Glenn Kenny

In the end it's still Gilliam Lite, but Gilliam Lite is better than no Gilliam at all.

For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.

The actors and acting are so attractive--as is, per usual in a Merchant Ivory production, the scenery--that the movie’s less deft handling of the scenario’s various themes, not to mention some stumbling in the final quarter, when the story’s tone grows a little darker, doesn’t stand out as much as it might have.

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.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.

A handsomely mounted, never-less-than conspicuously intelligent but ultimately too-conventional historical drama, The Liberator shoehorns the epic life of early 19th-century South American revolutionary Simón Bolivar into two hours of intermittently powerful cinema.

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.

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.

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 movie’s strongest feature is its depiction of a male-female friendship that matter-of-factly abjures any romantic component. Temple and Pegg, when their characters aren’t falling apart (and even sometimes when they are), convey intelligence and mutual regard with refreshing straightforwardness.

Its story line is clean; the live-action actors, particularly Rose Byrne (as Bea, an artist who paints portraits of the bunnies), bring their onscreen-appeal A game; and the computer-generated animals are charming, albeit lacking in the particular gentle winsomeness of Potter’s originals.

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.

As it happens, each one of these tales is also a love story, and The Fountain is Aronofsky’s profession of faith concerning love’s place in the idea of eternity. It’s a movie that’s as deeply felt as it is imagined.

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

All this is frustrating, as the picture contains a few grace notes that remind one what an acute filmmaker Wong can be.

Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.

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

It's rare that a picture that deals with as much tragedy as this one also manages to convey as much warmth to its characters.

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.

The filmmakers are clearly trying to bring an uncommon maturity to the fantasy film, and in many respects they succeed. While not everything here works, what does is impressive.

By no means watch this if you’re looking for a nourishing cinematic experience. But if your idea of a cozy rom-com is an old Hugh Grant one, this has some cine-comfort-food-carbs for you.

It’s this kind of mindful direction and editing that helps make 21 Bridges one of the most entertaining and thoughtful American policiers in recent memory.

Its dour eccentricity gives Hardcore Henry a potency above and beyond that of standard-issue show-off action fare. That doesn’t mean it’s not still obnoxious, though.

Bloom plays his role with a feral commitment, and while Turturro has portrayed several villains in his career, here his refusal to ingratiate even slightly yields a genuinely frightening characterization.

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

The filmmakers do seem frequently flummoxed by the scale of the narrative, and you get a sense of them trying to cram a lot into a two-hour running time.

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.

If this mess is what they ended up with after erring with the best intentions, I feel bad for them. If this is actually the end result they were going for, I’d be inclined to use the legal system myself, to file an injunction against them ever getting near a soundstage again.

Whatever “Flipside” ultimately “means,” it’s ninety minutes well, and often amusingly and movingly, spent.

So hackneyed, tired, labored and overstuffed with contempt not only for all of its targets but also its own self that one gets the feeling that the talented Mr. McDonagh has gone mad with rage. Possibly during dealings with the American film industry.

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.

The Land won’t win any awards for originality of premise. And the movie, after that premise comes into play, tends to meander more than a suspense story ought to. It meanders for the best reason, though, which is to help the viewer get to know the characters.

One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.

This sometimes rewarding but also bothersomely uneven comedy is Julie Delpy’s sixth feature film as a director; she also co-wrote.

The work by the two leads is consistently committed, not to mention oozing with old fashioned movie-star charisma.

Here and in the earlier picture it’s perhaps easy to apprehend Dumont’s approach with a “What’s this oddball up to now?” smirk. But if Dumont is joking at all, it’s a form of what used to be called “kidding on the square.”

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

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

This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.

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

Scarlett Johansson looks lovely and hasn't much to do besides that, McGregor only starts having fun when he's playing the "original" of his clone.

One thing is certain: for all the strain the movie exerts, it never comes close to touching the hem of the writers it purports to depict. And it leaves the mystical and erotic dimensions of their lives and works far outside of its belabored vision.

The reason for all this dull-to-offensive story stuff is, of course, the dancing, which has its moments but overall seems so calculated to impress that it loses all other reason for being.

