Kyle Smith

Barbie is a template for how not to write a crowd-pleasing Hollywood feature.

Though it does have a handful of dirty jokes meant to earn the audience-pleasing PG-13 rating and features Marge swearing, it falls short of classic status.

I’m probably more intrigued than 99.3 percent of the American public by the idea of deconstructing the hidden symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but the theories proposed in the doc Room 237 aren’t eye-opening. They’re laughable.

A clever, elliptical, slightly bizarre and altogether transfixing psychological thriller.

A backstage drama that has all the sizzle of a glass of water resting on the windowsill, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria mistakes lack of dramatic imagination for smoldering subtlety.

Mr. Gaffigan’s feel for his perpetually disappointed character keeps us invested in him while Mr. West devises some insightful moments and a climax whose emotional content nearly matches its tricksy element.

Better than decent. But if Stallone (who wrote and directed the flick) had pulled a few punches to the heart, it could have been truly worthy of that first, glorious movie.

The determination to find greatness in the ordinary gives Song Sung Blue a magical, unforced luminescence that much more immodest films usually lack.

It isn't every day that one witnesses, via a camera mounted with the driver, some of the final images in a man's life before he crashes into a wall at enormous speed. Whether you'll feel good about yourself after watching is up to you.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

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.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

The movie about his life and legend, written and directed by Sean Mullin, has two purposes and succeeds delightfully at both.

A Most Violent Year is a small picture, but each brushstroke is laden with detail and craftsmanship.

As things pick up in the second half, the splendid photography and tempestuous John Adams score cannot quite conceal that the film is uncomfortably close to being an extravagantly elongated, Fendi-clad episode of "Dynasty."

Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.

Silence comes to us billed as 30 years in the making. Unfortunately, it plays like 30 years in the watching.

There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.

The oddly compelling documentary Moving Midway is an engineering tale combined with a family history and a ghost story.

The film could have been improved if it had been less aggressively limp. But the post-adolescent, pre-adult moodiness is spot on: Everyone's favorite author is a bitter recluse, and the soundtrack heaves with the suicide sounds of Joy Division. Trier's intent is to reproduce a sweet, hazy vision of the agony of youth. Ever so elliptically, he succeeds.

Instead of a theme park, it’s more of a cathedral—solemn, sober, beautiful and forbidding. Greig Fraser’s photography and Hans Zimmer’s score are full of majesty.

Bidding to be the “Terms of Endearment” of zombie movies, Maggie sucks all the life out of an idea that just won’t die.

Pity the boxing movie that thinks it can be both "Raging Bull" and "Rocky."

The doc consists of interviews with the absurdly grandiose Jodorowsky (whose fans include Kanye West) plus acolytes like current director Nicolas Winding Refn and film nerds, all of whom walk us through storyboards and tell us how awesome this “greatest film never made” would have been.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

In these days when flat-out comedy features are scarce, it’s one of the most welcome tenants at the summer multiplex. A mid-movie snowman gag puts the new one over the top, bestowing on it the honor of being mentionable alongside its predecessors. It sets the lunacy level to “inspired.”

It has a dogged all-night charm and a sense of who its audience is.

If you can overlook Andie MacDowell's Mitteleuropa accent as a Jewish Holocaust survivor (I know: big if), the cinematic roman a clef Mighty Fine has some quiet charms.

For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

The lean, athletic Mr. Herzog, 83 years old, seems as spry and eager as ever, and his global enthusiasm remains a force of nature in itself. Ghost Elephants takes its place as yet another of the director’s essential forays into the wild and unknown.

Honorable, worthy and windy, Fences is essentially a PBS episode of “Great Performances” that is inflated for the big screen without ever quite belonging there.

This strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.

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

Carney’s film (unlike his disappointing previous effort “Begin Again”) is mad, irrepressible youth incarnate, by turns as exuberant as “The Commitments” and (nearly) as heartfelt as “Once.”

All three of these attractively awful figures are to egotism approximately what the sun is to light, which makes for a delightful triangular battle for supremacy not unlike the one in All About Eve. Clever plotting—an early, seemingly throwaway scene in which Félix does some goofy martial-arts training turns out to be critical—and inventive character details enhance the wicked fun.

Priscilla is gorgeous and at times intoxicating, but like Ms. Coppola’s previous efforts, it could do with less woolgathering and more character development.

Indignation is devastating, haunting and important.

Chile ’76 subtly illustrates how difficult it becomes to separate the personal and the political in an authoritarian state. As it goes on, it develops from a character portrait into an unusually realistic thriller, with danger asserting itself everywhere.

A rock bio minus the fun. The sex is guilt-stricken, the drugs are used to treat epilepsy, and the rock 'n' roll is about isolation and despair.

