Kyle Smith

Vogt-Roberts never develops the characters enough to make us care whether anyone lives or dies and never whips up even a flirtation between Hiddleston and Larson.

Congratulations are in order to Table 19: This comedy about the random losers stuck together at a wedding reception actually, uncannily, creates an experience as dull, awkward and excruciating as the thing it mocks.

It’s a captivating throwback that promises to lead the genre away from sci-fi flash and trickery. I’d rank it beside “X-Men: Days of Future Past” among the best X-Men entries.

It’s Peele’s first film, but it has none of the rough edges or self-indulgence you’d expect from a rookie.

It may be a second-rate “Lord of the Rings,” but at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Mia Goth is as fine a name as can be imagined for the actress playing a creepy, hollow waif in A Cure for Wellness, and her name is practically a tag line for this fantastically eerie movie: “Me a Gothic!”

Nutty as The Lego Batman Movie is in conception, it’s nifty in execution.

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 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.”

Fifty Shades will make you dumber.

In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In The Comedian he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.

What profiteth it a man if he should gain the whole world, but lose his hairline? Matthew McConaughey considers the question in Gold, which is in essence a vanity project about a vanity project.

It’s too bad that Keaton plays Kroc as a grasping, alcoholic sleaze as he builds the McDonald’s brand into an all-American empire, but I forgive the movie’s cheap shots because this is one of the most thorough and satisfying depictions of business — everything from quality control to cost-cutting and branding — ever put on film.

Heavy-handed message movies don’t come more harrumphing than “Miss Sloane,” a clunky dramatization of the gun-control argument liberals still don’t understand is being conducted solely among themselves.

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

If (like me) you have a parental obsession with brainwashing your children to adore everything from Sinatra to “Shake It Off,” Sing may be your most effective weapon since “Happy Feet.”

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

A triumphant and heartwarming film, not an angry and scolding one, that carefully maps how excellence and determination win over the doubters.

A great American movie about the greatness of ordinary Americans, Patriots Day combines an electrifying manhunt with the intimacy and feel for character writer-director Peter Berg showed in his brilliant TV series “Friday Night Lights.”

The Will Smith weepie Collateral Beauty couldn’t be more calculated and manipulative if it slapped you on the back, shoved a giant lollipop into your mouth and immediately tried to sell you a time share in Tampa.

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.

La La Land deserves credit for high spirits even if it’s essentially a collection of glamorous throwback music videos for so-so songs.

Clipped, controlled and composed, Jackie Kennedy was a woman of her times, but since composure doesn’t win you Oscar nominations, Natalie Portman opts to play the part with a sort of emotional incontinence.

This is a true story, and at times a gut-wrenching one, even if it necessarily sugarcoats some aspects of the plight of lost children.

This is Beatty’s first film in 15 years, a project he’s been working on for 40 years, and it’s immensely pleasing to see him in such fine form. Or, as his obsessive-compulsive subject would say, such fine form. Such fine form.

Bad Santa 2 is vulgar, nasty and offensive, but it has flawed aspects also.

Allied is slow-footed and tepid, its plot twists dopey and soapy. I was rooting for things to get interesting, but I would have settled for a few surprises.

Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, soulful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer.