Justin Chang

With a few exceptions . . . Borat’s satirical jabs don’t land with quite the same cringe-making force this time; the setups are too convoluted, the anonymous targets too genial, the payoffs too meager.

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.

This beautifully composed picture brings a robust physicality to tried-and-true source material, but falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.

It’s an affectionate, sometimes downright slobbery career salute with a soft, unexamined center — a moving experience for all involved, no doubt, but one of limited interest outside the celebrity bubble it depicts.

The conceit itself is by turns intriguing and laborious, and depending on your willingness to unpack it, it will be either the revelation that sends this movie soaring into the stratosphere or the heavy stone that drags its featherweight pleasures down to earth.

As a gorgeously conceptual art-horror object, El Conde frequently mesmerizes; as a proper evisceration of its subject, it can’t help but feel curiously defanged.

Moonfall is stupid, in other words, but I don’t mind admitting that it feels, at this point in time, like my kind of stupidity.

We are not not entertained.

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

Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life.

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

This isn’t just a remake; it’s an act of cinematic upholstery, with all the padding that implies.

What makes the extended trip-tastic finale ultimately disappointing is that it remains a resolutely exterior experience, a set of wild but recycled gestures that reminds you just how tedious watching someone else’s LSD high can be.

A pair of beautifully mismatched lead performances elevate a predictable drama to unexpected resonance in The Favor.

Gibson has made a movie that is somehow both deeply dishonest and crushingly sincere — and still at war with itself, long after the final shot has been fired.

As it winds its way toward an unexpectedly grisly final showdown, The Other Woman often feels stranded between gross-out comedy, romantic fantasy and distaff psychodrama in a way that compels fascination and impatience alike.

A patiently observed, often unsettlingly violent drama that can’t help but feel overly familiar in some of its particulars, rich in rural texture but low on narrative momentum or surprise.

This rambunctious paean to pot retains the trademark Apatow sweetness even as it careens from messy vulgarisms to even messier violence.

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.

Smith may have some ways to go as a feature filmmaker, but he has given us a world of such grottily realized depravity that it feels like a story unto itself.

As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments.

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.

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.

The story does build, in its second act, to an unsettlingly persuasive indictment of a society that teaches even its youngest members to hate, condemn and destroy women. But did the movie have to fixate so lovingly on that destruction, or make its chief destroyer so compelling?

As good as his actors are — especially the wonderful Dequenne, whose Sophie quietly seeks to repair the boys’ broken bond — they cannot conceal the calculation inherent in this story’s design. Nor can they quite overcome the disconnect between the glossy, self-admiring visual beauty of Close and the stormier, uglier emotional depths it purports to uncover.

The crisply made feature delivers an involving if not always persuasive portrait of religious leaders in conflict.

The nagging lack of specificity with which the film concludes can’t help but call its entire dramatic construction into question.

Revealing without being especially compelling, In Between Days offers a bleak, rigorously naturalistic portrait of an Asian-American teenager's physical and emotional dislocation.

Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag, this neo-“9½ Weeks” is above all a slick exercise in carefully brand-managed titillation — edgier than most grown-up studio fare, but otherwise a fairly mild provocation in this porn-saturated day and age.

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

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

Those willing to engage may be pleasantly surprised by some of its understated virtues.

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.

A serviceable picture that offers all the sumptuous visual pleasures of a historical costume drama, yet little in the way of actual history.

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.

Higher on stylistic dazzle than originality or coherence.

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

One of the movie’s persistent problems is that it often seems to be nothing but lessons — most of them bluntly spelled out, swiftly absorbed and almost automatically rewarded, in ways that short-circuit tension and emotion.

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

For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention.

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.

A likable enough lark that rarely achieves outright hilarity.

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

Like the young Natasha herself, Black Widow feels as though it’s been programmed into submission — and scarcely allowed to live and breathe before it’s suddenly over.

At a certain point, we are no longer watching a naturally escalating conflict so much as a rigged allegory of masculine aggression, contrived not only for our entertainment but also for our edification.

While the film is drenched in atmosphere and packs a verbal and visceral punch, its relentless downward spiral makes for an overdetermined, not entirely satisfying character study.

