Keith Phipps

There might not be anything in Deep Water that hasn’t been done better in other movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t done well here. And there’s something to be said for its efficiency: The conspicuous acts of homage often make it like you’re watching three or four different movies at the same time.

If you have an audience that doesn’t mind a story that includes lies, aversions, and omissions so long as it doesn’t get in the way of thinking too much about the songs they love and uncomfortable truths about the artist who created them, you don’t even have to put that much effort into what you’re making up.

Without spoiling Normal’s central twist, suffice it to say that it leads to a lot of gunplay that allows Wheatley to off one character after another in violent, sometimes explosive fashion. It’s more wearying than shocking, but not fatally so thanks to a brisk pace, a willingness to shift gears with little warning, and, again, Odenkirk’s humane performance.

After an opening stretch that retains the film’s first-person perspective, Kawamura skillfully uses long, fluid takes and compositions that create a sense of unease about what might be just out of frame. But Exit 8 only fully commits to horror in a few select scenes.

It’s not badly executed, but there’s nothing scary or clever enough to set it apart from similar films beyond the Faces of Death connection, a throwback meta cloak wrapped around a merely good-enough modern horror movie.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is, like its predecessor, solidly put together and even elicits a chuckle here and there (most of them, as before, courtesy of Black). But it’s also pretty much as impenetrable as Finnegan’s Wake for those not locked into its hermetic, mushroom-and-brick-filled world.

All the aspects of Alpha that work makes the film’s final stretch, which brings together the two timelines in a way that makes a lot more sense symbolically than logistically, that much more unfortunate, but no less of a worthwhile effort from a director who understands that shock and horror can sometimes clear space for understanding and empathy.

Pulling this off requires an actor who can balance comedic grace and gravitas with the skill of, well, Ryan Gosling, who’s ideally cast as a man who can ponder big, existential questions at the end of the universe and goof around with an excitable pal from another planet. (Get you a movie star who can do both.) At once zippy and emotionally wrenching, the film performs a similar balancing act as its leading man.

It might be a well-worn tale of demons and satanic beasties at its core, but Undertone’s ingenious form gives it an unnerving intimacy that begins as a dreadful whisper then slowly turns up the volume until it threatens to drown out the rest of the world.

Drunk on its own ambitions and the permission to go as big as possible, The Bride! is seldom cohesive (and occasionally incoherent) but it’s also rarely boring, the sort of noble failure that’s more compelling to watch and discuss than a lesser success.

In the tradition of the opening scene, let’s bring it all full circle with the question that kicked off this series: Do you like scary movies? If so, there are plenty of other ones you could watch.

As satire, it’s toothless. (The rich are awful. We know.) That might be forgivable if the film was at all funny or could decide if Becket was a victim or a psychopath, a problem not aided by Powell’s noncommittal performance. He’s doing too little.

Good Luck feels raggedly put together at times, however precise Verbinski’s filmmaking might be within each scene, but as the story unfolds and the full scope of the threat emerges, a winning sincerity overtakes the film.

“Wuthering Heights” looks great and it’s fun to wander around in it for a while, but it’s hard to shake the thought that Fennell’s film has been thrown together without much consideration for how all the rooms might fit together. It’s the cinematic equivalent of The House on the Rock.

What begins as an attempt to send up pop star self-indulgence finds its way to self-indulgence by another route.

McAdams is the real show here, playing Lisa as a mouse who becomes a lion as she adapts to an environment that allows her to be herself at last.

It’s rare that a work of science fiction offers a grim vision of the future, then asks us to learn to love it.

Roberts skillfully stages some memorable kills but, despite the unusual antagonist, Primate too often feels like a by-the-numbers slasher that expects the novelty of a bloodthirsty chimp will carry it.

Played by Foster with flinty persistence, Lillian is part of the long, great tradition of memorably screwed-up sleuths and A Private Life makes it easy to wish we’d see her again in a sequel in which she pursues a case that’s worth her time and ours.

It’s not a subtle movie, but it’s not a predictable one, either, opening several obvious avenues for its plot to travel down then closing them off and letting the elements collide in less obvious patterns.

As a horror movie, We Bury the Dead is light on scares (and has a little trouble sustaining momentum in its back half), despite some truly upsetting zombies. But Hilditch’s film works extremely well as a mournful mood piece anchored by Ridley’s thoughtful, melancholy performance as a woman trying to understand the fullness of her loss and the impossibility of recovering the past.

Though the film’s long middle section starts to feel a little repetitive, Park’s filmmaking remains unfailingly sharp and the performances perfectly calibrated to the increasingly absurd, and carnage-filled, situations in which they find themselves.

It evens out to an engaging-enough biopic, but if Song Sung Blue had found a way to interpret their bittersweet love story with a Lightning & Thunder-like intensity, it could have been even more.

