Justin Chang

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.

The Children Act evinces measured intelligence and polished craftsmanship without ever quite shaking off the feel of a work filtered through its non-native medium. Still, it’s always rewarding to watch Thompson bring her lucid wit and deep emotional reserves to bear on a meaty role.

It plays less like a meaty mystery than an extended thank-you to the fans who breathed it into existence. Still, it’s smooth and engaging enough on its own compromised terms, clearly informed by Thomas’ genre-savvy storytelling and unpretentious craftsmanship, and not without a certain self-deprecating sense of humor about its own immodest origins.

Anchored by a terrific performance from Nick Nolte as a grizzled umpire who gets an unexpected second chance at fatherhood, this easygoing comedy-drama plays out slowly but assuredly, infusing a conventional story about a blossoming relationship with welcome reserves of honesty and humor.

The Photograph is a movie of seductive, slow-savored pleasures.

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

[A] beautifully bittersweet and generous movie — which, like life itself, draws no distinction between the significant and the insignificant.

Let the Corpses Tan — or, to use its even better French title, “Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres” — is a feverish, obsessive act of cinematic rehabilitation, a shoot-’em-up conceived in tribute to a peculiar strain of blood-spattered B-movies from the 1960s and ’70s.

Charm City Kings clearly knows what it’s doing; unfortunately, what it’s doing is often just as obvious to us.

The result may not be much more than an exercise in craft, a skillful demonstration of all the games you can play with long takes, moving cameras, blurred focus and cavernous pools of darkness. But craft is hard to overrate these days, and Sandberg’s technique, far from feeling assaultive or bludgeoning, has the effect of heightening your concentration.

With its pummeling scenes of mud-and-blood combat, its majestic, nearly monochrome widescreen images and its beautifully broody Nicholas Britell score, this plainspoken but unfailingly intelligent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henriad demands and ultimately earns your surrender.

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 wildly ambitious rumble-in-the-jungle battle epic arrives bearing so heavy a burden of industry expectations, one wishes the results were less kitschy and more coherent; still, the filmmaking has a raw physicality and crazy conviction it's hard not to admire.

Amirpour has vision to burn, and inside this not-so-bad batch of splendid atmospherics and half-baked ideas is a leaner, sharper movie trying to chew its way out.

Partridge navigates risky material with assurance, delicacy and a deepening sense of intimacy that can turn, without warning, into complicity: The more at ease we feel in the characters’ company, the more disturbingly questionable the situation becomes.

Giddily recycling everything from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix” to yakuza actioners and National Geographic documentaries, it’s a garish, trippy, wildly uneven and finally quite disarming piece of work, graced by a moment-to-moment unpredictability.

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.

With its belabored gags, misfired pop-culture references and garish visuals crammed together like so many disjointed body parts, this manic kidpic cranks up the annoy-o-meter early on and rarely lets up.

In the end M.A.S.H. succeeds, in spite of its glaring faults, because Gould, Sutherland, Skerritt, Jo Ann Pflug as the delicious Lt. Dish, and Roger Bowen, as the goof-off commanding officer who is bright enough to recognize his junior officers' medical competence and stay out of their way, are all believable and bitingly funny in their casual disdain for the Army.

This family-friendly outing captures the story's human snowball effect with a measure of sly, satirical wit, if also an excess of boilerplate subplots and jokey '80s details.

Kelly Reichardt blends her lucid observational approach with a topical-thriller format to engrossing effect in Night Moves.

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.

Where the film falters is in its willingness to settle for canned uplift, reducing the substance of Malala’s global activism to multicultural montages, goosed by Thomas Newman’s emotional cattle prod of a score.

Land is a movie of hard truths that go down a little too easily, a story as terse but never as elemental as its title.

Haley’s movie is ultimately a feature-length valentine to his star, and as such it’s something of a mixed blessing.

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.

Resisting the temptation to invest its characters and storytelling with any particularly winsome, distinctive qualities, the film quickly devolves into an infernally busy and overextended chase sequence crammed with desperately unfunny comic patter and noisy, pointless action.

I’ll admit that I found much of Babylon mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

The movie, which begins streaming Friday on Disney+, emerges a generally charming, sometimes cloying exercise in wildlife anthropomorphism.

The Sense of an Ending, despite its polished construction and immaculate pedigree, doesn’t ultimately mean as much as it thinks it does.

Even the flaws of Thank You for Playing have the effect of underscoring its humanity; the movie may immortalize a creative endeavor, but it never loses sight of the fact that it’s also honoring a life.

To call the movie a mess would be to state the obvious and perhaps miss the point. The movie’s sense of moment-to-moment chaos — madcap scenes of bellowing, falling, tumbling and general agitating — is scarcely accidental. It is, on the contrary, very deliberately achieved.

What the movie refuses to do is dazzle, or resonate, or overstay its welcome, which is another way of saying it doesn’t really linger. As “8’s” go, it could stand to be a little crazier.