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

Mid90s possesses just enough sensitivity and feeling to make you wish it had more. Hill’s script aims for, and often achieves, a fleeting, fragmentary portrait of group dynamics, but it’s stymied in its attempts to distinguish Stevie’s pals as individuals rather than types.

Graced with some extra star wattage courtesy of Helen Mirren and Ed Harris, this diminishing-returns sequel sends Nicolas Cage on another quest to strike it rich, get young auds excited about history and solve puzzles that are generally less stimulating than yesterday's Sudoku.

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.

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

Silly, screechy and eminently watchable.

While Chris Kelly’s semi-autobiographical writing-directing debut gets off to a painfully broad start, it does intermittently find its footing as it progresses, gathering enough well-observed moments and details to counterbalance its otherwise flailing stabs at humor and pathos.

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.

Given the sheer number of threads that Moorhouse (who adapted the novel with her writer-director husband, P.J. Hogan) keeps in play, it’s surprising how well The Dressmaker coheres, albeit more along narrative lines than tonal ones.

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.

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

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.

A sensitively directed slab of romantic hokum that wrings an impressive amount of emotional conviction from a thoroughly ludicrous premise.

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

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.

A watchable enough picture that feels content to realize someone else's vision rather than claim it as its own. Any real sense of risk has been carefully ironed out: The PG-13 rating that ensures the film's suitability for its target audience also blunts the impact of the teen-on-teen bloodshed.

Alone in Berlin is ultimately hobbled by its own cinematic inertia, its inability to reimagine the past with the kind of intensity that would also speak to the present.

Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm.

Sandler isn’t doing a strained meta riff on his persona; he’s playing an honest-to-God character, plagued by stress, uncertainty, and an unfashionably big heart. There’s art to his performance, and no shortage of life.

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.

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.

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

As it is, No Strings Attached is content to be sweet rather than edgy, to make you go "awww" instead of "hmmm."

Revisiting the book of Exodus in a feverish Southern-gothic context, this lurid, often ludicrously entertaining slab of Biblesploitation builds an earnest case for spirituality in a skeptical age.

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.

Shazam! commits none of the Seven Deadly Sins of franchise filmmaking, only the venial offenses of excessive multitasking and being a bit over-eager to please.

This vapid street-dance soap opera boasts the series' flashiest moves and klutziest script yet, like a brilliant acrobat with a speech impediment; it's also one of the few 3D releases since "Avatar" to make compelling use of the format.

The movie, to its credit, harbors few illusions about Diana’s people skills. And it has, in Bening, an actor with a natural affinity for rough edges and sharp retorts, plus an ability to make emotional sense of a character’s fury.

Frenetic actioner about refugees from a genetic cloning plant starts off intriguingly, burns up its ideas in the first hour and pads out the rest with joltingly repetitive action sequences.

The film conveys key information and makes important distinctions not generally known, and its effectiveness probably depends on the viewer’s tolerance for poorly executed kitsch and manic physical intrusions by the filmmaker.

[A] thin but engaging portrait.

The relentless tension and close-quarters intimacy that [Krasinski] established in the first film can’t help but slacken under the weight of a swiftly expanding narrative.

If they never fully sell the situation, the actors nonetheless deliver strong, emotionally accessible work.

Tackles a nifty futuristic premise with bargain-basement efficiency and a deadpan, devil-may-care attitude. It's an initially invigorating tactic that proves slapdash and unsatisfying over the long haul, reducing a potentially rich sci-fier to the level of a halfway decent time-killer

Diverting but rarely transporting, unpredictable yet strangely overdetermined, Garrone's film never conjures the sustained, enveloping magic promised by its extravagant design and its agreeably unhinged story sense.

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.

The problem is not that this film is upsetting (it should be), but that it ultimately seems more interested, and skilled, at dispensing regular shocks than fresh insights.

Unfolding largely within the confines of a single apartment complex, the well-structured scenario is arresting but ill-served by an overly fussy visual treatment from helmer Jeff Renfroe, while Peter Krause's increasingly psychotic performance as an amateur snoop frequently threatens to cross the line between forceful and off-putting.

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.

As diverting as this action-packed caper often is, it feels not just weightless but emotionally and morally stunted whenever it veers into grown-up dramatic territory.

