Justin Chang

An initially clever exercise winds up feeling like the wrong kind of hackwork.

It’s kind of funny and kind of scary, if ultimately neither funny nor scary enough to keep the two modes from canceling each other out.

If Genius is a failure — and by the generally unilluminating standards of most mainstream movies about the creative process, I’m not entirely sure that it is — it succeeds in being a noble, even charming one.

Even tots may emerge feeling slightly browbeaten by this colorful, strenuous and hyperactive fantasy, which has moments of charm and beauty but often resembles an exploding toy factory rather than a work of honest enchantment.

The terrors we see in A Cure for Wellness are never as scary as they are beautiful, but they are never so beautiful as they are arbitrary.

Funky disco-era throwback never fully jells with a surprisingly intense central tale of father-son estrangement, strongly acted by Chi McBride and 18-year-old rapper-thesp Bow Wow.

Although fiercely committed performances by Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell provide director Tony Goldwyn's film with a core of emotional integrity, a less heavy-handed, more informative approach would have served them and the audience better.

This graphically well-rendered kidpic is less crass and mouthy than many recent feature-length toons, but also more sluggish and ungainly as it tries to approximate DiCamillo's singularly delicate tone.

Watching Sion Sono’s unruly telepathic sex comedy The Virgin Psychics is a bit like having a dog hump your leg for the better part of two hours; it’s filthy and monotonous and fairly interminable, but after a while you’ve been so thoroughly numbed that you have to admit it’s kind of sweet.

Lawrence doesn’t just steal scenes; he brings things back to earth, sometimes by expressing open contempt for the plot he’s mired in. His comic instincts are exactly what Bad Boys for Life needs as it tilts toward third-act grandiosity.

Christie’s story, one of her finest, is hard to screw up, even when Branagh and his returning screenwriter, Michael Green, seem bent on proving otherwise. Their movie is an often fussy, hectic confusion of old-timey pleasures and 21st century sensibilities, a mash-up that makes for some especially incongruous visual choices.

Director Chris Weitz's problematic new picture, which, despite Demian Bichir's affecting lead performance and a strong feel for Los Angeles' Mexican-American communities, emerges an earnest and overly programmatic heart-tugger.

The love and dedication that the filmmakers (including Dominguez’s wife and exec producer, Shelley Morrison) have poured into this project are more than evident onscreen; what it needs now is the sort of strong, supple cinematic vision that could tie its disparate strands together.

By the Sea always offers something to tickle the eye and ear, even as it leaves the heart and mind coolly unstirred.

A strong cast, beautiful production values and generally pleasant execution can't disguise the fact both laughs and surprises are on the thin side here, despite the abundant care and affection lavished on the central characters by first-time writer-director David Munro.

The arguments between Ramanujan and Hardy form easily the most absorbing aspect of The Man Who Knew Infinity, as their eloquent clash of wills is shown to be not just intellectual but ideological in nature.

This high-end softcore thriller is juicily watchable from start to over-the-top finish, but its gleeful skewering of the upper classes comes off as curiously passe, a luxe exercise in one-note nastiness.

Motherless Brooklyn is the kind of knotty, ambitious, character-rich, politically conscious entertainment the studios so rarely get behind anymore, you can’t help wishing it were better.

The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension. And even with a physically impressive production at his disposal, Fuqua’s filmmaking instincts are clumsy and prone to cliché.

The possibility of redemption hangs over this movie, as it does in much of Schrader’s work. But for the first time in this trilogy, that possibility is resolved in a manner that feels neither fully examined nor earned.

Keaton embodies the formidable Stone matriarch with an offhand sense of humor that cuts like a knife.

Picture needs every ounce of goodwill it can wring from Rudd's likable lead performance to offset a sour, borderline misogynistic streak for which scattered snickers offer only modest compensation.

The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.

The surfeit of familiar faces is a poor substitute for Steinbeck’s psychological astuteness, his rich understanding of the way human beings respond, individually and collectively, when they are backed into a corner.

Offering a more straight-faced brand of idiocy than its cheerfully dumb 2009 predecessor, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might well have been titled “G.I. Joe: Regurgitation,” advertising big guns, visual effects and that other line of Hasbro toys with the same joyless, chew-everything-up-and-spit-it-out efficiency.

Remains as tame in its presentation as its target audience would expect. Students drink beers on occasion, but no one is shown having sex, taking mind-altering substances or using language that would jeopardize a PG-13 rating. On the plus side, the film also abstains from any overt message-mongering.

A disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise.

A cheerful summer lark that briefly achieves comic liftoff but peters out well before its overblown Times Square climax, it proudly demonstrates that mediocrity — whether in the hunting of malevolent apparitions or the making of a mainstream comedy — is not, and never has been, an exclusively male pursuit.

A mildly intriguing thriller of comeuppance that leaves you wanting more — not more archly stylized violence or repetitive revenge fantasy, perhaps, but more insight into the connection between the eponymous assassin (Abigail Breslin) and her highly skilled mentor (Wes Bentley).

This warmly conceived but largely formulaic picture is by turns sensitive and shrill, culturally perceptive and overly broad in its dysfunctional-family melodramatics.

The Meg, stolidly directed by Jon Turteltaub (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “National Treasure”), winds up proving a fairly obvious theory about its chosen sub-genre: the more massive the shark (and the budget), the lighter the scares and the lower the stakes.

