John DeFore

Though not without its moments, the film offers too little of interest for its leading ladies to do, and feels throughout like an adaptation of a comic book that was written for the sole purpose of being sold to an IP-hungry film studio.

Though the movie is rife with too-convenient coincidences and relies on another iffy plot point or two to make its emotional arc work, the monster-killin’ functions well enough that few will complain.

A satisfying action pic that finally realizes the potential of its pulp-meets-sociopolitics conceit.

A throw-everything-against-the-wall collection of silly jokes that reimagines American history as a bro-tastic action flick, Matt Thompson’s animated film makes Drunk History look like a Ken Burns production.

A mature crime picture whose decades-hopping action makes the effects of generational poverty obvious without having to spell it out, it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness.

While the team-up still fails to become more than the sum of its parts, at least we can appreciate Hayek’s enthusiasm for the over-the-top role.

In F9’s would-be showstoppers, the thrills are mostly AWOL or the feats are simply too idiotic to embrace, even guiltily.

Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.

While offering some of the expected musical material and concert footage, the film is much more interested in the singer’s emotional health, especially as it pertains to political unrest in his native Colombia. Though these themes might open the film up to interest outside Balvin’s fan base, neither is explored with enough depth to really accomplish that; in practice, Boy is for pretty devoted fans only.

One unfortunate effect of the jumbling is that it cools off Statham’s slow-boil performance, and prompts us to question the logic behind H’s plan.

A B-movie that would benefit immensely from some wit in the script and charisma in the cast, it’s not as aggressively hacky as P.W.S.A.’s oeuvre, but it runs into problems he didn’t face in 1995: Namely, the bar has been raised quite a bit for movies in which teams of superpowered young people have fights to save the universe.

The doc pads out its assertions of malfeasance with personal scenes that fall flat, never giving much insight into its subject's personality or deepening the sympathy we may have started off with for the children she left behind.

A likably low-rent, low-ambition entry into a genre whose standard-bearer, Meatballs, doesn't set the bar very high, Mike Stasko's Boys Vs. Girls goes to summer camp for its promised battle of the sexes.

Barkan proves a highly engaging man, impassioned but funnier than a terminally ill man should be. Intimate scenes with his young family are essential to the appeal of a film whose big issues remain as pressing now as they were during filming in 2018.

Taking itself much less seriously than the Taken series and its predecessors, it's a wish-fulfillment romp just as ludicrous as any of them but more fun than most.

Listening to one of Smith's speaking engagements would be a much more entertaining way for a fan to spend 115 minutes, and non-fans or fence-sitters will likely find this piece too puffy to be very useful. But few will deny that Smith is good company — an always-likable guide happy to make jokes at his own expense while he works to be the "Kevin Smith-iest" Kevin Smith he can be.

A great deal of human drama underlies all this, but not all of it makes it to the screen.

This is a compelling drama with real-world concerns that shouldn't be ignored, and it deserves better than to be the victim of an actor's offscreen sins.

The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.

It's parental wish-fulfillment that isn't at all interested in what being a kid actually feels like.

This is all passably satisfying, but would be vastly better if the screenwriters weren't lazily explaining every single detail in voiceover. Grillo generally excels as a man of few words, but here his disembodied voice is a wall-to-wall shag carpet, dampening the fun we'd be having if we could just focus on the mayhem Carnahan delivers.

Tim Story's Tom & Jerry is five to ten minutes of action that might have worked in one of the cartoon duo's shorts, surrounded by an inordinate amount of unimaginative, unfunny human-based conflict.

Ultimately, none of the storylines offers a surprise or tells us anything we don't already know, this many years into America's opioid ordeal. And arriving at a moment when Crisis could refer to so many other calamities, its failure to illuminate anything makes it feel like a distraction.

A captivating lead performance and a truly massive central metaphor make it a memorable arthouse film.

Kyle Allen and Kathryn Newton balance energies well as the boy who thinks he's found his groundhog girlfriend and the girl whose secrets keep romance at bay. Viewers who haven't soured on the format yet could do much worse than this sweet entry.

It makes a global crisis intensely personal, even romantic.

While the two young thesps acquit themselves nicely, much around them conspires to prevent their debut from being a memorable one.

It alternates between too simplistic and incomprehensible, spending much of its time in between those poles in the "I understand, but I don't care" zone.