A luridly entertaining thriller that plays like “Fatal Attraction” for extreme religiophobes, or perhaps a very gory episode of “The Brigham Young and the Restless.”

Beau Is Afraid offers arresting confirmation of Aster’s talent and fresh evidence of his limitations. It’s a big, wildly ambitious swing of a movie, one that seems eager to liberate itself and its characters from the conventions of form and genre. But that more expansive energy is at odds with and ultimately constrained by the story’s mother/man-child dialectic.

Harding’s story, in this overly broad retelling, is not especially strong on narrative density — or, for that matter, ambiguity.

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.

There's no doubt Johnny Mad Dog means to leave the viewer with a visceral impression of its terrors, on that it largely succeeds. Whether that accomplishment deserves praise is more of an open question.

As a tribute to the work that journalists do, Civil War feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions.

This solid if disposable genre exercise maintains a hard-driving line of action and a commitment to one-damned-thing-after-another storytelling that carries it past any number of narrative speedbumps and preposterous detours.

This is proficient, measured filmmaking from a director who has already peered more deeply, and persuasively, into colonialism’s heart of darkness.

On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive, the big picture too overdetermined to really sweep the viewer away.

It never quite comes together — the decades-spanning connective tissue somehow feels both overstated and thin — but Husson’s skill with actors, among them Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù and the great Glenda Jackson, yields undeniable dividends.

The experience of watching Ask Dr. Ruth is a bit like that of meeting someone unaccountably delightful and almost being knocked backward by the gale-force strength of her personality, and then wanting to go out and buy one of her books so as to actually learn something about her ideas.

This elaborate exercise in visual Baum-bast nonetheless gets some mileage out of its game performances, luscious production design and the unfettered enthusiasm director Sam Raimi brings to a thin, simplistic origin story.

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.

The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.

To complain that “Elvis” is basically a compilation of musical-biopic conventions is a bit like complaining about a greatest-hits album; it also misses one of Luhrmann’s strengths as a filmmaker, which is his ability to suffuse clichés with sincerity, energy and feeling.

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.

Computer Chess is ultimately too slack and scattershot to work consistently well as a comedy.

Besson, an industrial-strength entertainer and the reigning maximalist of the European film industry, isn’t selling originality so much as volume. He has made a madly overstuffed Mos Eisley Cantina of a movie, one that surveys its diverse alien constituencies with the wide-eyed wonderment of a small child and the attention span to boot.

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.

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.

An oddball male weepie whose curious mixture of sweetness and sadism is well anchored by two solid, character-rich lead performances.

At a time when tortured superheroes like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman would benefit from some serious psychotherapy, it's almost refreshing to see a comicbook caper as blithe, weightless and cheerfully dumb as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

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.

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.

It’s a movie of alternately promising and frustrating half-measures, in which Reeves’ shrewd storytelling instincts and the usual franchise-filmmaking imperatives repeatedly fight to a draw.

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.

For a movie that bristles with more revolutionary fervor than Dahl’s quieter, more inward-focused story, “Matilda the Musical” could use a little messier, more rambunctious energy.

Schlocky yet resourceful.

An attempt to infuse an earnest piece of comicbook lore with an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek sensibility yields decidedly mixed results in Green Lantern.

By the end of this clumsy, audacious story — the title of which turns out to have a doozy of a double meaning — Ben will be stripped of every last secret and falsehood, left with no more room to run or hide. You believe him at long last, even if believing the movie is a trickier proposition.

Sword of Trust evokes the specter of American divisions past and present — between North and South, right and left — and suggests that comedy has the ability to disarm them all. It’s a heartening idea, but it could be sharper.

It’s amusing, up to a point.

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 crazed intensity of Franco’s filmmaking, while duly evocative of Haze’s primitive state, is ultimately too hectic and unmodulated for anything to burrow deep and stay there.

In aiming to steer his dark, fatalistic vision toward something genuinely contemplative and cathartic, Inarritu has managed to appropriate the beauty of Malick’s filmmaking but none of its sublimity — another word for which might be humility. There is plenty of amazement here, to be sure, but all too little in the way of grace.

