Justin Chang

A lavishly overstuffed gift basket of a movie.

Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.

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.

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

You walk out in the depressing realization that you’ve just seen one of the more interesting movies Marvel will ever make, and hopefully the least interesting one Chloé Zhao will ever make.

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

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

Superfly may be suffused with political fury, but it is also unapologetically awash in cheap, disreputable B-movie thrills.

Your head might not be spinning as you exit the theater, but your senses will be deeply and thoroughly ravished.

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

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

Central Intelligence is dumb in all the right ways, and also a bit smarter than you might expect.

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.

Measured and absorbing rather than deeply compelling or vital, this latest adaptation of a rarely well-filmed novel makes a strong effort to capture the stiflingly provincial world that Flaubert was able to describe in such precise, painstaking detail on the page.

Ultimately a sweet, simple ode to the virtues of honesty and commitment in a relationship, Arlo & Julie may be a trifle at day’s end, but it’s a deft and pleasurable one — steeped in affection for its characters, not too in love with its own quirkiness, and marked by a nice retro flavor apparent in the jazz records Arlo and Julie play (which make up most of the score) and the playful iris shots used as scene transitions throughout.

After the Hunt will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards. I wouldn’t disagree, but few directors build more luxurious houses than Guadagnino does, whatever the materials.

What’s remarkable about Scott’s genuinely imposing Old Testament psychodrama is the degree to which he succeeds in conjuring a mighty and momentous spectacle — one that, for sheer astonishment, rivals any of the lavish visions of ancient times the director has given us — while turning his own skepticism into a potent source of moral and dramatic conflict.

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

Part 2 has the bonus of a livelier Stewart performance than fans have been accustomed to. No longer a mopey, lower-lip-biting emo girl, this Bella is twitchy, feral, formidable and fully energized, a goddess even among her exalted bloodsucker brethren.

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

To say it’s all over the place, a frenzied collection of hits and misses, is to both capture its shortcomings and deliver a fairly cogent plot summary. But as directed by Susanna Fogel (“Life Partners”) from a script she wrote with David Iserson, the movie also has a playfully vicious screwball energy that consistently locates the violence in every joke, the humor in every kill.

Manages the curious feat of being at once relentlessly energetic and almost continually uninvolving; the title more or less sums up the amount of pleasure to be had here.

A sweetly amusing ode to the underdog sports movies that proliferated during that widely derided decade.

A likable enough lark that rarely achieves outright hilarity.

Well suited to Hillcoat’s gifts for low-boil suspense and brutal eruptions of violence in close, male-dominated quarters, the film has grit and atmosphere to burn but also a certain narrative sketchiness, as though unable to reconcile its sharp sociological portraiture with the pleasures of a more robustly plotted crime yarn.

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

There is no triumph or easy uplift here, only an urgent emphasis on Christ’s message of sacrificial love and a principled rebuke to anyone who would cheapen the gospel with politics — a conclusion that has lost none of its sting or relevance 2,000 years later.

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

Evan Jackson Leong’s film makes the most of its superior access and exciting basketball footage, overcoming repetitive stretches by sheer dint of a tremendous underdog story.

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

Deviations from the historical record aren’t a problem in and of themselves; it’s what those deviations add up to (or don’t), and what they say about the motivations of the artists behind them.

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.

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

Languorously paced and literally dressed to kill, the movie is a corrosive attack on beauty — or at least our soulless, corporatized definition of the term — but it is also, above all else, a hypnotically beautiful object.

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.

Searing portrait of an out-of-control youth who winds up in a decidedly shady rehab center has more than its share of teen-angst cliches but still makes a surprisingly trenchant tearjerker, thanks to strong acting from all quarters and an especially blistering perf from Lapica.

Septuagenarian director Robert Benton brings his characteristically fine touch with actors and appreciation for the female form to this tastefully erotic ensembler, but compassion finally outstrips insight in a drama as soft-headed as it is soft-hearted.

Fitfully amusing and nearly saved by its distinguished cast.

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.

This slavishly faithful update... fails to tap into anything culturally specific or uniquely funny in its Pasadena setting or its theoretically looser, livelier black cast. And because the characters are so flat, we couldn't care less about the blows to their sense of propriety.

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.

Cuaron’s movie may be an exaggerated nightmare vision of murderous xenophobia run amok, but the catharsis in this tale of survival and payback is undeniably real.

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.

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

Johnson doesn’t get to pledge his love for unicorns and Molly Ringwald in this relatively straight-faced outing, but his versatility is more than intact: He’s a human wrecking ball, a human bridge and a human teddy bear rolled into one. He’s a towering Dwayneferno.

