Leah Greenblatt

If there’s anything Sander’s ravishing set pieces fail to sufficiently color in, it’s the movie’s emotional stakes.

Last Dance is missing a lot, but it has the moves you mostly came for — and in its final strobe-lit moments, the full release of a Hollywood ending.

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 might not be a more gorgeous-looking movie this year than Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

An ill-judged twist pitches the story sideways, but Crudup's performance holds the center. His pain isn't soggy or showy; it just feels true.

Hathaway’s take on the underwritten Jules is refreshingly unshowy, but De Niro seems a little lost.

Lively looks fantastic in every era’s fashion as it passes, and she does a nice job of conveying Adaline’s old-world diction and reserve; there’s no Gossip in this girl.

Woman could use some of the quieter character nuance of a movie like last year’s "Wind River," another fact-based drama that reflected the struggle of indigenous people with a sensitive, unvarnished kind of naturalism; White’s well-meant version is undoubtedly incomplete, and gilded with a certain amount of Hollywood silliness.

Their odd couple interplay propels a series of shambling, expletive-laden mishaps that aim more for easy laughs than Wild epiphanies.

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.

How to Be Single is a lot like its Jager-bombing, romance-seeking protagonists: Cute and goofy and kind of a mess.

As Bird time-jumps between the claustrophobic action of the house and a desperate sort of jailbreak, director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) keeps the mood taut and defiantly in the moment.

For all the patently corny bits and some 17 attempts at an ending, Power still somehow makes it easy to suspend your disbelief and your imaginary degree in biochemistry, and just let it ride.

Kids could still watch the peerless 1966 original, though their blooming little cortexes will probably respond to the shiny-bright novelty here — and be newly spellbound by a tale almost as old as color television, but still evergreen.

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

Linklater, who brought such subtle, generous feeling to films like Boyhood and the Sunset trilogy, feels somehow miscast as the steward of Bernadette‘s willful eccentricities.

Globe-trotting tomfoolery ensues, in ways never quite as witty or engaging as you want them to be, though Hugh Grant and Josh Hartnett bring a certain insouciant zing.

Even Helen Mirren, the Queen Midas of class acting, can’t fix this well-intentioned miss.

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

The Gentlemen is nothing if not a callback to the Locks of yesteryear, star-stacked and defibrillated with enough juice to jolt a gorilla out of cardiac arrest.

Efron and Devine are an endearingly loony duo, and as much as Plaza and Kendrick never quite sell their vixen shtick, the supporting cast is wickedly stacked. It’s like riding a roller coaster fueled by Red Bull and grain alcohol: kind of gross but pretty fun, too.

Shift looks and feels low-budget, from its slapdash effects to its sketched-in script, though that also feels like kind of the point: It might be bright daylight, but it's always midnight-movie time somewhere.

It’s not a bad setup, and Bridges would be a better movie, easily, if it had let a little more nuance creep into its script. Instead, it lays the task squarely on Boseman’s shoulders — having him fill in all those broad strokes with his own fine lines, and spraying bullets and mayhem across the rest.

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.

There’s a pleasing sort of B-movie-on-an-A+-budget simplicity to Death Cure.

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.

Director Paul Weitz is mostly known for lighter, more observational stories like "About a Boy" and "Mozart in the Jungle," and the strongest moments in Bel Canto are the small ones.

For all its clumsiness, the story resonates—and the photos that run over the final credits are a poignant reminder of the real life, not just the political legacy, that Laurel left behind.

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

If it all feels like less than the sum of all that wig glue and flop sweat and silver lamé — and far short of Ferrell's best — it's also still the kind of movie that frankly, the lowered expectations of These Times are made for: Not a new song or even a very good one, but somehow still enough to hum along.

What saves it is the casting (Fanning especially is fantastic, both winsome and wonderfully strange) and Mitchell’s obvious fondness for his milieu. His giddy, knowingly camp direction has a sort of glitter-stick DIY spirit that keeps the movie aloft long after the story itself has run out of road.