Funny Pages itself sometimes feels like an exercise in misplaced artistry, a student’s overly precocious stab at brutish cynicism. Its biggest laughs, which tend to go hand-in-hand with its meanest jolts, seem to arise less from any recognizable emotional or situational reality than from a filmmaker’s desire to shock and humiliate his characters, to put them repeatedly through the wringer.

The movie derives its energy almost entirely from the bristling quality of the dialogue and the easy ensemble flow of the performances.

While it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.

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.

A tougher, wiser film might still have extended the characters a measure of compassion, but it might also have left the audience with a deeper curiosity about where life’s challenges could take them next.

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.

While Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, et al. are still good for a few chuckles as a gang of superannuated government assassins, this globe-trotting action-comedy diversion applies a bigger-is-better philosophy across the board, upping the stakes, the firepower and the travel budget, but keeping real thrills and laughs at a modest trickle.

Its emergence from the dark waters of studio oblivion is far from unwelcome: It’s solid enough by the diminished standards of January, when the multiplex becomes a cinematic dumping ground, and it’s visually slicker and more sophisticated than its setup would seem to warrant.

Bristling with arguments about the complexities of black identity in a supposedly post-racial America, this lively and articulate campus-set comedy proves better at rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame.

Carey Mulligan gives an affecting, skillfully modulated performance that lends a certain coherence to this assemblage of real-life incidents, composite characters, noble sentiments, stirring speeches and impeccable production values — all marshaled in service of a picture whose politics prove rather more commendable than its artistry.

Won't do anything for adult auds, but this second bigscreen adventure from the popular VeggieTales franchise should easily win over tots with its reliable menu of silly songs, easily digestible morals and wholesome (if not always fresh) produce-based characters.

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.

Director Kimberly Peirce’s intermittently effective third feature eschews De Palma’s diabolical wit and voluptuous style in favor of a somber, straight-faced retelling, steeped in a now-familiar horror-movie idiom of sharp objects, shuddering sound effects and dark rivulets of blood.

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.

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.

There’s a certain pleasure to be had in seeing a revered auteur go off the disreputable deep end, and there’s no denying A Touch of Sin packs a visceral wallop.

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.

Over the course of its generally absorbing if overlong 117-minute running time, it offers a brief and appreciably sympathetic take on the lure of fantasy, the pleasures of role play and the thrill of commanding the multitudes — which is to say that it’s, among other things, a film about filmmaking.

Safe Haven offers an unsurprising but not unsatisfying tour through recognizable Sparkville terrain.

The result doesn't feel evasive so much as vaguely incurious, and its focus on the message over the man himself can be as impressive in its single-mindedness as it is frustrating.

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.

It's really not all that bad. Ultra-derivative bigscreen transplant of one of the most successful (and controversial) games ever made plays like a mutant cross between a biotech thriller and a zombie movie, with all the alien autopsies, blood-gushing protuberances and meaningless scientific jargon that come with the territory.

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.

Bloated but energetic, entertaining but interminable, tortured but strangely satisfying, Fists of Legend spends two-and-a-half hours unraveling the knotty saga of three middle-aged fighters, their shared dark past and their rocky road to redemption.

There is something inspired about the idea of fusing old-school aesthetic brio and revisionist politics, but the instant you see what Damsel is up to, its power begins to dissipate.

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.

A well-crooned country tune can invest even the hoariest cliches with honest feeling, and in much the same fashion, The Song takes a familiar tale of love, marriage, betrayal and redemption, and delivers a largely satisfying rendition.

The Judge pivots on a simple yet inspired stroke of casting, pitting Duvall’s iconic gravitas against Downey’s razor-sharp wit, and then supplying no shortage of opportunities for both men to chew the scenery.

Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.

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.

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.

Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power—by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself.

Maddin's singular humor and fabulous black-and-white mise-en-scene can't sustain this fever dream beyond its initial fascination, making for an intriguing transitional work unlikely to broaden his audience.

A pleasant if fairly pedestrian viewing experience, one that more or less gets the job done in terms of balancing the requisite ooh-ahh moments with another unsurprising reminder of man’s capacity for selfishness and destruction.

