Jordan Hoffman

Bonello's decision to show rather than tell keeps the audience on its toes.

his bleak and somewhat sadistic picture is the type of movie that unfolds like a slow car wreck. You know something bad is going to happen, you just aren’t sure what, or how, and when it eventually happens it is repulsive and yet you still can’t turn away.

The bulk of The Intern is a morass of wackiness, a chain of sequences shot in a flat and predictable manner that range from tedious to idiotic.

Age of Adaline, which starts off looking like a frothy series of excuses to put Blake Lively in some fabulously timeless gowns, ends up an emotional and even bold chamber drama. Its ending is ludicrous, but also perfect, and I’d be lying if I didn’t get a little choked up.

It is highly likely you’ll forget the movie by the time you go to bed.

While engaging, this Desierto is a little dry.

Weirdly it's because it is so damned hokey that parts of the movie are agreeable. One can't help but laugh. That, plus the lead performer, Ben Wang as Li Fong, is extremely likable. He gives a terrific performance, even if you've seen every beat before.

There’s just too much good stuff to dismiss White Bird in a Blizzard out of hand, even if it does have a somewhat dull and desultory plot.

Plaza has found her Ron Burgundy: the vessel of a true imbecile in which to pour her strange genius.

Naishuller’s technique is one that could be well served as a shorter gimmick; a solitary action scene in a larger film. Hardcore is unrelenting and unforgiving in its commitment to be loud, fast, destructive and gross.

Everything about this picture is at such a deliberate arm’s length that it is hard to know what is meant to be whimsical and what is serious melodrama.

No one in the film is particularly likeable, and while the global implications about epistemology are interesting, the specifics of this particular case, at least rendered here, are quite dull.

The whole picture is lifeless and without consequence.

Life After Beth, a frustrating affair due to its waste of resources, feels rushed and under-rehearsed. It is a style of film-making that hopes it can glide its way into your good graces on ad-hoc performance flourishes, a wall-to-wall audio mix and editing patches. One soon recognizes this all a cover for one key issue: a lack of original ideas.

There are sequences of the four prowling the streets on their boards with a fatalist, sinister beauty that show Caple Jr is more than capable of crafting striking compositions. Unfortunately, the jump from image-making to storytelling in this case fails to stick the landing.

Unfortunately both Eisenberg and Stewart, both frequently brilliant, are on unsure footing here. The movie simply doesn't know if it wants to be Jason Bourne or Cheech and Chong.

There aren’t any clever moments, just a parade of clichés you’ve seen in many other indie romances.

It’s as if everyone made this movie about the joy of being on vacation—while also taking one.

Surely there is a good movie to be made about caring polyamorous relationships, but as with any romantic story the audience needs to fall in love with the idea of these characters being in love.

We can debate if Burn Your Maps merely fetishises a different culture or holds it in true reverence, but I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else, the performances are terrific all around.

As things go bad for Wilson, the movie, unfortunately, loses a considerable amount of steam as well.

Ti West’s pointless new film The Sacrament, an exercise in talking loud and saying nothing, isn’t just bad, it’s infuriating.

For a film that reminds use over and over that this is a whole new world, this movie feels awfully familiar.

Amsterdam is not a great movie by any shakes, although it looks terrific and all of the performances . . . are energetic, entertaining, and enjoyable.

The film isn’t a home run, but with Rudd in the lead in something so out of the ordinary for him, it’s fair to call a ground rule double.

S-VHS isn’t as pants-pooping scary as the first, but it is funnier, tighter and slicker.

It’s surprising that a film about Deep Throat could be such an anticlimax.

Hunting Elephants has its requisite scenes of planning and setbacks, but it mostly settles for old-people jokes (now I know the Hebrew for Viagra: it’s Viagra) and making Patrick Stewart look like an imbecile.

There’s not much that glitters in Gold, a lackluster caper that proves that even the priciest ore can bore.

What’s strangest about this three-hour movie, though, is that despite some deadly slow patches, it still feels like an hour was cut from it, considering how characters develop off-screen. On more than one occasion, there are scenes that suggest deep and lasting relationships between people … that must have happened while the camera was somewhere else.

Abhorrent politics aside, it’s also a terrible movie. The dialogue is atrocious, the performances rote. One could make the case that its incoherence is a grand meta-narrative statement about the fluidity of combat, but I don’t think that’s the case.

“Expendables 3” has fewer nauseating clichés than The Judge.

The Ted franchise is perhaps unstoppable if MacFarlane sets his sights a bit lower, finds a way to streamline the plot mechanics and just give moviegoers what they never knew they wanted: time hanging out with a foul-mouthed anthropomorphised soft toy.