For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart.

The film’s fundamental earnestness and Cameron’s gift for astounding visuals and kinetic action scenes usually offset most of the flaws and a nagging sense of déjà vu.

Death makes what’s left unsaid unknowable. But life can make the gap between parents and children feel unbridgeable, too. Father Mother Sister Brother plays like a long, plaintive sigh of acceptance that this is the way of the world, and perhaps a quiet wish that it might be otherwise.

It’s as if everyone seemed to think that all the film needed was to assemble the right pieces and the rest would take care of itself. And with pros like these, they almost do.

Ella McCay has some fine moments but getting to those little gold nuggets requires a lot of tedious sifting through the sand.

As the record of a landmark staging of a great play, however, this Merrily feels like a gift to all those who wish they could have been there, or want to return.

Shakespeare’s wife may remain forever a mystery, but Hamnet makes Agnes a creation of yearning, aching humanity who’s impossible to forget.

It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?

Sweeney’s transformation is more than just physical. She’s convincing as both the scrappy kid no one expected to go anywhere and the swaggering superstar who began throwing verbal blows at opponents.

Trier gives all four of these characters—and the actors who play them, all brilliant— the space to process their related sets of unsettled emotions.

There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its refusal to oversimplify the matter and a script that allows Turner, Teller, and Olsen to make their characters more than mere type

Though Baumbach lays the groundwork for a satire of Hollywood excess, he instead delivers a familiar but elegant depiction of successful men reflecting on choices they can’t undo, the damage created by those decisions, and the limited time they have left to make right what they still can.

The singular word “portrait” isn’t quite right, however. Both Whishaw and Hall deliver lovely, tender performances that capture the friendship between the writer and her subject.

Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror.

That Nouvelle Vague looks like it could have been made alongside Breathless is its most immediately striking feature. From the aspect ratio to the film stock, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a contemporary production. The tone, however, is wry, knowing, and resolutely comic, even occasionally sentimental.

At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.

It Was Just an Accident is both typically uncompromising and, for long stretches, disarmingly funny.

Once the film finds its true hero, it becomes exactly as good as the idea of a del Toro adaptation promised: the defining 21st century cinematic Frankenstein.

Through it all, Reznor and Ross keep the music pulsing in time to the action and for some thrilling, surprisingly long stretches, that’s all the movie needs.

While Luna and Tonatiuh play characters transported by movies, the film in which they appear never quite summons the same power.

The film’s structure comes with some built-in restrictions, limiting how well we can get to know House of Dynamite’s many characters, who range from low-ranking soldiers to the highest rungs of power. But it also challenges a first-rate cast to tease out their characters’ hidden depths.

It’s the work of someone who didn’t take the time to realize he had nothing to say, then decided to say something anyway.

Hawke’s ability to convey flashes of self-awareness elevates his performance from a brilliant impression to a fully realized tragic portrait.

As a love story, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t really work. And given that much of the movie—scripted by Seth Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang)—is concerned with telling a love story, that's a pretty big problem.

Adhering to Kerr’s real-life story allows Safdie to skirt clichés, but it’s really only Johnson’s memorable characterization that suggests Kerr’s story had to be told.

Goldstein and Poots play off each other well, creating the sense of a years-deep connection that’s suddenly threatened by what’s changed between them, but also by what’s remained the same. They’re convincing as two people who don’t know what to do. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a movie that also doesn’t really know what to do.

The film weaves a study of what it means to discover you’ve built your life over an abyss into the fabric of a multiplex-friendly horror movie, but it wouldn’t work without Hall’s deft, complex performance.

Though any Cage-free attempts at comedy fall flat, the action remains exciting, thanks in large part to Logothetis’ steady-handed, no-frills approach. Who knew putting together a bunch of gifted martial artists and letting them exercise those skills could take an action film so far?

The film emerges as a perfectly agreeable action movie, one that’s both true to the concept of Charlie’s Angels, and probably unrecognizable to anyone time-traveling from the 1970s. That’s okay, though. Some concepts have to evolve to survive.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie is too much Between Two Ferns to fit into an episode but not enough movie for a sit-down-in-the-theater experience. Still, it’s companionable in the lowered-stakes world of Netflix films where pleasantness and a handful of highlights seem to matter as much as excellence.

It’s an appreciably less-engaging film in every way, suffering from lurching storytelling, wild vacillations in tone (even within scenes), and a strong cast that never fully gels as a group.

Hobbs & Shaw proves they work well together, stretching out the sparky dynamic of their previous appearances together to feature length.

There’s a lot going on in Tarantino’s latest film, including an exploration of the delicacy of a moment in time and how easily an era can be swept away.