This maddening yet deftly made, and finally disarming, documentary comes through with enough heart and hilarity to sell its celebrity-stalking shenanigans to genuinely moving effect.

This tale of a still-grieving widow (Bening) hypnotized by a dead ringer for her late husband verges on ludicrous, but ultimately succeeds at conveying one person’s complicated yet emotionally rational response to a highly irrational situation.

John Slattery makes a wobbly transition into feature filmmaking with this drab and uninvolving dark comedy.

Whether or not it triggers a craze for divinely inspired detective stories, Risen makes a decent case for itself as the “Columbo” of the genre: It’s amiable, creaky and not remotely predicated on the element of surprise.

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

The movie...resembles a sloppily tended garden plot where crude sight gags and violent set-pieces flourish like weeds, but anything resembling actual humor or delight refuses to take root.

Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.

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

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.

An unremarkable if far from unpleasant sequel.

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.

This muscle-bound meathead extravaganza is a sometimes blissfully cretinous endeavor, delivering the maximum firepower and zero brainpower its target audience expects.

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

Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon's buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Amusingly predicated on the romantic possibilities of phone sex, Easier With Practice pushes past its titillating premise to become a quietly provocative love story about emotionally stunted manhood and the risks some guys will take to connect.

Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.

It’s pleasurable enough to see Skarsgård and especially Peña, so often cast as a genial second banana, taking pride of place in their own vehicle, even if this one fails to make the most of their considerable chemistry.

Tasked with reinterpreting one of the most frightening and emblematic villains in the Disney canon, Gadot evinces no feel for malevolent cunning, or even knowing cynicism; smacked down repeatedly by her Magic Mirror, she can barely conjure a decently icy glare in response.

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.

In scene after scene, Serra holds beauty and menace in a kind of uneasy equilibrium. He’s made a trouble-in-paradise movie where the trouble doesn’t overwhelm the paradise so much as poison it, at an almost imperceptible slow drip, from the inside.

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

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

Mistaking cliché for comic insight, and lacking the kind of conceptual rigor that a Pixar intern could probably muster, the script falls back repeatedly on the kinds of assumptions about human behavior that are meant to be cute and relatable to grown-ups and kids alike, but which instead offer an unflattering glimpse into the movie’s lazy, cynical soul.

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

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 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.

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.

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

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.

Morley sustains a vibe of low-key Lynchian weirdness throughout, enough to keep your mind from wandering even as the investigation meanders this way and that.

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

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

The Gray Man was directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, though it’s such a synthetic, soulless bundle of goods that it barely feels touched by human hands. Full of smirking one-liners, blink-and-you-miss-’em international locations and acts of gratuitously unpleasant (if more implied than seen) violence, it’s basically Netflix Winding Refn; it’s globe-trotting comic nihilism for the whole streaming-loving family.

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

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

The irony is that Bohemian Rhapsody, a song that triumphantly bucked convention, should now serve as the title of a movie that embraces every cliché in the days-of-our-lives biopic handbook.

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

[A] thin but engaging portrait.

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

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

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.

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

Though its forays into the subconscious may strike more adventurous cinematic palettes as precious and unimaginative, few will be able to resist Martin Freeman's appealing lead turn or the wry Brit wit that gives this fanciful confection a robust comic core.

A witty, warmly crafted chestnut.

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

Under the pretext of offering fun for the whole family, the movie winds up doing almost precisely the opposite; its attempts at grown-up sophistication and cheeky, knowing humor are clueless and hectoring enough to leave any adult in the audience wishing they’d been straight-up ignored.

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

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.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about casting off the shackles of old age and embracing excitement in life, there isn’t a single moment here that feels original or spontaneous.

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.

Lee and Protosevich have made a picture that, although several shades edgier than the average Hollywood thriller, feels content to shadow its predecessor’s every move while falling short of its unhinged, balls-out delirium.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“Golda” feeds that time-honored tradition of watching a virtuoso screen performer vanish behind a famous name and a wall of cinematic artifice.

From time to time its mix of foul-mouthed bro camaraderie and in-your-face violence nods in the direction of modest entertainment value, but the net effect is a whiplash-inducing muddle. The movie is full of noise and energy but devoid of real wit, coherence or impact.

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

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

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

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.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is a slight but improbably successful example of a movie that, despite its profusion of chrome and steel, somehow succeeds in touching something human.

It's hardly the first or last time Hollywood has plundered one of its own long-dormant properties, but it's also a reminder that not every resurrection has to feel like a desecration.