Alas, a winning lead performance isn’t enough when it is at the center of a flawed movie. The Greatest Showman can only hoodwink for so long before the tent collapses. This is an enjoyable film, but its rags-to-riches tale in a sanitized 19th century is extremely by-the-numbers.

While I wasn’t exactly expecting greatness from the film, I did think it would contain a few thrills and maybe some laughs. Having Lara Croft leap around and avoid traps should be an easy formula—but for this crew, it remains an unsolvable puzzle.

Unfortunately the bulk of the picture is cut together like a beer commercial on poorly lit cheap video without much panache. Unless primary colors with a gauzy halo is panache.

It’s just so embarrassingly thin. The few chuckles are all the more depressing when you realize that this could have been a winner with a clever screenwriter and a competent director.

Director Ron Howard does a solid job of getting the smell of salt off the page and into the picture. The first half works quite well simply as a procedural, but when the action comes we run into trouble. The well-earned seriousness is washed away as we’re broadsided by B-movie tropes.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny isn’t so much a continuation as a Xerox copy with cheap toner.

Masterminds is a bit of an interesting case study, as it is basically a Coen brothers film but put through a mechanism that removes all the wit, visual style or excitement. In its place are tortuously dull set-pieces, rambling dialogue and banal stagings.

Despite the uncomfortable sexism and altogether predictable nature of the film, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t modestly entertaining.

By the end of the movie few won’t be rolling their eyes or checking their watch, but there’s enough that’s fundamentally good in the meat of film not to wholly reject what The Giver is giving us.

It has a nose for what's cool, but is completely inept at execution.

Johnson’s Ana squeezes believability out of one of the more silly romantic entanglements in recent popular culture. It’s all there in her face, which Taylor-Johnson frames in close-up. She’s fully aware this scenario is ridiculous, but can’t seem to turn away from its lunacy.

Though this telling has more than its share of well-worn story beats that Salinger’s hero Holden Caulfield might accuse of being phoney, there are enough occasional insights into the creative process, as well as juicy tidbits about the secretive Salinger, to make this a very agreeable, if at times shallow, watch.

Schreiber saves it to an extent with some unusual performance choices, but when you compare this ending to the emotional supernova of Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine” it comes way short.

This is not much more than a light crowdpleaser, but when you’ve got two powerhouse performers like this it is very difficult not to find oneself at least temporarily charmed.

Jared Hess, co-creator of Napoleon Dynamite and a string of other small oddball pictures, brings a fresh perspective to what could have been a lumbering IP-pallooza movie.

This isn’t a movie so much as a fetishist’s fever dream—a fantasia of New York crime movies from the 1970s that places the specificity of its time and place at center stage more than any actual New York crime movie from the era.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of our top-tier film actors right now, is on good form throughout, and the others act their hearts out, too. But they are somewhat left out to dry in a production that feels more like syndicated television than a feature film.

Perfect Sisters may stand accused of being rife with tone-deaf stylistic choices, but the more positive spin is to call it a marginal film elevated, however inadvertently, by the strange specificity of its scenes.

Raimi manages to keep things engaging, which is a very real act of wizardry in and of itself.

All of the action is shot cleanly, and I could always tell where everyone was in relation to one another during the setpieces — which may not sound like much of a win, but if you think that, you clearly haven't watched too many direct-to-streaming movies. If you want something done efficiently, hire a union man.

The Legend of Tarzan ends up being a garbled, clunky production that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.

The first half of Pacific Rim Uprising is about as fun as a trip to the dentist. The second half, however, is a dizzying and delightful foray into enjoyable pandemonium. It’s like the laughing gas really kicks in.

By the end of this 89-minute film, I was absolutely on the edge of my seat. Not due to suspense, but due to my utter disdain for the infantile plotting.

It’s a film tremendously out of step with current tastes, and while I doubt that was its goal, this peculiarity makes it strangely watchable – even enjoyable.

In the spaces between the hackneyed dialogue, ham-handed score, and poor acting, Walking With The Enemy eventually wins its sole victory: a desire to look the story up on Wikipedia later that day. That may be a small triumph, but it’s hardly the mark of fine cinema.

Tina Fey is in the film, for heaven’s sake, and I love her to pieces, but by now we know to expect something humdrum when she’s on a movie screen.

The first act of the film wins some laughs on surrealist shock humour, but at the expense of ever accepting this character and her world as real.

What we have on our hands is a dud, but there are a few grace notes that save it from being an unmitigated disaster.

Despite the numerous patchy moments The Brass Teapot by and large squeaks by as an enjoyable entertainment.

For young people looking for something to do besides doomscrolling, you could do far worse. For those old enough to have seen the first one in theaters, this'll be a decent one to stream later in the year.