Aiming for an Alexander Payne-style synthesis of wry comedy and unflinching character study, pic has been made with the utmost sincerity, but the frankly lugubrious material and barely compensating spasms of humor are all but impossible to warm to.

Respect is fine, fitfully rousing, even respectable. And sometimes, it’s something more.

This vulgar romp is a generally harmless, heartwarming affair, a cinematic Christmas cookie almost sweet and flaky enough to cover the fact that it's laced with hash, cocaine and assorted bodily fluids, blood included.

Conventional but rousingly effective picture.

Context and psychological insight are the major casualties of Day Night Day Night, a dramatically limited but strangely powerful portrait of a young would-be terrorist.

While the characters’ background details (including their occupations) are kept to a minimum, the emotions the story touches are vivid and accessible.

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.

Onward is a touching, lovingly crafted oddity — a movie that acknowledges its borrowed elements at the outset and then proceeds to reinvigorate them with tried-and-true Pixar virtues: sly wit, dazzling invention and a delicacy of feeling that approaches the sublime.

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

Transit touchingly illuminates the close bonds that can form within migrant communities, even as it refuses to harbor any illusions about how easily those bonds can be broken.

The real battle in Roman Polanski's brisk, fitfully amusing adaptation of Yasmina Reza's popular play is a more formal clash between stage minimalism and screen naturalism, as this acid-drenched four-hander never shakes off a mannered, hermetic feel that consistently betrays its theatrical origins.

The mix of busy comic exaggeration, affectionate ’80s nostalgia trip and gloomy mid-perestroika history lesson never comes together.

The trouble with this muscular, fitfully absorbing, confusingly titled action movie — a bigger, brasher and less memorable picture than its predecessor in every respect — is that its cynicism too often feels like a put-on.

It's a sign of that pic's dramatic durability that "Kid" manages to be as absorbing as it is, despite its nearly 2½-hour running time.

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

Birds of Prey, directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson, is an impudent blast of comic energy. Light on psychology and devoid of prestige, it’s a slab of R-rated hard candy that refuses to take anything, least of all itself, too seriously.

The actors hurl themselves into their roles with sufficient commitment and feeling that you believe in Tom and Isabel completely, even when the creaky narrative machinery around them begins to trigger your skepticism.

Dragged Across Concrete has been made with enough skill and moody, meticulous craftsmanship — another Zahler signature — to earn its own measure of tolerance, or at least some closer scrutiny.

The poster made it look kind of fun, and lo and behold, it is. It helps that the pairing of Bullock and Tatum — now that sounds like a law firm I’d hire, or at least a hoity-toity restaurant I’d eat at — is as delightful as you’d expect from two actors of such goofy charm and combustible energy.

Tsui tries to preserve that human element in fits and starts throughout “Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings” but to little avail.

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.

Raimi’s sheer passion for his material can sometimes overwhelm the coherence of his storytelling, and his unfashionable sincerity doesn’t always mesh with the breezy quip-a-minute tone that is the Marvel enterprise’s preferred comic idiom. I mean those both as compliments.

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.

By turns a teeming slice of life and a virtuoso farce, reveals itself in the final stretch as a cracked fairy tale.

For Huppert, most celebrated for her uncompromising severity in films like "Elle" and "The Piano Teacher," the movie is an opportunity to cut gloriously loose; no less than Claire herself, she seems to be enjoying her holiday.

The complications are ludicrous, but the movie navigates them with cheek and verve, and the jokes land with surprising consistency.

Even when Allied loses its footing, there is something unmistakably touching about Zemeckis’ commitment to evoking a world so quietly, heroically out of step with the times.

Its fun first hour soon gives way to a leaden, expository approach that unwisely favors emotional stakes over speculative-fiction smarts.

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.

It’s a film of modest charms and secondhand pleasures, enough to help pass a summer afternoon, if not to quell the sense that it was made for less-than-creative reasons.

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.

When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? I think it sees a good actor giving a well-meaning, unevenly directed and often touching performance in a movie that strives to wrest something raw and truthful from a story that’s all bald contrivances, technological as well as melodramatic.

Working from a tightly compressed screenplay by David Nicholls, director Mike Newell strikes the beats of a deservedly oft-told tale with dour competence but little in the way of dramatic inspiration or visual flair.

A rare studio entertainment featuring a largely Latino ensemble, yet necessarily fronted by a big-name draw like Costner, McFarland, USA feels at once mildly progressive and unavoidably retrograde.

McCarthy pushes the thriller narrative in directions more extreme and harrowing than plausible, bringing Bill and Allison’s story to an unexpected point of reckoning.

By the end, thanks to Leon de Aranoa’s steady direction and the actors’ slow-building character work, “A Perfect Day” manages to coalesce into a reasonably tough-minded, compassionate vision of the difficulties and rewards of trying to do the right thing in an intractable situation, though the film has to overcome more than a few flat, indolent stretches to get there.

