Jake Coyle

There’s a stale emptiness to Living that doesn’t entirely dissipate in even its most moving scenes.

It would be easy to hail The Naked Gun as something better than it is, since it simply existing is cause for celebration. But like most reboots, particularly comedy ones, the best thing about the new “Naked Gun” is that it might send you back to the original.

As cinematography, Malcolm & Marie (shot by Marcell Rév) is great. As cinema, not so much.

Pearce, sweaty and grungy, steadies Memory; it’s his film as much as Neeson’s.

This is an unusually soulful coming-of-age movie considering the number of spinal cords that get ripped right of bodies.

Bird may go down as a rare miss for Arnold but you can still see the keenness of her eye and the nimbleness of her camera, with her regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan. And that’s true never so much as when the camera is on Adams, a talent, whose melancholy eyes say more than all the theatrics around her.

That a movie called “The Sheep Detectives” tries to impart lessons of morality and mindfulness is, of course, laudable. A wide swath of entertainment aimed at children makes no such attempt. But “The Sheep Detectives” could have used more slapstick and less CGI sincerity.

I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who just wants to see her and these actors together again. But the movie, well stocked in Prada, could have used a bit more of Streep’s unflappable devil.

American Animals would be a legitimate cautionary tale if it wasn’t invalidated by its own existence.

The real heist of Crime 101 is an old one: If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

While its ideas are often intriguing, the movie feels like high-concept scaffolding that only thinly conceals it hollowness. It’s a Tesla without electricity.

For the big tonal swings in A Simple Favor to work, the characters needed to be more plausibly grounded. Lively and Kendrick’s early scenes ping-pong nicely with odd-couple chemistry, but “A Simple Favor” loses the thread, and never shakes the feeling of a rushed Gillian Flynn knockoff.

A pair of other recent films — “Minding the Gap,” ″Skate Kitchen” — better explored the camaraderie and freedom of skater culture. But there are glimpses here of a more radiant, lyrical film.

Tigertail comes off more as an idea of an arthouse movie than one propelled by its own volition.

Honk for Jesus in the end doesn’t aim for anything like the madcap parody of, say, HBO’s riotous “The Righteous Gemstones,” but it may have been more successful if it took the approach of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and kept its camera glued to the first lady of the church.

Someone Great has not exactly rewritten the rom-com rule book. Where it distinguishes itself is in the fresh faces of it cast (the rom-com is not known as the most diverse of genres) and in focusing on the hard realities of breakup rather than the fairytale of falling in love.

As a B-movie with a couple of A-listers, “The Rip” will probably go down as a minor and flawed genre exercise. But even in their lesser efforts, the sincerity of Damon and Affleck’s buddy routine remains winning.

Plane is as broadly sketched as its title. Puerto Rico doubles here for Philippines, and most of the story elements, too, feel like they’re stand-ins for basic plot conventions.

Abominable is sweet and simple enough, but its emotionality always feels thin and, like much of the film, paint by numbers.

A dead-end wrong turn in the usually boundless Pixar universe. Buzz, himself, is a bit of a bore, too.

Goddard’s film looks terrific and has all of the — as Hamm’s character would say with exaggerated Southern flare — “accoutrements” of an intoxicating slow-burn thriller, but none of the payoff.

A calculatedly combustible concoction, designed, like its chaos-creating character, to cause a stir. To provoke and distort. I wish it was as radical as it thinks it is.

Only a few times does the banter between Moana and Maui really remind you of the fun that characterized the original.

Productions of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull almost always tip too far into farce or wade too deeply into tragedy, unable to sustain the play’s elusive balancing act. Michael Mayer’s lush and lively big-screen adaption is unfortunately no exception.

All the momentum that “Wicked: For Good” does gather is owed significantly to its stars. To a large degree, these movies have been the Erivo-and-Grande show, a grand spectacle of female friendship that rises above all the petty biases and misjudgments to forge a vision of harmony in opposites. It’s a compelling vision, and Chu, as he did in the triumphant “Defying Gravity” culmination of part one, knows how to stick the landing.

It’s not plot deviations from King’s novel that hamper Pet Sematary. It’s that, from early on, Kölsch and Widmyer, rely less on the detailed accumulation of atmosphere that King built his tale on, than jump cuts and music cues to build suspense. It puts Pet Sematary on a more familiar genre track.

Collet-Serra’s genre mechanics, stylized and sober, are efficient. His trains run on time, even if — especially in The Commuter — a rush-hour’s worth of implausibility eventually wrecks the thrill.

Hosoda grafted “Beauty and the Beast” into “Belle,” to sometimes awkward, sometimes illuminating effect. But in “Scarlet,” he struggles to bridge “Hamlet” to today. It’s a big swing, the kind filmmakers as talented as Hosoda should be taking, but it doesn’t pay off.