Kimberley Jones

The final takeaway isn’t tragedy. It’s histrionics.

What surprised me about Petzold’s latest is how ultimately straightforward, even slight, it felt upon conclusion, even with certain questions left aggravatingly open-ended.

The familiar faces inject instant warmth, but I’m not sure it’s entirely earned. By the time Jay Kelly arrived at its last line – buffed to a bland sheen, as if the whole film was reverse-engineered to land there – I had cooled considerably.

Goldstein, better known for his comic work and coming off a wincing dramatic arc on Shrinking, has limited range but nestles into his sweet spot here, a combination of smirking and sincere, and the underrated Poots is magnetic. The script – witty, anemic – only gestures at her character’s chronic depression, but no matter. Poots bodily fills in the blanks, transforming an underwritten part into a complex, rounded person. She’s an original.

The questions being probed here about how to be vulnerable, what it takes to connect – y’know, the big stuff – aren’t exclusive to romance, after all. And I so admired the movie for having the daring and openheartedness to try to tackle the big stuff. I just wish I liked it more.

Eden shows humanity at its worst, but without reflecting much on the why of it all – a Lord of the Flies analogue that concludes not with a gut punch but a tidy historical coda.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

It’s a shame, with this much talent in front of and behind the camera, a more precise picture couldn’t emerge from material so obviously close to the heart.

If anything, Daniela Forever feels overly familiar. Calling to mind other life-of-the-mind films, it suffers by comparison, falling short of the wowee-zowee visuals of Waking Life, the satisfyingly intricate mechanics of Inception, the soulfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

A startling beauty who radiates both intelligence and a teenager-like surliness, Mackey is Hot Milk’s main point of interest and its stable anchor. She makes a meal of the scraps meted out about Sofia’s backstory, her inner thoughts, and motivations – which is what makes the film’s final moments so rankling.

Magic Farm feels more like a work-in-progress than a final draft.

Teetering toward made-for-TV in its facile depiction of Walter’s many wives and veering tonally from too broad to totally mawkish (the score wants to arm-wrestle tears out of you), The Friend is all soft edges.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

A model and artist’s muse turned photographer who shot unforgettable images of Europe at war, Miller was then largely forgotten by the establishment, until her son revived her work after her death in 1977. Underappreciated in her time, one wishes better for her than this underwhelming biopic.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.

The story, alas, is colorless and flat: a terribly earnest picture of two sad people looking for somebody or something to jump-start their battery.

The disappointment in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare lies in how much potential it had to be something more.

I will never understand the internet’s fascination with Sweeney, who appears to be scowling even when she’s smiling, but she and Powell both bodily throw themselves into their parts. The effort is there. It’s just a shame the material they’re working with isn’t better.

It takes only moments into the film, when star Timothée Chalamet first opens his mouth to sing, to discover Wonka’s two fatal errors: The songs are not good, and the guy singing them is even worse.

The problem in adaptation here is that Collins’ source book accessed Snow’s inner monologue, a churn of competing emotions and priorities at odds with his unruffled outer self. Without that insight, Snow’s evolution from war-scarred orphan to what Donald Sutherland is playing in the original quadrilogy is rendered as blank as, well, snow.

By fashioning itself a thriller above all else, Foe obstinately opts for the no-man’s land in between both tracks, in the process wasting its tiny, mighty cast, and the opportunity to say anything impactful.

Alongside Kathy Bates and Laura Linney, Smith is one of three grande dames of acting headlining The Miracle Club. Disappointingly, director Thaddeus O’Sullivan doesn’t put any of them to good enough use in this featherweight Irish dramedy set in 1967.

Scaffolding his story on an illogical foundation, Braff (Garden State, Wish I Was Here) continues to be an aggravatingly unsubtle filmmaker, over-relying on totems of profundity (a train set, a tattoo) and showboating with the camera in ways that distract rather than enhance the drama.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about scratching at real feelings, it comes off as phony as a perfume ad.