A half-hearted exercise in political paranoia, The Sentinel unravels its wrong-man scenario with business-like efficiency and an impressively jittery visual scheme, but falls far short of providing visceral or emotional thrills.

It’s not bad for an hour’s entertainment; too bad it runs for two.

Paul Haggis' middling fourth feature evinces a sometimes pulse-quickening fascination with procedural details, and climaxes with a good dose of swift, suspenseful filmmaking. But what was briskly diverting in the original has been rather laboriously overworked.

The grim relentlessness with which Destroyer seesaws between time frames — as if to make sure that no state of abjection, past or present, goes unexplored — wore me out long before the endlessly protracted finish.

This final production from the team of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant is itself adrift in more ways than one, with a literate but meandering script by "The Remains of the Day" novelist Kazuo Ishiguro that withholds emotional payoffs to an almost perverse degree.

With the exception of one clever twist at the midway point, what transpires here is thin, vaporous and awfully derivative. But my goodness, how Shaye holds you, even through the most routine of jolts and the most ludicrous of circumstances.

This painfully well-meaning but largely unpersuasive bid for cross-generational understanding feels at once of-the-moment and too obvious by half, like a less overblown version of “Crash” for the information superhighway.

While the fine cast teases out glimmers of nuance here and there, Mary Agnes Donoghue’s film plays like a series of hand-holding growth exercises for closed-minded conservatives, and relies too heavily on its tying-the-knot finale for both dramatic momentum and emotional closure.

The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated.

A fitfully creepy, overly protracted chiller that plays more like a noncommittal sampler of horror techniques than the vivid nightmare it's clearly aiming for.

The glaring failure of Tomorrowland is that its central premise — children are the future — is almost completely negated by the preachiness of the execution and the clumsiness of the storytelling.

As a sustained piece of action choreography, then, Athena is frequently staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of modern French identity, the movie feels thin and overdetermined.

I’m wary in general of making any definitive pronouncements about Locked Down, whose charms and irritations (and it has its share of both) are largely a matter of timing and perspective.

What Tolkien offers instead is a picturesque, amber-soaked balm for armchair Anglophiles: the manners and mores, the crisp witticisms and stirring, stiff-upper-lip sentiments. These pleasures aren’t negligible. But neither are they a substitute for a genuinely cinematic window into a genius’ mind.

It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact.

First-time director Jason Zada does generate an intermittently spooky sense of mystery that not even the muddled scripting can fully demolish.

An alternately sensitive and heavy-handed small-town drama that turns the Salem witchcraft trials into a tenuous metaphor for the intense pressures brought to bear on today’s female youth.

This bizarre but weirdly bloodless retro-camp exercise is neither funny nor eerie enough to seduce the uninitiated, and will court bemused reactions at best from the series' still-estimable fan following.

Despite abundant talent on both sides of the camera and a bevy of eye-catching supernatural beasties, this f/x-heavy story of a literature-loving father and daughter battling dark forces unleashed from the pages of a rare tome doesn't conjure much in the way of bigscreen magic.

In contrast with the fragmented kineticism of Paul Greengrass' "Bourne" movies, there's no existential dimension to the shattered-glass aesthetic here; it's just raw, chaotic action, inelegantly shot and staged but no less unnerving for it.

Once the script is done playing its belabored game of who’s who, it becomes a sleek and moderately clever exercise in narrative misdirection, with at least one or two twists sly enough to pull the wool over even an attentive viewer’s eyes, as the climactic rush of “gotcha!” flashbacks makes duly apparent

At once delicate and clumsy, tender and twee, Restless wraps the pain of grief and impending mortality in the balm of a teenage love story.

A high-energy, low-impact caper-comedy that labors to bring a measure of wit, romance and glamour to an overworked spy-thriller template.

Though sufficiently well made to suggest a viable career behind the camera for debutante writer-director Angelina Jolie, In the Land of Blood and Honey seems to spring less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse.

Unwieldy and exasperating, but not without a certain pushy, ingratiating charm.

Despite Amy Adams’ affecting performance as an artist and ’50s/’60s housewife complicit in her own captivity, this relatively straightforward dramatic outing for Tim Burton is too broadly conceived to penetrate the mystery at the heart of the Keanes’ unhappy marriage — the depiction of which is dominated by an outlandish, ogre-like turn from Christoph Waltz that increasingly seems to hold the movie hostage.

Ehrenreich isn't given much to work with here, but his sly comic reserve and devil-may-care attitude give you reasons to keep watching, well after the story has stopped doing anything of the sort.

There's no denying that viewers not prepared for the relentless stream of nasty personalities, profane invective and bone-crunching violence are in for a very long sit.

An in-your-face double helping of fat jokes, crude slapstick, wacky Southern-black stereotypes and occasionally inspired improv.

Fair Game serves up impeccable politics with a bit too much righteous outrage and not quite enough solid drama.

Mama, for all her digital and prosthetic creepiness, is finally a bit of a bore.

Helmer Donald Petrie seems at times to be making the modern-day equivalent of a Doris Day comedy, setting the pic in a lacquered fantasy New York, piling on cutesy-coy dialogue and mining a fluffy premise for all manner of far-fetched cleverness.

Writer-director Ryan Murphy strives mightily to capture the bracing hilarity, pathos and surreal incident of Burroughs' bestselling memoir, but this rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author's deadpan tone or episodic narrative style.

Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile"), Frank Darabont's screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.

Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies.