Crawl’s virtues, however, remain formidable: It’s fast, efficient, crisply directed, and delivers on the promised alligator thrills. In another year, that might be worth a polite nod. This year, however, those B-movie values feel especially refreshing, and illuminating too.

As grim as the above might sound, it’s also a spry, funny, moving film that never heads in the direction in which it looks like it’s about to head, kind of like its protagonist.

Whannell commits to making a science fiction film plugged into the moment in which we’re living, and making grim projections of what might be around the corner.

In retelling a story whose political implications could still start a screaming match decades later, it takes a mushy approach seemingly determined to offend no one, or at least offend no one all that much or for very long.

Finley’s debut is an odd, hypnotically compelling film filled with dark laughs and unanswered questions.

Though it doesn’t come close to touching the original, it’s not the years-late embarrassment it might have been.

The filmmaking is so strong and the scope so large it helps obscure the fairly simple moral at the heart of the script by Zvyagintesev and Oleg Negin.

Whatever he’s done in the past, Eastwood here seems most interested in paying tribute to some men who deserve the commendation — nothing more, and nothing less.

Vega’s remarkable as Marina. Her character never opens up to anyone, but Vega skillfully conveys an inner life governed by sadness and a will for self-preservation.

The results suggest that Ponoc was guided by a single principle: If Studio Ghibli won’t make Studio Ghibli films anymore, then we will. Which is to say Mary and the With’s Flower is delightful — a visually stunning fairy tale filled with whimsical ideas and warmly realized characters — but also familiar.

From the moment Katja returns to find her life shattered, Akin seldom lets the tension subside, and Kruger’s performance matches the intensity at every step.

Anderson has made a strange, entrancing, often darkly funny film that’s at once like nothing he’s ever made and one no one else could make.

There’s not a wasted moment as The Post packs what could be an overwhelming amount of information into a story that ultimately reveals itself as a Capra-esque morality play with deep roots in recent history and a style that sometimes calls back to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s.

It’s a film that remembers how awful it can be to grow up, and that even those who survive it usually don’t get out without taking a few scars.

It’s a wistful, unabashedly minor swan song that fittingly casts Stanton as a man recognizing he’s much closer to the end of his life than the beginning — and wondering what it all means.

Flanagan has a command of how to make the most of a single location, and Gerald’s Game often captures a sense of mounting tension and fear through small touches like the play of light through the window signaling the end of another day with no promise of a way out.

The humanity behind The Square‘s jabs save it from seeming nihilistic but they also implicate everyone watching. The film seems less nasty for having such a well-developed protagonist, but also that much more squirm-inducing for anyone who recognizes a bit too much of themselves in Christian’s unexamined attitudes.

Blade of the Immortal raises some compelling questions: What does it mean to be virtuous in a world that doesn’t value virtue? Is there any way to shuffle off the burden of past sins? When does immortality become a curse?

It’s a film about lonely people in an isolated part of the world, the sort of place where people go to disappear and sometimes slip further away than they’d intended. It’s also one of the most suspenseful and uncompromising noirs of recent years.

She was, the documentary argues, a complex artist, one of awe-inspiring talent and many frustrating contradictions, and one who deserved better than to become just another punchline on her way to the grave. Kapadia provides a heartbreaking reminder of what we lost when we lost her.

The setpieces, in addition to mostly rehashing better scenes from earlier films, feel thrown together to serve the effects, and the effects look far less astonishing than anything in Cameron’s first two films.

The director’s observant approach to the material helps pave over the frustrations.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.

There’s little in Burying The Ex to suggest it’s a Dante movie at all, given how far it’s removed from the smart, exciting films he used to make. Maybe it’s best if everyone just pretends he wasn’t involved.

Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.

Pacino never goes too big, as he’s had the tendency to do for a while, but he also never goes deep. Manglehorn wanders and rambles, and the movie follows along dutifully, even though there isn’t much to see along the way.

The characters occupy homes where nothing is ever out of order, but Barthes creates a sense of unease that never lets up, and a suggestion of chaos underlying all the neatly arranged possessions in the Bovary home.

It’s fun, but it’s ultimately more of the same in brand-new packaging.

Its pleasures are familiar and its frightening bits less frightening than before, but Insidious: Chapter 3 still does right by a series that’s served as proof that, in horror, less can be more.

An earnest attempt to convey the essential truth of Wilson’s extraordinary career and difficult life animates both halves of the film, and both performances.

Whatever Crowe’s ambitions, Aloha feels like a tropical transplant of past work, and an unfortunate demonstration of the law of diminishing returns.

What almost rescues the film is Arterton’s performance.

Content to let his work speak for itself, Giger has little to add to the conversation, and while it’s intriguing to see him working in—or sometimes just ambling through—a house filled with his work and sources of inspiration, Sallin too often lets these scenes crowd out the story she’s trying to tell.