Christopher Robin finds ways to distinguish itself within its generic confines.

Gadot and Pine give great pillow talk, and their easy screwball rhythms provide not just levity but ballast: They ground a movie in which time, for all its malleability, always feels like it’s slipping away.

Truth be told, I don’t much mind the version of Bad Times at the El Royale we have before us. Even if, with its multi-chapter narrative and time-skipping plotlines, its mix of verbal longwindedness and abrupt violence, the movie initially seems to warn of a terminal case of Tarantino-itis: an El Royale with cheese.

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.

The individual tales, though ornamented with all manner of fabulous CGI curlicues, are overly busy and only mildly involving, and “Three Thousand Years of Longing” ultimately feels arch and encumbered in that self-conscious way that stories about storytelling often are.

Sutton’s vision is unsettling and immersive, his technical precision immaculate. The sound design alone — long, ambient silences disrupted by a flashbulb-popping hallucination or a sudden scream — is reason enough to see the movie in a theater, whatever unpleasant associations the ending may conjure.

Even its most surreal flights of fancy are tethered to a ploddingly diagrammed story whose indisputable lessons — cherish the ones you love, and also make room for more of them — are driven home with dispiriting obviousness.

What might have seemed pro forma on paper...overcomes its occasionally studied stylistic tics to become a troubled, anguished love story that neither exaggerates nor soft-pedals the demons on display.

Only a curmudgeon could entirely resist the laid-back charms of Red, an amusing, light-footed caper about a team of aging CIA veterans rudely forced out of retirement.

The troubling whiff of nationalist sentiment doesn’t entirely blunt the force and sweep of Ryoo’s multi-pronged narrative, even when the story generally proceeds in fits and starts.

Among the movie’s more disquieting pleasures is the sight of this peerless actor — known for her ability to project an air of casual, chilly mastery over any situation — wilting under the mockery of her character’s unruly students, who treat her with only slightly more contempt than her colleagues do.

This is a quietly insinuating picture with, by my estimation, one good jump scare, a lot of queasy chuckles and an overall atmosphere of slow, creeping, heavily perfumed rot.

The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground.

This well-acted, smoothly crafted drama tells a story of cross-generational bonding in the face of historical oppression, in touching if unsurprising fashion.

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.

It’s like a “Fast & Furious” movie that’s been deconstructed and reassembled as a gleefully demented live-action cartoon.

Good-humored and endearing, full of energy and color (sometimes neon) if not quite Pixar-level invention.

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.

Berg’s blunt, pummeling style offers few nuances and makes no apologies, but his broad brushstrokes have clearly found an ideal canvas in this grimly heroic rendering of hell on earth.

There’s something fitting, even respectful, about the sheer number of movie stars that have been pressed into service here. Throwing subtlety to the wind with wild gesticulations and exaggerated Italian accents, they may flirt with and sometimes tumble headlong into stereotype, but they do so with a verve and commitment that, for the better part of 2½ hours, disarms judgment and suspends disbelief.

It’s an effective if reductive conceit, which more or less describes Being the Ricardos, one of those pleasantly tidy biographical fantasias that aim to compress something remarkable — a life, a career, a cultural phenomenon — into the space of one revealing week.

Everything old is shockingly, stirringly new again in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the rare sequel so unexpectedly enchanting that it plays less like a rehash than a reclamation.

Under Johnson’s patient, observant direction, a relationship that might sound ridiculous on paper lives and breathes with surprising tenderness and plausibility onscreen.

Celeste & Jesse Forever earns points for bucking formula, but its fusion of snark and sincerity has a calculated slickness that rings increasingly hollow.

Wrapping the political hot potato of illegal immigration in the sentimental balm of a mother-son reunion drama, this stirring tale will be embraced most enthusiastically by Mexican audiences on both sides of the border.

The triumph of Diane is that the movie, no less than its heroine, refuses to be diminished. What looks at first like a solid, well-carpentered exercise in downbeat indie realism ends up, by dint of its unexpected tonal and temporal leaps and sudden formal ruptures, in less easily definable territory.

A smart and absorbing new French comedy that initially unfolds like a series of psychotherapy sessions and eventually brings its story to a suitably mythic climax not far from a sputtering volcano.

For all its visual sweep and propulsively violent action, this bloodthirsty rendition of the Old English epic can't overcome the disadvantage of being enacted by digital waxworks rather than flesh-and-blood Danes and demons.

A bit embalmed in its own nobility, it’s an extraordinary story told in dutiful, unexceptional terms, the passionate commitment of all involved rarely achieving gut-level impact.

On its own unpretentious, unapologetically pleasure-seeking terms, “The Shallows” has enough to recommend it — not least the fact that you could watch it twice in roughly the same amount of time it would take to watch “The Revenant,” and with little appreciable loss in adrenaline or poetry.

Over the course of a generous 137-minute running time, Mackenzie evinces a patience in his own storytelling that only occasionally tests yours. There are excesses and longueurs, to be sure, but crucially, the tone of the piece never feels monotonous.