A certain exhaustion sets in well before the end, collapsing any meaningful distinction between camera-hogging self-indulgence and critical scrutiny.

Predictable developments are more or less redeemed by spirited execution and the pleasures of an able, good-looking cast.

In the end, there’s no outrage in War Dogs — no lacerating insight, no gonzo satiric energy, nothing more than warmed-over cynicism and some mild titters at the spectacle of boys being boys under uniquely deadly circumstances.

The actors are all game and well paired, but flashes of chemistry and an appreciable level of production finesse (courtesy of d.p. Simon Chapman and composer Michael Yezerski) aren’t enough to bring the requisite charge to this flimsy, pseudo-provocative material.

Little Red Riding Hood gets a cheeky CGI makeover in Hoodwinked!, a fast-paced, fitfully clever 3-D-animated feature that will entertain tykes.

The result may still be a big, bloated spectacle, but it's a big, bloated spectacle you can just about follow.

No one is likely to disagree with the basic correctness of the movie’s conclusions, though you may well object to the process by which it arrives at them.

Zac Efron's squeaky-clean tweener-bait profile is unlikely to be threatened by 17 Again, an energetic but earthbound comic fantasy that borrows a few moves, if little inspiration, from "Big" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

Adorable and annoying, patently unnecessary yet kinda sweet, it's a calculated commercial enterprise with little soul but an appreciable amount of heart.

An unremarkable if far from unpleasant sequel.

Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.

Comes off as a derivative wisecracking machine rather than a feat of sustained imagination.

It’s no stretch for Kingsley to project stiff dignity and forthrightness, but that familiarity works against him here, despite his every effort to give the character a human pulse. Clarkson, expert at bringing authenticity to the most inauthentic material, gets to show far more range.

Admirably ambitious if conceptually muddled, it short-circuits a lot of those signature “Magic Mike” pleasures — including some of the lust, and a lot of the laughs — and signals its headier ambitions with a dramatic shift in scenery.

Alternates between intimate wildlife saga and majestic views of the North Pole, offering strong visual compensations for its meandering structure, syrupy tone and excessive sampling of Paul McCartney's back catalog.

Fitfully amusing and nearly saved by its distinguished cast.

The filmmakers’ undeniable chops and bizarre tonal shifts fail to transform the material into anything more than a stylishly gruesome exercise.

For all her improvisational skill and that of her top-billed costar, the much-vaunted Hart-and-Haddish pairing never pays dividends. It feels more like Half-and-Half.

Your wandering attention may begin to fixate on other deficiencies: the flimsiness of the narrative scaffolding, the thinness of the characterizations and the filmmakers’ tendency to mistake platitudes for poetry.

A capably assembled if ultimately unremarkable thriller.

Director Ron Maxwell’s adaptation of Harold Frederic’s 1893 novel elicits a certain amount of admiration for its old-fashioned carpentry and earnest, worthy approach, but its stilted dramaturgy and endless speechifying defeat the committed efforts of a sprawling ensemble.

In the story's one major stroke of invention, the usual premonitions of death have been replaced with a set of photos.

This middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested as it depicts two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it.

Old grabs you right away, starts losing you at the half-hour mark, pulls you back in with some agreeably bonkers set-pieces, drags you through a tedious closing stretch and finally leaves you in an oddly charitable mood: Say, that wasn’t so bad, except when it was terrible.

RV works up an ingratiating sweetness that partially compensates for its blunt predictability and meager laughs.

You can share Jarmusch’s despair — I certainly do — and still find its expression here too tired, bloodless and self-satisfied by half.

It diverts for a while, only to dissipate almost immediately upon conclusion.

Absent the infectious live-audience energy of Chris D'Arienzo's legit hit, this affectionate glam-rock-a-thon reps a visually bland staging of frankly insipid material, never tapping into the raucous, go-for-broke energy that would spin the show's cliches into gold, let alone platinum.

This cloddishly contrived suspenser is too busy to bore, but too farfetched to thrill, combining routine heist-thriller machinations with dialogue that often thuds like a body hitting asphalt.

What derails Blockers in the end is a curious lack of imagination, an inability to think beyond the raunch-com genre's most sentimental clichés.

Lovely to look at but a headache to listen to.

Scoob! was never going to be a great musical, but did it have to turn out to be just another superhero movie?

The simplicity of the story Eastwood is telling would seem to suit his unvarnished, unfussy style, though frankly, a bit more fuss — a few more takes to smooth out a wobbly performance, an extra light bulb or two in the interior shots — wouldn’t have gone awry. But “Cry Macho,” with its attractive but not indulgent landscapes (shot in New Mexico) backed by a spare, twangy Mark Mancina score, takes pains to reject anything that might smack of falsity or pretense.

Inspirational but uninspired sports movie.

Yes, we all contain multitudes. And, yes, we must learn to take the bad with the good—a lesson that Inside Out 2 bears out more dispiritingly, I think, than its makers intended.

Feste...has been known to elicit strong performances even from thuddingly obvious, maudlin material. But her attempts to establish an atmosphere of drab, low-key realism — evident in the dim lighting, wobbly framing and Laura’s penchant for rumpled plaid shirts — can scarcely conceal the essential phoniness of the material.

Never fully succeeds in burrowing under its protagonist's skin, despite conspicuous effort.

If this misleadingly titled movie is meant to be a whimsical Capra-esque fantasy, as the production notes suggest, then why does it make such a show of its topical relevance? If it’s meant to lay bare the realities of the system, as the production notes also suggest, then why does it feel so toothless and inconsequential?