This hyperactive toon extravaganza has color, flair and energy to burn. But it’s the sort of relentless juggling act that finally proves more exhausting than exhilarating.

Observing the situation at an icy remove, Beyond the Hills never builds the palpable menace and pressure-cooker anxiety of "4 Months," and its dramatic progression feels obvious, even predictable, by comparison.

True torture-porn aficionados will be disappointed, as editor Tariq Anwar cuts away right before blade meets flesh -- a move that feels a tad, well, gutless under the circumstances. But elsewhere, "Citizen" proves startlingly graphic, even by R-rated standards.

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.

Krampus isn’t especially scary, but it generates goodwill nonetheless for treating its home-invasion-for-the-holidays setup with an appreciably straight face.

A middling third-wheel comedy elevated a couple of notches by the ineffably weird charms of Owen Wilson.

Lemmons advances this story with straight-faced conviction, orchestrating narrative and spectacle with a grandiosity that proves easier to admire from a distance than it is to engage with onscreen.

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.

A movie needn’t be a work of art—and "The Final Reckoning," the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark.

Though the plot here may be a confusing, multi-threaded mess (which may in fact be the script’s truest homage to Chandler), it’s occasionally offset by the exuberance with which Black blends splatter and slapstick, and the leeway he grants his two very game leads.

Lee’s movie at once examines and embodies the complicated riddle of cultural identity: Beneath its boozy antics and largely predictable narrative developments, it offers warmly perceptive insights into how difficult it can be for so many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to define themselves.

As the hours roll slowly past, it’s hard not to feel that this epic achievement in monotonous misery might have retained its impact at a fraction of the length, and that even our grimmest truth-tellers might well find themselves capable of saying more with less.

The King of Staten Island works hard to strike its own artful balance of humor and heartache, qualities that both seem permanently etched in Davidson’s face. Part of the movie’s inevitable fascination is the question of how much is made up and how much might be rooted in lived experience.

Much as he did with Ruth Rendell's "Live Flesh," Almodovar has taken an ice-cold psychological thriller, penned by a novelist of far less humanistic temperament, and performed some stylistic surgery of his own, adding broad comic relief, overripe melodrama, outrageous asides and zesty girl-power uplift.

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.

An excess of levity can quickly become its own kind of leadenness, and for long stretches between its genuinely amusing gags and set pieces, Thor: Ragnarok, credited to the screenwriting trio of Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost, is a bit too taken with its own breezy irreverence to realize when it’s time to rein it in.

Surfing the crowd in Altman-lite style, pic skims the surface entertainingly but goes limp in its stabs at seriousness, especially in the final scenes, which all but drown in emotional confrontations and hasty happy endings.

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.

Though its absurdist inventions occasionally border on twee, this affectionate slow-blooming romance mines an understated vein of comic melancholy that the actors' wistful performances perfectly capture.

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

Waist Deep packs considerable energy and style into its tale of an ex-con forced back into a life of crime to rescue his kidnapped son. Yet the kinetic direction and occasional sly humor can't disguise the tale's banal brutality or pump much excitement into its routinized pileup of shoot-outs and car chases.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is a witty, fastidiously imagined adventure and a touching, sometimes troubling ode to the power of friendship. But it also demonstrates some of the problems that can befall a movie when its vast ambition and confidence outstrip its finesse.

An uneven but enjoyable trio of films that take affectionate (and sometimes literal) aim at the Japanese capital.

As a study in atmospheric seclusion, The Other Lamb is beautifully crafted enough to hold your attention, but you can’t shake the feeling that Selah’s next chapter — and Cassidy’s — might well be the more interesting movie.

The movie is almost exactly what you’d expect: It has stirring speeches, infuriating setbacks and a tendency to overstate the obvious.

[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.

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.

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.

An audacious premise gets dangerously unstable execution in Four Lions, a ballsy but wobbly high-concept farce that sends up the bumbling schemes of a Blighty-based jihadist cell.

A self-serious eco-thriller assembled with a competent but heavy hand, A Dark Truth decries corporate corruption and Third World oppression in an all-too-obvious manner.

A comic thriller with a delectably hard shell and a soft, hollow center.

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.

