Jocelyn Noveck

The rebelliousness of each of the strong women here — mother and daughter — somehow coalesces into understanding. Such moments can be sappy, but here, as with her lovely opening shot, Keshavarz does it well. She sticks the landing.

Certainly the film has a fascinating premise, one that would have worked well enough were it totally fictional — but works better with the knowledge that it’s based on fact.

The mashup of genres may feel a bit tonally rough, but it ultimately works, not least because of its unifying factor: Sweeney, who imbues her no-holds-barred portrayal of Martin with both sweetness and rage, with brio and real vulnerability.

Luckily, The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, gets one thing very right: Tahar Rahim’s masterful central performance. The French actor achieves something his big-name costars — Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — do not, presenting a multi-layered, subtly shaded and deeply moving portrayal that proves hard to forget.

Stone is always compelling, and with an ace nemesis in Thompson, she’s having a blast.

Some people hate horror films of any kind. They’re not the intended audience here. But for those who don’t, or are mixed, it’s true: You may watch “Final Destination Bloodlines” through fingers covering your face. But chances are high you’ll be smiling, too.

Lawrence’s novel may have been shocking when it was published — most famously, it was the subject of a major obscenity trial in Britain — but it is not shocking now, no matter how frank the sex scenes. So any adaptation needs more to distinguish it than heaving bodies, however attractive.

Does all this work? Well, it depends on how you feel about ... Cats. Did you love the show? You’ll find stuff to love here. Did you hate it? Ditto! Or maybe ... you’ll have both reactions? That’s possible too.

Vice is frenetic and fun, flippant and frustrating.

While much of Bissell’s film is poignantly rendered, especially the spirited lead performances by Taraji P. Henson and Sam Rockwell, it has its flaws and its omissions.

The biggest challenge for Styles, and for the studio that lists him as one of a six-actor ensemble — albeit at the top of the list, they’re not stupid! — is to mute the confident pop-star magnetism, in service of the story. This he does. At times, though, it seems he’s pressing too hard on that mute button, erasing personality from his portrayal.

A slick, fizzy bit of entertainment that’s occasionally delightful and usually fun, even if the translation to 2024 definitely has its rough spots.

Bring your hand warmers, toe warmers, heart warmers and soul warmers — this update of the 1922 silent vampire classic will chill you to the bone...But it may not terrify you. Everything in Robert Eggers’ faithful, even adoring remake, from his picturesque 19th century German town to those bleak mountain snowscapes leading to that (brrr) imposing castle in Transylvania, looks great. But with its stylized, often stilted dialogue and overly dramatic storytelling, it feels more like everyone is living in a quaint period painting rather than a world populated by real humans (and, well, vampires) made of flesh and, er, blood.

The chief weakness of “Freakier Friday” — which brings Curtis and Lohan back for an amiable, often joyful and certainly chaotic reunion — is that while it hews overly closely to the structure, storyline and even dialogue of the original, it tries too hard to up the ante.

While it’s a nice way to spend just short of two hours, it seems he could have sucked a little more out of those dusty old graves.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is clearly not aimed solely at kids, but rather is banking on the fact that adults, too, will be drawn to the striking visuals and mature themes at play.

For all these characters, something about being subjugated by someone else provides a perverse sense of comfort.

Kudos to Hancock for making the film crackle along wittily, drawing in even those of us prone to shudder at movies with a fast-rising body count.

Not surprisingly, Carmichael proves a director who is nothing if not confident and comfortable with the UNcomfortable. He keeps the action moving — at a few moments, the film even feels like an action pic.

Rylance is also one of those few actors who can power an entire film, and The Phantom of the Open definitely rides on the strength of his signature quirky energy as it tells the true-life story of Maurice Flitcroft, a shipyard crane operator from northern England who stunned the golfing world in 1976 by entering the British Open under false pretenses — he’d never played a round of golf — and shooting the worst qualifying round in Open history.

A smart rom-com that tries to be honest about life and still leave us smiling — that math seems to add up just fine.

At the end, you might be a bit confused by what has really happened, or is yet to. But the journey has been absorbing.

The main problem with The Spy Who Dumped Me is its strange dissonance of tone. There’s nothing wrong with trying to be a hard-knuckle action film and a goofy comedy all at once. But here, that effort results in moments of occasionally stunning violence that simply don’t mesh with the light-hearted vibe the filmmakers seek elsewhere.

