Jason Bailey

There’s not much here for anyone over 10 to focus on, aside from how strange it is that the puppy Clifford looks so much more fake than the giant one.

Tom Hanks is such an avatar for optimism and goodness that the qualities of this character – his heartbreak and vulnerability and resignation to a certain kind of hopelessness – land with greater impact, and he’s so good that when the filmmakers go for the big emotional wallop at the end, they almost pull it off.

The new Slumber Party Massacre feels like the last thing a movie with this title should be: safe.

Even its weakest pieces are still entertaining, and the good stuff is exceptionally so.

Derrickson can build a mood and craft creepy imagery, and he moves his camera with precision. But this feels like a notebook of compelling visual and narrative ideas that never quite fit together, that can’t quite manage to coalesce into coherence.

There are a handful of genuinely chilling compositions, copious buckets of blood, and while I know we’re all tired of throwback synth-heavy scores in horror, this is a pretty good throwback synth-heavy score. Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House otherwise rarely feels like this is more than a job for hire.

One can’t help coming away with the feeling that if the intelligence and originality of All My Puny Sorrows matched its earnestness, they could’ve really had something here.

Movies like “Earwig” defy criticism or even explanation. ... Lucile Hadžihalilović took a risk by making a movie this peculiar; it feels like the least we can do is take a risk by watching it.

The Survivor is occasionally infected by the aridness of the handsome, well-made historical film — it feels old-fashioned, in both the complimentary and pejorative senses. But some of that is purposeful and even a little subversive.

Gellar and Goldfine manage the tone expertly, inserting little jolts of humor to keep things from getting too reverent.

McDonagh is such a smart writer that one spends much of the movie waiting for his script to exhibit some awareness of the trope, and to comment on it, but that acknowledgment never arrives – and as a result, this is his thinnest screenplay to date, flimsy enough that, in a lesser actor’s hands, it could really fall apart.

That ending, poetic and beautiful, is the chronological conclusion of Days; emotionally, it crests a few minutes earlier, as the two men go on a modest dinner “date” after their encounter.

The picture is hobbled by the bland, lifeless color palette of too much contemporary genre filmmaking, as well as a buffet of unintentionally hilarious dialogue, and when the big third act reveal arrives, it’s comically dopey. And once that turn is taken, well, you can pretty much predict every beat that follows.

There’s little in Respect that one couldn’t glean from a Wikipedia scan, and in terms of her work, time would be better-spent re-watching “Amazing Grace” or revisiting her albums.

A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, Wolfgang provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.

The complexity of the plotting overwhelms the picture a bit, which gets a little fuzzy in the middle – but it eventually forcefully snaps into focus, mostly by finding its spine in the simple notion that this is a movie about people under pressure.

It’s so fresh and so funny in its first hour or so, in fact, that it’s a real bummer to watch it all fall to pieces in the home stretch, with a pivot into drama that’s too much, too fast — and, more importantly, too much of things we’ve seen before.

It’s all so breezy and light that you just want to join them and hang out for a while, even with all the drama they’ve got brewing.

At its best, it does what Bourdain’s work did: “Roadrunner” makes you want to jump on a plane, discover a new place, a new culture, eat a great meal, and make a new friend. What could be more valuable?

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a marginally better movie than “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” But that’s kind of like saying that getting stabbed in the gut is marginally better than getting stabbed in the neck.

Bana is one of the producers of The Dry, and it’s not hard to see why he wanted to act the role, which is uniquely suited to his specific talents – his potent mixture of brusque physicality and barely bottled emotion. Connolly is a patient enough director to let us take in the pain this man holds in his face and the quiet power in his eyes.

It’s rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.

The pacing is wobbly – it runs a too-flabby 105 minutes – and some of the filmmaking is pretty rickety . . . . But Swan Song is about its performers, and they shine.

Gregg, who wrote and directed, has mostly written for television, and while this is her feature directorial debut, she’s a born filmmaker.

The de rigueur slapstick scenes for the title characters don’t even play, as the integration of animation and live action is so clunky that it feels like we’re watching special effects demonstrations rather than gags.

One of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal.

Filled with fascinating yet long-forgotten anecdotes ... "Street Gang" ultimately focuses on the correct subject: the artists and educators who made "Sesame Street," and how much of its power and influence seems an outgrowth of the unique chemistry created by those specific people, at that specific moment.

In the Earth isn’t a complete washout; there are moments of bleak humor, genre fans will enjoy the striking imagery and gross-out shivers, and the director has an undeniable gift for setting and maintaining a mood (he gets a big assist on the latter from Clint Mansell’s synth score). But ultimately, it’s kind of a slog.