Like some of the feature-length spinoffs of old “Saturday Night Live” sketches that proliferated in the ’90s, it feels like a padded version of a bit that was a lot sharper in five-minute increments.

Despite some clever virtual-reality concepts and projections about the next frontier of globalization, Alex Rivera's ambitious directing debut lacks the vision, or the budget, to pull off its fusion of sci-fi and aspirational saga.

Where so much horror cinema wields the sledgehammer, Flanagan consistently applies a scalpel. His work here is notable for its visual control, its refreshing dearth of jump scares and the delicate filigree of its world building.

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.

Even when he’s dealing with this boilerplate material, Collet-Serra brings an understated intensity and a subtle emotional pull to every scene, aided immeasurably by actors who invest their roles, big and small, with just the right degree of conviction.

Savages never quite captures the novel's diamond-hard sarcasm, it offers other satisfactions in its visceral immediacy, its overriding sense of danger and a clutch of performances that, whatever one's reservations about the characters, can't help but court the viewer's emotional investment.

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.

Lux Aeterna, to its credit, is a pretty terrible commercial and an undeniably fascinating experiment.

Has Gordon Gekko gone soft? The answer is, sort of -- a development that takes some of the bite out of Oliver Stone's shrewdly opportunistic, glibly entertaining sequel, which offers another surface-skimming peek inside the power corridors of global finance.

This accomplished debut feature avoids most of the usual pitfalls, channeling its outrage into a tense, focused piece of storytelling with a powerful sense of empathy.

The performances remain delectable, the multiple murders startlingly bloody -- even the ones that are presented purely hypothetically. [02 Nov 2018, p.E4]

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.

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.

A villain will rise, as he must, and the inevitability of that spectacle is the source of this movie’s undeniable power as well as its real limitations.

What’s on-screen too often feels like wan, second-rate imitation, and the few differences seem motivated less by a spirit of imagination than one of joyless anxiety.

Roughly three parts charming to one part cloying, The F Word attempts and largely succeeds at pulling off a smart, self-aware riff on romantic-comedy conventions while maintaining a core of earnest feeling.

Ben-Ari seems just as invested, if not more so, in the social and psychological obstacles that can make breastfeeding problematic, and she explores them with impressive rigor, sensitivity and a refreshing lack of judgment, listening intently while prescribing little.

Judd Apatow's instincts have rarely been sharper, wiser or more relatable than in This Is 40, an acutely perceptive, emotionally generous laffer about the joys and frustrations of marriage and middle age.

While its surface pleasures are dazzling — if a bit protracted, at well north of two hours — it finally suggests that memorable screen villainy and complex inner humanity may be forced into a kind of stalemate, at least when there’s a corporate-branded intellectual property involved.

For all Winocour’s obvious skill behind the camera, too much of “Disorder” bogs down in ill-defined motivations and credulity-straining plot turns.

Lovely to look at but a headache to listen to.

Lovely but listless.

Never before has Malick explored sexuality so openly onscreen, and while the nudity is fairly discreet, the eroticism of flesh cradling flesh, even the gesture of a hand touching a shoulder, turns out to be a natural subject for Lubezki’s exquisitely graceful camerawork.

It’s without a shred of guilt that I say there is honest pleasure to be found in Before I Fall, which takes an unapologetically silly conceit and wrings from it a surprisingly nimble and affecting survey of contemporary teenage attitudes and anxieties.

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.

What Lin restores in this mostly solid entry (which he co-wrote with Daniel Casey, both stepping in for longtime series screenwriter Chris Morgan) is a sense of emotional continuity.

The result, though it delivers only in fits and starts, is still sharper and more inventive than most comicbook-adapted fare, and eventually gets the job done as far as action buffs are concerned.

An eerily precise match of filmmaker and material, Cosmopolis probes the soullessness of the 1% with the cinematic equivalent of latex gloves.

For all the anti-colonialist sentiments expressed in Victoria & Abdul...those criticisms are ultimately subsumed in a warm, troubling glow of British Empire nostalgia.

[A] dense, disturbing and palpably angry new documentary.

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

A defiantly analog rejoinder to last year's tech-savvy baseball drama, "Moneyball," Robert Lorenz's square but sturdy directing debut rests on the wonderfully spiky chemistry between Eastwood and Amy Adams.

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.

Snakes on a Plane is exactly the sort of tasteless, utterly depraved, no-nonsense sluts-and-guts extravaganza it was meant to be.

Gallic helmer Eric Valette (“State Affairs”) invests this giddily implausible crime yarn with a propulsive sense of energy.

Its so-called audacity smacks of calculation and emotional cowardice.

Bello gives a tremulous wacko-mom performance from which she has eliminated every whisper of camp. She’s both sympathetic and infuriating, and her scenes with her daughter hint at a more painful, complicated emotional history than the movie has time to explore, though it’s nice that it bothers to explore it at all.

