Jon Frosch

Unlike in The Celebration, the cruelty and suffering in The Hunt feel both overly schematic and intellectually muddled.

For all its nasty twists and turns, its fake-outs and flashbacks and pile-up of double-crosses, this story of an elderly con man and the wealthy widow he targets feels fatally devoid of danger. Square, tame and tidy as the London-area house kept by Mirren’s primly elegant, creamy-complexioned septuagenarian, The Good Liar is a work of skill but little spark.

For all its relatability, the movie is safe and sitcomishly amusing rather than sharply funny, hitting the same genial notes over and over instead of building real comic momentum.

A twisted tale of toxic female friendship, the film offers its share of pleasures: eye candy in human, sartorial and real-estate form, as well as the unmistakable flair of a director and performers who know their way around a piece of pop entertainment. But the result leaves you scratching your head.

There are chuckles here and there, but a striking absence of belly laughs; Girls Trip it’s decidedly not.

What stays with you is Jacobson’s grippingly understated lead turn, which promises a fruitful screen life beyond Broad City.

The film, poised awkwardly between costume-drama prestige and all-out schmaltz, is so busy sweeping us up in a swirl of music, scenery and beautiful, suffering faces that it forgets to do the actual work of earning our emotions.

There’s nothing glaringly wrong with the new movie. ... What’s missing is the blazing urgency.

Bad Moms milks the “women behaving badly” conceit with a single-mindedness that might be depressing if the movie didn’t have an ace up its sleeve: the glorious Hahn, who injects what could have been another insipid studio hack job with a bracing shot of personality.

A flawed but affecting two-hander that intrigues and frustrates in nearly equal measure.

Although smoothly directed, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea has little visual personality or dramatic urgency. What might have been a tough and adult take on a bond full of hope but thwarted by war plays more like an after-school special.

The movie is stuffed with talent and buffed with hipster-indie polish. It’s also frequently silly, only fitfully involving and often surprisingly banal despite its outré premise.

Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature-length debut is visually sharp, with period design that's eye-catching without being fussy or fetishistic. Too bad there's not much going on beneath the surface.

As with many other portrayals of this ugly period, the movie's central figures and their experiences have been cleansed of complexity, embalmed in a sort of hagiographic glaze that makes even the pain look pretty. Harrowing things happen, but it’s the easiest kind of "tough watch”; we know exactly what we’re supposed to feel and when we’re supposed to feel it.

For all its potential, the movie ultimately feels like a frustrating miscalculation; the ingredients are there — it's the recipe that's off.

Tag is neither bad nor good, but rather, despite its out-there story, almost numbingly ordinary: an easy, breezy action-com that’s sometimes amusing but rarely funny, competent rather than inspired.

A tacky corporate noir that makes you long for the leanness of Margin Call, or even the clumsy theatrics of Arbitrage.

Bu I, admittedly, had a hard time getting on its woozy wavelength. But The Beach Bum is a work of undeniable commitment and craft — a gonzo picaresque, soaked with booze and filled with gyrating, jiggling flesh, that will play well to the not-negligible segment of the population where cannabis lovers and cinephiles overlap.

Writer-director Tyler Riggs’ feature debut has a ripe, palpable sense of place and a pair of magnetic leads in Nisalda Gonzalez and Matthew Leone as the young lovers. All that promise and potential make the film’s eventual surrender to narrative cliché and thematic overreach all the more frustrating.

Blame essentially flirts with one set of clichés only to settle down with another. But it has the merit of at least striving for the substantive (the agonies of teenage girlhood) over the merely titillating (transgressive sex).

Sluggish and somber, with nary a wink, chuckle or sigh of relief to mitigate the misery, the film is a slog. That's unfortunate, because the writer-directors have a strong visual sense, and, in Wood, a magnetic lead.

Even when it grows too enamored of its own lyrical driftiness, there’s undeniable skill in Patterson’s use of space, color and sound. The movie might have worked as a mood piece; at times it almost does.

Central Intelligence demonstrates an above-average interest in story and character, and tries, if not always successfully, to craft real comic situations and action sequences. It's been made with a certain level of polish and professionalism. And it capitalizes on the chemistry between Hart and Johnson.

The Ticket is underwhelming in several ways, but the performance driving it is magnetic — and helps alleviate some of the bludgeoning obviousness of a morality tale that New York-based Israeli writer-director Ido Fluk hasn’t fully figured out how to tell.

It's an odd match of a screenplay (adapted by Berman and Pulcini) that's too obvious, telegraphing rather than teasing out its twists, and direction that's overly timid; one gets the sense that the filmmakers are checking off genre tropes and tricks from a list instead of finding ways to invest them with fresh chills or shivers.

The director finds himself stymied by weak source material — Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1990 play about a young man who returns home to tell his family he's dying — and only intermittently well served by his starry French cast.

The film boasts enough manic energy and straight-up weirdness to keep you entertained before overstaying its welcome in the final act.

This lugubrious indie drama is affecting in parts but never gels into a satisfying whole.