If Fury Road were only interested in action, it would still be a stunning achievement, but the film has more on its mind.

One’s uptight. The other’s flamboyant. Put them together and… Well, not much happens, except the desperation Hot Pursuit brings to its attempts to wring laughs out of the contrast.

The D Train hangs some inspired ideas and winning comic moments on material that’s not strong enough to support them.

Whedon’s handling of the personal material is what makes Age Of Ultron extraordinary. Remarkably for a film so overstuffed, no character gets neglected.

Welcome To Me never develops much momentum, doesn’t always know what to do with supporting players like Leigh, and builds toward a finale that plays as a bit too neat. Yet even this doesn’t betray the character’s cracked integrity.

In some ways it takes the right approach, attempting to mix moral lessons into a narrative rather than hit audiences over the head with them. But the lessons are so pat that every moment in which Pepper makes a good moral choice feels like an act of self-congratulation.

However misguided, it’s clearly one from the heart, a movie that should never have happened, and one that’s hard to believe actually exists. Roar is one of a kind. With any luck, it always will be.

For everything here that’s new and exciting, there’s much that’s way too familiar. The kids are so one-dimensional and unpleasant, it’s hard to care once they start dying off.... Unfriended is often more innovative than scary, too, with some memorable but not particularly chilling and hilariously foreshadowed death scenes.

It’s the choice to put the voices of the main players front and center that saves Lambert & Stamp from taking the rise-and-fall shape so familiar from Behind The Music and similar projects.

While Driver and Seyfried are both quite good, there’s nothing specific enough about their characters to avoid making the film feel like a blanket condemnation of a whole generation and their new ways of doing things.

The result is a relentlessly dour film livened up only by Bardem’s shameless scenery-chewing and the occasional jolt of action. Otherwise, it’s an endless frown of a movie that does little but confirm that Penn’s talents, while impressive, aren’t limitless.

If there’s a real person beneath Danny’s over-the-top showbiz-lifer persona, Pacino never finds him. Pacino probably still has it in him to do measured, subtle performances, but this isn’t one of them. He’s more mannerism than man, even in some otherwise-relaxed scenes with Bening.

Alternating interviews, observational passages, and conversations with past students, Hawke’s low-key film never pushes too hard for effect and lets any drama emerge slowly.

Where the first film kept insisting that drama and liveliness need not disappear in the golden years, its sequel feels almost like a rebuttal. Hopefully everyone involved will find something better to do before this unexpected franchise opens up a third location.

Stearns directs with a slow-burning intensity that becomes more unsettling the deeper Ansel goes into his task, and the more it becomes apparent he doesn’t have an easy way out.

Despite an intriguing opening and an overqualified cast, The Lazarus Effect can’t shake a been-there/resurrected-that vibe left over from Flatliners, Pet Sematary, and countless other films stretching back to Frankenstein.

Shooting on 35mm, Jody Lee Lipes makes the harshness look beautiful and unforgiving, and in a film filled with strong performances, Morton’s work stands out.

Some of the gags Bruce Wagner’s script lands about the business of Hollywood and the insanity it breeds call out for rimshots that Cronenberg never supplies. The silence can be awkward, but it’s just as often fascinating.

The film never entirely figures out what it wants to do with the myth of the superspy, but at least it has fun along the way.

If Project Almanac didn’t bungle it all with a shrug of an ending, it would be easier to recommend. Maybe someone with a time machine should go back and give the movie a do-over.

Starr and Shihabi, a charming newcomer, play off each other beautifully, and even when the film becomes a little too heavy-handed...their relationship keeps it grounded.

Strange Magic certainly isn’t an ordinary sort of mess, and the personal nature of the project is still evident in the finished film.

The film refreshingly portrays its kids as part of a diverse group trying to succeed in a country in which they can never find secure footing. That’s the big-picture story here, and one even the occasional underdog cliché can’t obscure.

Paddington is a charmer, portrayed as a little guy whose unflagging goodness makes it easy to forgive his clumsiness. That’s the one detail from Bond’s book any adaptation has to get right, and this one nails it.

Despite the sharp dialogue...and carefully managed dramatic rhythms, Match still can’t help but seem a bit cramped, particularly once the plot starts to take some predictable turns and the shouting starts. It’s a fine line that divides the intimate from the claustrophobic.

Even Neeson can’t rescue this halfhearted shrug of a movie.

It’s a handsome disappointment, fast food masquerading as fine dining.

Chandor’s film suggests more than it can explore, and a contrived climax makes the film seem like less than the sum of what’s preceded it.

Big Eyes contains comedy and tragedy, too, but they pair much less agreeably here, in part because each of the film’s two protagonists belongs much more to one world than the other.