Schnabel's signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga.

Scrumptious as it all is, it hurts to watch chefs so committed to excellence in a movie so content to settle for attractive mediocrity.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.

A movie of slick, surface-level pleasures that’s unpersuasive at its core.

This broad ethnic farce serves up a full-on culture collision, but -- thanks to a handful of diverting performers -- stops just short of becoming a train wreck.

Hitchcock is a diverting but dramatically insipid account of how the Master of Suspense took his biggest gamble and delivered his greatest success with "Psycho."

Cruising somewhere between therapy drama and paranoid thriller, this middlebrow tone poem aims for ambiguity but often veers into soporific, suspending answers (and often, viewer interest) en route to an ending that explains all.

Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem.

Elaborately conceived from a visual standpoint, Ridley Scott's first sci-fier in the three decades since "Blade Runner" remains earthbound in narrative terms, forever hinting at the existence of a higher intelligence without evincing much of its own.

De Niro’s scenes with Mann glow with warmth and wit, but something in his performance clenches up whenever Jackie gets behind a microphone and starts railing about masturbation, incontinence and other below-the-waist targets.

We Are Your Friends” has its heart in the right place, and it’s shrewd and cuddly enough to get a few likes. But it would be an infinitely better movie if it sustained the sort of trancelike sonic ecstasy that turns fans into fanatics.

Although fronted by solid performances from Sienna Miller and Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani as two desperate souls who bond over their shared love of belly dancing, this tale of friendship and rebellion on the open road reps a thin, obvious reworking of a well-worn template.

Cage supplies a stream of tension-defusing laughs while the script steadily applies the screws, but this disposable exercise in comic nihilism offers only a modest payoff at best.

Joel David Moore leads a cast full of token minorities and bickering bimbos, whom writer-helmer Adam Green dispatches with knowing glee and an obvious love for genre conventions that almost overcomes the derivative scripting.

Pacific Rim Uprising...is an unquestionably dumber, slighter, less fully realized piece of work than its predecessor. It is also 22 minutes shorter and, though no less committed to an aesthetic of shattered glass and pulverized steel, a rather more endurable experience on the whole.

Like most sequels that exist for chiefly commercial reasons, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn’t a great movie; with its flat dialogue, overblown battles and cloying CGI critters, it’s not even a particularly good one. . . . But it’s also not without its pleasures.

Crazy new gadgets, vigorous action sequences and a thorough production-design makeover aren't enough to keep Total Recall from feeling like a near-total redundancy.

Its glimmers of comic rage and generous helpings of battlefield carnage, though patchily entertaining on their own, never coalesce into a coherent reason for being.

I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, Materialists trips up on its own high-mindedness.

Although shot and performed in a determinedly raw, naturalistic register, this emotionally roiling portrait of two twentysomething Texas sweethearts too often veers toward melodramatic overstatement, inspiring little empathy or understanding despite the committed performances of promising young leads Taissa Farmiga and Ben Rosenfield.

What seems at first like an ingenious and surprising dramatic strategy feels, by the end, like an evasion on the movie’s part, a refusal to grant its subject the unflinching honesty it deserves. A true story it may be, but no one should mistake it for a truthful one.

Despite the range of musical genres represented and the obsessive attention to visual detail, there is a bland, wearying homogeneity to the way Trolls World Tour looks and sounds.

What's onscreen feels as half-assed and juvenile as it was probably always envisioned to be, suggesting an umpteenth retelling of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" by way of "The Hangover," or perhaps a far less inspired version of "Attack the Block" transplanted to small-town Ohio.

This overplayed, underachieving laffer feels thoroughly manufactured to Disney specifications.

It’s hard not to conclude that, in the case of “Eden,” Howard simply isn’t mean enough for this material. His temperament is better suited to stories of heroic resilience than ones of greed, bloodlust, and cynical isolationism.

[The Director] is especially good at integrating his New Mexico locations into the action, from a key combat scene on a bridge to a car chase that unfolds, with limited visibility, in a cornfield...Kim's handling of his first English-speaking cast isn't quite as assured, although everyone more or less gets by

Leaving no heartstrings untugged and no doggie-fart jokes uncracked, scruffy pic reps a very mixed breed of obvious humor, gently moving father-son drama and sub-"Backdraft" trial by fire.

The key to enjoying Sanctum is to look, not listen.

Completely disposable yet rousing on its own crude, testosterone-saturated terms.

A cute but disposable item were it not for the story’s weird racial undertow.

This unwieldy drama of conscience in the wake of tragedy is hyperarticulate but rarely eloquent, full of wrenchingly acted scenes that lack credible motivation or devolve into shrill hectoring.

All the more disappointing, then, that a story so pregnant with dramatic possibilities should wind up feeling like such an unconsummated opportunity. Drawn from Stephenie Meyer's polarizing, weirdly compelling fourth novel, the film is rich in surface pleasures but lacks any palpable sense of darkness or danger.

Where the film falters is in the writing of its central relationship: That Jackie and Angelo love each other fiercely doesn’t make their interactions any less hard to take, and Australian newcomer Thwaites (“Maleficent,” “Son of a Gun”), despite his ample charisma and pitch-perfect American accent, can’t quite get past his character’s callow, whiny affect.

Competent but juiceless New York melodrama, an unpersuasive marriage of head-slamming action and middling civic intrigue that treats issues like gay rights and public housing as red herrings rather than actual talking points.