Irresistible has its smart laughs and real pleasures.

That the comet is a stand-in for climate change is hardly a secret going into Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s exceedingly watchable, funny and star-studded yet somewhat chaotic satire.

Kravitz almost pulls it off. With the help of a terrific cast, she offers strikingly confident, brashly entertaining filmmaking, until everything seems to break down in a mess of porous storytelling.

This film’s biggest lack is the connective tissue — we don’t ever really understand, alas, how young Trump became President Trump.

Eventually, the movie does seem to get where it’s going. A scene between Alice and Roberta touches upon issues of literary ownership and artistic license that haven’t yet been fully mined. It’s a bit late in the game. But the ride has been pleasant.

Unlike Robert Eggers’ 2024 “Nosferatu,” which was beautiful but bleak to look at and featured an ugly, fearsome vampire, Besson imbues his main character with a swashbuckling sexiness that suits his star’s craggy appeal.

Book Club has a script that’s often so heavy on the corn — make that corn syrup — that it strains credulity and leaves you groaning. But then, darn it, suddenly it makes you tearful, with an unexpectedly genuine moment, or laugh out loud. It’s a credit to the cast, and the cast only.

At times Spoiler Alert feels like an edgy, clever film that plays wittily on the main character’s lifelong obsession with TV. At others, it feels like a more formulaic, holiday-themed tearjerker — the passing years are marked in a Christmas card montage! — that wrings our tears in unsubtle ways.

Master ultimately suffers the fate of many promising films with many good ideas and not enough time to develop them — some paring down would have improved the latter part of the film.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, hotly awaited by devotees of the decades-old role-playing game, makes darned sure to be fun, and funny — enough to laugh at itself. And that’s the thing that makes it work.

It’s a pleasant and occasionally mesmerizing ride, thanks in no small measure to Sandler’s skillful empathy and yet another absorbing turn by Mulligan, who never disappoints. In the constellation that is Hollywood, her star continues to be one of the brightest.

Yes, there’s a lot you can predict from the outset, not to mention lines you could have pre-written, word for word. But that doesn’t mean your heart won’t be caught up in this deeply felt, poignantly told story from Navajo country, especially when the last player takes that last shot in those final seconds — never mind some heavy-handed moments.

The violence is expertly choreographed, but some of us surely could have done with less bloodshed (there are Tarantino-esque flourishes here, too) and more dialogue to deepen some of the tantalizing relationships Samuel introduces.

At one point in this 184-minute drama, I started wondering if I was seeing a bunch of disco balls trying to destroy each other. But maybe this was a moment of sensory overload.

Memory is selective, memory is jumbled, memory travels in different directions. And so does “Mothering Sunday,” Eva Husson’s affecting and visually pleasing — if languorous — meditation on love and loss, based on a woman’s memory of an impactful day that reverberates through her long life.

The issue is simply that with all the artistic resources and refreshing ideas here, there’s a fuzziness to the storytelling itself.

A vivid presence despite her dry-as-dust tone, Threapleton makes a splendid Andersonian debut here as half the father-daughter duo, along with Benicio Del Toro, that drives the director’s latest creation. Their emerging relationship is what stands out amid the familiar Andersonian details: the picture-book aesthetic.

Whether Moore’s frenetic but absorbing work here — the cinematic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, where you throw everything and some of it sticks — pleases or frustrates you, one thing is clear. Moore’s at his best when hitting a subject dear to his heart.

The sequel, again directed by David F. Sandberg, feels less breezily funny, less fresh, less fleet of foot.

Guadagnino gives us a lesson in the history of Hollywood itself, not to mention the birth of the “movie star” and the role fashion has played in that. (It’s great fun.)

A novel like Coetzee’s invites readers to fill in the blank spaces. On a screen, we tend to crave more specificity. The result, coupled with a too-languorous pace, is a film that’s intermittently engrossing and always interesting, but less potent than it could have been.

For every laugh-out-loud moment in the smartly paced first half, there’s a sigh later as to what might have been.

Despite being near the action, we don’t feel particularly close to it. Still, we get to see the wheels turning, and it’s hard not to get wrapped up in some of the backstage moments.

It’s a film that tells its stunning tale with heart and conviction, yet seems somehow reticent about pointing a truly critical finger at either the brutality of a sport that broke this family, or the man who seemed to give his sons no choice in the matter: family patriarch Fritz Von Erich.