Despite a lead performance by the always welcome Julianne Moore it is rudderless in its presentation and outright stupid in its central conceits.

Ryan Gosling wanted to make an art film and, despite some dull patches, pretty much succeeded.

This movie sure means well, and it’s just entertaining enough to (slightly) slip off the shackles of the great cultural conformity factory it ultimately represents.

Trash Fire is too quick to burn through its ideas.

Songwriter sells the “nice boy” bit well, but if you aren’t already a fan, it eventually becomes tiresome. There are occasional glimmers of a real person (wishing to topple Adele, laying down a “no Snapchat” rule at his house, etc.) but rarely is a feature film so bluntly just marketing.

Unfortunately, there is an uncanny lack of urgency in the film. The characterizations are flat, the would-be quippy dialogue rarely elicits laughs, and the action sequences seldom rise above the level of satisfactory.

The action is the real star here, and it’s all good enough. It isn’t great – the aerial special effects are distractingly cheap – but at least there’s lots of it on display.

The first sixty minutes of Pompeii are awful, bordering on unwatchable... The final forty-five minutes of the movie however are, by sheer force of will, irrefutably entertaining. At least there’s raining death in the form of fireballs smashing up the place.

Does this mean that Sabotage is a rich, morally complex story about the gray zone between good and evil? Hell, no. It just means it is a bungle.

After the unnatural way it plops this gruesome group in their social Siberia, it goes from (alleged) comedy to serious drama with all the subtlety of a 10-year-old playing Mario Kart.

Many of The Boss’s troubles stem from its constant, unpredictable shifts in tone.

This is television-level moviemaking top to bottom, from its preposterous premise, scenery-chomping performances, idiotic sound cues and force-fed jump-scares. Deliver Us From Evil delivers formula, and in a formulaic fashion.

There is something so authentic in this film that once you get past the annoying voice and some of the dreadfully unfunny side characters, it is disarmingly sweet and even occasionally clever.

Only completists need check in with Homefront. The rest of us can just stay home.

While we open with dazed individuals in a crashed limousine as it begins to take on water, Submerged’s frequent flashbacks eventually reveal a tiresome crime plot rife with soporific acting and unremarkable dialogue.

What’s ultimately frustrating about Zipper is that it seems like it has something important to say about infidelity and the sex industry, but can’t decide what that should be.

It’s a play shoehorned into a film. Sometimes that can work – LaBute’s managed it before – but it’s a steep hill to climb, and this one doesn’t quite make it.

One of the world's top disturbing tourist attractions is now finally getting the spooky film it deserves

Basically a drama-in-disguise. Unfortunately, it’s a formulaic and extremely uneven one, albeit with a number of sympathetic performances.

Considering this is the first biopic of one of the world’s most beloved athletes, it’s too bad such a predictable and ham-fisted kids’ flick was the goal.

There’s no way around this: The November Man is asinine. It is not without its pleasures – if you like seeing people get hit in the face with shovels, that is – but it might be the most irresponsibly dumb spy thriller I’ve seen in some time.

Put bluntly, Tim Story's film wears you down until you relent and say, yes, I like these people and it's fun to watch them all have such a good time.

Hollow, uninteresting and false.

Embarrassing for everyone involved not because of any squeamish subject matter – quite the contrary, seeing retirement-age characters are refreshing – but because the story structure is so fake and so plodding.

Surprisingly, many of Bekmambetov’s updates work well.

There are, indeed, some sparks in this movie. The Vikander/DeHaan romance is a dud no matter how well it’s lit, but the “downstairs” passion between Grainger and O’Connell has a degree of realism and eroticism.

Jacqueline (Argentine) isn’t just a bad movie – there are plenty of those. It’s infuriating.

Co-writers and stars June Diane Raphael (“Whitney,” “New Girl”) and Casey Wilson (“Happy Endings”) are genuine and true comic performers. Even though the story stunk, the set pieces were uninspired and the direction was downright wretched, when these two are “on” and doing schtick, they are absolutely fresh and hilarious.

For a movie with the ostensible mission of spreading the Gospel, it does a poor job of speaking to anyone except the faithful.

The Michelle Yeoh fronted spin-off movie Section 31 is 100 minutes of generic schlock containing only trace elements of Star Trek.

There’s no way to overstate the gorgeous look of this film, but the mannered dialogue and deliberateness of pace becomes less of an homage to Asian revenge films than a parody.

I’d be lying if I said this movie didn’t crack me up on more than a few occasions.

Cripplingly lifeless.

The movie gets completely lost, unsure if it wants to be a serious exploration of repressed memories or a work of giddy, spooky trash.

My All American is awful; but it gets points, I suppose, for at least looking professional.