You might wish that the ending, and the story overall, had packed a bit more dramatic oomph, but Miller’s decision to keep the emphasis entirely on character and theme shows impressive confidence. He gives the movie all the juice it needs.

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.

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.

Though it renders a convincing portrait of fractured family life and boasts its share of powerfully acted moments, this schematic tale of two siblings, ripped apart by jealousy, misunderstanding and unshakable trauma, plays like a more polished but less effective twin to the 2005 Danish original.

A Hologram for the King arrives at its feel-good conclusion honestly enough, but its cultural engagement feels tentative, even secondhand: The movie conjures no shortage of potent images, but push a bit deeper and your fist closes on empty air.

The High Note, written by Flora Greeson, sits less comfortably on the fence between insiderish melodrama and broadly accessible crowd-pleaser.

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.

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

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.

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.

A fabulously designed underground metropolis proves more involving than the teenagers running through its streets in City of Ember, a good-looking but no more than serviceable adaptation of Jeanne Duprau's 2003 novel.

Artfulness and restraint can be admirable qualities in a filmmaker, but rage and despair, when channeled with this much force and purpose, can be undeniably effective substitutes.

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.

By the time Dorothy and her friends march on Elphaba’s lair, there seems to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.

While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.

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.

Videogamers who've been itching for "Grand Theft Auto: The Movie" can tide themselves over in the meantime with Crank, a down-and-dirty actioner that follows a rugged antihero trying to outrun death by keeping his adrenaline flowing.

The actors are better and subtler than their earlier counterparts; the gore effects, too. Moviegoers looking for an excuse to grab their companions’ arms for two hours could certainly do worse.

The movie is both a lesson and a diversion, a movie that seeks to educate by means of trickery and misdirection. It is thus best approached as a kind of cinematic shell game, in which the focus of the story keeps shifting and the full scope of the corruption on display remains just out of view.

[The] story never fully comes into focus. You catch glimpses of it in between the busy, mechanical lurchings of the plot, in the swirling movement of a camera pan and the ardent commitment of the actors.

This sophomore directing effort for Ross Katz (“Taking Chance”) resolves itself a bit too tidily in the final stretch, but sustains affection most of the way with its well-observed moments and gently offbeat comic rhythms.

This is polished yet authentically moving.

Despite the script’s direct acknowledgment that it’s telling a “white-American-lady story,” the movie never quite shakes off a glib, incurious outsider’s perspective that can tilt into outright cluelessness, particularly where some of its more egregious casting choices are concerned.

For better or worse, it’s very much a Zack Snyder production: unwieldy but absorbing, awash in stilted dialogue, flimsy characters, bone-crunching violence, ridiculous-verging-on-sublime needle drops . . . and have-it-both-ways political subtext.

Wisely sticks to its protagonist’s p.o.v. while avoiding a longer view of the calamitous events around her, making up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.

Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day is crammed with enough melodramatic incident for three movies, all of them seemingly scripted by Tyler Perry in a very foul mood.

This exuberantly foul-mouthed and mean-spirited comedy goes somewhat soft in the final stretch but remains an often uproarious model of sharp scripting and spirited acting.

The undeniable intensity of Gyllenhaal’s bulked-up, Method-mumbling performance may leave you feeling more pummeled than convinced in this heavy-handed tale of redemption, in which director Antoine Fuqua once more demonstrates his fascination with codes of masculine aggression, extreme violence and not much else.

The sense of film craft here is so delicate and assured that, even at its most razzle dazzle-prone moments, the movie never seems to be straining for effect.

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.

Jason Matzner's woozily romantic, gorgeously lensed directorial debut about a trailer park love triangle seems to unspool in a dream of its own, and despite some sketchy story elements, much of it is pretty intoxicating -- that is, until the unambiguous life lessons bring pic down to earth with an earnest splat.

Resolutely sappy and sometimes amateurish, the briskly paced doc remains heartfelt and direct about the same admirable mission Wampler had in making the climb.

In the end, The Mule is essentially a straightforward, somewhat overextended crime story enlivened by its uniquely grotesque circumstances (based on a true story, as noted at the beginning), and directed by Mahony in a lean, no-frills style that’s entirely convincing where it counts.

The rare sequel that not only improves on but retroactively justifies its predecessor, this lightning-paced caper-comedy shifts the franchise into high gear with international intrigue, spy-movie spoofery and more automotive puns than you can shake a stickshift at, handling even its broader stretches with sophistication, speed and effortless panache.

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.

At his best, Roth plunders elements from countless other tales of supernatural spookery — ominous spell books, shuddering tombstones, grown men and little kids shooting lightning bolts from their fingertips — and nudges them eerily close to genuine enchantment.

Joffe's first feature never shakes off the feel of a telepic with above-average production values, and its unsteady lead performances and often garish stylistic touches make a muddle of the source material's psychological acuity.