Check your brain at the popcorn-butter pump in the lobby and enjoy it.

It all bumps along, as road trips do, through silliness and boredom and occasional, unexpected charm. But Feste’s story never really gets the rhythms right, and Boundaries finally reaches the end of the road, feeling like nothing so much as a missed opportunity.

If the script’s epiphanies don’t feel quite as shocking or profound the second time around, it’s still pleasing to watch these beautiful, troubled people move through their equally beautiful spaces: something borrowed, something blue — and with Freundlich’s careful alterations, something new.

Policeman, as emotionally earnest and elegantly made as it is, mostly feels like a movie we've seen many times before: a pleasantly escapist two hours with pretty people in pretty clothes, madly sublimating their feelings until the final, luminous frame.

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 movie is much better when it relaxes its death grip on screenwriter-y punchlines and slapstick cringe and just allows its cavalcade of stars to act like actual, you know, people.

The main thing the movie misses in portraying Marilyn solely as a tragic sex bomb isn't just the pleasure that Monroe herself brought to millions, but de Armas's inner light too. The spark and vitality so evident in previous projects like Knives Out and No Time to Die has been smothered down to one note: walking wound. What's left is mostly empty iconography and a few indelible images, a bombastic curiosity wrapped in the guise of high art. Some like it cold.

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.

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

Frankly, it's almost enough just to watch them all run around in states that range from manic panic to Zen serenity while McKay employs his usual coterie of meta tricks and treats. But it's hard not to long for the shrewder movie that might have been: Not just a kooky scattershot look, but a deeper truer gaze into the void.

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.

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.

A maximalist action thriller that is almost comically violent, unfailingly glib, and intermittently very fun.

Maybe unavoidably, the movie that’s emerged from all that has the distinct whiff of compromise and art by committee — the opposite, in other words, of nearly everything Queen’s flamboyant, defiant frontman stood for.

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.

Leitch embarks on a series of adrenalized set pieces that defy logic and physics so breezily that its relentless, ridiculous violence plays more like a winsome ballet.

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.

As an attempt to scale the craggy heights of a marriage in crisis, Downhill may be more bunny slope than black diamond — a force mineure, but still worth the trip.

The script’s second half drifts, going too soft on teachable moments, but Little still finds its loopy sweet spot: Tom Hanks’ "Big" flipped and recast as pure black-girl magic.

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.

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.

What shines through is the visual wit and innate sweetness of the storytelling, and Carell’s cackling, cueball-skulled misanthrope — a (mostly) reformed scoundrel who can still have his cake, and arsenic too.

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.

You wish you’d seen more of this Taylor a long time ago. But that’s the point of the whole movie, maybe: She was always there; it just took her 30 years to get to here.

Live by Night is clearly Affleck’s love letter to classic pulp, and almost no noir touchstone goes unturned in its two-hour-plus run.

The movie never quite stops feeling like Moulin Rouge! written in extra-large block font, or Broadway projected straight onto a big screen, which certainly isn’t bad news if that’s exactly what you love.

An airy, half-baked meringue of a movie, Paris Can Wait is the kind of film that leaves you famished — not just for la belle vie on screen but for the stronger sustenance of plot and character.

She’s (Stewart) just another action hero — albeit a smart, flinty one with exceptionally good hair — learning the hard way that under the sea, as in space, no one can hear you scream.

Uthaug also manages to work in a few genuinely cool visual tricks, though the dialogue, from a serviceable script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons is strictly standard; a mix of clunky action-movie exposition and winking Indiana Jones-style humor.

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.

[Taylor] deftly translates the bleak, raw-boned menace and tricky time signatures of Train’s intertwined plotlines, and draws remarkably vivid performances from his cast, particularly his two female leads.

At just over 120 minutes, though — a blink in Marvel time — this Ant-Man is clever enough to be fun, and wise enough not overstay its welcome. Who better understands the benefits, after all, of keeping it small?