Bier plunges herself into mainstream horror filmmaking with a gusto that doesn’t always offset her lack of precision. For visceral intensity, she never tops the early scenes of mayhem and mass panic; slow-building, artfully modulated tension in close quarters seems beyond the movie’s interest or purview.

Overblown saga of shape-shifting demons, butt-kicking clerics and the perils of interspecies romance occasionally dazzles but finally frazzles with its relentless visual assault, embedding Jet Li and his capable castmates in one screensaver-ready fantasy backdrop after another.

This intermittently effective thriller serves as a rickety vehicle for its two perfectly cast leads, working better as a slow-thawing two-hander than as a chilly ghost story.

Made with obvious passion and drive, but also a nagging predilection for Holocaust-drama cliches.

While I’m generally inclined to applaud an action movie that seeks to be more than just an exercise in carnage, The Villainess turns wearyingly stop-and-go whenever it tries to fill in the void of its protagonist’s emotional and psychological history.

Unsubtle, uneven and undeniably effective, this take-no-prisoners cancer weepie poses a fascinating moral quandary.

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.

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

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.

As an evening’s entertainment, it’s almost passable — genially diverting one minute, sour and self-satisfied the next. As a men’s fashion showcase, it’s exemplary — a parade of neatly tailored charcoal waistcoats, colorful flannel tracksuits and a lovely ribbed cardigan that Charlie Hunnam wears like a second skin.

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.

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.

Surely the truth (or something close to it) of who these men and women were must have been more fascinating, and more worth mythologizing, than what transpires in this strained mashup.

This handsomely mounted picture is, at nearly 2 1/2 hours, far too long and indigestible for a film whose protagonist spends most of her screen time under house arrest.

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

By the end, Ross’ initially disarming fusion of cleverness and whimsy has curdled into a dispiritingly familiar mix of sentimentality and self-satisfaction.

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.

Result is far less abrasive than some of its predecessors, but for that very reason seems unlikely to generate the attention needed to meet Solondz's already modest commercial standards.

This superhero spin on a largely Eastern legend will appeal primarily to Asian genre aficionados on homevid.

For all these missteps — including the convenient and predictable use of elderly death as a plot device — the leads’ odd-couple chemistry does become steadier and affectionate as their dance lessons continue, and the film manages to close on a quietly touching final note.

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.

Ultimately, Jobs is a prosaic but not unaffecting tribute to the virtues of defiance, nonconformity, artistry, beauty, craftsmanship, imagination and innovation, qualities it only intermittently reflects as a piece of filmmaking.

Falls somewhere between stale retread and half-hearted parody of superhero-movie formulas.

It’s possible to watch this movie, in other words, and feel that the series is carving out a new direction, returning to its ancient stomping grounds and sticking to a familiar holding pattern, all at the same time. Such is the repetitive, rudderless nature of so much big-budget franchise filmmaking, even with a proven talent like Bayona behind the camera.

Neither the script’s up-to-the-minute signifiers nor its cheekily self-aware humor can entirely dispel a formulaic feel.

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.

Unfortunately, it’s an anticlimactic conclusion at best, full of tacked-on thriller shenanigans that, once they’ve petered out, make you wonder exactly why this story drew the filmmakers’ attention to begin with. The answer to that, happily, can be found in Portman’s every glimmer of nuance.

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.

Uneven but not unpleasant.

There is a little whimsy, or perhaps a touch of blarney, in “Belfast,” though you can sense Branagh hard at work, straining to keep every impulse toward cutesiness in check. The tone is stringently measured.

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

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.

Jack the Giant Slayer feels, unsurprisingly, like an attempt to cash in on a trend, recycling storybook characters, situations and battle sequences to mechanical and wearyingly predictable effect.

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.

Asch's first feature is intelligent, respectable yet curiously muted in tone and impact, never fully catching the viewer up in either its crime saga or its account of individual rebellion within an insular religious community.

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.

To be sure, Aniston leads with her scowl here, in the sort of performance that often gets called “brave” but is, in fact, more accurately described as a well-executed change of pace.

A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama that might well have been titled "My Week With Marie Antoinette."

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.