A lesser filmmaker, and a lesser actor, might have made American Sniper into an unthinking bit of jingoism. Eastwood and Cooper keep finding respectful complexities in Kyle’s story, until the film reveals itself as too simple to have much use for them.

Leigh’s generous approach to capturing the fullness of Turner’s life, through unhurried rhythms and scenes, makes Mr. Turner memorable.

Scott loses the humanity amid all the gods and kings. The setpieces, however, elevate the film around them.

If nothing else, the sweep of Workman’s cradle-to-grave approach helps place Kane in a broader context, making it one chapter in a long life and a drama-packed career. The only trouble with the film is that Welles’ story has been told many times over, and Workman struggles to find anything new to say.

It all serves a portrait of 1970 California that mixes absurdity with an air of looming cataclysm, a volatile formula that wouldn’t work without Phoenix’s performance.

There’s a sense that the band has left its mark on Sheffield as surely as the city left its mark on the band. This concert might be Pulp’s last hometown appearance, but it hardly seems like goodbye.

Even at its best, the film plays like the comedy equivalent of a legacy act reuniting for a tour fueled more by nostalgia and goodwill than inspiration. It’s less sequel than encore, and it’s probably time to turn on the house lights and close this buddy act.

Radford’s pacing, which alternates between “stately” and “deathly,” keeps robbing the film of any momentum, and for every charming moment between the two leads, the film offers annoying bits of overstatement.

Interstellar often seems afraid to let any development go unpacked and uncommented upon, except for a handful of points that dive into the action and expect viewers to catch up. The film is at its best in these moments, when it’s unafraid of challenging storytelling, particularly since Interstellar never has trouble finding visuals to match its heady concepts.

It isn’t a hopeful story, but it is a story of how committed people have fought and struggled to create the possibility for hope in the future.

It’s a painfully minor movie that doubles as an accidental study in how pros handle themselves when given less-than-challenging material.

The Judge ultimately plays less like a film than a series of big moments, some of which work well. Downey, Duvall, Farmiga, D’Onofrio, and Thornton aren’t known for making dull choices, and they often dig out nuance where others wouldn’t find it.

There’s real craftsmanship to the film, but it’s in service of a story that can’t quite support it.

Neither Grossman’s uninspired staging nor the performances help much.

The film aims for twee, but lands on torturous. It’s narcissism blown up to a global scale, in the guise of a quirky voyage of self-discovery.

Plotnick’s mix of straight-faced absurdity and unexpected poignance doesn’t always gel, but it also makes the film more resonant than a straightforward spoof could ever be, and adds another layer to the film’s central joke: You can take to the stars, but the past will always travel with you.

While 20,000 Days On Earth never finds the real Nick Cave, it’s because it knows better than to try to look for it.

The film feels more thrown-together than thought-through, but the best moments transcend such problems.

By turning her attention to an underreported chapter in recent history, Kennedy has found a trove rich with unreal imagery and stories of heroism in the face of defeat.

It’s hard to care about the fate of characters who never seem particularly alive in the first place.

Neither Molina nor Lithgow are stranger to big performances, but here, they offer studies in restraint, underplaying dramatic moments in ways that make them all the more powerful.

Weiner might have a great movie in him yet, but Are You Here suggests his true talent lies elsewhere.

Dinosaur 13 is haunted by the nagging sense that only one side of the story is getting told.

The energy never flags, the film conveys a deep love of Brown’s music (which fills almost every scene), and Boseman remains magnetic whether onstage or in quiet moments.

Gunn, a B-movie enthusiast who got his start at Troma, has found a way to bring funkiness and humanity to a galaxy-spanning blockbuster, one filled with dogfights and floating fortresses, but also with heroes quick with a quip, fast on the draw, and more than a little beaten up by the universe.

Brett Ratner remains a director of no great distinction, but here, he proves himself an adept orchestrator of battle scenes, clearly presenting the forces on both sides, and using clear, coherent editing and dynamic compositions.

When the film doesn’t strain for twinkly enlightenment, it stoops to find the easiest possible joke.

Yet for all the heady ideas at play, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes remains a visceral film, one of movement, action, unexpected developments, and disarming poignance.

Earth To Echo is yet another found-footage film, and not a particularly inventive one at that.

Evans is a revelation here, delivering a haunted performance that his previous work has only suggested he had in him. He gives the film a solid center, allowing others in the cast to explore the extreme.

While Michôd never satisfactorily develops the central relationship, The Rover is still a showcase for two strong performances.

The film wavers between the drippy and the glib from start to finish, sometimes within the course of a single scene.

Edge Of Tomorrow’s finale can’t live up to what’s come before, though that’s mostly because what comes before is so rich and unusual, particularly in the middle of a summer blockbuster season that doesn’t always value richness or novelty.

