Jesse Hassenger

It’s the first time McCarthy has made such prickly use of his talent for summoning audience sympathy, allowing Bill’s regrets about his parental shortcomings to resonate through his every decision.

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm.

In its loopy, beguiling, occasionally befuddling way, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it’s trying—and sometimes failing—to sum something up about Miller’s own history of loving strange movie magic.

On the Rocks is her most accessible movie so far, with less hazy atmosphere and a sturdier, more traditional center: Laura is written by Coppola and performed by Rashida Jones with a directness lacking in The Virgin Suicides or Lost in Translation.

If Gudegast is indeed aiming for Michael Mann, as some contemplative shots and a synth-y score suggest, he’s arguably missed the mark wider than ever. If he’s hoping to chart his own territory, well, Pantera spends a lot of time in the wilderness – before teasing another sequel, of course, where surprise will be even harder to come by.

As they often do, Tomlin and Fonda make their material look sharper than it really is.

On the whole, The Aeronauts is a pretty good small-scale adventure movie. It’s also a pretty dull everything-else, the unceasing flashbacks providing multiple instances where telling might have been preferable to showing.

With its three leads all having appeared repeatedly in the small-town setting of "Parks And Recreation," My Blind Brother sometimes feels like an alternate-world appendix to that beloved show.

It’s still mostly just a time-passer for younger kids — and, absent a strong point of view, as much of a hedged bet as its narration-and-song opening.

The Lucy-Desi material that should be at the heart of the story never really pays off, as if it’s wandered off and found another, secret movie to inhabit.

The performers do sell a lot of this material. Bell is especially funny as a cheery, lonely mom whose litany of childcare responsibilities has cut her off from the rest of the world.

For a touch-and-go exercise in hoping the audience will fill in not just the narrative blanks but the emotional ones, there’s We Live in Time.

Fuze doesn’t fly off the rails at its midpoint. It keeps moving forward at a steady clip. By its final stretch, however, the effort to sustain itself becomes more visible, and less quietly confident.

The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.

The heroes are noble but believable, the villains appropriately loathsome, and the violent clashes, particularly a turning-point castle infiltration, are exciting without indulging in a Gibson-style wallow in torture and gore. But the moments of offbeat personality that animate Mackenzie’s best work are fewer and farther between.

As in a lot of good sci-fi, the movie is set in a particular world, but driven by the characters that inhabit it.

It turns out that Sing’s myriad irritations are a lot more eclectic than its long, long playlist of pop hits.

Springsteen’s earnestness makes him seem like a nicer, more open-hearted sort than Dylan in A Complete Unknown. It also makes for a less prickly character in a less entertaining movie.

Josh Hartnett does a fine job in Fight or Flight’s intensely physical, one-versus-100 lead role, but the movie doesn’t have much to offer beyond 15 minutes of inventive action and 80 minutes of aggressive mediocrity.

In other words, 12 years have elapsed since the last Bridget Jones movie. A skinnier, more put-together Bridget isn’t necessarily a more interesting character; she’s a little more "Sex And The City" this time out, however incrementally.

As much as the movie sidesteps biographical conventions with its narrow frame and playful tone, it can’t avoid a separate cliché that plagues this sort of material: Elvis & Nixon is basically a diverting TV movie given a theatrical release.

This makes The Final Girls an odd concoction: a semi-crude and not especially scary horror-comedy with some real emotional depth.

Only in fits and starts does Together capture the electricity of live performance.

It’s telling that The Forgiven has the shape of a long, dark night of the soul, while actually taking place over several days.

If anything, Demons Strike Back is an even zanier and more kid-friendly affair than the Chow original. Yet without Chow’s unique strain of silliness, it also feels louder and more antic while covering less ground.

Ana may be attempting to climb the class ladder, but the movie moves between classes with a freedom that feels weakly imagined.

Yet none of this stuff, largely but not exclusively confined to a rote opening 30 minutes or so, works as well as the seemingly lower-stakes but far more evocatively handled saga of John Wick’s dog.

Primate makes a characteristically concise case for Roberts as a genre stylist to keep watching.