Fans of the real-deal Chucky movies, with their cheerfully low-rent effects and bawdy, impish humor, may well regard this slick new offering as a desecration masquerading as an upgrade. Which is not to say that this Child’s Play is entirely without its brutish, haphazard pleasures.

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.

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

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.

The empathy that Taylor summoned so effortlessly in his previous films feels strained and unpersuasive here, and moments that should be lacerating...are overplayed to ghastly effect.

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.

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

The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.

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

It's a sweet, klutzy charmer, with moments of wit, insight and, yes, beauty, some of which it seems to stumble upon by accident.

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.

This rambunctious, "Jumanji"-style extravaganza is a gallery of special effects in search of a story; rarely has so much production value yielded so little in terms of audience engagement.

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

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

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.

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.

With considerable grace and beguiling modesty, the movie frames its subject as one of Christ’s most discerning followers and a crucial witness to his ministry, death and resurrection.

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

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

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

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

The rare Hollywood remake that, by daring to reinterpret its source material within a fresh political context, actually has a reason to exist.

Sweetly amusing, gently anarchic and never mean-spirited.

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.

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

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

This high school horror romp tackles its bad-girl-gone-really-bad premise with eye-rolling obviousness and, fatally, a near-total absence of real scares.

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

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

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.

Picture's comic smarts and affecting daddy-daughter drama provide a sturdy platform for its heartfelt advocacy of informed voting and responsible citizenship.

Uncertain whether to be a cheerfully weightless killing spree, an earnest odd-couple comedy or, most hilariously, a straight-faced Eastern European political thriller, Tom O’Connor’s screenplay falls back on shopworn snark and half-baked bromantic attitudes.

Uninspired character animation and obnoxious banter aside, The Wild is ultimately done in by the persistent stench of been-there-seen-that.

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

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

Trading on the pedigree of Ang Lee’s 2000 Oscar winner but capturing none of its soulful poetry, this martial-arts mediocrity has airborne warriors aplenty but remains a dispiritingly leaden affair with its mechanical storytelling, purely functional action sequences and clunky English-language performances.

May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.

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.

A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, Open Windows elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia.

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

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.

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.

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

For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty . . . The Witches is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients.

Piling on the misery-laden subplots in scene after angry, overamped scene, Before I Disappear is the sort of movie that can’t stop reminding you how cruel the world is and how messed up its people are, to the point where its bludgeoning cynicism feels no more authentic or lived-in than the glimmer of hope that suddenly breaks on the horizon.

A surprisingly shrewd and energetic romantic comedy.

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).

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

Its modesty is what makes its very real virtues -- a tart, literate script, an adroit balance of humor and pathos, a memorable onscreen collaboration between star-scribe Scott Caan and his father James -- so cumulatively impressive.

Scene by scene, The Flowers of War is an erratic and ungainly piece of storytelling, full of melodramatic twists and grotesque visual excesses (a bullet pierces first a stained-glass window and then a girl's neck), which are nonetheless delivered with startling conviction.

The key to Seuss' tales, as with all good fables, is not only their cleverness but their surpassing elegance and simplicity, qualities that this busy, over-cluttered contraption of a movie seems entirely uninterested in replicating.

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

Poised between revisionist fairy tale and smirking sendup, this gaudy, over-frosted cream puff of a movie half-heartedly positions its famous heroine as a dagger-wielding proto-feminist, yet ultimately suffers the same fatal flaw as Julia Roberts' evil queen: It doesn't really care about anything except how pretty it looks.

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

An altogether bumbling excuse for an action-comedy.

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

The filmmakers seem curiously at sea over the purpose of their assignment, possessing neither the patience to plunge headlong into the story’s familiar depths nor the radicalism to reinvent it entirely.

It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface.

For a catalog of aggressively stupid, socially deviant male behavior, Rick Alverson's cheekily titled The Comedy is not without a certain subversive intelligence.

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

The overall execution is so pedestrian that it’s possible to feel more moved by the filmmakers’ good intentions than by the actual emotional content onscreen.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Upside was probably never going to be a good movie, but it needn’t have been such an unfortunate, spectacularly ill-timed one, the victim of circumstances it ultimately has neither the wit nor the imagination to transcend.

To properly appreciate Must Love Dogs, one must first love John Cusack. Thesp's maverick turn steals the show in this otherwise middling romantic comedy, which retools standard meet-cute elements for the Web generation in pleasant but uninspired fashion.

Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.

Adam Sandler's recent low-key phase continues with this cleverly conceived but conspicuously unfunny comedy.

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

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

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.