There is not much “edge” here, but Clooney and team prove that sometimes, slow and steady — or should we say, pretty and pleasing — can still win some races.

Director James Watkins and especially his excellent troupe of actors, adult and children alike, do a nice job of building the tension, slowly but surely. Until all bloody hell breaks loose, of course. And then, in its third act, “Speak No Evil” becomes an entertaining but routine horror flick, with predictable results.

Despite the compelling source material, “Ordinary Angels” is one of those movies where you can predict developments with certainty.

Teamwork. Friendship. Family. Playing for the game’s sake, not money. All these themes come together in a warm-hearted but highly predictable way.

For older viewers, though, it may be hard to ignore some of the clunkier moments of a script that, in trying to update a story created in 1963, gets in its own way with dialogue that while sometimes funny and sweet, can be awkward and occasionally even off-key.

Again, it all feels like a 30th reunion — maybe because it IS one — where the liquor flows, old stories are rehashed, the men haven’t aged quite as well as the women, the kids steal the show, and by the end you’re happy to have gone but feel no need to be at the next one.

Hawke takes a fairly one-dimensional character and gives it an intelligent and shaded performance.

All the charm and style in the world, and J.Lo has more than anyone, can’t make up for the bizarre tonal imbalance of “Shotgun Wedding,” a movie too violent to be funny and too funny (in the odd, weird sense) to be fun.

Some have argued that the film glorifies its subject. It doesn’t, really. But it doesn’t explain him, either. And that leads to another question, which is, if there’s nothing really new to say about Ted Bundy, need we be saying anything?

Despite some satisfying moments, by the increasingly cringe-worthy last third of the movie you’re just annoyed that it seems to want to cover all bases — to have its, er, cannoli and eat it, too.

Rodriguez and her fans deserve better than Miss Bala, a disappointingly bland and formulaic Hollywood remake of a much grittier and bleaker Mexican thriller.

This is a very big, very (very!) loud, very jumpy horror flick, and the screams will come, and they’ll be audible. Which is precisely what “Alien” fans are surely waiting for.

It’s hard not to think of the title when contemplating the overall effect of a film that spares no expense to entertain, yet ends up feeling a little aimless, perplexingly bland, and — what’s the word we’re looking for? Oh yes. Gray.

It’s hard to pinpoint why this next level of Grace’s very bad wedding night, again directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, feels darker and heavier — and hence, less enjoyable — than the original, which managed to maintain a bouncy feel, even with bodies combusting at an absurd rate. But if we have to blame someone, we’re gonna go with the doctor from “The Pitt.”

Writer-directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly offer up a commentary on the value of work. There’s a critique of capitalism, and an intriguing buddy relationship between two women with very different lives but shared goals.

Parallels to “My Best Friend’s Wedding” come early and often.

The action comes fast and furious, and the banter is pleasant enough. Diaz, especially, makes the proceedings decently enjoyable and some of the sillier lines believable.

The Alto Knights, despite its pedigree, doesn’t rise anywhere near the heights of its glorious predecessors. It is, rather, an enjoyable if choppily paced look at a relationship between two men, where unfortunately we’re arriving pretty late in the game.

Richardson, throughout, gives an empathetic and endearing performance, and Hardy matches her for charm, even if he doesn’t convince as a self-described “maths nerd.”

The real problem with I Feel Pretty, written and directed by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, is not in its message or conception, but in its ragtag execution.

In an extremely physical, committed, even exhausting performance, Pattinson takes what could have been an unwieldy mess and makes it much less, well, expendable.

Not all of it works, but it’s never uninteresting or uncreative — especially when it comes to finding inventively horrible (or horribly inventive) ways for people to die.

Ultimately, Pain Hustlers feels like a retreading of the same ground covered in other recent works, bringing nothing especially new to the table and, in splitting the stylistic difference between slick/breezy and poignant/authentic, succeeding fully at neither.

Of course, it all comes down to a Shyamalan-style final twist — the most entertaining part of the film, but it comes way, way too late. Listen, we’re all up for some summer fun on the beach. But by the time we’re allowed in on the secret here, we’re feeling a bit tired.

A feminist recasting of the familiar story is welcome, of course, but the screenplay focuses so insistently on its female-empowering message that it feels at times like we’re just getting hit over the head with it.