This silly but straight-faced supernatural thriller manages to elicit an occasional shudder in between cheap jolts and false scares, emerging as a feat of competent direction (by debuting helmer Stiles White) over derivative scripting (by White and writing partner Juliet Snowden).

It flirts with politics but is content to settle, in the end, for a parlor trick.

It would be silly to expect this movie to achieve the cinematic equivalent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliance, but you can’t help wishing it had more to offer than righteous speeches and stirring glances, that it put a few more ideas in your head to go with that lump in your throat.

The movie is a polished, well-made affair (Depp’s smallpox pustules look scarily state-of-the-art) but also a disappointingly juiceless one, with little of the messy go-for-broke filmmaking energy that Maïwenn has brought to better, rougher works like “Polisse.”

What starts out as a mildly diverting thriller blows itself to smithereens in the final reel.

As cinema or literature, Murder on the Orient Express may be little more than a clever parlor trick. But in its final moments, even this overstuffed, underachieved movie offers a morally unsettling reminder that — with apologies to Chandler — the art of murder isn’t always as simple as it appears.

Dickler's acting debut is memorably repellent, even if the movie he's in -- a fitfully engaging story about two estranged brothers on a road trip -- often feels forced and unconvincing, even on its modest, intimately scaled terms

In a way, Indy has been swallowed up by not only the very action-comedy movie formula he helped normalize but also by the dispiriting, depersonalizing trends in 21st-century studio filmmaking.

Unlike “Hustle,” Amsterdam only fitfully locates the moment-to-moment comic verve — or the bittersweet sense of longing — that would give these characters and their farcical shenanigans the deeper human resonance it’s clearly aiming for.

Intermittently stirring and undeniably well made as it slowly unspools a multi-pronged drama set during the 1999 outbreak of the Second Chechen War, the picture has run-of-the-mill pacing and storytelling lapses that are compounded by its ultimately hectoring, didactic approach.

The didactic presentation, grim speechifying and tacked-on love story all signify a less-than-healthy regard for the audience's intelligence.

Last Knights is a fairly ludicrous mystery and a so-so action movie, but it’s nonetheless been constructed with an earnest attention to detail that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Even the Brit-wit chemistry of Russell Brand and Helen Mirren can't offset the self-conscious degree to which this tame, calculated effort sticks to its source.

As this latest gets under way, Thor has recovered his enviable god-bod but still has little sense of purpose. The problem with “Love and Thunder” is that it seems to reflect this identity crisis while pretending to solve it.

As directed by Stuart Hazeldine, even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material’s stranger undercurrents.

Diverting in bits and pieces, but absent the heart, soul and ingenuity one associates with the best of Disney animation, the endlessly merchandisable picture could very well soar at the box office, but it won’t stick the landing where word of mouth is concerned.

Directed with flat, joyless competence by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”), “Venom” brings with it a laborious, decades-spanning development history. A movie this long in the works should arrive on-screen feeling like more than just an afterthought.

Intermittently enjoyable hokum at best.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is somehow both hectic and leaden, a thing of exhausting, pummeling mediocrity. It offers up dazzling feats of sorcery and realms of wonderment (early 20th-century London and Paris among them) and manages to conjure the very opposite of magic.

A dour study of terrorism, 1880s style, The Secret Agent represents an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's only London-based novel, the fidelity of which to the original text does not yield a terrifically exciting film.

It pulls off the impressive feat of feeling both hyperactive and lazy. This is hardly the first time a major Hollywood franchise has succumbed to narrative flabbiness, or invested in grand, elaborate world building with the kind of devotion that far outstrips the viewer’s interest.

What makes Furlough such a wan, dispiriting experience is how indecisive and fundamentally timid it seems. Rather than subtly braiding drama and comedy together, as real life often does, the movie oscillates jerkily between the two modes, as though hesitant to commit to either one.

Somehow hectic and lumbering, diverting and dispiriting all at once, this mud-toned medieval pulp largely cleaves to the spirit of Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” series, reducing a fabled figure of British lore to two hours of tough-guy swagger and head-pounding digital thwackery.

Despite its clammy atmosphere and two credible and appealing leads, the movie is mechanical in its rhythms and unimaginative in its terrors.

While only the converted will likely see the redemption behind the manipulation, picture delivers a strong enough dose of spiritual saccharine to yield solid if not heavenly returns from its trusty target audience.

Jungle Cruise, despite its more-than-capable leads and its much-vaunted attention to detail and verisimilitude, never feels transporting in the way that even mediocre blockbusters were once able to muster. It’s less an expedition than a simulation, a dispatch from a wild yet oddly pristine world where seeing is never close to believing.

A clumsily edited feature-length version of five episodes from History’s hugely popular 10-hour miniseries “The Bible,” this stiff, earnest production plays like a half-hearted throwback to the British-accented biblical dramas of yesteryear, its smallscreen genesis all too apparent in its Swiss-cheese construction and subpar production values.

“Oh, Toto, this doesn’t look like the Oz I remember,” Dorothy murmurs at one point. Truer words were never spoken.

The future looks alternately grim and hysterical in Aeon Flux, a spectacularly silly sci-fier that plays like "The Matrix" crossed with "The Island" and reinterpreted as a long-lost Michael Jackson video.

Shorn of eroticism, intensity or purpose... it strikes familiar beats in a manner more strained than inspired.

