Jake Coyle

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of Dolittle isn’t the incoherent story line, the suffocating CGI or the unfunny stable of celebrity-voiced creatures. It’s that Downey’s personality doesn’t come through at all, either a victim of the surrounding mess or a party to it.

Ly’s film excels in its lively verisimilitude, its terrific cast and its intensity. Les Miserables is a powder keg, always at risk of detonating.

For a movie predicated on satisfying fans, The Rise of Skywalker is a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion to what had been an imperfect but mostly good few films.

If Eastwood had extended the sensitivity it shows to Jewell to others, it might have been worth something more. Instead, it becomes just what it preaches against: a hatchet job.

The question, ultimately, is whether Bombshell ought to have spun quite so snappy a movie out of such a story. It does cartwheels to make a vile tale compelling, and it can feel like a parade of starry impressions rather than something genuine.

The Two Popes might promulgate an optimistic portrait of the Catholic Church and its leaders. But in these sweetly sincere scenes, you forget Benedict and Bergoglio are pontiff and pontiff-to-be. And the moment of respite from the world’s arguments and divisions feels like a benediction.

The whodunit turns out not only to still have a few moves left but to be downright acrobatic.

It’s Jones who dominates the film

Where Haynes excels is in teasing out the personal and professional connections that mingle throughout.

21 Bridges is well crafted enough to pass the time, but anything more than that is a bridge too far.

The Good Liar is a kind of film one wants to love. Such old-fashioned genre movies, let alone those starring actors in their 70s and 80s, are hard to find these days. But in trying to take a simple crime set-up and stretch it into a more sweeping tale of vengeance and victimhood, The Good Liar has to make some fairly preposterous moves to get there, and it doesn’t do a very good job of cloaking them.

Last Christmas is about as buoyant as leftover eggnog. Clarke’s natural charm comes through — she looks ecstatic to be out of Westeros and playing a less upright character — but such a fleabag-screwup role feels better suited to a more comedic performer.

All sequels and no originals make us all dull boys.

Motherless Brooklyn is done well enough that you wish it had struck out on its own path, rather than crib from Robert Towne and Roman Polanski. It’s hard to forget it, but that’s “Chinatown.”

It’s starting to seem like every franchise film, when in search of a story, throws a battle against the wall and hopes something sticks. Not only has this gotten tiresome, but it also sacrifices what we came here for in the first place: Jolie and Pfeiffer glowering at each other.

It’s a movie best seen less as a historical epic and more as a metaphor for a rising young movie star coming up in a culture he aims to subvert.

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.

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

Aside from verging on the one-note, that focus constricts the very linear, very self-contained Ad Astra, a taut but inflexible chamber piece in a genre given to symphony.

Taking each storyline at a time, all accompanied by flashbacks, gives each character some depth, even as the crowded film — at nearly three-hours long — verges on turning into a clown car. That sheer much-ness is in the spirit of King’s massive book. “Chapter Two” is, for better or worse, a horror carnival.

Brittany Runs a Marathon starts comically; its first moments, with Brittany working as an usher at an off-Broadway theater are its funniest. But it grows increasingly earnest. That’s part of the movie’s charm but also what leads it a little off track.

Blinded by the Light isn’t a new tune, but it’s sung with an infectious passion and it captures something sincere about the globe-spanning, life-changing influence of great pop music.

Good Boys mines that gulf between childhood and adolescence like few films have before.

Even if the material — a haunted scarecrow, a young woman’s vengeful ghost — can feel stale off the page, Øvredal’s filmmaking is fresh and vibrant.

Usually, it’s pleasingly aware of its own silliness. But there are blind spots.

Pitt, in particular, appears so utterly self-possessed. It’s a swaggering grade-A movie star performance in a movie that celebrates all that movie stars can accomplish — which, for Tarantino, is anything.

Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, so abundant with realistic simulations of the natural world, is curiously lifeless.

The movie’s premise is one long Uber ad, but it’s a clever enough buddy comedy setup, and both Nanjiani and Bautista are good comic performers. So what’s missing here?