John DeFore

The film captures the cost of Henry's well-intentioned sin, following this pained new creature out into the world and, very briefly, giving his suffering an almost Malick-like voice.

It's a wobbly but amusing pic that only really raises eyebrows at the end.

The film takes a more prosaic approach to its sci-fi premise than its predecessors did, presumably in an attempt to reach viewers who need more hand-holding. ... Despite its uncanny start, Synchronic is just more normal than it might have been, and less deep.

Lacking the charming eccentricity of a "Turbo Kid" or the compelling mood of many retro-horror successes, the picture has little to recommend it as a theatrical experience.

Armando Iannucci's The Personal History of David Copperfield turns the author's well-loved autobiographical epic into a fast-moving yarn, sometimes hilarious and always entertaining.

Odd, then, that [Brewer and Murphy's] Dolemite Is My Name is such a conventional-feeling biopic, one with its share of laughs and surprising anecdotes but little of the enduring strangeness that kept the 1975 Dolemite rattling around in our cultural memory

A straightforward biopic ... The film's edge is somewhat dulled by respect for its subject, who's drawn here as more hero than man.

[A] gorgeously shot and sensitively acted drama, a demonstration of range from the actor-turned-director.

Though Muschietti occasionally finds lovely filmic ways to transition from one to the next, the stories don't get to resonate with each other in a meaningful or emotional way — as they might in a series of well crafted hour-long episodes.

The gritty pic's aesthetic scratches an itch for lovers of '70s/'80s urban grime. But atmosphere and attitude overwhelm story here, and trotting out old tropes like amnesia doesn't help.

Performances are generally competent, but nobody in the cast has the kind of presence needed to overcome Ranarivelo's by-the-numbers dialogue.

While Travolta may believe he's seriously engaging with the character, following thesps like Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn into the always-dicey enterprise of mimicking disability, his performance is all shtick and no heart.

For those with only a glancing knowledge or none at all, this is as good an introduction as you could want.

Director Lopez offers no more lightheartedness than the film absolutely needs to show that their spirits haven't been crushed by squalor; meanwhile, her effects artists use mostly excellent CG to slowly hint at how interested the world of the dead is in Estrella's predicament.

Neither funny, insightful nor moving, it's mostly objectionable for its failure to exploit the facets of Coogan's screen persona that line up so neatly with the smug blatherers who dominate the AM dial.

Neither Gan's screenplay nor his direction of the cast quite sells this scenario, but once he introduces some accidental violence, the picture can ride the familiar logic of crime-gone-wrong storytelling.

As jumbled as all this is, the film never achieves the kind of sweaty intensity of the original.

A good-natured ride at first, its limited scope grows more apparent as it goes; still, a feel-good approach is unlikely to hurt it as it begins a road-show release concurrent with the band's 50th-anniversary tour.

The plot does, finally, allow the emotions Robbie won't express to erupt in a way that threatens everything, and Kenneally's script deals knowingly with the aftermath. But it doesn't always seem to understand the characters around its hero any better than he does himself.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

Ready has a fine time with its setting (the trappings of old money are much more appealing here than they were in Netflix's Murder Mystery), and Weaving is sharp enough to play things straight as the ensemble around her goes for the occasional laugh.

Set disbelief aside, and primal phobias may well suffice to get you happily to the other side of this adventure.

A surfeit of bad-ass mystery-man posturing and dearth of either convincing emotion or visceral kicks makes this pastiche unmoving, an assemblage of tropes few will enjoy wading through.

More than colorful enough to excite genre fans who like a dash of history with their swordplay.

As things stand, personal perspective brings something to this rudimentary documentary, but not nearly enough to help it compete with more polished portraits of big-top razzle-dazzle.

Given the utter incoherence of the main characters' comings and goings, the pic's main point of interest is its documentation of Burning Man's many oversized art projects.

The first-time filmmaker (a Cuban who moved to the U.K. for film school) is deeply committed to the seriousness of his tale, but seems to feel a leaden pace is the only way to do it justice. The result is a movie much easier to respect than to enjoy.

A fascinating look at an artist's life.