While Colman peels back Hilary’s layers of grief and rage with all the ferocity and subtlety you’d expect from an actor of her caliber, even she can’t sell the joyfully beaming pivot required of her in an interminable sequence in which Empire of Light essentially becomes the ’80s equivalent of Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial.

Falcone’s attempts to spin this flat, formulaic comedy into an affecting character drama are frustrated by filmmaking choices that work against a sense of persuasive reality.

McCarthy, who can toss off an insult like “Suck my d—k, Gigantor!” and give it a vague impression of wit, coaxes forth just about every laugh and stray chuckle that could possibly have been extracted from the material.

It’s astonishing how little tension or even momentary menace Trevorrow is able to mine from individual action sequences, how tame even T. rex now seems in its late-franchise dotage. The mix of practical and computer-generated effects used to bring these behemoths to life has evolved by leaps and bounds, but their ability to stir and scare us — much less provoke even a moment’s thought — is a thing of the ancient past.

Jessabelle serves up a murky and underwhelming cauldron of Southern-fried voodoo-horror claptrap.

What Snyder has contrived here feels less like a vital re-energization of the form than a ponderous guided tour through a museum’s worth of familiar superhero-movie tropes and conventions: Look at this, look at that, try not to look at your watch. Like the Flash himself, Snyder wants to slow time to a crawl, to deconstruct every gesture, to make his obsessions your own. He wants the movie to go on forever. Mission accomplished.

No matter how many (presumably non-computer-generated) tears Smith sheds, he and Lee never transform this baby hit man into a plausible science-fiction conceit, let alone invest him with a soul.

Banking on the appealing chemistry of Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah -- with co-star Katie Holmes awkwardly upsetting the balance -- this strained heist comedy about three cash-strapped femmes is watchable enough for a few reels, but lacks the requisite wit and amoral energy to capitalize on its get-rich-quick premise.

The more the film implicates David, the more it distances itself and the viewer, playing out in the emotionally detached but sensationalistic, overripe manner of a tabloid freakshow.

In the Heart of the Sea feels stiff and unconvincing, weirdly devoid of texture, and populated by ciphers who speak primarily in the leaden language of exposition.

It’s understandable that Hardwicke didn’t want to mimic her predecessor’s moves. But in chop-chop-chopping the action into standard Hollywood fragments, she has drained the material of its tension, its meaning and its purpose, to say nothing of its beauty.

This murky psychological suspenser manages the tricky feat of being as predictable as it is finally preposterous.

The only real tension you feel in Dying of the Light is that between the thoughtful, tough-minded character piece Schrader presumably thought he was making and the bruised, indifferent hackwork that has ultimately made it to the screen.

Its most memorable effects, though, are not technological in nature. They are the wary side-eye glances and unexpected smiles that cross Fishback’s face as she banters with Foxx and Gordon-Levitt and also the streams of hip-hop poetry — carefully scripted but thrillingly delivered — that come pouring out during a few welcome stretches of down time.

There's more genuine humor to be gleaned from saying "Woodcock" over and over again than from watching Mr. Woodcock, a wan comic effort barely elevated a few notches by Billy Bob Thornton's passive-aggressive villainy.

Although John Wells’ dramedy is energized by its mouth-watering montages and an unsurprisingly fierce lead turn from Cooper, Steven Knight’s script pours on the acid but holds the depth, forcing its fine actors (including Sienna Miller and Daniel Bruhl) to function less as an ensemble than as a motley sort of intervention group.

Rebecca Hall's enjoyably bubbly lead performance lends the picture an occasional frisson of amusement.

This inane and incredibly tasteless sequel qualifies as an excuse to bring back those hard-working funnymen Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis for another round of amateur-criminal hijinks and semi-improvised vulgarity, jabbing away repeatedly at some elusive comic sweet spot where blatant nastiness and egregious stupidity collide — and very occasionally hitting the mark.

A picturesque adventure-comedy that quickly capsizes under the weight of its obnoxious slapstick, pedestrian dialogue and general unwillingness to rise above stock ideas and situations.

Achieves a modest degree of tension and dark humor before tilting into gory overkill, while its diffuse central ideas — about materialism, the dangers of playing God and the latent human capacity for violence — never really take plausible shape.

In filtering a ripped-from-the-headlines story through the prism of satire, Suburbicon winds up squandering much of its power. For all that the movie borrows from history, it conveys little in the way of truth.

Unsettles without illuminating, marred by narcotic pacing and a blank lead performance.

While there are a few chuckles to be had here, mostly courtesy of Wilson’s gee-willikers delivery, the rest of the cast fares worse, including Haddish, whose bumbling clairvoyant is stuck cracking moldy jokes about PayPal and CVS.

There’s a deeper emptiness at the core of the movie, a failure of nerve and a fundamental incuriosity about what makes the Snowden affair interesting and relevant, then and now.

Like a beautifully tailored suit that starts to smell funny after a few minutes, this sumptuous but stultifying lark sets up a quasi-Hitchcockian intrigue between two strangers abroad, but smothers any thrills or sparks in a haze of self-regard.

Too much of Strangerland simply feels dodgy and overdetermined, veering between art-film pretensions and melodramatic gestures, and governed by ambitions that outstrip the filmmakers’ abilities.

Don’t Worry Darling, for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie.

The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford.

Bland, canned but studiously professional sequel retains most of the principals from Fox's family-friendly 2003 hit, including the ever-reliable Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt.

