Jesse Hassenger

The Color Purple is involving on a scene-to-scene basis, but it has a processional quality. Though it’s less constrained than Spielberg’s sometimes sentimentalized version of the material, the new movie isn’t less sentimental – or less thirsty for audience approval.

The younger characters are so full of life, and the older ones so full of trenchant but predictable talking-point issues, that it sometimes feels like a middling movie encroaching on a good one.

Playmobil: The Movie isn’t as funny as some of the direct-to-video Lego-related movies, either, and that’s very much the field it competes in, theatrical release or not. As children’s entertainment goes, this is a harmless distractor, but it’s also poorly conceived at every story turn, unable to even stick to a particular generic message to make up for its extremely basic humor.

Though little about the technical skill of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero brings to mind Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of "War Horse."

At times, Rogue Agent feels reluctant to fully engage in the kind of deception that might make it a trickier, more “fun” piece of work; it’s almost too tasteful for its own good.

For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.

Well into his late period, Campbell still knows his way around a crisp cut, but sometimes that’s most noticeable in Cleaner when he’s not directing action at all – which is a surprising amount of the time.

It never pushes far enough into that territory to distinguish its beautiful losers from the many addiction-movie characters that precede them.

It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.

Henson saw potential in Spinney that he proceeded to realize over the course of many years. I Am Big Bird only has 90 minutes to cover the basics.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.

After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.

It’s hard to fault Puzzle for going in a more rigorous, serious-minded direction... until it trudges in that direction with such repetition. Turtletaub and his screenwriters lay the borderline-anachronistic details of their heroine’s oppressive life on so thick that the movie starts to sag.

Everything’s Going to Be Great just has characters and ideas waiting in the wings to rush in nonsensically.

Mr. Holmes has moments of palpable regret and loss, but visually speaking, it looks like a blandly touching movie about a lonely old man who befriends a scrappy kid and learns about the magic of storytelling. Eventually, that’s the unexciting destiny it fulfills.

It’s a movie about a toxic relationship that digs into the harrowing psychological details of mental and verbal abuse without exploiting it. It’s also a single-minded PSA picture — indie portraiture with hardly any identifying details filled in.

Ritchie’s film is less infatuated with displays of All-American bodily sacrifice than movies like Lone Survivor and 13 Hours, but it still keys into a kind of performative, manly anguish.

Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.

There’s little of the intimacy of Bahrani’s best work, and while the book has been described as dark-humored, the movie feels more like a typical prestige adaptation, hitting the key themes and scenes without finding an independent tone. Despite its obvious currency, it’s more yesterday than tomorrow.

Lopez indulges a different form of movie-star vanity than simply making herself over as an unstoppable woman of action. The movie pretends to conceal her mothering sensitivity, but it’s actually flaunting the same maudlin old-man sentimentality that drives so many Liam Neeson vehicles, minus the genuine anguish Neeson can usually summon on cue.

The movie keeps enough of Richard’s messy past off screen to feel like a hagiography with a few concessions, rather than a true warts-and-all portrait.

It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.

No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.

The dead air in the movie’s opening section is intentional, yet there are moments where Final Cut, the movie you’re actually watching, feels off – not through outright incompetence, but the eerie, imitative quality of a too-soon-too-little remake. Call it undead air.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

Despite some white-knuckle moments, Dynamite slackens with each runthrough of its perma-climactic 15 minutes. In the world of global catastrophes, Bigelow increasingly resembles an unwitting tourist, just like the rest of us.

Instead of deepening his material, Condon has made an unsuccessful fling of a movie: fun for a while, but trying to get as far as it can by leaving crucial material off of its profile.