right to be. But ultimately, The Assignment ends up being ridiculous even by its own nonsensical standards.

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

The filmmakers keep the visuals merry and popping bright. Benedict Cumberbatch, voicing the Grinch, opts not to compete with Karloff at all, which is smart, and speaks in an American accent, sounding rather like Bill Hader, which is confusing.

The Surrogate feels like the vexed progeny of an elevator pitch and an ethics advice column.

Guerra aestheticizes everything to an extreme.

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.

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.

The movie acknowledges its many antecedents.

As moving as Mr. de la Manitou’s testimony sometimes is, this movie too often feels like a credulity-straining attempt at hagiography.

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.

Ms. Henson, ever simmering, takes Mary’s moral conundrum very seriously. Her expressive eyes and nuanced body language work well for the character; she can put across a major change in attitude just by shifting a hip. The script, though, doesn’t give her a whole lot of material with which to credibly enact her character’s crisis.

What it conveys is not so much Mr. Mekas’s experience as Mr. Gordon’s will, and his cheap sadistic hostility to the audience. It makes this film a vexed experience.

This is the kind of movie that is usually defended with one word: “harmless.”

As it happens, this movie is an expansion of Ms. Pourriat’s 2010 short film, “Oppressed Majority,” which was a punchier, and not particularly comedic, allegory of sexual assault. That picture can be found on YouTube; I don’t think it’s good either, but it’s more genuinely thought-provoking than its expansion.

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

It is also a romantic comedy/drama whose tone ping-pongs from grave to lyrical to absurdist willy-nilly, and hits all those registers at fortissimo volume.

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