Jen Chaney

This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.

We get a reboot that takes no risks and steers away from the uncomfortable sexual jolts of its predecessor. This movie doesn’t raise hell. Honestly, it barely raises heck.

The movie Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul belongs to Regina Hall. By the end, she has seized it with both hands thanks to a performance that, especially in the film’s second half, is explosive, multi-layered and, unfortunately, much more purposeful than the film itself.

Too much is skimmed over rather than dug into deeply.

In its subtext, this movie tells us that nothing is as good as you might hope. That’s true of the era that Tony would later, wrongly, glorify. And it’s true of a movie that is fascinating to study and consider, but not nearly as good as the television series that made us wish for this movie to exist.

The result is a piece that’s more personal, but also not as rigorous and objective.

This film ultimately doesn’t reach its full potential in part because it can’t settle firmly enough on a vibe or viewpoint. It ping-pongs between buoyant caper, farce, and female empowerment drama without ever lingering long enough in a single zone to make an impact.

It’s obvious that Poehler and her colleagues have taken great care to impart all the right civic and social lessons, and that’s good. But watching Moxie, you wish they could have exhaled more and allowed more unresolvable messiness to infiltrate the movie’s spaces.

A movie about such a pivotal figure who fought, and still fights, so hard for gender equality should spark some intense emotion, especially if you’re a woman. Weirdly, The Glorias never does that.

Class Action Park tries with only partial success to capture the dissonance between the funny war stories told about that hazardous site and how awful and tragic it was that young people lost their lives there.

It’s as if the film is taking after its own heroines: aspiring to something bigger than it should, and too often looking awkward in the process.

Big Stone Gap suffers from some hokey moments, including an ending that’s both implausible and too heavy on the sap.

Perhaps Sneakerheadz needs a sequel, one that more directly interrogates the shoe manufacturers themselves about the hazards of pumping up so much hype about their product.

Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.

Unfortunately, this procedural/character study unfolds in a manner that feels more generic than genuinely deep.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is like the family movie equivalent of a Krabby Patty: It tastes fine and will satisfy some cravings. But it’s ultimately a product cranked out to make money and keep our consumer-driven society, much like Bikini Bottom’s, chugging along without significant disruption.

What transpires in this adequately acted, uninventive film fails to add any fresh twists to the cash-vs.-conscience formula.

My Old Lady isn’t the tart slice of dessert that its initial scenes suggest it might be. In fact, it only becomes truly compelling in its second half, as Horovitz drives toward darker material and farther away from the light.

The Disney animators still take great care to capture the majestic beauty in the jagged landscapes and towering conifers of the Yellowstone-esque Piston Peak Park. Unfortunately, the same contours and shading don’t apply to the characters.

It’s a perfectly pleasant cinema-studies seminar, but one that stops just short of teaching its students anything truly insightful.

Decoding Annie Parker could have shown much more effectively and deeply that the fight against an often ruthless disease can be won by women attacking it from multiple sides. Instead, it sticks mostly to one track, taking audience members on a journey that, sadly, via the movies or their own lives, they already may know a little too well.

This film can’t decide whether it’s a Noah Baumbach-ian character study or an episode of NBC’s Revolution.

It doesn’t provide enough rigorously reported context about what happened in 1991 to feel like anything close to a definitive portrait of the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas saga.

The film captures its lush, leafy settings with an understated evocativeness that fully immerses the audience in its sense of place. The problem is that the movie ultimately leans too heavily on that sense of understatement, failing to let genuine, unexpected emotion fully break through to the surface.

The Bag Man is always teetering on the edge of amateurish absurdity, before being tugged back from the edge by its actors.

Hall and Hart have appeared together in several movies, including 2012’s Think Like A Man, but have never been paired as love interests. Here, they lock into a manic, improvisational groove from minute one.

In a movie like this, where plot points are practically an aside, the characters’ depth and the dialogue quality are what give it potentially memorable zing. Cavemen is not only zingless, it practically pulls a muscle attempting to generate some.

Lacks a sense of structure and purpose, ambling from one tense conversation to the next without effectively making a impact.

Angels Sing is a heartfelt but less-than-polished piece of work that isn’t for everyone, particularly those who can’t suspend the disbelief required to accept preposterous plot developments, or the sight of Lyle Lovett wearing a variety of snowman sweatshirts. But graded on a Christmas-movie curve, it actually isn’t bad.

As a stand-alone documentary, it begs for more conflict and a broader canvas from which to explore the contemporary theater scene.

As an enjoyable documentary about the history behind a surprising game-changer of a song, this film works well. But it misses the opportunity to take its material to the next level and say something bigger.

The fact that this overlong, often preposterous comedy succeeds at all (which it does, only occasionally) proves that the Vaughn/Wilson charm can still work a measure of magic.