Thieves feels oddly joyless — a mostly rote perp walk through the mechanics of unarmed robbery, sprinkled with occasional slapped-on signifiers of fun (wild camera angles, snazzy soundtrack, smash-cut flashbacks to Swinging London).

The movie, whatever its pile of ideas about love, gender constructs, and modern living, never really transcends Stepford mood-board pastiche. It's all nefarious and gorgeous, Darling, and strictly nonsense in the end.

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.

Dumbledore feels like an improvement, at least, on the joyless, enervating slog of 2018's Crimes of Grindelwald; it's nimbler and sweeter and more cohesive in its storyline. And the cast, less trapped in a fug of half-formed symbolism and subplots, are allowed realer and more romantic stakes.

The extremely game presence of actors like Zoë Chao, Veep's Sam Richardson, and This Is Us's Justin Hartley (as the dimpled bohunk she left behind) help anchor the chaotic wisp of a plot that follows, as does Wilson's barrelling, blithely crass energy.

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.

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.

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.

Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake, also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt, featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.

Jon M. Chu (several Step Up movies) has taken over directing duties from Louis Leterrier, and he has a lighter, goofier touch. He seems to get that the silliness is baked in.

With or without that hallowed history, it's hard not to feel the lack of something in director Ben Wheatley's lush, ponderous update — the most obvious thing, perhaps, being Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The racial politics feel almost willfully retro, but the actors’ charisma cuts through: Forced to work strictly from the neck up, Cranston is just the right amount of gruff; Hart, aside from a deeply unnecessary catheter scene, gives a gratifyingly prickly and vulnerable performance. Somewhere beneath this passable-enough Upside, there’s a better, sharper movie for them both.

What’s fun is just watching Lopez and her supporting cast — including her real-life best friend Remini, Tony winner Annaleigh Ashford as her tightly wound coworker, and a loopy Charlyne Yi as her phobic new assistant — move through the scenes so easily.

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.

A charming and generally painless way to spend two hours. It’s not nearly as sharp as some of the best stuff she’s done, but it’s pointedly kinder too, wrapping even its nastiest characters.

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.

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.

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

In Ray’s hands, it’s essentially a grim procedural with too many moments of untapped potential and a moderately shocking twist. Save his version for a rainy day or a long airplane ride; or better yet, go rent the original.

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.

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.

The result is a candy-coated, willfully quirky wisp of a film; like a Michel Gondry fantasy dipped in glitter and rainbow sprinkles.

You just wish — after two solid but oddly joyless hours — that Legend strained less to hit its marks, and swung a little more.

In a movie that only nominally needs to make sense, those little mango-colored agents of chaos — with their thumb-shaped bodies, jaunty overalls, and inscrutable dialect ("Who are these tiny tater tots and where did they get so much denim?" Gru marvels in his own esoteric accent) — are often the best thing on screen, a loopy confluence of Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel.

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.

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).

The Bronze has a loony Napoleon Dynamite–meets–Talladega Nights-on-the-balance-beam charm. Hope may be a giant jackass, but she’s America’s jackass.

King is an engaging actress to watch, if she only had an actual backstory, but the movie is so relentlessly romp-y and blood-splattered it quickly becomes numbing.

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 star works valiantly to channel Eden/Veronica's pain and confusion, and the whole humanity of a life her captors so casually dismiss. As a performer, she commits utterly; if only the story could do the same.

The 3-D animated film delivers a mildly diverting mix of winky meta-jokes and moral lessons, cannily aimed at both the next generation of tiny consumers and their more sophisticated parents.

Director Drake Doremus carefully constructs an us-against-the-world romance for Silas and Nia (an idea he pulled off beautifully in the underrated 2011 drama "Like Crazy," starring Felicity Jones and the late Anton Yelchin) and provides them with a rogue band of fellow thought rebels, including Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver.

For kids maybe this is still magical; grownups, though, will waste many long, busily bedazzled minutes wondering why the powers that were able to bring Pfeiffer and Jolie together on screen couldn’t do at least marginally better by them both, and give them parts to truly sink their movie-star teeth into.