For all the actors’ commitment and ferocity, the experience they offer feels less like a confrontation with the anxieties of modern life than a plush, moody escape.

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.

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

A frequently mesmerizing if exceedingly strange coming-of-age odyssey.

A bold, often clumsy, but always intriguing piece of work.

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.

Crisp, efficient and appreciably modest in scale...this conspicuous attempt to breathe new life into a long-dormant action franchise gets at least a few things right, chiefly the shrewd casting of Chris Pine.

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

It isn’t good, exactly — as boozy friend-reunion comedies go, it’s no “Girls Trip” or “The World’s End” — but it has its ticklish grace notes, plus some first-rate second and third bananas, despite a script that seems to be working both too hard and not hard enough.

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.

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.

All you need is love -- for the Beatles, for psychedelic visuals, for ideas about being young in the ‘60s -- to fully enjoy Across the Universe.

A joyous, liberated approach to comedy, a genuine sense of the grotesque and pacing so relentless that even the less-than-uproarious bits don't overstay their welcome.

Unfortunately, [Showalter] is often stymied by a pedestrian script by Abe Sylvia ( TV series “Dead to Me” and “Nurse Jackie”) that lurches from one defining life moment to the next and leans heavily on Chastain’s performance to establish a sense of emotional and psychological continuity.

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

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.

Emotionally potent performances, gently offbeat humor and writer-helmer Max Mayer's assured touch guide this tender New York love story to a quietly hopeful conclusion.

Granting Esther the same psychological weight he grants Juan would have helped, surely. That Reygadas refuses to do so might be interpreted as a boorish lack of curiosity — or, more charitably, as an honest self-indictment, a refusal to speak for a character he doesn’t know or understand.

Evocatively lensed, skillfully made and duly attentive to the mercurial qualities of its daunting source material, Walter Salles' picture pulses with youthful energy but feels overly calculated in its bid for spontaneity, attesting to the difficulty and perhaps futility of trying to reproduce Kerouac's literary lightning onscreen.

Lovesong makes a virtue of restraint as it traces a complex emotional history in two parts, and innumerable (and sometimes quite literal) shades of gray.

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.

It may not subvert every cliche of the high-school romance genre, but director Jake Schreier’s coming-of-age dramedy nonetheless pulses with moving and melancholy moments.

Luce has a lot on its mind, and its desire to provoke and disturb is far from unwelcome. But in attempting to think outside the box, the movie may unwittingly trap itself inside one, too.

The movie is a thin but painless retread, cloaking its derivative storytelling in a familiar cloak of fan gratification.

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

Like any pleasant surprise, this funny, frenetic, cheerfully nonsensical movie makes its own rules and gives you a few things that you weren’t, well, expecting.

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

A low-budget horror-thriller that’s resourceful enough to wring a few fresh chills from a slender premise and a less-than-novel formal conceit.

Foster’s pistol-packing turn as an avenging dark angel nearly sustains director Neil Jordan’s grim vigilante drama through a string of implausibilities and occasionally trite psychological framing devices, with deft support from Terrence Howard as a sympathetic cop.

Beyond the occasional plot frissons and juicy supporting turns, it's an emotionally and psychologically threadbare exercise.

Temperance of a different sort, a willful abstention from trippy stylistic excess, is what makes this 1960-set Caribbean picaresque easily the most lucid screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's work, even if it's still several drafts shy of a fully developed yarn.

It's not the personal, distinctive portrait of misfit girlhood it could have been.

A beguiling blend of the audacious and the familiar; it dances right on the edge of the ridiculous and at times even crosses over, but is armored against risibility by its deep pockets of emotion, sly humor and matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical.

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.

For the most part, nothing about Claire in Motion seems overly calculated. It knows precisely where it’s going, but it’s also wise enough to leave that destination open-ended.

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.

Some might describe Butt Boy’s plodding, procedural-style storytelling as (ahem) assiduous, though I’d say constipation is the more appropriate metaphor: The story strains and clenches for more than an hour before finally reaching its bloody, long-overdue and admittedly eye-popping release.

Despite another solid performance from Jennifer Lawrence, anchoring Russell’s sincerely felt tribute to the power of a woman’s resolve in a man’s world, it’s hard not to wish Joy were better — that its various winsome parts added up to more than a flyweight product that still feels stuck in the development stage.

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.

This is a comedy whose laughs seem to arise as much from the silly, sun-drenched atmosphere as from individual gags, and whose pleasures can feel as sweet and impermanent as marijuana smoke.

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.

A strikingly original and provocative first feature from scribe-helmer Carlos Brooks.

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.

You can reject the conclusions of Campos’ movie, particularly its unrelenting pileup of dead bodies, and still take pleasure in its atmospheric surface — in the persuasiveness of its small-town environs (shot on 35-millimeter film by the gifted cinematographer Lol Crawley) and the vigor of its performances. He may not persuade you all the time, but the devil is very much in those details.

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."

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.