On film, goosed along by Thomas Newman’s jaunty score and a generically weepy power ballad co-written and performed by Hanks’ wife and producing partner, Rita Wilson, the effect is hollow, placating. They’ve turned themes of great love, loss, and the will to keep going into … easy listening.

Forbidden love! Terrible betrayals! Decades-old repressed truths! The plot elements are all there for something emotional wrecking, but Grandage and his cast approach it with such enormous restraint, the oxygen is cut off completely. This is bloodless filmmaking.

Tilt your head and you can catch the ghost of combustive screen trios past: Design for Living, Band of Outsiders, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But Amsterdam’s three leads – individually charismatic performers all – collectively can’t sell the film’s sentimental, facile idea that love beats all, even those pesky fascists. And that breaks my heart a little.

Genial and unbothered, Confess, Fletch never climbs higher than mere adequacy.

“Freely inspired by a true story.” That’s the filmmakers’ cunningly phrased hand-wave acknowledging the gap between actual history and the moony-eyed imagined romance proffered here. Still, it’s a curious deployment of the creative license: You’d think the construction of one of man’s greatest monuments would supply sufficient drama on its own.

Die-hard Downton fans aren’t going to grumble at the chance to spend more time with well-loved characters, and there are plenty of bright spots along the way.

The story – two guys, one girl, much deceit – is eternally contemporary. Sometimes gigglingly so in the hands of ever-erratic Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pan), who injects horny, corny musical theatre-kid energy into this latest iteration of Rostand’s doomed love triangle.

Doggedly mediocre actioner The 355 is the cinematic equivalent of gathering together Formula 1’s finest drivers and tossing them the keys to a Yugo. With two Oscar wins and four Oscar nominations between them, Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o are gonna do some pretty nifty work with a Yugo. Still, actors this capable deserve better gear.

It’s a lot, but also very little: The action amounts to multiple variations on “try not to get wet, or caught out” to push along a plot that dispenses the usual life lessons about being brave and valuing friendship.

There are a million reasons why couples break up. If only We Broke Up had landed on one, they might have really had something here.

The love match is cringing; as a rom-com’s raison d’etre, their limp connection pretty much sinks the thing. But when the script settles down and stops feeling quite so much like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thesis project, it has its bouncy moments.

From the most generous angle, All I Can Say functions as a found footage précis of the perils of fast fame, illustrating Hoon’s deepening addictions as the band’s profile rises.

I’m coming down harder than I meant to. If you’re a fan of the series – and I am – you’re still going to fan. (There’s no entry point for newcomers; it’s too in medias res.) The scenery is lush. There’s ever the pleasure in Steve and Rob’s company. I just wanted to feel by film’s end like I’d arrived somewhere new. Like the journey had been pulling me somewhere inevitable but still enlightening.

Although the filmmaker’s presence in her own film is never remarked upon, I imagine she felt compelled by a feeling of kinship with the artist; Dyrschka, a first-time feature director, is the first filmmaker to profile af Klint, which is a notable achievement. But I don’t think we’ve had the definitive film portrait yet.

The sensation that dogs Hope Gap is that they forgot to roll camera on the most dramatic parts. What’s left over isn’t bad, only underwhelming.

Yes, the 84-year-old Maggie Smith is back as the Crawley materfamilias, and as ever she’s the MVP.

Oliver and director Ry Russo-Young (Before I Fall) cherry-pick a few of these digressions and give them an artful, collage-like treatment; they don’t go far enough to mask the skimpiness of the story, which has been whittled down to Natasha and Daniel almost exclusively.

What I learned from Monrovia, Indiana is that I – personally – am bored by mattress shopping, City Council arguments over fire hydrants, and high school band concerts I am not obligated by shared DNA to attend.

In The Grinch power rankings, this one trails Theodor Geisel’s original 1957 storybook and Chuck Jones’ cheeky 1966 TV special by a long mile.

Kunis and McKinnon don’t exactly set the screen on fire with their chemistry, and there are only the most perfunctory shadings to their characters.