Though it retains the buoyant musical stylings and splendid visuals that made its predecessor so distinctive, this chatterbox of a sequel loses its way with a raft of annoying side characters for which the slender narrative framework provides far too indulgent a showcase.

A bland and innocuous small-fry outing that retains a measure of the original Hanna-Barbera cartoon's charm, though scarcely enough to justify the time, expense and visual-effects trickery it must have taken to inflate an endearing 2D cartoon into a dopey 3D extravaganza.

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

While roving interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals.

A sporadically engaging martial-arts extravaganza that looks even better compared with its predecessor, last year’s borderline-insufferable “Tai Chi Zero.”

Not unlike the shiny snow globe at its center, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is a thing of consummate craftsmanship, a smoothly engineered and fundamentally lifeless object that's nevertheless capable of giving even the grinchiest moviegoers a brief attack of the warm-and-fuzzies.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.

Lovely but listless.

Wingard’s movie, for all its abundant mischief, doesn’t trust the power of its own illusion. You can see these woods a lot more clearly now, and what you see is that you’ve been here before.

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

If the film’s trio of new screenwriters (replacing series mainstay Ehren Kruger) have seamlessly upheld the crass and juvenile “Transformers” sensibility, then Bay’s visual sensibility has, if anything, matured, to the point of demanding and earning your exasperated surrender.

Not a particularly funny movie. Indeed, the true dilemma of this misguided seriocomedy lies in the filmmakers' confusion as to whether they're making a side-splitting bromance (nope) or an unsparing, warts-and-all look at screwed-up relationships (sort of).

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

Well-meaning but dramatically lopsided tearjerker bogs down in generic teen angst and domestic squabbling.

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.

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.

Acquits itself well enough. Gratuitously gory and derivative to the core, Venom manages to deliver some effective frights in between large swaths of voodoo gibberish.

There is nothing better about this Cat Person, which coarsens, flattens and torturously over-elaborates a story whose elegant concision was precisely what made it such rich and elastic interpretive fodder.

A flashy, lunkheaded sci-fi extravaganza sure to appeal to teenagers who like their interplanetary warfare bloodless, their high-school soaps squeaky-clean and their numbers countable on one hand.

The dancing is more dynamic than the plotting in Stomp the Yard, an energetic if formulaic underdog tale about warring black fraternities specializing in an intensely competitive style of step dancing.

There are stretches of tedium in this lumpy and derivative mythology, to be sure. But there are also immersive IMAX 3-D backdrops, striking ambiguities and irresistible moments of straight-faced lunacy. The line between hack work and labor of love may be perilously thin, but you can sense the difference in the way Jones earnestly, wholeheartedly embraces the magic that powers this realm.

While Glass is an intermittent showcase for his undeniable filmmaking gifts — his meticulous attention to detail, his shivery command of technique — the movie winds up feeling less like a progression than a dead end.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is an aimless, sweet-souled jumble. Its ebullience is palpable, if rarely infectious.

In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling.

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.

This cheeky update of a classic fairy tale boasts almost as many talking points as merchandising opportunities.

Nothing about the foolishness and outrageousness of what the movie shows us — no matter how virtuosically sliced and diced by McKay’s characteristically jittery editor, Hank Corwin — can really compete with the horrors of our real-world American idiocracy.

A strong cast struggles valiantly to rise above Lifetime material in In the Land of Women, an appealingly scruffy if overly programmatic drama.

Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.

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

It’s a nail-biter and a head-scratcher rolled into one: The mind may initially race to keep up with logistics, but eventually one acknowledges the futility of trying to make sense of a situation that Bay himself hasn’t managed to clarify.

Has its share of deadpan amusements, but its combo of mordant whimsy and tearjerker moments winds up curdling in an unappetizing fashion.

If the idea was to tell the story from Liz’s perspective, the movie botches that perspective badly: Abandoning any sense of narrative rigor, it can’t keep hunky, charming Ted from becoming the protagonist of his own hideous story.

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.

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

The more you realize where Shyamalan is leading us — and by this point, it’s not exactly a surprise destination — the more difficult it becomes to locate a worthwhile point. Perhaps the point is in the impressive discipline of the filmmaking, though if anything, given its premise, the movie wants to be a grislier, more nastily unhinged piece of work than it manages.