BlackBerry is a biography of a once-great business that is fascinating enough on its own terms without being reshaped to fit a narrative formula.

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

Rom-coms died because they weren’t very rom and didn’t have enough com. But Sleeping With Other People, which is both hilarious and emotionally alive, is as delightful as a first date that crackles with possibility.

Situations get increasingly ridiculous, and none of the characters ever seems like anything but a screenwriter's sketch.

A fantastically entertaining biography.

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

Mr. Wang’s honest self-appraisal yields a richly detailed film.

Despite all of the hideous critters Hellboy encounters, there is a hint that things are considerably weirder elsewhere.

Two possible ways of regarding Please Give: It's shallow. Or maybe it's deeply shallow.

A deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.

The purity is admirable. The excitement is notable. “Chapter 4” may run nearly three hours, but when we’re having this much fun calling out “Oof!” and “Get him!” the evening passes in breezy delight.

The movie can be mildly amusing. But I couldn’t figure out which of the three principals I least wanted to know.

Based on the true story of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, The Counterfeiters is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.

How dark is this comedy? It's a big hit in Ireland.

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.

Ex Machina offers plenty of intriguing style but a spotty story line.

Directed by his longtime friend and collaborator Richard Linklater, Mr. Hawke makes the most of what might be the year’s most brilliant screenplay, by Robert Kaplow, by delivering a Hart full of mischief and wit, desperation and self-loathing. There has never been a great book written about Hart, but at last he has this movie to renew and restore his story.

"HP6" is suspenseful and artfully realized. It's a definite improvement over J.K. Rowling's dimly written and exposition-clogged book.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

Po speaks loudly and carries big shtick. Let the rest of the world cringe at our hyperconfidence, our charisma, our pure awesomeness.

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.

Thanks to an inert story and disagreeable characters, its 90 minutes go by slowly.

As Mamie Till, the previously little-known actress Danielle Deadwyler gives an astonishing performance, shimmering first with tenderness and later with the kind of agony no mother should ever have to contemplate, much less bear.

At the end the film turns into an infomercial for President Obama’s Iran deal, but Gibney delivers plenty to think about — and fear.

Mr. Peele has loads of ideas and builds up considerable suspense and dread, but he fails to tie everything together with a resounding final act.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

It’s easily the most effective work of horror I’ve seen this year.

How English is this movie? As English as a cold, rainy day at the beach. As English as the politeness that masks hostility, as English as a pie that contains meat, as English as secretly wishing you lived in some other country.

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.

The intended overarching message is that vile men can exercise a kind of mind control over their innocent girlfriends. Perhaps. But Alice, Darling delivers an equally striking unintended message: that two people in a failing relationship have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other.

Mr. Ritchie has fashioned a simple, meat-and-potatoes action thriller, in the same category as “12 Strong” (2018) and “Lone Survivor” (2013). Yet unlike those films, this one is pure fiction, which both untethers it from reality and imbues it with a certain free-floating meaninglessness.

While the subject has been the province of clichés and exaggeration, the movie’s points are well-crafted, despite a wild Hollywood ending at odds with this indie offering’s otherwise gritty appeal. As it decries a social problem it adds layers and surprises. It can’t be dismissed as an overwrought message movie.

Best of Enemies illustrates how even literary swashbucklers can be reduced to schoolboy behavior.

Although the movie is reasonably suspenseful for a while and has a few witty moments (of a first draft, the ghost says, "All the words are there. They're just in the wrong order"), it rings false.

Probably no studio mulls its “brands” as obsessively as Disney does, and The Jungle Book is very much a careful, calculated brand extension, not a reinvention. But that’s just fine: What better lesson to teach kids than respect for what came before you?

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.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

As subtle and careful and slyly disturbing as Child’s Pose is though, it and many others of its genus suffer from an airlessness, pacing like the growth of algae, a dishwater color palate and a dirge-like monotone.

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

Leonard Bernstein was a towering musical figure and a complicated man. Netflix’s “Maestro” has a great deal to say about the latter characterization and surprisingly little about the former.

The ludicrous action thriller Beyond the Reach fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency of “No Country for Old Men,” but there’s no denying it brings to mind another Southwestern classic about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons.

Combining the best aspects of “Interstellar” and “The Martian,” but more satisfying in the end than either, this 2 1/2-hour epic Christian allegory recreates the same mix as the best Steven Spielberg fantasies—wonder, adventure, humor, warmth and pathos, all infused with a child’s sensibility.

Director Marc Silver expertly interweaves the courtroom drama and its larger social and human connotations.

The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer.

The Wave, competent as it is, lacks the heart-rending power of the similar 2012 tsunami movie “The Impossible.”

Twice I have left a Calvary screening feeling dazed and moved.