Inelegant but not uninteresting, Ramen Heads is a bronze contender at best.

They (Mirren and Southerland) give potent and particular performances, bright buoys at sea in an otherwise nondescript picture.

Why do I feel like a bummed-out tourist gone home with dashed hopes? “I was promised a new-millennium mindfuck, and all I got was this crummy pick-the-bodies-off horror.”

Early Man is wanting: of a cleverer narrative, of memorable characters. It’s not bad, necessarily. It just feels like an early draft of a better movie to come.

The Death Cure is at its absolute best when something’s getting blown up, or a plan is being hatched to blow something up: Series director Wes Ball is aces with action, and almost as effective with the procedural steps to get to said action.

Turning Poirot into an action figure with a gun is simply heresy.

The Exception’s line is not an easy one to walk, this marriage of soapy melodrama and real-world events, and with Courtney leading the parade, it’s destined for failure.

The story never drags – it’s too frenetically paced for that – but it’s still kind of a drag.

The film gets there eventually, but one wishes it weren’t so timid about embracing the inherent schlockiness of the genre.

Alas, the younger actors in the Sixties stretch are no match for the senior set, weightless and blank next to the gravitas of Broadbent, Walter, and Charlotte Rampling.

An actor most at home playing devilish, Keaton’s got the last-reel Machiavellian shrug down cold. But neither he nor the filmmakers do much to illuminate the neural pistons fired from brain to bodily shrug.

Before a foot of film was ever shot on Live by Night, Affleck had already made a decision that would be the film’s undoing. He cast himself as the lead.

The film is less successful at exploring the chinks in her armor – the stuff that makes her human, and a person of interest. Chastain is great – she’s always great, right? – and the brittle braininess she radiates is the film’s crowning seduction.

Either way, Beatty has taken an object of enduring fascination and made him … not so much.

The adaptation, by screenwriter John Romano and McGregor, debuting as a director, roughly sticks to the plot points of the novel but sheds its nuance, and reduces Zuckerman’s role to a mere background information delivery system.

Never Go Back is boilerplate action-thriller, filmed with an anonymous style and scripted so that characters talk in catchphrases.

It’s a tedious watch, inferior in every way to David Fincher’s slick, grinningly grim "Gone Girl." Any chance for lightning striking twice is going, going, gone.

Sausage Party glints of greatness, but this is half-cocked comedy at best.

What it does have in its favor are two sit-up-and-clap supporting turns from Skarsgård, all barking bear in tacky gold chains, and Lewis, who wears the sour mouth of someone who just underwent a prostate exam. Collectively, they’re the film’s fail-safe: Whenever Our Kind of Traitor threatens to go completely inert, they show up and give it a good goosing.

Hard truths: Popstar’s jokes land pillow-soft.

While the Occupy Wall Street rage supposedly fueling this thing is flimsy, what’s left is still solidly entertaining.

But being Charlie – what’s going on inside this angry kid’s head, what made him turn to drugs, and finally turn away – that is more elusive. And that is the film’s great disappointment: that something so clearly conceived in earnestness and from real-life, first-person experience ends up feeling, well, kinda fake.

The actors are all game, but the job’s beneath them – Hemsworth, a pro, and a real champ at faking enthusiasm for this dud; Theron, still doing camp but this time with no tempering complexity or empathy; Blunt, stuck playing a frost-bitten Mommie Dearest.

I like the declarative clarity, the strength of conviction in the title. I wish the movie itself bore the same certainty, or sturdiness.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among Janeites, that we’ll spend long hours scouring every streaming service out there, hungering for a corseted drama to watch. In that respect at least, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is fresh meat, if a tough cut.

Mostly Legend just lurches.

Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot

This “one crazy night” taps out at lightly kooky; there’s nothing here that gets within striking distance of the sheer weirdness of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" or the darkness of "After Hours", to name two genre stablemates.