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.

It is hard to blame the audience for a movie that keeps daring us to envision a richer, funnier, more intelligent and imaginative version of it at every turn.

At times the experience of watching Election Year is a bit like scanning a few years’ worth of alarming headlines while someone sets off firecrackers under your desk. Black Lives Matter, drone warfare, local protests, home-grown militias, predatory capitalism, the Florida electorate, pop pop, bang bang.

Crammed with ideas, jokes, laments, non sequiturs and some terrific actors you’ve seen before (if not nearly enough), the movie comes at you like a warm hug wrapped in a kung fu chop: It’s both a sweet, sentimental story about a Chinese American family and a wild, maximalist sensory assault.

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 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.

What is inescapably moving about Megalopolis, and what throws even its strangest excesses into meaningful relief, is the degree to which it has evolved into an allegory of its own making. Coppola has made a defense of the beautiful and the impractical, not just as principles of urban design or meaningful living but as art-sustaining forces in the cinema itself.

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

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

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.

By manipulating their story to advance the cynical notion that you really can't trust anyone, the filmmakers inadvertently beg the question why their own motives should be so above suspicion.

As infernally sugary as this movie may sound on paper, and however mercenary its commercial intentions, it’s hard to resist its silly, utopian vision of a world where happiness reigns, love wins and the mere sound of Timberlake’s voice carries the promise of salvation.

Mackenzie's second collaboration with Ewan McGregor (following 2003's "Young Adam") tritely tosses together two indifferently conceived characters against a backdrop of global panic that generates no urgency.

A jagged little pill that, in the end, goes down too smoothly.

Is there a point to all these cheeky meta-shenanigans? Not really. Yet it’s hard not to share Morelli’s delight in the possibilities of an impossible story structure, and if the final work feels inevitably uneven, that’s less a flaw than a feature — a testament to the visual and tonal distinctiveness of the movie’s individual parts.

This methodical courtroom drama is charged with impassioned performances and an unimpeachable liberal message. But its stodgy emphasis on telling over showing will limit its reach to Civil War buffs and self-selecting older viewers.

By the end you may feel moderately relieved and more than a little creeped out, but you may also wish that this undeniably compelling documentary had done more than lightly brush the surface.

Stick with Song to Song, and Malick’s elusiveness becomes surprisingly direct. Long, tense conversations are reduced to a few piercing exchanges. Difficult questions and answers are distilled to their philosophical essence. People clash, break apart, fall down, get back up and slowly, tentatively reunite.

Iñárritu, rather than answering them or leaving them provocatively unanswered (either one would be fine), does what he seems to do with most of his stories and ideas nowadays: He flings them around, roughs them up and rearranges them into an imposing, finally insufferable monument to his own awesomeness.

Funny and sad isn’t the easiest combination to pull off, and while both descriptors fit The D Train well enough, this dark comedy might just as well be described as edgy and soft, audacious and coy, a largely enjoyable letdown.

Clearly, Passion means to be a hoot, a wet-dream thriller for cinephiles. But by the time it reaches its overwrought final act, the picture has generated neither the tension of its forebears nor the audacity that would allow it to transcend its silliness.

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.

This robust, impersonal visual-effects showpiece proves buoyant and unpretentious enough to offset its stew of otherwise derivative fantasy/action elements.

As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormákur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.

[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

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.

Slickly charming, genteelly erotic and directed with supreme polish, Cashback is a conventional romantic comedy that plays unconventional games with time and memory.

If you can stomach the violence -- and despite the R rating, that's a big if -- it's hard to deny that Zombie has made exactly the movie he set out to make, guaranteed to satiate his considerable fan base and sicken just about everyone else.

If you do see the movie, by all means surrender to its portrait of an earlier era of toxic celebrity culture, and also to the bracing nastiness of the central performances.

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.

A passable, tolerable, not unbearable, totally inoffensive adaptation of Judith Viorst’s beloved 1972 children’s book.

[Park] brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.

A moderately clever dystopian mindbender with a gratifying human pulse, despite some questionable narrative developments along the way.

Directed by the gifted but erratic Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, the movie is thin, rote and silly but, Huppert being Huppert, it’s good for a diabolical chuckle or two.

Boogie tries to appreciate its own contradictions, and also to complicate the audience’s expectations. It positions Boogie as an underdog of the underrepresented, a potential breakout star in an arena where the odds are stacked against him. But it also resists the temptation to turn him into an easy emblem of success, while neatly sidestepping the feel-good uplift and predictable, reconciliatory outcomes that tend to hold sway in the sports-movie genre.

It’s hard to completely dismiss a mainstream horror-comedy that offers a nice supply of sharp and grisly, at least until it takes a disappointing turn for soft and cuddly.

It’s a compelling thesis, though predicated less on supporting arguments than on dramatic feints and hallucinations, on scenes that either evaporate like smoke or strand the viewer in a thick cloud of metaphor. Sunset is maddening and mesmerizing.