Schepisi does nothing inventive visually, and the stars can’t find the humanity beneath Di Pego’s dialogue, generate much romantic chemistry, or make their personal struggles feel like burdens instead of scripted complications they’re destined to overcome before the credits roll.

Edwards’ film doesn’t care much about metaphorical resonance, and cares even less about its human characters, many of which get forgotten for long stretches of the film. But Godzilla has a way with a disaster setpiece, and it cares a lot about providing awesome monster-on-monster action on a mammoth scale.

Whenever it features feet flying through the air, Brick Mansions is a pleasure. Asked to do anything else, it’s one stumble after another.

As much an inspirational email forward as a film, it’s helped by the work of a strong cast and some photography that makes Nebraska look like heaven on earth. That doesn’t make it persuasive, however.

Oculus takes a potentially corny premise further than most could, but it keeps stumbling on the possibilities, never quite taking any of them all the way.

It’s an unwieldy, sometimes overreaching effort, but the laudable ambition makes it easy to forgive some rough patches.

Mistaken For Strangers, which covers Tom’s time with the band and his subsequent attempts to piece together a movie about that time, is a sweet, funny, and sad film, but also an exceedingly odd one.

Like its immediate predecessor, Muppets Most Wanted has one tremendous advantage, even when it missteps: Muppets.

While the Veronica Mars film feels a bit small and closed-off by big-screen standards, it will no doubt be big and welcoming enough to those who love the series.

Excerpted from The History Channel’s 10-part 2013 miniseries The Bible, then given extra footage, Son Of God boils the life of Jesus down to feature-length, but it plays less like a movie than a hastily edited attempt to explore a new revenue stream.

Pompeii just feels like an excuse to rain digital terror on screaming extras. There’s much to see here, but little to feel, and even less to remember.

Pettyfer and Wilde look the parts, but any scenes asking them to emote quickly turn disastrous.

Pokily paced for a 78-minute movie, The Jungle Book counts on winning characters and memorable songs to carry it along. That turns out to be a safe bet.

Fans of the books might enjoy seeing their world brought to life, but most everyone else will likely leave feeling as if they’ve just completed a seminar on vampire lore, and they’re likely to fail any pop quiz that follows.

For a film that clearly required a small army to make, it often feels thrillingly off-the-cuff, which keeps with The Lego Movie’s themes of creativity and weirdness: Nobody’s following an instruction book with this one.

Though the film portrays the racism of the South as institutional and inescapable, it’s a little too eager to offer glimmers of hope with increasing frequency as the film nears its end and Tibbs and Gillespie come to understand each other better.

Though light on drama, Apple’s scenes at the shelter are easily the best part of the film, among the few moments when Gimme Shelter decides to show the effect of faith and charity rather than simply preach it.

There’s promising raw material here, particularly in the early scenes. But the film’s second half seems determined to snuff out the promise of its first, making it hard to wish for this incarnation of the character, or any, to have more big-screen adventures.

Where 300 made a virtue of its low budget by stripping the visuals down to their essential elements, the shot-in-Bulgaria Legend Of Hercules mostly just looks rushed and cheap, only coming to life in a handful of fight scenes, and then only briefly.

The triumphs feel engineered, and the realizations overheated. Seldom has a globe-spanning, soul-plumbing search for what really matters looked so inconsequential.

Jones delivers a quietly wrenching performance as a woman who comes to recognize too late how much of herself she’s lost. It’s subtle work in a film that is sometimes content to be a little too subtle.

It’s both unfailingly exciting and overly familiar, a restless but risk-averse film that’s a little too content to borrow from what’s worked before.

Where Barton Fink sometimes resembled a horror movie, Inside Llewyn Davis plays like an elegy. Its conclusions are more regretful than angry, and while the conflict between art and commerce is no less central, there’s much more emphasis on that conflict’s personal toll.

McCormack admirably tries to squeeze a lot of real-world messiness into Expecting, but her film’s essential phoniness refuses to make room for it.

What makes it effective isn’t the facts of the case, so much as the way Philomena lets viewers spend time with its characters and get to know exactly who’s getting hurt.

It looks like no other movie, Marvel or otherwise, and it’s populated by characters compelling enough to support a more complex, richer story than this one.

It’s a monster movie made with energy, but no real enthusiasm, and its setting just makes it feel like a long way to go to get the same old thing.

The amusements here are mostly of the unintentional kind.

At its best, The Broken Circle Breakdown has the feel of life as it’s remembered—moments out of time tethered together by the feelings of those living them.

Condon seems to hope energetic staging and furrowed brows will compensate for a script that’s essentially an exchange of halfhearted arguments.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger have all the gravity here, and keep pulling Escape Plan in the direction of an old-fashioned tough-guy action film, one filled with nods to their onscreen pasts and offscreen exploits.