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

Roberts brings an acrid sense of bitterness and sorrow to this exceedingly sharp-witted sleuth, registering the cruel passage of time and the toll of unspeakable tragedy in every careworn feature and vocal quaver.... it’s a skillful and humane turn from an actress whose darkly penetrating gaze comes closest to fulfilling the mystery of the title.

That rare ensemble piece in which all four principals are not only compellingly drawn but handled with an astute sense of dramatic balance.

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

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.

The outstanding big-wave footage proves more credible than the overfamiliar dramatics in Chasing Mavericks.

I feel more qualified than usual to announce that Saban’s Power Rangers (Saban clearly never learned to share) is a witless and cobbled-together pile of junk, and I mean that not as an insult so much as an assurance of brand integrity.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Even a premise this stupidly contrived stands a fair chance of working if there are a few decent yuks to be had, but absent any such inspiration, We’re the Millers falls back on the sort of lazy but desperate, sexually fixated non sequiturs that have become de rigueur in studio comedies, jabbing repeatedly at the human groin in hopes of eventually hitting something funny.

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

Jeff Daniels' gleeful misanthropy and Lauren Graham's emotional openness are poorly served by the pic's transparently phony story and therapeutic uplift

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

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.

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

Inspirational but uninspired sports movie.

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

This fur-fetched tale is bearable family viewing.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

While 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.

For once, truth in advertising: Dealin’ With Idiots spends 83 minutes doing exactly that.

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

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

It’s not the clumsiness of the filmmaking that rankles so much as the hypocrisy.

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

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

Bad Education reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other.

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

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

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

A risible slab of Detroit gothic that marks an altogether inauspicious writing-directing debut for Ryan Gosling.

A Civil War-era actioner of questionable taste and historical accuracy but surprisingly consistent entertainment value.

Like even the lousiest Regency-era frippery, it has its intermittent pleasures, most of them visual. No movie that finds Dakota Johnson modeling high-waisted frocks against the Lyme Regis seawall or the lush Somersetshire countryside could be called a complete waste of time.

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

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

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

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

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

Movie stars may be less valued than they used to be, but it's still puzzling to see Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts stuck in a romantic comedy as flat-footed and tone deaf as Larry Crowne.

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

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

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.

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

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

It takes a peculiar kind of ineptitude to cast an actor as good as Michael B. Jordan and wind up with something as decidedly not good as Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.

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.

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.

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

Adams tries, as always, to make intelligent choices, to underplay the intensity and avoid the obvious. She works against the freneticism of the filmmaking, emphasizing Anna’s moments of groundedness and lucidity as well as the instinctive empathy that likely made her a good psychologist to begin with. By rights she should be the centerpiece of a great and genuinely Hitchcockian thriller. This one is for the birds.

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

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

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

Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.

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

A 23-minute movie dragged out, via some narrative gimmickry, to a punishing hour and a half.

The movie is choking on fumes before it’s even had the chance to begin.

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

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

Despite its bullet-point nods to toxic masculinity and some glib armchair sociology about the rage-fueled society we have become, “Unhinged” doesn’t have much on its mind. Its sharpest subtext derives from the casting of Crowe himself, whose malevolent glare and low, insinuating growl are scarily believable here, even as they suggest a self-conscious dig at his own past persona.

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.

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

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

It’s a muddled, tortured miasma of a movie and also, inevitably, a fascinating one.

The potential for screw-tightening suspense gets lost amid the ineffectual dramatics in Phantom, a feeble fictionalization of a crucial but little-known moment when a rogue Soviet submarine brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

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

It's a Wonderful Afterlife is a movie to make Frank Capra roll over in his grave from indigestion.

The trailer for Pitch Perfect 3 makes it look and sound like a comedy, which puts me in the unfortunate position of announcing that it is nothing of the kind. It's a tragedy in four-part harmony.

A slick, disposable soap opera.

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

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

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.

Delamarre knows his way around an action scene and keeps the proceedings moving briskly enough, even if the picture clocks in at about 10 minutes longer than its taut, 81-minute predecessor.

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

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

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

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

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.

Sentencing a sad-looking John Cusack and a hard-working Malin Akerman to roughly 90 minutes of solitary confinement in a poorly lit underground bunker, this glum, juiceless spy thriller is a by-the-numbers affair indeed, unlikely to find an audience on any frequency.

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

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

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

Uneven but not unpleasant.

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

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

For all its initial playfulness, the script never rises to the level of surreal, cortex-tickling pleasure it seems to be aiming for, and for all its self-awareness it’s weirdly devoid of humor.

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