The Little Things has a couple of hair-raising scenes and a few nifty, low-key twists in store, though little about the overall experience of watching it can really be called surprising. I don’t mean that as a knock. The pleasures and comforts of crime fiction, even with the built-in expectations of suspense and revelation, are not always dependent on novelty.

Miller, like most directors, isn’t remotely in Cameron’s league as a maestro of action technique. But he gives the visual-effects-encrusted combat scenes a nicely visceral intensity, with just the right ratio of spatial coherence to logistical chaos.

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.

A mix of found-footage thriller, mock-doc realism and public service announcement that rings true almost as often as it rings false.

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

More zippy, diverting fun from Robert Rodriguez's family filmmaking factory.

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.

By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, A Wrinkle in Time is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.

Writer-director Nick Cassavetes' sprawling dramatization recklessly blurs the line between reconstruction and reality in ways that are admittedly interesting, if more than a little artistically suspect.

Those who have had their fill of the director’s impressionistic musings will find his seventh feature as empty as the lifestyle it puts on display; for the rest of us, there’s no denying this star-studded, never-a-dull-moment cinematic oddity represents another flawed but fascinating reframing of man’s place in the modern world.

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.

The Rise of Skywalker nakedly offers itself up in the spirit of a “Last Jedi” corrective, a return to storytelling basics, a nearly 2 ½-hour compendium of everything that made you fall in love with “Star Wars” in the first place. The more accurate way to describe it, I think, is as an epic failure of nerve. This “Rise” feels more like a retreat, a return to a zone of emotional and thematic safety from a filmmaker with a gift for packaging nostalgia as subversion.

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

It's hard not to be moved by the words of love, gratitude and resilience spoken by earthquake/tsunami survivors and volunteers in Pray for Japan. But well-meaning platitudes go only so far in this sincerely felt, raggedly structured compilation of footage.

Thoroughly -- and sometimes justifiably -- infatuated with its own cleverness, this mistaken-identity thriller delights in narrative complication and Tarantino-esque self-awareness.

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

Impressively made and serious-minded to a fault, this physically imposing picture brings abundant political-historical dimensions to its epic canvas, yet often seems devoted to stifling whatever pleasure audiences may have derived from the popular legend.

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.

No one really needs this mostly middling, fitfully funny and never unpleasant movie. And the movie itself seems cheerfully aware of that fact as it deftly lifts lines, beats, characters and songs from its 1992 predecessor, every so often punching up the comedy, wrinkling the plot and injecting a dash of politically corrective subtext.

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.

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.

With an invaluable assist from Sam Rockwell, hilarious and wounding as a deadbeat dad who lands a high school coaching gig, it's the rare inspirational movie with more than just winning or losing on its mind.

In lieu of poetry, [Ozon] has composed an exemplary piece of prose: clear, direct and quietly illuminating. At the same time, you would hardly describe this movie as neutral or devoid of anger. On the contrary, its moral outrage is all the more pronounced for being so controlled.

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.

The Japanese action aesthete plays it cool and smooth in a picture that exerts a steadily tightening grip, though not until after a first hour of near-impenetrable gangster gab that may leave the uninitiated feeling stranded.

By narrowing its range of voices to Christian leaders, thinkers and writers, Kevin Miller's sober, stimulating documentary on the hot topic of eternal damnation necessarily limits its audience, but achieves a level of rhetorical eloquence that would theoretically appeal to open-minded viewers of any religious stripe.

After a promisingly funny first half, this tale of three coke-snorting gal-pals trying not to screw up their friend's nuptials all but drowns in its own catty cynicism, turning as stingy with emotion and insight as it is with real laughs.

A welcome dose of honest silliness at a time when most family-oriented toons settle for smart-alecky.

Chaves is a solid craftsman with a weakness for easy jolts, but also a gift for filling the frame with strategically unnerving pools of light and shadow; he can turn even a daylit room into something ominous and suggestive.

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.

Slithering along as deliberately as one of Vic’s snails, Deep Water runs hot and cold; it’s sometimes a self-aware hoot and sometimes a disjointed drag.

Zendaya . . . has a way of rendering dialogue irrelevant. She holds a closeup here more skillfully and naturally than her co-star does, and her silence proves far more eloquent than his words. And those words turn out to be the undoing of Malcolm & Marie, not just because there are so many of them, but because they feel like the building blocks of a meta-movie parlor trick, an intellectual exercise that exists for no purpose other than its own justification.

The cause of death would appear to be visual-effects overkill in the case of Rigor Mortis, a flashy, incoherent and virtually scare-free Hong Kong horror exercise that marks the directing debut of actor, singer, record producer and fashion maven Juno Mak.

The sharp satirical edge that earned Fountain’s novel comparisons to “Catch-22” feels duller and more sluggish on the screen as Lee strains to weave his story’s dissonant tones and subplots...into a movie that works as both a compelling psychological portrait and an astute political argument.