Kyle Smith

The movie generally looks great, thanks also to Dominic Watkins’s expansive production design, yet it thinks very little of its audience and comes across as a pee-wee “Game of Thrones.”

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

The Life of Chuck is an overstuffed suitcase of a movie, one that comes off as a bit graceless and misshapen with all of the cramming and jamming.

The movie is like a two-hour trailer, with one viscerally intense fight scene following another, filmed as usual for the series in long, fluid takes to maximize the wow factor.

The movie makes no attempt to dress up any of its many clichés.

If Bono is melodramatic, Mr. Dominik is an enabler. Thom Zimny’s matter-of-fact direction of another paternally damaged rock star’s concert confessional, “Springsteen on Broadway,” let its star’s charisma shine through. “Stories of Surrender” is more like an epic of self-parody.

It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.

The film’s airless, cramped quality demands consistently high-level dialogue—words that sting and burn. Instead, the two big speeches, especially the second one, land somewhat like filibusters.

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.

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.

In short, every element here has the dusty funk of an item pulled off the back shelves at the Goodwill store for blockbuster story beats. Your enjoyment of the film will thus largely depend on the overall vibe: whether you enjoy hanging out with the new gang as they strategize and quarrel and banter, with occasional interjections of everyone punching, kicking and hurling each other meaninglessly around the set.

The overall effect is appropriately trippy, and revealing.

It’s a bloody comedy that’s also a buddy comedy.

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.

Mr. Malek is incapable of providing the audience with an emotional hook.

I can’t imagine a movie doing a better job bottling such an experience. Drinking it down requires a taste for the maximum dosage, though.

A Working Man is watchable enough, with the occasional interjection of humor, but it’s a formulaic punch-’em-up that simply jams in as many fights as it can with little effort expended on plausibility.

Directed by James Griffiths, “Wallis Island” is warm, endearing and very funny, a quintessential indie smile-maker about nice, humble people adorably stumbling their way toward a little happiness.

While the film is partially redeemed by a couple of surprisingly touching late scenes involving Ridley and her dad, for the most part it’s merely a weak satire in which we’re meant to cheer as the moneyed class gets a sanguinary comeuppance, with crushed skulls and spilled intestines presented as hilarious.

The contrast between the two Killians—mighty on the outside, meek within—makes Magazine Dreams a wrenching character study, by turns lovely and chaotic.

Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.

“Snow White” is the fairest of them all, in the sense that fair can mean mediocre.

The almost nonstop fighting and Mr. Quaid’s low-key charm are enough to make the movie a serviceable action offering. Moreover, the script, though focused on wacky spasms of violence, has a strong human element at its core.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Messrs. Soderbergh and Koepp have followed one of (Elmore) Leonard’s Laws—“Leave out the parts that people skip”—to construct an electric, fast-paced thriller that amounts to one climactic scene piled atop another.

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.

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

Last Breath, which runs a compact 91 minutes, doesn’t feel like a finished film: The dialogue is strictly functional, and there is so little time for establishing character that none of the three principals really makes an impression.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

Ex-Husbands is more a poignant reflection than a fleshed-out story. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions to the various predicaments it considers. But Mr. Pritzker has a sagacious understanding of our various stumbles and humiliations, how we prove unable to make a marriage work or even communicate effectively with our children or parents.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.

If “Brave New World” isn’t an event film, at least it’s competently executed, without resorting to played-out gimmickry such as skipping across the multiverse. And it gives the audience plenty of analogues for real-world problems.

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.”

The intricately choreographed fight scenes are amusing enough, not that they have a lot of impact given the overbearingly silly musical score and the lurching, chaotic plot.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

As a document of Liza’s triumphs, talent and temperament, though, “Liza” is, like its subject, disarmingly sweet and completely lovable.

The plot is so cleverly constructed that its undertones sneak up on you. Their subtlety makes them that much more effective.

In stripping down the legend—no talk of ancient curses or silver bullets here—Mr. Whannell may have modernized it, but he has also made it so joyless that it might as well have been produced by Glumhouse. This “Wolf Man” chases its own tail.

Belgian writer-director Michiel Blanchart’s debut feature is snappy and tart.

Ms. Aitken seeks to draw a connection between Terry’s life story and her dedication to helping these impossibly vulnerable and sweet birds, but a documentary that avoids important questions is a failure.

Blunt, brassy and chatty, she makes for a refreshingly open host of her own life story.

Dylan was the idol of an era; many weedy intellectuals have sought to explain why. Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.

Ms. Reijn’s film is brilliantly evocative, exploring the shameful, shadowy parts of a complicated woman’s psyche, the ones she would never discuss and doesn’t fully understand herself.

Firmly rejecting the prevailing style in horror movies today, Mr. Eggers has created a somber, cold-sweat doomscape that is in no way a thrill ride.

The big cats of Mufasa: The Lion King take a long walk from an arid and desolate climate to one teeming with life. The movie itself represents a journey in something like the opposite direction, from the bountiful gardens of creativity to the chilly environs of the corporate brand-extension department.

A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film.

Mr. Kamiyama has sent into battle nothing but armies of clichés.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

September 5 is tough, rough, messy and gritty, in the tradition of American cinema from the decade in which it takes place.

