Kyle Smith

Just when this thing seems dead, though, the movie picks up considerably, and the much-better second half nearly redeems it. I give the credit to an experienced conjurer of the unexpected triumph: Peyton Manning.

The film is at its best in the way it keeps building the stakes of the character clash, thanks in large part to the virtuosity of the two lead actors.

“F1” is a fun, exciting, predictable popcorn picture so formulaic it even contains a reference to formula in its title.

It was one of the last moments when the balance between 1940s-style uplift and what became known as cinema’s American New Wave still held; within a few years, boomer culture simply subsumed all else. “Desperate Souls” does a fine job of exploring the tectonics of that shift.

There is injustice here, but Mr. Hallström doesn’t push too hard on the theme; instead of interjecting what’s happening in the script, he simply allows us to experience Af Klint’s dignified frustration.

Aptly enough considering its title, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is two pictures in one: a dead section set with the living and a lively part that takes place among the dead.

Messy as it is, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first MCU movie in several years that’s mostly enjoyable.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd are nearly always enjoyable, even when working with less-than-scintillating material, and each has a boyish streak that’s exactly the right register for this exercise in silliness.

“Sound of Hope,” like its predecessor, is a big-hearted film made with a homespun sincerity that comes as a refreshing surprise at the multiplex these days, though it has the gauzy, simplistic feel of a cable-TV movie.

At its best, “Furiosa” is like a more fun, less ponderous and mysticism-free “Dune,” with every pedal properly to the metal. But it’s closer to numbing than enthralling, like a long ride with no shock absorbers.

At its best it’s entertaining in a quaint, late-’60s way, which makes it a pleasant summer surprise.

Caligula is still far from great, but it has risen to the level of an enjoyable, intermittently campy soap about ruthlessness, with one or two affecting moments.

It’s a passable bloody-knuckles action piece for those who enjoy relaxing with a couple of hours of crazed carnage.

If you stick with it through the somewhat plodding first half of this overly long retelling, you’ll be rewarded with a rousing final hour.

The film is a lesbian-road-trip gangster farce with a hint of political satire, and though it’s admirably offbeat I found it only mildly amusing.

The setup is fun to explore. But after establishing it, the movie essentially gets stuck delivering variations on the idea of Mother splitting into two selves, the domestic and the feral.

After an intriguing start and a strong middle, however, the film can’t quite deliver a satisfying ending.

What started out as something that promised to be akin to a droll, twisted Coen Brothers comedy instead wanders off into reverie. And when the movie ends, critical questions are simply left unresolved. Mr. Cronenberg may not care about closure, but a movie can benefit greatly from it.

For those who can tolerate—or better yet, relish—extreme violence, The Equalizer 3 is diverting enough. If the script is so-so, the beautiful Italian locations, Mr. Washington’s still-world-class charm and an eerie, frightening musical score by Marcelo Zarvos lift it (slightly) above average for the action-thriller genre.

Though the film can’t capture Wolfe’s writing, it does a public service in passing along its subject’s wisdom.

The Inventor falls awkwardly between a kids’ movie and one for grown-ups.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

Given that the character is a literal saint, and the script never stops reminding us how brave, honorable, loving and committed Mother Cabrini is, the movie suffers from a certain steadfast tone. It’s warm with fondness but never boiling with passion, and a major star might have succeeded in making Cabrini larger than life. As it is, she comes across as so pure that it’s a little difficult to relate to her.

It’s a film that demands to be watched several times to figure it out, but although I occasionally enjoyed its mordant humor, it’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to sit through once.

Cobbling together ideas from other, better movies, Rust isn’t original enough to be a must-see, but it didn’t deserve to be canceled because of an accident, either. Mr. Baldwin has been largely absent from the screen in recent years, and this effort is a reminder that, to use a word often applied to Harland Rust himself, he remains formidable.

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

On a scene-to-scene basis, it’s an impressively taut film, but it left me wishing for a more compelling conclusion than “people are nasty to one another.”

Ms. Polley, a longtime actress who got started in movies as a child, does an admirable job of keeping the dramatic temperature at a high level despite the strictures of the format, and Ms. Mara, Ms. Foy and Ms. Buckley all make a vivid impression. Yet no one in the movie seems to have a grasp of the practical realities.

Having simplified matters, Ms. Fennell sloughs off the psychological depth of the novel and instead lavishes attention on the heavy breathing and the decor, exhibiting much interest in the ornate mansion in which the Linton family lives (one room is set aside for ribbons only) and the costumes and accessories with which Ms. Robbie is gloriously draped.

Though very funny at times, and refreshing in the way it keeps us guessing, Spin Me Round is only partially successful.

Dream Scenario is such an imaginatively offbeat movie that it’s a shame it isn’t better.

Writer-director Kirk Jones doesn’t do a great job finding anything fresh to say about this unnerving situation, with one exception.

