Jon Frosch

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.

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.

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 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.

Cooper can do this kind of arrogant-but-irresistible golden boy shtick in his sleep, but that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to watch. Flashing his baby blues and a fiery temper, the actor gives a fully engaged performance that almost makes us want to forgive the movie’s laziness. Almost.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

Almost nothing anyone does registers as recognizably human; it’s all just a pretext for yet another round of envelope-pushing outrageousness.

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.

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

The movie is all tease and no follow-through, letting its story leak out in dribs and drabs that fail to gather any momentum or meaning, let alone mystery.

With brilliant comedians like Hahn and new addition Christine Baranski on board, there are line readings that pop and jokes that land.... But A Bad Moms Christmas is louder, busier and more pandering than the original — an exhausting spectacle of skilled performers gamely mugging their way through a cash grab.

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

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.

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 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.

No matter how tongue-in-cheek, and toothless, the film's sardonic view of mental health care feels unfortunately timed given our mass anxiety-inducing current circumstances. The truth is, we could all use some good therapy right about now; Bad Therapy, on the other hand, is not indicated.

Mikael Buch's debut feature is silly and sweet, but also paper thin and mostly unimaginative: a series of cartoonish vignettes during which a generically eccentric Jewish clan confronts movie-family problems (adultery, divorce, health scares, tense sibling relationships).

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

A sluggish exercise in formalism ... [Monica] feels like a movie perpetually struggling to connect.

Its rhythms are sluggish, its jokes predictable and the gags are set up with such thudding deliberateness that even the sight of Ferrell losing control of a motorcycle, careening through the air and crashing straight through his house barely raises an eyebrow.

The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.