There’s never any doubt that redemption is the end-game for Jones, but the claim for his saving is weak sauce; the case against him has been too emphatically, if unintentionally, argued.

The film is as thin as a picture postcard.

Best yet is Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, big as a Russian bear and as ice-cool as the country’s signature 80-proof spirit. Is it unpatriotic to wish this was his movie, not the twitchy American guy’s?

Digging for Fire fails its title’s own promise: It has the capacity for startling insight and artistry, but mostly it’s just a toe listlessly pushing dirt around.

The music so wholly engulfs the second half of the film, there’s no room left to expand on characters that feel less than lived-in or on the film’s more ambitious ideas.

Oh, how I rued my failed foreign-language skills in the opening moments of Gemma Bovery. Who wants to read subtitles when a French baker is rolling out such pliant, such pokeable, such heavenly looking dough?

Size matters, too, in Live From New York!, a portrait of SNL at 40, but in inverse: 82 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to consider every angle – or even many angles – of a cultural institution.

Saint Laurent gets across how isolating celebrity can be, how exhausting it is to keep a toehold on top of a mountain that keeps shifting underfoot. But the film is allergic to insight: It’s as numbed-out as its hero addict.

When the action shifts to Bill’s childhood home – an islet along the Thames, downriver from the legendary Shepperton Studios – some of the magic of that place rubs off on Boorman’s picture: It becomes lighter on its feet, moves with the breath of life and not just the strength of memory.

The subject itself – the musicians, the music – and the spirit of the thing – one son’s obvious devotion – transcend the film’s technical shortcomings.

This con artist caper from the writer/director duo behind "Bad Santa" and "I Love You Philip Morris" bears some superficial resemblance to the 2005 romantic comedy "Hitch."

Little girls will love it. I used to be a little girl once, too. I didn’t care much for the Top 40 glossy coat slathered over every song, but this heart will never harden to a spunky kid who’s certain the sun’ll come out tomorrow.

The movie lumbers on some more, reiterating the obvious and relying on overfamiliar imagery. Audiences have a long year to wait for Part 2. Would it not have been better to leave them breathless than heaving a sigh?

Saving Christmas will hold little interest for anyone not already a believer. It’s too single-minded in its instructional purpose, too averse to multidimensional characters, too youth-pastor-like in its dorky humor.

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

Wright is terrific – sensitive and alert – in the live-action opening. But that opening runs more than 45 minutes long, a way too heavy-handed preamble to the crazed animation to come, and the actress’ vocal delivery – soft-spoken, gently bewildered – is too soporific to pull off lines like, “Look at me, I’m your prophet of doom.”

It’s an impossible standard, maybe, but in 42 minutes, TV’s "Friday Night Lights" delivered all-star-level emotional complexity and action. When the Game Stands Tall is strictly JV squad.

Occasional animated inserts inspired by Chantry’s work as an illustrator, while accomplished, inject an off-note of whimsy that doesn’t quite square with the script’s stabs at edgier humor.

Patinkin and King’s characters’ wrangling with spirituality is sincere, and specific. Everything else in this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink film feels like too many ideas stored up over an especially long winter.

Amusing enough, but weirdly joyless.

A bright idea, disappointingly dulled in the execution.

The promising-sounding football movie would turn out to be a movie about men talking on phones.

The bestselling first book in yet another dystopic Young Adult series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent is engrossing enough to devour overnight, and flimsy enough to forget by morning light. Neil Burger’s film adaptation faithfully reproduces the same effect.

Isaac and Olsen are both mesmerizing actors, and Lange and Felton also do very good work in supporting roles, but their collective gameness – all that acting their pants off (sometimes literally) – is underserved by the film’s script and direction.

The richly hued CG animation is quite nice – a mix of hyperdetailed character work and painterly cityscapes and pastorals – and the script putters along with small but regular amusements.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a very pretty production – pretty colors, pretty scenery, pretty bromides – and a busy one, too, which helps distract us from the sad fact that the movie is generous and humane but not all that interesting.