It’s possible that something’s getting lost in translation, but Demme’s film only occasionally makes it seem like it’s worth the effort for the rest of the world to catch up.

It’s a classic tale of survival that draws on how movies, in the right hands, can make viewers see the world through others’ eyes, and to feel what keeps them grasping as it threatens to slip away.

No doubt a decent movie could have been made about the behind-the-scenes life of CBGB, but CBGB isn’t it. It’s as flip about the club as it is about Kristal, the music, and the time and place that shaped it all.

Captain Phillips could have stopped at simply depicting what happened; it’s the steps it takes to examining why it happened that make it extraordinary.

It isn’t just sub-par for Argento, it’s sub-par for virtually any director. It’s a stain on Dracula’s good name, and a waste of time for even those looking for the cheapest of vampiric thrills.

The film uses the cutting edge of technology to take viewers to the far reaches of the human experience, but also to create a sense of empathy, of investing in the life of another person. It’s a remarkably complex film, but an admirably simple one, too.

An advocacy doc constructed to make a clear political point first and function as a film a distant second.

The film retains much of what worked about the first film, and it brings a similarly smart, patient, visually striking approach to the gags.

Muscle Shoals’ story has needed telling, and Camalier packs that telling with memorable stories and music—though the film sometimes substitutes admiration for investigation, paving over conflicts and moving on to the next amazing piece of music to get recorded in town.

Though Wan is stepping away from horror, at least for now, to direct the next The Fast And The Furious sequel, the latest Insidious entry suggests he’s a long way from running out of new tricks, or at least finding infinite variations on old ones.

While some of the scenes feel contrived, the naturalistic performances never do.

It finds no clear answers, but that suits both the horrific event and this haunting, elusive film.

There’s a wealth of information in My Father And The Man In Black, but Holiff’s directorial choices don’t always help in conveying them.

While Good Ol’ Freda will surely fascinate hardcore Beatles fans, there simply isn’t a feature-length story here.

Wong’s usual concerns overwhelm the film, and though his pairing of fisticuffs and longing is sometimes awkward, he surrounds the awkwardness with some of the most beautiful images in his career. In Wong’s world, beauty goes a long way.

Though essentially a straight-faced horror film, You’re Next also taps into a rich vein of black comedy.

While virtually every shot looks like a work of art, much of the beauty of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints comes from Lowery’s refusal to choose sides.

For much of The Patience Stone, Farahani is the movie, and as she shifts from fear to despair to anger to emotions she’d never previously considered, her magnetic presence goes a long way toward putting a human face on the film, more successfully than the material around her.

For all its simple politics, clanging dialogue, and underwritten roles—only Damon’s natural, and deepening, ability to suggest unspoken disappointment gives his character dimension—Elysium works, though never as well as it should.

Kormákur lets his stars balance the buddy-movie levity with just enough dramatic weight to keep it grounded, and his directing style seems like a conscious corrective to the disorienting cutting and obvious CGI effects that have come to dominate Hollywood action films.

Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often, it’s frustrating: It’s a film without a net, and it tends to land with a thud.

Shamelessly exploitative, but never entertainingly so.

There’s a strain of gross-out humor—most bodily fluids make cameos—that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie. But more bothersome is a tendency The To Do List shares with its heroine: mistaking checking items off a list for progress.

For all the memorable dialogue and elegant camerawork (courtesy of Javier Aguirresarobe), it’s Blanchett’s movie, and her performance tells yet another story, that of a woman losing control.

With The Conjuring, [Wan] once more turns the familiar terrifying, making it easy to fear what’s behind that closed door, or under the bed, or just around the corner, making a creaking noise that doesn’t sound quite right.

It’s light and loose in ways that Almodóvar hasn’t let himself be in decades. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a lot of fun, a relentlessly entertaining lark that, like its setting, soars into the clouds, then discovers it doesn’t really have a way to get down.

It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches - "The Wire's" Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass - that it's never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.

If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help.

Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.

Lincoln is built around a magnetic Day-Lewis turn, and the film is a memorable, sometimes stirring look at how even the most righteous bill must struggle, and even cheat, to become a law. It demands a bigger stage than the one it's given here.

Directing his first live-action film since 2000's "Cast Away," Robert Zemeckis paces it brilliantly, slowly ramping up the energy from hungover lethargy to coke-fueled confidence, while creating undercurrents of dread as Washington hits his stride.

It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.

Measured scene by scene, the film isn't always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It's an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement.

While Seven Psychopaths sometimes hits the philosophical shallows, its pleasures still run deep.

Only the finale threatens to undo all that hard work. Though well-done, the last act leans less on the facts of the case than on Hollywood contrivances, heightening the tension with embellishments that feel at odds with the methodical, deliberate film leading up to them.

