Leah Greenblatt

It's all patently ridiculous, and even at 95 minutes, a stretch to call this loose cannonball of high camp and sticky-bright gore a movie.

What should be breezy, featherweight fun — Reese! Ashton! A screenplay by the lady who wrote The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses! — instead turns out to be oddly hollow, a meandering and synthetic approximation of classic rom-com canon with too little romance or comedy in its strained, familiar formula.

Shyamalan may be saying something meaningful about faith or environmental destruction or the corrosive fraying of the social contract (could this vigilante crew really be motivated by pure homophobia, as Andrew believes?). But the message is mostly lost in sentiment, and a lingering sense of the better, messier movie that might have been.

This Wedding clearly wasn't meant to be a masterpiece, but even as mid-winter fluff it feels like a rush job: a marriage made for lazy-Sunday streaming at best, 'til death — or more likely, a better script — do you part.

By swerving into territory already better owned by outrageous indies like Promising Young Woman — and to a lesser degree, last year's Sundance breakout Fresh — Cat forfeits its own underlying message, without finding anything else new or even particularly coherent to say.

Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real.

There's no doubt both actors deserve sharper, less silly material than this, but when they're playing beer pong in a Bali bar and drunkenly pogo-ing to House of Pain's "Jump Around," Paradise is almost, for a moment, a place on Earth.

The whole thing is so airless and hollowly constructed, so full of mimed but unfelt feelings, that it's a relief to put this body in the ground and forever hold your peace.

The production and costume design are, unsurprisingly, impeccable. But the resolution of the central mystery is both rushed and obtuse, and it all unfolds in a frenetic, flailing whirl of pomp and nonsense that Amsterdam's strange circuitous journey and almost embarrassing surplus of stars never quite justifies: a whirring music-box curiosity in search of some elusive purpose, and a point.

Here it often feels clumsy and maddeningly inconsistent, stranding Fraser in a melodrama undeserving of his lovely, unshowy performance. Whatever he wins for The Whale — and early prizes have already come — he deserves. The rest is just chum.

Keaton seems to be having a ball with her pratfalls too, though you wish it wasn't all played so silly and flat-out conventional in the end: new broad, old tricks.

It's August and we have Idris, Beast seems to say; do you really have anywhere better to be?

Novak, who spent years refining the squirrelly ticks of his self-regarding salesman Ryan on nine seasons of The Office, isn't a demonstrably different dude here. His callow-millennial act — and the navel-gazing vagaries of modern content culture — make fertile ground for satire, and many of the jokes here do find their soft targets. But it can also feel hollow and exhausting in main-character movie form.

Director Olivia Newman (First Match) bathes the story in so many broad, creaky tropes and odd tonal shifts that nothing ever feels real for a moment.

This Persuasion chooses to wear its source material like a thin disposable skin, discarding many of the vital organs (brain, heart) and most ideas of subtlety as it goes. Austen may be immortal, but she's not inexhaustible; maybe it's time to tell another story and let her rest in peace.

Crimes of the Future . . . sometimes feels like a Cronenberg Greatest Hits, at least aesthetically; so loaded does it come with his signature themes and gooey, seemingly hand-crafted contours.

A better, subtler movie lurks somewhere in Mincemeat; for dads and history buffs, the pleasant hash it presents instead is passable enough.

The whole thing is so wrapped in leaden dialogue and B-movie cliché that by the last weary, bloodletting hour, you'll envy Alex's ability to forget.

Both directors have made much better movies; go watch one of those instead.

It's all cream puff, a featherweight fairytale too shiny and mild to attempt the better movie about midlife romance and second chances that might have been.

The movie's final frame asks us to believe that Sarah Jo has finally, ecstatically found herself; by then, whatever reason we have for watching is already long lost.

The cast's chemistry never quite gels beyond their staged circumstances, and too much of the dialogue replicates actual life without finding a deeper resonance: the rambling anecdotes, latent passive aggressions, and aimless small talk of ordinary people just living their lives.

For all the outsize fight scenes and casual profanity though, the whole thing is oddly bloodless. (Even a rampaging bull hardly leaves a bruise.) And so Red Notice goes: blithely skimming through its slapstick fantasy, and laying bejeweled eggs wherever it lands.

The film can't seem to stop piling on idiosyncrasies, a kind of willful kookery that mixes uneasily with the more serious elements of personal tragedy and mental illness that run through it.