As ridiculous as it gets, and that’s plenty, A Dog’s Way Home manages to serve up a one- to two-hankie finale, depending on the extent of your dog-person-ness.

The movie steers into a “beat the system” narrative that packs some stirring “Erin Brockovich” energy.

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.

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.

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.

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

Clay Tarver, a veteran of the TV series “Silicon Valley” (and a founder of the postpunk band Chavez) directs with an eye and ear that’s a cut above what one usually gets with this sort of fare.

Please Stand By is a sensitive character study whose story beats are a little bit overly familiar, to be frank. Dakota Fanning is excellent as Wendy.

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

Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.

Those who aren't inclined to lambaste will surely have some stimulating conversations after the film is over.

The plot thickens ... and thickens ... and thickens. Gudegast is clearly an avid student of heist pictures, and he layers this one with a lot of spectacular complications even while he muddles the average viewer’s potential rooting interest.

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

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

On its surface, “Onlookers” is a movie that can be described very simply. For about an hour and twenty minutes, a series of very neatly composed shots depict natives of Laos and tourists observing a variety of sights and sites.

This is a perhaps even more misbegotten remake than the Farrelly Brothers' update of "The Heartbreak Kid."

Django is for the most part everything Reinhardt’s music was not: listless, glum and meandering.

Paul Rudd plays Berg with the droll, boyish charm he’s brought to dozens of other roles, but he adds a protective coating. This movie, directed by Ben Lewin from a Robert Rodat script (one adapted from Nicholas Dawidoff’s fascinating 1994 biography of Berg), relishes Berg’s compulsion to remain an enigma even to those closest to him

Reminders of Him deserves credit for serving it all up unabashedly and without a single wink. This is largely thanks to the stupendous Monroe, and also Withers.

Kirkby does keep up a jaunty pace. But he also seems preoccupied with impressing his inner hipster, as with an attitude toward race that dares you to call it cavalier. And his again edgy music choices.

Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife is less interesting, and less successful, as a remake of a much-bruited '70s art film than it is as a compendium of Rockian observations on the current state of the African-American bourgeoisie.

The movie hits its cinematic stride, as it happens, when events are at their worst. The Promise is drenched in production value and replete with ravishing shots of sunrises and sunsets, but it’s in the scenes of fleeing, of battle, and of horrendous loss that the film is at its most effective. The depiction of the savagery inflicted on Armenia is bracing.

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.

The movie percolates enough that even when, at its climax, it shamelessly recycles a grisly punch line from 1987’s “RoboCop,” it’s kind of endearing, not least because Mr. Anderson and company make it work.

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.

The heretofore nothing-but-delightful Simon Pegg stumbles in the long-anticipated feature film directorial debut of -- ta-da! -- David Schwimmer, who takes the sow's ear of a script given him by Pegg and Michael Ian Black and deep-fries it into a burnt pork rind of a movie.

The anecdotal, multi-narrative approach is useful in personalizing the phenomenon, but the movie still brought me up short. The approach also has liabilities. I wanted more context, more history.

The film itself falls short on two crucial levels: it’s neither sufficiently profound nor intoxicating enough to justify or transcend its self-seriousness. As good-looking as the movie and its stars are, Ardor, whose title refers to a literal state of burning, never manages to catch fire.

As for me, watching this overripe, ignorant parading of Hollywood privilege an hubris put me in mind of a different song--Neil Young's "Revolution Blues." Specifically the bit about Laurel Canyon being filled with famous stars . . .

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.

Aside from race jokes, Ted 2 offers a nearly staggering number of weed jokes, a couple of which are mildly funny, or at least funnier than the rape jokes.

Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”

It’s a challenge to keep action coherent and build suspense in the submerged environment simulated in “Underwater,” but Eubank doesn’t meet it, instead falling back on stale shocks that are not credibly buttressed by swelling bass effects on the soundtrack.

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.

What fascinated me most about the movie was its likely inadvertent depiction of the comfortable bubble the band and its fandom seem to have created for each other.

The movie’s not a barn-burner or future classic, but new Westerns are thin on the ground these days, and this ultimately is a better-than-decent one.

It is earnest and tortured and pointless, in a very self-serious suffer-for/with-art fashion.