None of it is particularly novel or exciting.

It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.

It's taken a while for Kane to make it to the big screen, maybe because fantasy barbarians and long-ago kings have more immediate appeal than pious, slouch-hat-wearing men with poor senses of humor, but Solomon Kane gives it a go anyway. The results suggest a compelling movie could be made from the material, even if it isn't this one.

In Trouble With The Curve, Eastwood plays a reminder of an older way of doing things, a professional whose likes the world won't see again once he's gone. The role isn't much of a stretch.

Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.

While Bachelorette is admirably free of the normal formulas governing movies that revolve around women and wedding dresses, it doesn't offer anything more satisfying in their stead.

It's a potentially creepy setting that would give an innovative director a chance to do a lot with a little. Unfortunately, Lincoln isn't one of those.

There really ought to be a lot more movies like Hit & Run, but only if they're just a little bit better.

The film spends so little time developing its characters, apart from all that expository dialogue, that it's like asking audiences to care for paper dolls. And Sparkle never delivers on the promise of its most famous song by giving viewers something they can feel.

As Pattinson nears the bottom - both of his fortune, and to all appearances, his sanity - Cronenberg has to take the film somewhere, emptying out into a confrontation between Pattinson and a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti) that never fully ties together all that's come before.

The Odd Life Of Timothy Green attempts to stage a modern fairy tale in Middle America. But in spite of an abundance of earnestness, the pixie dust needed to create magic remains out of the film's reach.

Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.

Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art.

In spite of some prominently featured green slime and power-beam weaponry, it won't make anyone forget "Ghostbusters" anytime soon.

The Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by "(500) Days Of Summer" director Marc Webb, doesn't put its own stamp on the material, which feels warmed-over in ways that don't help.

Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.

Like "The Girlfriend Experience," Magic Mike doubles as an of-the-moment film about life in a down economy, so much so that it would play like a bait-and-switch if it didn't just as thoroughly deliver as a movie about stripping.

This time out, Shelton seems to be playing the part of someone who doesn't know how to finish what she started.

Adrien Brody delivers a colorful turn as a braided-and-tatted drug kingpin who thinks his pet toad talks to him (funny animal, check!), but High School is otherwise a tedious sludge through the same gray corridors where the same old gags wait around every turn.

Bravely or stupidly, both A Little Bit Of Heaven and its heroine charge on as if the introduction of terminal cancer didn't change things that much.

Mostly The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stays focused on the cutesy, low-stakes personal journeys of its English characters, characters it would be hard to care about if they weren't brought to life by actors who give the film substance and gravity it doesn't otherwise know how to earn.

Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.

That's a lot for any film to unpack, and "The Last King Of Scotland" director Kevin MacDonald deserves a lot of credit simply for keeping the narrative coherent.

As a pretty, low-stakes bayou romance The Lucky One works well enough. When asked to carry any kind of dramatic weight, however, it collapses.

It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?

The film alternates sloppily executed sex gags with sentiment, as did its predecessors. And it's all just slightly more endearing and amusing than it has any right to be.

In spite of a promising start, an unconventional setup, attractive photography, and game lead performances from Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing quickly turns into exactly the sort of wet cardboard box of a movie its title suggests.

There's probably a graduate thesis to be drawn from this, about what audiences want from horror films, and ways to make viewers uncomfortable with their own voyeuristic desires, but that doesn't make the thrills any less sour, or the end any less exploitative. (Or worse, dull.)

Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century.

It's crude in every sense: The film looks like shit, the characters are boors, and it's as sloppily put-together as the home movie it pretends to be. Project X's commitment to its crudity almost redeems it, though.

It's thin material, to say the least, and manipulative to boot, putting women, children, and a SEAL father-to-be in jeopardy in ways more about servicing cheap thrills than any larger point about the perilous state of the world in 2012.

It's unashamedly escapist, but a turn for the serious as The Vow nears the finish line only underscores its essential silliness and what a poor job the film has done making it seem like its characters need each other for reasons beyond looking good together.

Without Radcliffe at the center looking scared out of his wits, The Woman In Black would seem even slighter than it already does.

As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.

The aerial sequences look an awful lot like X-wing-versus-TIE-fighter battles and the effects have the same not-quite-solid feel of the Star Wars prequels. When the heroes crash, they go up in blazes of digital glory that seem just as artificial as the plotting that brought them to their fates.

To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.

It's an odd, unsatisfying combination that moves from mopey drama one moment to a reaction shot of a monkey smacking his forehead in exasperation the next. By the end of the film, viewers might understand the monkey's feelings all too well.

Ritchie has made a film that's so busy, it starts to become boring.

As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.

After establishing an atmosphere of nearly unbearable dread, Alfredson keeps thickening and chilling it.

Outrage is compelling to watch until it becomes exhausting.