If we're all disposable space chum in this franchise game anyway, who needs a coherent narrative and character arcs? Just bite the head off every chicken, and lean in.

Guilty, for all its wild-eyed excess, does find some blunt-force propulsion for a while, particularly if you're coming to it new. But the movie seems to mistake the taut minimalism of the original for something that needs to be goosed and adrenalized, a thriller on constant defibrillator.

Writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) seems to be aiming for an Inception-style metaphysical mind-bend, with the sci-fi jolt of Minority Report and a bleak splash of Waterworld. But her intentions get lost in some cloudy marine layer in between, sunk by hammy hard-boiled dialogue and a story that leaves logic at the door.

The script, accordingly, herks and jerks along with a sort of forced-festive glee, its mounting body count buffeted by goofball banter and pounding soundtrack cues. A good half of the jokes don't land, but unlike his predecessor's joyless slog, Gunn's version at least celebrates the nonsense.

Old comes close to seeing its metaphysical mystery through. In the end, though, it settles for something more like supernatural camp, with telegraphed twists and jump scares.

Unlike Remorse, and other bloody misfires out this month, Dead isn't particularly ugly or offensive; it's engaging enough and sometimes almost unintentionally fun. For a star who so rarely chooses to be on screen these days though, it feels like another kind of mortal sin, at least in Hollywood: forgettable.

Wrath is just another loose bag of lizard-brain thrills and wood-block dialogue: too ugly to be camp, too grimly familiar to feel new.

The movie marches on in grim, silly lockstep to its themes: a compendium of jump-scare terrors almost exhaustively heard and seen, but rarely calibrated to make you feel much of anything at all.

Vengeance is wrought without remorse and even less sense. The only sure thing, judging by the promise of a post-credits scene, is a sequel.

If you want a great monster movie that's actually also about people — how they think and talk and feel when they're more than just screaming kaiju chum in the water — try 2017's Colossal, currently streaming on Hulu. If not, maybe Godzilla vs. Kong's brawling lizard-brain shock and awe is exactly the void you came for.

There's only so much real-world intrigue a crime committed almost entirely via ones and zeroes can entail, and the script's halfhearted attempts to make it all Mean Something feel more than a little callow in the end.

For all the frenzied action of the final scenes though, there's an airless, overwrought sense of diminishing returns — and that's a comedown we've seen too many times before.

Barring any greater lessons on motivation or forgiveness, the movie becomes little more than an endurance test; one far easier — at least for the viewer — to fall away from than to stay.

There's a better, weirder story in here somewhere — about teenage desire and social Darwinism, gender and perception — but the movie seems happy enough to settle for familiar, goofy jokes and jump scares; a freak flag half-flown.

This Witches, alas, has the misfortune of doubling down on all the late writer's eccentricities, while somehow finding only a fraction of his magic.

If wallpaper and polyester were any metric to judge a movie by, I'm Your Woman could have been a masterpiece.

It doesn't help that Pistorius' Rachel spends the first 75 of it like a woman who's never seen a horror movie — if there were noises in the basement, she'd run right down to investigate with a plastic spork in her hand — and the final 15 like a ninja assassin who invented them.

It feels almost churlish to fault the film for its weightlessness, when light is exactly what movies like this are meant to provide: a fizzy, sun-drenched escape from the pale monotony of our own lives.

In a world where a morning tweet can feel as dusty as the Dead Sea Scrolls by nightfall, it almost seems like madness to try to capture this current political moment on film.

Even at 93 minutes, the material feels thin, and so does its moral message. But the movie's goofy, blunt-edged claustrophobia may also be its greatest gift to viewers: the chance to be grateful that the only ones haunting our own homes right now are us.

Maybe what's most frustrating is how much the movie's deeper themes — morality, mortality, the twilight of power — churn intriguingly at the edges of nearly every scene only to turn toward sentiment, or become merely secondary to its relentless focus on his physical decline. There’s merit, of course, in exploring the good and bad in every man, even one as notorious as this one; Capone, in the end, just settles for ugly.

If only hilarity ensued; instead, Wedding manages to feel both overwrought and underbaked, consistently squeezing the natural charm out of its players in order to bang their hapless miscommunications and personality quirks into the ground. It's enough to make it through once; Repeat may be a bridge too far.