It’s also all over the map, in every way possible. It’s visually gorgeous at times but then boring to behold at others, emotionally poignant at times but stunningly cloying at others. It’s also confusing (though to be fair, many might call the book confusing, too.) Mostly, it’s just a frustrating whole comprised of some pretty promising parts.

There’s a lot of gross, both kinda and mega, over this film’s 93-minute running time. Also a lot of poop jokes, and penis jokes, both canine and human. You get the picture.

At a certain point, somebody says “I just hope this goes better than last time.” It’s a cheeky reference to the first film, but also a rather dangerous line to include in a sequel, because they almost never go better than last time. This one doesn’t either, but at least it’s upfront about what it’s doing: just making stuff bigger and crazier.

It’s an odd paradox that this movie feels both high-minded and also at times frustratingly pedestrian.

A movie as frothy and insubstantial as the foam on a nice cappuccino. It’s also about as believable as some of the woefully stereotypical Italian characters here.

Luckily, Neeson has a way of lending his rough-hewn dignity to even the most perfunctory of plots — because this one, it must be said, is perfunctory.

What’s never quite fleshed out here is why this all should resonate with us — or how these haphazard moments, albeit compelling, weave together in the cohesive way the filmmakers seem to promise.

The early scenes in this wacky place high in the mountains are the best part of “Ballerina” — they actually contain deft surprises and even a glimmer of humor, which is hardly something we expect in a John Wick film.

A well-cast and often entertaining but campy and sometimes obvious thriller starring Amanda Seyfried and James Norton.

If “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” felt like a pale imitation of the buoyant original, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” feels sorta like a pale imitation of that pale imitation. Or, to analogize with a favored franchise food item: like a thrice-warmed piece of baklava.

Without spoiling any secrets, the film progresses in horror-film mode before, in its third act, tying things up in a somewhat clever, unexpected way. By then, though, you may have given up on this group.

Food, family, a big karaoke scene … and a spotlight on an immigrant community underrepresented in Hollywood. There are worse ways to spend 96 minutes.

Monday has an artsy, improvised feel, but also falls prey to some pretty standard rom-com tropes.

All the buzz and talent around a tale that’s sold more than 12 million copies can’t thoroughly mask a sometimes corny, often clunky script, even if most of the lines are delivered by Daisy Edgar-Jones, whose poignant, grounded lead performance is the distinguishing highlight of the enterprise.

Did you want closure in a satisfyingly coherent way? That’s not what you’ll get. Did you want to see Curtis in one more (we think) badass performance as durable Laurie Strode, whom she’s been playing for some 45 years? You’ll get that. Did you want to see more gore and guts, with a disturbingly creative scene involving a record turntable? You’ll get that, too.

It’s not complicated. But there are worse things in life than 88 minutes of uncomplicated chuckling.

A sort of high-gloss, nicely crafted daydream with a good score and generous references to LA noir films.

Somewhow Adams, who also produces here, makes these things seem, if not quite natural, then logical.

Make no mistake, the clever writing is here, as is the style, the sleek technique, and some terrific performances (Rosamund Pike is especially delicious in a supporting role). What’s missing, or muddled, is the message — and perhaps even more, the heart.

If the plot feels truly chaotic, blending (deep breath here, please) mythology, astrology, autobiography, confessional, modern romantic comedy and Old Hollywood glamour (still with us?), it is so J.Lo — so very, very J.Lo — that it feels logical, too.

The tension escalates quite effectively, but the payoff feels weak, because the thing — or person, or whatever — that we’re supposed to be most scared of is hardly as scary as the buildup.

This is a 135-minute film that demands a lot more depth. And, so, to co-opt a political phrase from Bill Clinton, whom Quaid also has played: It’s the script, stupid.

Atlas, an often ridiculous sci-fi epic with dialogue cheesier than a Brie wheel but also an old-fashioned, human heart o’ gold, is a J.Lo movie. Through and through.

It’s really not a good sign when a movie ends with a bold, shocking flourish and much of the audience can be heard muttering through the credits: “Wait, um ... WHAT?”

There are some sweet kisses (otherwise, it’s very chaste) and some nice declarations of motherly devotion (credit to Williams for doing her best) but the cheese factor is regretfully high.

Yes, the cinematography is what stands out here. There are also several compelling performances, though Baldwin’s somewhat halting, somber turn is not among them.