While I rather doubt that co-writer/director Yuval Adler pitched his new picture as “'Death and the Maiden' meets ‘Leave it to Beaver,’” that sure is what he ended up with, conceptually at least.

Tolkien manages several scenes of credible emotional delicacy.

What’s interesting about Rock Dog is just how very unapologetically a kid’s movie it is.

In a movie year in which I’ve had to see both “Clown” and “Trash Fire,” the bar for worst of year is pretty low. I suppose that Pet, for me at least, completes a trifecta of sorts.

Harris and Murray are such reliably engaging screen presences that they provide a few glimmers of entertainment, provided you’re able to set aside the movie’s practically all-encompassing repulsiveness.

Watching it with a demonstrative crowd in a Times Square theater proved to this former grindhouse devotee that sometimes you can go home again, at least momentarily.

Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.

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

Aside from a rock-solid performance by Thomas Jane as the grizzled cop, Crown Vic, which is named after the Ford model car that is the default of the LAPD black-and-white, has very little to offer the discriminating moviegoer.

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.

This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller, and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith.

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

Whatever investigation it’s attempting, the movie is leaden in its pacing — the first 15 minutes feel like an hour — and its constricted shooting style, practically all hand-held almost close-ups, is transparent in its contrivance of realism.

On the plus side, there are these super-scary mechanical octopus-type things with a billion eyes and metal tentacles that fly in great awful swarms and look like the non-organic versions of the flying-brain-and-spinal-cord monsters that made the otherwise laughable '60s sci-fi flick "Fiend Without aFace" so cool.

Clash turns into a full-fledged horror movie, albeit one without the fake comfort of a supernatural or science-fiction pretext. It’s just man’s inhumanity to man, in full sway.

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

Part of what makes these kind of war movies such cinematic comfort food (aside from the moral certainty they strive to convey) is their familiarity. But I wonder if said familiarity is what compels contemporary filmmakers to overstuff the material -- Flyboys is a good two hours and 20 minutes.

Paltrow, whose previous directorial feature was the somewhat more apt 2007 showbiz romcom “The Good Night,” is an attentive student of cinema, as his mini-homages to the likes of Antonioni and Lucas in this story testify. But his story is a veritable nothingburger, here and there recalling notes from the likes of “Giant” and “There Will Be Blood,” but never really connecting on levels emotional or intellectual.

Perhaps paradoxically, it’s when the film is at its most quiet that it’s also most persuasive.

Starting Out never builds to the explosive climax it seems to be heading for, which I suppose is a good thing for its overall integrity, but maybe not so good for its motion-picture value.

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

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

The movie, directed by Robin Pront from a script by Pront and Jeroen Perceval (who’s also one of the film’s lead actors), is well-crafted up to a point. But the end to which it is crafted is utterly useless.

A spectacularly foursquare “family is what you make it” redemption story. The kind of thing that film critics like to dismiss as “looking like a made-for-TV movie,” as if that comparison/analogy even holds as a dismissal anymore.

While it’s inevitable that some, maybe many, viewers will find the dual role a distraction, those who hunger for De Niro in mobster mode will get more than their fill.

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

A largely fun watch, a corporate crime tale of consistent tartness enacted by a superb cast.

Turgid even in its brightness, overwritten in a way that does nothing to camoflauge its first-draft quality, jaw-droppingly overacted by all but one of its central cast members; it’s a Woody Allen disaster that elicits both a cocked head and a dropped jaw.

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.

While I might actually go out and buy the soundtrack album, the last thing I’m gonna say about the movie is friends shouldn’t let friends pay money to see We Are Your Friends.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

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”.

Anybody can make a movie that's anti-slavery. But to make a movie that's explicitly anti-democracy-that's something.

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

While Rebel in the Rye isn’t quite as bad as its pile-of-bricks-clunky title suggests, it’s both simple- and literal-minded, less concerned with Salinger’s consciousness or sensibility than with his ostensible ontological status as a Tortured Creative Giant.

The spectacle — its eardrum-shattering, eye-popping pyrotechnics, with the violence framed against all manner of phantasmagoric computer-generated backdrops — is its own reward.

The potential for real offense is palpable, but Bruce Almighty never gets there; the script is too lazy and incoherent--truly effective blasphemy takes brains and rigor.