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.

Unfortunately, the script by Zach Baylin doesn’t do an adequate job of making either side of these cat-and-mouse games thrilling.

Through a single family, Mr. Rasoulof has created a vivid portrait of the dilemmas of today’s Iran, where the power of iman, or faith, suggests one kind of observation but the power of the iPhone suggests another.

Mr. Scott seems content to restage story beats and action scenes from the first film. Most cold-case sequels aren’t very good, and maybe there’s a reason for that.

The plot is so rich and eventful, and the script so witty, that the movie doesn’t drag once the extended flashback starts. Moreover, every moment is eye candy. The screen bursts with whimsical costumes (by Paul Tazewell) and sets (Nathan Crowley is the production designer), and all of the important roles are impeccably cast.

The movie takes on the shape of a video game, with the heroes swaggering confidently from one blowout action sequence to the next with hardly any thought given to making us care about the characters or establishing the film’s heart.

All of [Bogart's] facets are on view in a must-see documentary for fans of Golden Age Hollywood.

The film is a scintillating drama that explores a weighty historical dispute with Gothic flair.

Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.

It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.

Mr. McQueen seems consciously to be shedding his past style—the icy minimalism of “Hunger” and “Shame” and the scarifying gauntlet of his Oscar-winning “Twelve Years a Slave”—in a bid to make a big, warm-hearted, conventional holiday-season tear-jerker. Yet the film . . . will strike many viewers as a bait-and-switch exercise.

The inch-deep approach to history and social issues, the high-concept device, and the trite characters all seem better suited to a different type of movie—such as one of those gee-whiz featurettes shown at the EPCOT theme park.

Jonathan Abrams’s script is so amateurish it feels like a first draft.

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

Mr. Elliot’s script is so rich and gently funny that he could easily have made an excellent live-action feature from it. As it is, though, the animation makes it even more lovable.

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.

Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.

Taken strictly as drama, the film is tartly written and superbly acted, at least until it takes that polemical turn in its final stages. I’ve seen and heard enough about Trump to actively, if ineffectively, avoid content relating to him, but most of The Apprentice held me in thrall.

Borrowing the look of The Lego Movie, Piece by Piece is as bouncy and playful as a room full of rambunctious toddlers.

Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.

In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.

This kinetic, documentary-style, fly-on-the-wall and in-the-halls tale proves that in the hands of capable dramatists the rack of suspense can be tightened to an almost unbearable degree even when the outcome is known.

If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.

This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.

Neither the director, Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer and documentarian whose debut narrative feature this is, nor the film’s three screenwriters can solve its essential problem, which is that it amounts to a string of grisly anecdotes.

There is a difference between gleefully bonkers and tragically inept, and I’m afraid this omnishambles has earned a place in the anti-pantheon of the worst films ever made by a great director.

The plot beats are so dull, contrived and poorly engineered (for a few minutes the wolves must pretend to be rivals who don’t know each other) that the movie becomes an onerous chore comparable to the one that launches the action. Who can I call to make this dead movie disappear?

Bolstered by a spooky musical score, credited to the musician Rob, a tightly wound performance by Ms. Berry, and creepy unexpected appearances by beings who may or may not be manifestations of the Evil, Mr. Aja makes the most of an uninspired script. In this type of film, however, everything depends on the third-act resolution. It doesn’t deliver.

The film should have been cleverly dark and dripping with insider takes. Instead, it’s boringly schematic.

As lean and effective as its thriller elements are, especially in a breakneck third act, the movie is most intriguing in its subtext—an implied clash between conceptions of masculinity and the eras with which they’re associated.

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.

Though on the surface Slingshot looks like a space-exploration thriller with many cinematic forebears, it makes elegant use of misdirection.

Mannered acting, dismal cinematography, clunky attempts to enhance excitement via gimmicks such as slow motion, and a musical score like a fountain of goo all serve as flashbacks to Reagan-era network schlock.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

Though Mr. Skarsgård (who played the terrifying Pennywise in “It”) is gravely charismatic and FKA twigs is touching, the dour, depressing dankness of Mr. Sanders’s vision makes The Crow a turkey.

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 tone is dry farce that never strays into camp, with a mildly sardonic appreciation of oddballs recalling such Robert Altman films as “The Long Goodbye.” A creepily discordant musical score by Fatima Al Qadiri adds immensely to the feeling that everyone is hiding something and no good will come of it.

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.

Cuckoo brings up a lot of ideas but doesn’t organize them into anything like a satisfying resolution. As frenzy follows frenzy, it aspires merely to create a feeling of senseless chaos.

The charming, gentle simplicity of the book, with its childlike art, has been displaced by a mania for digital images and frantic attempts to be funny. This crayon should have been left in its box.

Mr. Liman handles each plot beat maladroitly, piling one utterly absurd contrivance or coincidence upon another.

At times, it’s scary how derivative it is. Still, as crepuscular weirdness seeps across the story and leads to a delirious ending, it’s largely effective.

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

Oddity is everything a horror film should be—creepy, exciting, unpredictable—and it leads to an ending that’s both shocking and inevitable.