Those who’d like to take their more mature children to an animated feature with considerably more imaginative richness than, say, “DC League of Super-Pets” will find that the Japanese anime movie “Inu-Oh” fits the bill: How often do you get a chance to take in a medieval rock opera? But an imaginative hook isn’t everything.

Successfully stringing together shocking, disgusting and terrifying moments counts as a solid day’s work for most horror directors, and since The Exorcist: Believer achieves all that it’s competent enough. But I expected better from Mr. Green.

The minimalist style keeps the suspense warm. The movie is unusual among teen horror flicks in that it largely avoids the usual cheap thrills and bursts of scare music. Instead, it carefully repeats isolated images and sound bites until they take on a shivery power.

If it's violence ye seek, and violently confused storytelling, look ye no further.

Japan’s loony suicide culture seems like an adequately scary backdrop for a horror movie, but the routine horror flick The Forest mostly settles for cheap thrills.

A sort of grown-up version of “Moonrise Kingdom,” France’s Love at First Fight has some youthful free-range charm but not nearly as much as its predecessor.

Ultimately, this throwback, made-for-TV-style film takes the easy way out in a cheesy climax, but its resolute quaintness may appeal to the kind of viewers who regard electricity as disturbingly newfangled.

Despite being named “Gator Bodine,” Franco seems like something Statham would scrape off his boots. Put it this way: Franco needs a baseball bat to be intimidating; Statham just needs to be Statham.

The movie falls into the same uneasy category as "Eight Legged Freaks": too tongue-in-cheek to be thrilling, not funny enough to be a comedy.

It's a one-joke movie, if "Jewish mothers are annoying" is a joke. But just as a film about boredom should not actually be boring, no movie should credibly simulate the experience of being stuck in a car with Barbra Streisand for eight days.

The laughs, the warmth, the love and the faith-based fellowship die out in the dismal final act.

The main reason for Winter's Bone to exist is that it delivers a little voyeuristic thrill -- a bit of poverty porno -- for the critics who awarded it their highest honors at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Ms. Findlay’s work is nevertheless so delicate as to be slight, so unassuming as to be unsatisfying. The friction between the two leads could form a strong backdrop to the film; instead, it is the film.

The documentary Tabloid shows that an oddball lead character and a smirky style do not necessarily add up to a complete movie.

In Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, selfish oldsters scheme to rob young people of their vital essence, sacrificing them in the process. It’s basically “Social Security: The Movie.”

Strip away the alt-country soundtrack, though, and you've got a Bette Davis fallen-woman-redeemed picture from 1937.

It suffers from a major structural problem, which is that in its endlessly padded middle section it coyly refuses to get to the point until it exhausts the audience’s patience, then sprints through a late explanation that deserves more careful consideration.

Unbroken, is a cinematic scrapbook, a collection of well-composed scenes practically cut and pasted from “Memphis Belle,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Life of Pi” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Unlike those other films, though, Angelina Jolie’s second effort as a director is more a series of similar events than a story, and lacks an underlying message except that torture hurts.

Wraps a sari around the kind of suffering-housewife picture that became a cliché 30 years ago.

Robin Williams’ last live-action film, Boulevard, is a frustrating ending to a stellar career, a cramped and melancholy film about a cramped and melancholy man.

Since this low-grade comedy doesn't really even attempt to be funny, the purpose of the movie is to establish (or reinforce) a feeling of luxurious old-timey melancholy.

The film achieves a mild uptick in the final act, with a surprise change of heart and a race to save a little girl, but up till then it's thickly earnest -- a conquista-bore.

Combines unpleasantness and stupidity to a degree that would be difficult to match unless you were stuck in bed with a case of the shingles while being forced to watch “The Ghost Whisperer."

It has cult item stamped all over it, and fans of (severely) experimental cinema might see it as a revelation. Most others will find that watching this movie is like having your senses beaten with a rake.

Gunning for the near-annual Ugly Makeup Oscar, Aniston proves, as always, a modestly gifted actress, only this time with scars and weedy hair.

David Gordon Green’s Joe largely succeeds in immersing us in a rural world of cruelty, ugliness, decay, neglect and aggression, but if there is a point to it all, I couldn’t find it.

The first “John Wick” was taut and nasty, a potent slug of B-movie. This one is so enamored of its own extravagance that, on more than one occasion, I was reminded of “Zoolander 2.”

The third entry features visual effects that are no longer novel, which means the writing deficiencies are now impossible to overlook. Without a compelling story, what emerges is not a movie but . . . a ride.

There is a passable 85-minute comedy in here, caked in an additional 30 minutes of flab.

A touching love story that gets sidelined by a tiresome intra-family African political dispute, A United Kingdom has a big heart that beats far too slowly.

The movie is well-acted, but it's as talky as if it were written for the stage, with fatally slow pacing. Strictly for hard-core Sayles fans and maybe for lovers of American roots music.