The overall feel is Hong Kong to the core…which means CJ7, like the first 25 minutes or so of "Shaolin Soccer," doesn't make many allowances to Western sensibilities.

In the end, the wafer-thin story amounts to the same nihilistic slop that Phillips served up in the first “Joker,” albeit remixed, genre-wise.

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 being well shot, confidently written, and acted with a surfeit of commitment by most of its cast (Mendelsohn, who not for the first time reminded me uncomfortably of Trivago pitchman Tim Williams, is director Forrest’s ex-husband), I found the world it presented both smugly insular and overfamiliar.

I did admire this movie’s near-lunatic genre-hopping.

Remarkably pointless movie.

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

Director Freundlich clearly likes to dig in deep with this kind of character material, and here it pays off in ways it really hasn’t in some of his previous feature work (which includes “Trust the Man” and “The Rebound”).

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.

And while I understand the anger that animates Awbrey’s script, anger doesn’t excuse its overall weak argumentation, not to mention its rampant plot holes.

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

The writer-director Zack Whedon toggles his plot between “Out of the Past” and “Three Days of the Condor” with highly mixed results before letting loose with a hilariously unconvincing climactic reveal.

The Broken Lizard guys don't so much send up a genre as inhabit it, and subvert it from the inside.

Noisome, fragmented mess of a movie, the fourth film based on Jack Finney's novel "The Body Snatchers" and the worst of them all.

It's a decent comic-book movie that delivers its goods with good humor and a minimum of bloat.

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.

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."

Well, if there’s one positive thing to say about Brimstone, it’s that it doesn’t lack for lunatic ambition.

This is a whiffed effort at an all too familiar subgenre: the ostensibly dark, searing human drama undercut by the fact that all the humans in it are boorish idiots.

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

Unfortunately, the reach of The Return exceeds its grasp, and so this film of gruffly beautiful images didn't put a hook in me the way Zvyagintsev so ardently seems to want it to. [March 2003, p. 27]

A slight but not-unengaging Young Person’s Romantic Comedy.

There are more than a couple of moments in this film, adapted by writer-director Tod Williams from a big swatch of Irving’s multigenerational quilt "A Widow for One Year," that get Irving’s sense of grotesque tragedy and tragic grotesquerie just right

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 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.

The problem is the material itself, with its trite observations and shockingly flat writing.

Given that the B-to-Z movies parodied in Cadavra were funny to begin with, it begs the question as to why writer-director-star Larry Blamire and company bothered. I think they’re not so much nostalgic for this type of movie as they are for the kind of laughter it provoked.

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.

The visual effects are decent, the cast is better than decent, and that’s all, folks.

This is a Hong Kong action picture in the classical mode, balancing mayhem with sentimentality, offering up bone-crunching and jaw-dropping set pieces, and pulling out all the stops for a finale teeming with stressful twists and turnabouts — not to mention kicks, punches, gunshots and explosions.

You know what might make an intriguing, revealing movie? The story of how, over 30 years after its debut, a relatively innocent arcade game starring a giant ape and other oversize beasts underwent a corporate transmogrification and became a turgid, logy sci-fi/action blockbuster.

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.

Too many times the characters in this movie sprint across the line separating quirky charm from know-somethingish affectation, and then stay on the wrong side of it.

A plot twist saves (that might not be the word for it) Don’t Tell a Soul from being absolutely oppressive, merely by injecting a scintilla of “what happens next” appeal — and letting the always-interesting Wilson stretch a bit.

Whether they’re comfortable owning up to it or not, the Russos are better moviemakers than their Marvel movies (the most recent of which was the gargantuan hit “Avengers: Endgame”) allow them to be. They demonstrate that here. Holland, also a veteran of the superhero mode of cinema (he’s Spider-Man these days) shows performing chops that web-slinging doesn’t often let him flex.

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.

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.

Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.

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

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.

As bad movies go, The Jacket belongs to a relatively rare but extremely intriguing/irritating genus.

It’s violence for cowardly voyeurs who want to make the people who annoy them just shut up in a way that’s silent, sterile, and thoroughly humiliating to the victim.