Unable or unwilling to match the visceral chops and moral provocations of superior serial-killer chillers, Righteous Kill is content to be a twisty genre exercise; it's like "Seven" as reimagined by M. Night Shyamalan.

For all its temporal twists and lyrical, sometimes remarkably photorealistic backdrops, Shinbo’s movie has none of “Your Name’s” narrative intricacy or stunning visual richness, much less its radical cross-gender empathy. These Fireworks look depressingly flat from any angle.

An initially amusing but fatally overstretched action-comedy that marks a lamer-than-expected big-screen outing for Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.

This dire battle-of-the-exes action-comedy severely tests audience goodwill by running an indulgent 110 minutes, crammed as it is with half-baked thriller subplots and aimless supporting characters, as if to distract from the central duo's nonstop bickering.

Appropriating all the external trappings of big-budget fantasy but none of the requisite soul, this leaden epic never soars like the CG-rendered fire-breather at the core of its derivative mythology.

Certainly you expect a good time from Bateman and McAdams, who give their banter just the right sly, sportive rhythm even when the lines and situations themselves come up short.

Nowhere near as much fun as its title, playing out like an unusually obtuse episode of "The Wire."

A clumsy but inoffensive romantic comedy.

Saltburn is shocking only in its puerility. No sophomore effort should feel this sophomoric.

"I had no conception of the depths of your emptiness!" a character shrieks in Bel Ami, and her words take on an unintended resonance as addressed to Robert Pattinson in the lead role.

Although assembled with consummate care and obsessive attention to visual detail, Pacific Rim manages only fitful engagement and little in the way of real wonderment, suspense or terror.

Coherence devolves into a noisy, cluttered portrait of dysfunction, all clenched fists and shouted expletives. The twists may be novel, but the talk, and the upshot, are all too dispiritingly familiar.

If "Freaky Friday" had an impudent, foul-mouthed little brother, it would be The Change-Up, an often needlessly crass, bromance-oriented spin on the body-swap comedy.

Brimming with fanciful ideas about life, romance and the rejuvenating power of music, Sueno sings a lovely tune but chokes on its own banal lyrics.

Benson displays more energy and assurance behind the camera than he does in front of it; even still, his tonal command of his own narrative is wobbly at best, employing cynical humor and climactic eruptions of violence to jazz up what is ultimately an overly earnest and predictable cautionary tale.

This f/x-heavy third adaptation of the Christian-themed fantasy series feels routine and risk-averse in every respect, as if investment anxiety had fatally hobbled its sense of wonder.

This uneven effort saddles its likable leads, Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, with the kind of verbally exaggerated sexual humor that not only comes off as embarrassingly strained and calculated, but also compromises what the picture genuinely wants to be.

This one, written by Fellowes and directed by Simon Curtis (“My Week With Marilyn,” “Woman in Gold”) with the same workmanlike efficiency, affords its share of passing pleasures. And not just of the usual luxury-porn variety, although those who watch “Downton Abbey” for the pearls, frocks and waistcoats, the posh furnishings and elegant dinners will hardly be disappointed.

While Sal means to honor its subject, it’s too clunky and amateurish to really illuminate him.

Snatched may represent a failure of sensitivity, but it’s an even greater failure of nerve.

The picture's attempts at comic portraiture feel sketchy at best, more or less assigning each character a single, belabored trait.

A blandly executed action-thriller whose cast names (Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe) and mild ’80s Louisiana flavor offer only modest compensations for the story’s workmanlike construction and routine twists.

While it earns high marks for Jon Henson’s production design, this murkily derivative sci-fi-horror entry sets its sights disappointingly low in terms of story and ideas.

Mira Nair’s latest immigrant saga saddles itself with a laborious narrative structure and half-baked thriller elements in a misguided attempt to open up what should be an intimate, introspective story.

As it is, so much obvious care has been taken to reproduce and update the charms of the Robert Stevenson-directed original — to deliver an old-fashioned yet newfangled burst of family-friendly uplift — that Mary Poppins Returns winds up feeling both hyperactive and paralyzed. It sits there flailing on the screen, bright, gaudy and mirthless, tossing off strained bits of comic business and all but strangling itself with its own good cheer.

Another blandly competent, thoroughly forgettable low-budget sci-fier assembled from the stray parts of other, better movies.

A draggy, generally laugh-free outing that wastes a perfectly good Anna Faris.

This moving but far from revelatory portrait of a beloved family figure registers as too slight and personal for significant theatrical play.

Even during the fun moments — and there are a few, if nowhere near enough — you know you’re in the presence of an impostor, a generic blockbuster wannabe in established franchise drag.

Not a thriller so much as an extremely violent swimsuit calendar, the lushly lensed but dramatically waterlogged Into the Blue is too infatuated with its scantily clad stars to make sense of all the drug dealers, boat looters and bloodthirsty sharks trying to hunt them down.

The Greatest Showman, for all its celebratory razzle-dazzle, in the end feels curiously lacking in conviction. Its pleasures, namely those Pasek-Paul songs, could be removed and repurposed for another story entirely, with no discernible loss in enjoyment or meaning...Its failures are rooted in something deeper: a dispiriting lack of faith in the audience’s intelligence, and a dawning awareness of its own aesthetic hypocrisy. You’ve rarely seen a more straight-laced musical about the joys of letting your freak flag fly.