Fists will smash; pecs will flex; hard consonants, like dirty cops, don't stand a chance. It's the only sure thing in this crazy world, kids — except maybe a sequel.

In the second half, the movie even manages a few rare moments of visceral thrill, and even something like catharsis. But nothing ever quite gels; instead, the story just keeps banging toward its bloody conclusion, always a little off the beat.

The film is so eager to please, so relentlessly quippy and quirky and tipped with antic whimsy, it often feels like visiting a zoo built into a Tilt-A-Whirl.

Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything — except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all. And yet that somewhere under the Jellicle moonlight, it is somehow, too, an A++.

A sort of forgettable Christmas wisp, a black-hearted jingle bell only half-rung.

It takes a lot of talent, apparently, to make a movie like Last Christmas — a pile-on of dingle-bell schmaltz so deeply ridiculous it’s almost hard to believe all the top-tier names that went into it.

Somehow though, the film registers as a strange, airless whiff — stale, inert, and oddly melancholy. The script rarely rises above the schematics of a thousand thrillers that languish on late-night cable, and the almost willfully cliché dialogue sounds as if it’s been generated by some kind of free-with-purchase screenwriting app.

The main problem with Chapter Two is that it goes on, and on, for so very long. If brevity is not necessarily the soul of a good scare, it would certainly serve a story that sends in the clowns, and then lets them just stay there — leering and lurking and chewing through scene after scene — until the there’s nothing left to do but laugh, or leave.

There’s so much talent in The Kitchen, and so much of it wasted; that’s kind of all you can think about for most of writer-director Andrea Berloff’s debut.

The leads are both charming, but they can’t override the tooth-aching sincerity of the script, or the cardboard conflicts that propel it.

There are a few legitimately great throwaway lines, and a few vaguely offensive ones. But the movie feels so fast and cheap that it’s hard not to wonder why they’ve made it at all, other than to jump on a small and so-far underwhelming trend in gender-swapping ‘80s remakes (see also: Ghostbusters, Overboard).

The whole thing would be more fun, you start to feel, if Intruder just committed fully to the schlocky midnight-movie glory of it all; let Quaid’s lawn-mowing wingnut swing that ax not just for soft vulnerable body parts, but the stars.

What it does have at the center is an actress who commits completely to the mess, even if Perry never quite deigns to show us the underlying talent that might justify her terrible behavior — or at least the loyalty of the countless friends, fans, and enablers who suffer the brunt of it.

It’s mostly left to Rodriguez to carry the absurdity on her shoulders, and the fact that she makes it so watchable is a real testament to her abilities. Next time, may the material rise at least halfway to meet her.

Åkerlund — the Swedish mastermind behind tastemaking music videos for the likes of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift — has jittery, high-gloss style to spare. But the primary-colored nihilism of his storytelling feels amateurish and ultimately exhausting; a gleefully unhinged teenage-boy dream that aims only for hard, shiny surfaces, and stays there.

It’s entertaining enough for popcorn — and gratifying, too, to watch these smart, strong women step into roles they’re so often left to support from the sidelines, while men have all the contraband fun. If only the execution of it didn’t feel like such a crazy-quilt patchwork of other, better films, and so jaggedly stitched together.

The script, by writer-director Victor Levin (Survivor’s Remorse, Mad About You) comes on like a rom-com David Mamet freight train; its verbal turns are so wildly overwritten that all the actors can really do is hold on to the wheel well, racing through reams of ratatat dialogue. But Ryder and Reeves surrender to it gamely, and sprinkle a sort of movie-star pixie dust over the too-muchness of the text.

Bynum shoots it all in high pop-pastiche style, with a near-constant barrage of neon freeze frames, slow-pan party shots, and romantic montages set to an eclectic, decade-spanning soundtrack (Tarzan Boy, David Bowie, Roxette, Suicide).

Overboard lists and wanders through the shoals of secondhand comedy and eventually, just drifts away.

Kodachrome isn’t a bad movie, it just never for a moment feels like a real one: A road-trip dramedy so schematic and loaded for emotional bear it feels like it was generated by a Sundance screenwriting app.

There’s also something depressing about Schumer playing off her own looks as if, without the abracadabra of her bonked-head delusions, she were some sort of hideous gremlin. Magician, heal thyself.

All style and mood, signifying not much.