Problem is, every time the movie gets near an authentic emotion, it barely pauses before making a run to the next Katy Perry song cue. (Seriously, both “Roar” and “Firework” are featured herein.) Given the care that the adult and teen actors invested in trying to honor their real-life counterparts, this feels lazy. If you like Katy Perry songs that much, you may feel differently.

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

Kidnap isn’t schlock, it’s garbage.

The movie balances amiable humor and standard believe-in-yourself bromides with better than average action sequences.

As a full movie experience this did not drop my jaw in a consistently enjoyable way. And the movie’s Trump joke is pretty ineffectual. Sad!

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.

The Belko Experiment is a grisly, sick-making exercise in sadism that tries to camouflage its base venality in a thought-experiment plot.

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

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

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

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

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 stridently theatricalized violence is horrific only because it’s so abjectly manipulative. By the end of the movie, my jaw felt unhinged from dropping so often.

This movie, which stars Stéphanie Sokolinski, the French musician known as Soko, in the role of Fuller, only comes alive during the dance sequences.

Perhaps this picture’s higher function is to be a calling card. But I don’t know what a calling-card project that demonstrates that its maker can semi-successfully mimic artistically vital but uncommercial directors is supposed to prove. For me, it mostly proved a waste of time.

Allen’s direction, with Vittorio Storaro lensing, is typically fluid. If you’re at all inclined to view this movie, you’ll find it’s very easy to take in.

The movie doesn’t always work, but it’s never boring.

This ostensibly edgy comedy didn't wring a single laugh out of me until maybe fifteen minutes before the finale.

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.

The Drowning...distinguishes itself by applying a depth of psychological observation that yields a genuinely unsettling vision.

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.

There are really no surprises here. But the action is bracing, Johnson’s performance is solid and, within its extremely narrow parameters, entirely convincing, and Gugino and Daddario are both gritty and attractive. The result is a pretty exemplary popcorn movie.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

The kids of today deserve better. So do I, come to think of it.

The shooting is picturesque, the acting overbaked.

Of course, all films, good or bad, are good or bad in their own way. I don’t know, though. All I See Is You seems extra-uniquely bad somehow.

The movie is not entirely my cup of tea, although it is refreshing in its depiction of diverse, older female characters.

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.

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.

As a fan and well-wisher of Coppola's, I wanted very much to like this movie, and I'll probably give it another shot once the DVD comes out. But, at first sight, Youth Without Youth's striving for exuberance reveals an almost desperate effort too much of the time.

I suppose it’s a genuine achievement that a movie packed with as much delightful canine (and agreeable human) talent as this one should be so insufferable.

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.

The earnestness brings the movie from mildly irritating pastiche status to actively awful, and that is all she wrote.

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.

The tonal weirdness and the philosophical fallacies and the general level of treacle did not sit very well with me. Then again, I have to admit I’m really more of a cat person.

Last Days manages to be thoroughly disquieting without overtly judging its subject.

For an ostensible action hero, Henry Golding in the title role does an awful lot of standing around and looking tense. The mayhem is frantic yet forgettable.

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 competently put together as this movie is, it imparted to me no sense of a higher calling, and thus left me unmoved.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Bad Samaritan director, Dean Devlin, handles the proceedings like Adrian Lyne (who directed “Fatal Attraction”) on HGH supplements (and divested of over a third of Mr. Lyne’s visual elegance, such as it is).

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 depictions of degradation and sadism are arguably accurate, yes. But they’re executed in a context that’s almost entirely free of meaningfully specific historical detail, to the extent that one comes to suspect this movie of commodifying human suffering.

A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com Maybe I Do was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.

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.

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.”

Speaking strictly for myself, Vin Diesel, here coming back to play Xander Cage, the James Bond of skateboarding character he originated in 2002’s “XXX” is the least exciting component of this 3D slam-bang fest.

[A] glib and repellent exercise in “can you top this” genre opportunism.

So, yes, the movie’s predictable, and writer Ryan Engle makes a lot of unforced dialogue errors.

It could be that Franco and Hudson, while not phoning it in, bring personae that are just too familiar/conventional to spark a high level of viewer involvement.

Directed by Pappi Corsicato and executive produced, typically, by the subject himself, the movie is never uninteresting but is often surprisingly low-energy and, even more surprisingly, visually drab.