The craven commitment to fan service that has long afflicted big-budget adaptations is still in evidence. The wooden dialogue and indifferent performances aren’t bugs so much as features of a corporate mindset that sees IP fidelity and imaginative storytelling as mutually exclusive aims.

Not every historical drama has to be a masterpiece of verisimilitude, but in a movie about intelligence professionals whose very job is to analyze every detail and sniff out damning discrepancies, instances of visual and narrative sloppiness stand out all the more glaringly.

As an exercise in sustained claustrophobia, the movie is not without its grisly accomplishments. Its effectiveness lies not in those moments when its characters are struck down without warning, but rather in the lingering sense that death has slowly, quietly taken up residence among them.

It’s bland enough to serve as a kind of palate cleanser at the end of a long and punishing moviegoing summer.

Neither a particularly good movie nor the pop-cultural travesty that some were dreading.

The manner in which the central scheme plays out is predictably moronic, vulgar and juvenile, though the parties involved just about make up for it.

Despite a credible and moving love story driven by strong performances from Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, director Peter Sollett’s film is an oppressively worthy and self-satisfied inspirational vehicle that views its story primarily as a series of teachable moments.

Icky though it is, Antiviral never builds the sort of character investment or narrative momentum that would allow its visceral horrors to seriously disturb, rather than seeming like choice gross-out moments lovingly designed for maximum viewer recoil.

Mawkish, clunky and unenlightening about female suffering in this or any generation.

A modestly affecting reconciliation drama wrapped in a so-so sports movie by way of a misogynistic romantic comedy, Playing for Keeps can't stop tripping all over itself.

Really, the problem with Eddington is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious.

Although funnier and mercifully shorter than its 2012 battle-of-the-sexes predecessor, this third collaboration between manic comedian Kevin Hart and director Tim Story (hot on the heels of their January hit “Ride Along”) is an exceedingly formulaic and ultimately exhausting thing to experience.

Divorce Corp. is reasonably cogent when it comes to explaining divorce-court terminology and statistics, even if it comes up somewhat short in terms of actual facts and figures. The filmmakers are far less successful when they start dragging in outrageous examples of official misconduct.

The film's noisy, slam-bang approach and lack of imagination in all nonvisual departments will keep it from rounding up a fresh generation of thrill-seekers.

A ludicrous, borderline-nonsensical supernatural concoction with a slightly redeeming sense of its own silliness.

A sporadically amusing, more often grating romantic comedy.

Equals walls itself off from the suspense implicit in its scenario — it’s practically an anti-thriller — and barely flickers to life as a tale of forbidden desire.

What it isn’t is especially insightful or memorable. Just because evil is banal doesn’t mean a movie has to be.

The body count runs high at Brangwyn boarding school, but tension, surprise and viewer interest are the real casualties in The Moth Diaries.

The series seems to have at last entered its frustrating, decadent, spinning-its-wheels phase.

The Mauritanian is a moral muddle as well as a narrative one, and it leaves you wondering why our empathy for Slahi has to be so mediated, negotiated and rationalized in the first place.

A slick, disposable soap opera.

Muppets Most Wanted looks and sounds eager to please but immediately feels like a more slapdash, aimless affair, trying — and mostly failing — to turn its stalled creativity into some sort of self-referential joke.

The title of this strenuously crude and crotch-obsessed movie may be lazy, but it’s also pretty apt.

A fine cast can only do so much with the script’s pileup of generational conflict and long-winded introspection, resulting in a willfully out-of-step picture.

While it's poignant seeing the whole gang again, the tired gross-out antics and limp romantic reprisals keep this hapless if heartfelt effort from qualifying as a decent comedy, let alone a generational classic.

Keaton’s performance — sly, affectionately cranky, subtly reverberant — is certainly one of The Flash’s highlights. But it also reveals, with depressing clarity, the imaginative poverty of the movie’s design.

What makes 12 Strong objectionable — and what will also make it appealing to some — is its attempt to induce a kind of amnesia in the audience, to ask that we forget about the subsequent moral and strategic failures of America’s “war on terror” or the limits of military retaliation when it comes to the pursuit of justice.

Spencer succeeds much more than the movie itself does; even when the writing and the filmmaking fail her, which is annoyingly often, she’s awfully good at using her beatific smile and tough-talking charm to elicit your nervous chuckles.

Amid all the clunky lines, the derivative plot turns and the surprisingly indifferent production values, you can sense this movie striving for something more sensitive and intimate than the usual blockbuster blowout.

While the result is yet another story of African suffering told from a white do-gooder's perspective, this particular do-gooder is intrinsically fascinating enough to warrant attention, albeit more nuanced attention than he receives here.

The French are smelly, vulgar, racist and oversexed, or so it would seem based on 2 Days in New York, a scattershot culture-clash comedy that goes down like yesterday's foie gras.

This sloppily constructed horror-thriller lacks the satirical bite and action chops to skewer extreme-right-wing zealots with the gusto Smith clearly feels they deserve, instead evincing the verbal incontinence and slack tension that have long dogged the writer-director's work.

So why does it all feel so laborious and overworked, so frantically self-regarding? It has something to do with the insipid quality of the songs, none of which threaten to lodge themselves in your brain the way the first movie’s lines so effortlessly do.

A little less chatter and a little more splatter might have improved Godspeed, an initially intriguing but finally overwrought tale of murder, retribution and quasi-religious fanaticism set in the land of the midnight sun.

The magic here feels machine-made and depressingly state-of-the-art.

The Holdovers is a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one.