The movie does get some fun gory mileage out of its cracked-Pleasantville premise; but mostly it feels like broad farce madly in search of a cohesive center, and a soul.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is strictly an Economy Coach experience, but it’s brainlessly fun enough in a late-’90s Brett Ratner buddy-comedy kind of way.

Monster metal, mass destruction, Anthony Hopkins saying “dude.” This is your brain on Michael Bay—a cortex scramble so amped on pyro and noise and brawling cyborgs it can only process what’s happening on screen in onomatopoeia: Clang! Pew-pew! Kablooey!

A raunchy, wildly off-the-rails farce from the team that more or less brought you Broad City.

As Snatched’s blonde-leading-the-blonde farce careens on, it stumbles into moments of deranged inspiration.

Even lush set pieces and a raft of prestige players (including Shohreh Aghdashloo, James Cromwell, and Jean Reno) can’t fulfill the movie’s pretty, ultimately empty promise.

The Great Wall looks like it could be a really amazing video game. Alas, it’s a movie, and kind of a brick.

Crass, senseless, and relentlessly talky, War on Everyone mostly seems like a movie at war with itself.

These actors are too good to be entirely sunk by the sheer silliness of the material (with the exception of Smith, who seems fully committed to playing the role of a human frown-face emoji).

As hard as they work to add nuance, Connelly is trapped in mad-housewife hysteria, Fanning’s a brat, and McGregor never really rises above a strange, stunned blandness. It’s a noble effort, almost completely lost in translation; give it an American pass.

The whole thing’s ludicrous, down to the last loony twist, but it’s also a lot more fun than Batman v Superman.

It somehow manages to make a fascinating, utterly contemporary narrative feel like old news.

The result, alas, is totally bolloxed, as a Brit might say, by execution.

The movie — dutifully shot in shades of old-timey sepia — does get better as its staginess falls away, but far too much drama stays on the page.

You’ll probably laugh hard more than once; Sorority Rising is still rich in bikinis and bong rips and boner jokes. It just doesn’t have much heart.

A few moments are fantastically bonkers, but granting director duties to McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, feels more like an act of love than wisdom.

Based on a lauded 2011 novel of the same name, Lamb is about as strange as it sounds: a Lolita story almost more unsettling for the lines it doesn’t explicitly cross.

If only Russell trusted Mangano’s true story. Instead, he’s turned her life into a over-staged mess of awkward exposition, contrived dialogue, and characters so willfully unreal they feel acrylic.

Jolie Pitt, who also wrote and directed, shows a lot of skin (her own and her cast’s) without ever really getting under it. Misery doesn’t just love good-looking company; it needs an emotional center and a satisfying narrative arc, too.

As silly and sometimes nonsensical as it is, the movie is surprisingly sweet and well-intentioned.

Your enjoyment of all this will probably depend heavily on your willingness to let the words romp and Taliban coexist for approximately two hours. The movie itself is slight and sometimes outright offensive, though it’s also intermittently amusing and not entirely unself-aware.

She’s Funny That Way is posted as a love letter to the classic screwball comedies of Hollywood’s golden age, but delivers ersatz Woody Allen instead; it’s like "Bullets Over Broadway" minus the mob plot and 90 percent of the charm.

Noah Baumbach’s latest wisp of privileged New York whimsy vaporizes on arrival.

What’s spanglish for déjà vu? There’s hardly a single moment in Hot Pursuit that won’t remind you of scenes you’ve seen at the multiplex a thousand times before. (The movie’s original title was Don’t Mess With Texas, probably because Thelma & Louise Ride the Pineapple Express All the Way to Jump Street — and They’ve Got Lethal Weapons, Y’all! was just too long.)

The movie is too odd and randy to play for kids on an Austin Powers level, and too broad to really work as farce. But Depp, god bless him, fully commits, and finds a few genuinely funny moments amidst all the outsize mugging and mild sociopathy.

Boy's premise reeks of stalker-movie mothballs, and it's too timid to fully dive into the high camp it hints at. Instead, this cookie just crumbles.

Sound titillating? It's not.

It's clumsy and wacky and intermittently amusing, and Rob Lowe looks like he's having a great time playing Real-Life Ned Flanders With a Deeply Weird Side once again.

A raft of fine actors – including Amy Adams, Richard Jenkins, and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay – are wasted in a sour, callow family drama that mistakes constant yelling for emotional tension and fortune-cookie aphorisms for wisdom.