Potter delivers her vision here in a form that’s perhaps too raw, too undistilled. There’s precious little lightness negotiating with the dark. Her lack of compromise is, as always, admirable — as is her way with actors.

I didn’t think I had see a worse fiction film this year than that other failed American Guignol, “Clown.” I may have been wrong.

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.

When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There’s certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that’s why there’s “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

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

Harvey is detail-oriented, good-humored, intimately involved and encouraging of her fellow musicians. The tunes she crafts for the resulting record are intricate and eclectic, but still honor the raw directness of her early work.

Rather than extend the epic sweep of this picture into the cosmic ineffable, he just wants the viewer bouncing along and rooting for its female hero. And the film succeeds admirably in this respect.

As the movie wears on, one suspects that the writer Luke Del Tredici and the director Jonathan Watson aren’t crafting an indictment of toxic masculinity, but an invitation to take some sadistic enjoyment in it, without consequences.

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.

The movie acknowledges its many antecedents.

Revisionist this may be, but it’s done with smarts and, sure ... perceptiveness and sensitivity.

As the parents, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Arquette seem just about as tired as the characters they’re playing. As Auralie, Ms. McLean is appealing and fresh-faced and could do well in a better coming-of-age movie in a few years.

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

Director Young shoots his unimaginative opus with an eye of getting all the value of the gore makeup department’s work on screen. In this respect, he does a bang-up job. As for everything else, well, this movie does answer the question “What if Eli Roth’s ‘Cabin Fever’ had zero sense of humor?” very satisfactorily.

This is a surprisingly old-fashioned disaster movie. In point of fact its old-fashioned-ness is really the only surprising thing about this eye-popping 3D spectacle.

The scenarios and their attendant psychologies are utterly conventional, but the characters and cast are appealing in equal measure.

LaBeouf essays a rather, let’s say, contemporary Pio. And completely sinks the picture.

In many respects, Silk Road is an excellent examination of why you should probably never date, or maybe even socialize with, a libertarian. It comes up short in almost every other way, though.

I’m not even going to discuss, in detail at least, the elephant in the ideological room that Passengers inhabits, which is its spectacular sexism.

The antics never out-and-out surprise, but they almost never fail to amuse.

The Hollow Point is such a shameless and indifferent recycling of Nihilistic Crime In The New American West clichés that it feels like it was crafted by committee. A really lazy committee.

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.

To his credit, the writer-director maintains a pretty decent balance between his disgust with this Business We Call Show and the movie’s thriller mechanics, which are not entirely well-engineered but do chug along to a not-unsatisfying climax.

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.”

Bad Therapy is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water.

A horror movie, a creepy and atmospheric and sometimes blood-soaked horror movie, and it’s got a good amount going for it.

The material about Kubrick’s process is finally more interesting than the discussions about his temperament.

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.

In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.

Not even a month after the John Travolta travesty “The Fanatic” seemed to have secured the title of Worst Film of 2019, up comes this movie to overtake it. By several lengths.

Food — its preparation, consumption and just what the hell its ingredients are — figures in a minimal plot that the filmmakers inflate in a variety of slick but ultimately unimpressive ways (particularly in the editing).

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

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.

The movie never builds enough momentum, emotional or narrative, to get the viewer on its side.

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.

De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision.

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.

A melodrama with an interesting trick in its tail, but I don’t think that director Garcia pulls the trick off as well as she might have. The movie is sumptuously shot by Christophe Beaucarne; every frame is robustly picturesque. But the story could have used a little less “Under the Tuscan Sun” and a little more “All That Heaven Allows.”

If you want to make a movie that argues for stricter gun laws, or more conscientious nationwide mental health care, by all means go ahead. But this kind of morbid, witless scab-picking, capped by an oh-so-ironic choice of closing credits song, is worse than useless.

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

This version has little quirk and less spark.

One watches this movie with a persistent “this is just … wrong” feeling. It’s not just the superficial depiction of Louis’s condition, or the facile depiction of racial dynamics, although those factors don’t help. Maybe it’s the pervasive self-seriousness in pursuit of what turns out to be nothing much at all.

Overall this remarkably glum, logy, convoluted and unengaging movie has only a vestigial relation to McCay’s work. McCay fans should beware. So should everyone else.