Overrun with malicious goblins, a vengeance-minded pig, a fast-moving troll and a giant horned ogre, but the true source of terror is scarier than all of these combined: New York real estate prices.

Parts of the film (which can be seen in select theaters and via video on demand) are so good that it’s a shame it strikes so many false notes.

What’s the difference between “21 Jump Street” and 22 Jump Street? Same as the difference between getting a 21 and a 22 at blackjack.

Alien: Romulus occupies a strange position: It’s lovingly aimed at fans who have seen its Carter-era predecessor 15 times, yet it’s unlikely to scare anyone except those who are new to the “Alien” shtick. In space, it turns out, no one can hear you yawn, either.

The movie generates a pleasing fog of suspense as it makes the audience pay attention to each new audio cue. Seeing the movie in a hushed theater is ideal; viewing it at home would almost certainly bring in distractions that would dilute the experience.

As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.

A comedy as black as vinyl, Kill Your Friends is a music-industry tell-all set at a decadent London record label in 1997.

If the film is ambitious, it is also inert.

In the utterly routine effort Skyfall, we're actually expected to cheer each chord we've heard so many times (here's a martini shaker! Look, it's a Walther PPK! And there's an Aston Martin!) We've been turned into wretched Pavlovian dogs, salivating at the bell instead of the snack. The highlight, by far, is a classic animated credit sequence: Adele, you are the new Shirley Bassey.

The Tillman Story purports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces -- massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.

So there is courage and cheekiness here. What there is not is a story, or much insight or even anger; anyone expecting an indictment of Iran will be sorely disappointed.

Though rousing in places, “Young Woman and the Sea” is a routine effort that feels made for television, and was (originally slated for Disney+). Clichés and predictability are more forgivable at home, but asking people to take the plunge on a movie ticket for this so-so offering is asking a lot.

They don’t make ’em like A Walk Among the Tombstones any more. Mainly because everyone got bored with ’em and stopped watching ’em.

As the movie's feet get stuck in its own misery, it made me appreciate "Trainspotting" all over again - its wit, how it moved, the way any outcome for its characters seemed possible.

This unapologetic B-movie at least keeps the action rolling, and the time goes by quickly. To put it another way, I’d rather see Gerard Butler stab a terrorist in the neck than flirt with Katherine Heigl.

It's the Food Network meets The Weather Channel meets . . . the Scary Doomsday Preachers Channel.

Creepy spirits in old-timey dress, ear-stabbing sound cues, slamming doors and bloody handprints: The horror flick Insidious isn't scared to be trite.

At Berkeley casts a nonjudgmental eye on everyone from cement layers to students discussing Thoreau to administrators complaining about budgeting. If only everything were interesting.

A scrapbook of bits from better Allen films that builds up to a hearty shrug.

Without an exceptionally skilled director of actors (such as Cameron Crowe), Cruise can’t dial up much emotion, so the two love interests for his character are two more than he can convincingly handle. He may be at home in the cockpit of a killing machine, but when it comes to displaying his humanity, he’s no Wall-E.

None of it rings true; those who seek a serious dramatic inquiry into the inner workings of the church should look elsewhere.

It’s mainly instructive in that it shows how liberals believe the end always justifies the means.

No, Warcraft isn’t a ridiculous mess; it holds together on its own musclebound terms. It neither tries to be jokey nor undercuts itself by being unintentionally funny. And it offers a bit more complexity than some other nonstop action flicks adapted from video games. It’s a real movie, just not a good one.

Alas, “sad case” is not how we want to see McCarthy; it’s frustrating to see her spend more than half the movie being the pathetic target of jokes rather than the dominating figure she was in “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat,” both of which are far funnier than this one.

It follows exactly the same path as both "Glory Road" (except that was basketball) and "Gridiron Gang" (football).

Misshapen, malodorous and firing its grubby tentacles across the room in a feeding frenzy, The Thing reminded me of a roomful of journalists immediately after someone announces Open Bar. The movie's victims disappear like cocktail peanuts and without a whole lot more significance.

Calling Child 44 a mash-up of “Dr. Zhivago” and “Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t do enough to capture how strange it is.

An essential document of bad taste that needs to go right into the time capsule. History must not forget.

A cute, spunky found-footage thriller undone by a lumpy plot and a weak ending, Operation Avalanche revisits the urban legend that the moon landing was faked, with some fresh twists.

This one is essentially “The Firm” with smartphones.

Even if the movie had more shadings, though, Marshall's political point would undo his he-man action-flick format. If you're looking for a rallying cry to make the emotions sizzle, "Quagmire!" isn't it.

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of Good, a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

I don’t know how many sex scenes featuring Winstone and Atwell you can handle, but the movie breaches my limit, which is a firm zero.

In mashing together story elements from Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” with the look of Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” Lowery put 90 percent of his energy into the atmosphere and 10 percent into the script.