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

While its mode of argumentation gets weaker as the standard-issue boy-meets-girl-meets-carpe-diem plot progresses, the appealing cast and brisk running time help “Jexi” not wear out its welcome.

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

What chafes is not so much the vulgarity (although it is as relentless as it is unfunny) but the movie’s intractable infatuation with it.

In Zoe, the characters, all in their 30s at least (except for the robots, I know, but bear with me), still believe that 100-percent glitch-free everlasting love is a reasonable life goal. It’s this component, even more than the poorly realized sci-fi trappings, that finally make the movie a little insufferable.

While Glanz is the only cast member who gets within swinging distance of charisma, Roberti’s chops as a romantic lead are lacking.

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

As the movie heads for its quietly ghastly denouement, its plot mechanism gets a little wobbly, which is ultimately forgivable. It’s a genuinely tough picture, but it also has a real undercurrent of compassion.

Every aspect of this computer-animated movie directed by Kelly Asbury seems equally overdetermined and tossed-off, as if it were a caffeinated weekend project for everyone involved.

The movie ambles along amiably enough for a while; it’s better if you are a fan of one or more members of the cast.

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

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

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

The movie’s incredibly irritating characters made me remember why I only ever needed to watch “The Blair Witch Project” once, and its hobbling, dopey, drawn-out plotlines and xenophobic thematic threads made me think very, very kind thoughts about Eli Roth’s “Hostel” movies, which at least have ruthless efficiency going for them.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The movie feints in the direction of confronting horrific geopolitical realities, but there’s a specter of sentimentality hovering above the proceedings, waiting to smother everything in sight.

Irritating film.

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.

Mechanic: Resurrection suffers from a storyline and script that strains credulity and insults intelligence even by the low bar set by the majority of contemporary action movies.

All Eyez on Me, a fictionalized film biography of Shakur, directed by Benny Boom and starring Demetrius Shipp Jr., is not only a clumsy and often bland account of his life and work, but it also gives little genuine insight into his thought, talent or personality.

While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.

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.

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.

As conventional and stiff as Max Rose itself is, Lewis’ performance in it is full of virtues: he’s committed, disciplined, and entirely credible.

Is this all well-acted? It certainly is, especially by Langella. But all things being equal, I’d prefer to see him in a revival of “The Man Who Came To Dinner.”

I’m not qualified to say whether it’s an effective delivery system for its Christian message, but I think I can credibly pronounce it a good popcorn movie.

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

For adults -- even adults with fond memories of the TV series -- this is one bizarre mess.

The proceedings, which also include Susan falling hard for a smarmy “Jumpoline” proprietor played by Jim Rash, are professionally executed. Yet the movie’s pace seems glacial. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed a bunch of fish into a barrel and didn’t bother to shoot them.

If you saw the trailer, you got the best the movie has to offer.

Yes, Burying The Ex, I thought as I watched, I AM on your side conceptually already. Now could you start being genuinely funny? Or scary? Or something?

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.

To get at the heart of what’s wrong with The Face of an Angel all you need to do is consider the professional stones it takes to adapt the Amanda Knox case into yet another movie about the existential/amorous crises of a white male filmmaker. (And then have the nerve to dedicate the results to the memory of the murder-victim in the real-life case!)

Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.

The movie does gain in stature just by letting Cage be Cage. When he’s riding in a car right after his release, Frank rolls down the window feeling a breeze on his face. Cage puts on that “shine sweet freedom” expression he used at the end of “Con Air.” If you’re a fan of the actor, this is a moment when all is right in the world.

A consistently intelligent (or at least bright), coherently constructed comedy that is on occasion a rather pointed critique of the American education system in the early 21st century. Don’t let that keep you away, though. It’s more often than not really funny.

There’s actually a not-too bad caper plot underneath the incoherent over-direction from Mann.

Jonathan Penner’s sharp script (from a story by Robert Damon Schneck) and Stacy Title’s assured direction keep the heat on, and there’s some resourceful misdirection that deepens the story and intensifies the scares.

Sometimes the walls don’t have to be closing in to create an oppressive atmosphere. Sometimes it’s just enough to have the wallpaper closing in.