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.

For all its noble intentions, though, the movie struggles to transcend broad outlines: Its characters are strictly symbols, timeworn archetypes of good and evil as threadbare and familiar as the artfully faded calicos and denim on their backs.

For what is being called a final installment, it all tends to feel both anticlimactic and a little grim in the end.

Purpose itself plays like a family film from another era, its gentle sensibilities a million miles removed from the winky pop culture references and meta layers of most modern all-ages entertainment. The effect is sweet, benignly retro, and just a little bit boring; a comforting Milk Bone for the soul.

It all goes down easily if not exactly unforgettably; a wispy slice of hirsute whimsy.

Rain is not a bad movie, really, and it doesn’t sell itself as anything other than earnest, floppy-eared family entertainment. But there’s a gooey out-of-time feeling to the whole thing that a lot of films like these seem to have — a sentimental IV drip that steadily manipulates heartstrings without ever quite touching anything like true life.

Aniston has a great time as the vampy, Krav Maga-ing Bitch Who Stole Christmas, and Miller’s willful idiocy is weirdly endearing.

To be clear, Stuber is a very silly movie: Half the action scenes look like they were shot inside a Cuisinart, the sexual politics are questionable, the violence cartoonishly extreme, and the plot has the general coherence of a wet napkin. But Stuber knows that sense and logic aren’t what its audience came for; we’re here for good dumb fun — and of course, central air.

Escobar’s story hardly lacks for plot points, and director Fernando León de Aronaoa (Mondays in the Sun) hits them all obligingly, if broadly. What he doesn’t carve out much room for is richer character motivations or context.

If Hathaway and Ejiofor are sometimes saddled with talky theatrical monologues that sound far more like a screenwriter's fever dream than the words of any ordinary human, they also commit in a way that manages to makes the leaps in tone and logic work, probably better than they should.

Director Cory Finley (who also helmed 2017’s great, underappreciated "Thoroughbreds") brings a light touch to Mike Makowsky’s script, nimbly balancing broader comedy and pathos.

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

It almost seems churlish to single out one aspect of the film for unreality, when the whole thing is essentially one Riverdancing leprechaun short of a fairy tale. And when so many dangerous drinking games can be invented to accompany the rise and fall of Christopher Walken’s mystery brogue.

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

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.

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

What follows is another slapstick dose of hard-R ridiculosity with a soft-nougat center, but it also passes the Bechdel test maybe better than any other film this year, and its older generation of stars are too smart not to go to town on their stock roles.

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 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.

Witherspoon can easily carry an entire movie in her dimples, but it’s hard not to measure Alice against a role as richly written as her recent turn on "Big Little Lies." Here, she’s mostly just a winsome proxy for midlife wish fulfillment — a bubbly brunch mimosa you drink up before the fizz is gone.

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.

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.

The final 30 minutes of the film descend into something so bloody and outrageous it nearly works as camp. Still, it's hard not to think of the better movie buried somewhere in Window's odd feints and histrionics, if only its makers had trusted themselves — or been trusted — to tell it.

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.

You won't respect yourself in the morning, but you might have some dumb, lizard-brain fun.

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.

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.

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.

The Goldfinch feels like more than the sum of its disparate parts; a painting in the wrong frame, maybe, but one whose imperfect beauty still draws you in.

Mostly this is all just pretext for dreamy postcard shots of Europe, a metric ton of slapstick, and as many highly specific vocal riff-offs as one empty airplane hangar can handle.

This one has its own wonky charm and intermittent moments of genuine, depraved hilarity; it's like "Bridesmaids" drawn in crayon.

It's a broad, helter-skelter farce whose best bits hinge almost entirely on the considerable charms of its star.

What we get is the usual mash of swashbuckling nonsense and soggy mythology: There will be romance, and revelations, and some silly gold-plated cameos (hello there, Sir Paul McCartney! And whoops, goodbye). Through it all, Norwegian duo Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki) feel less like directors than shepherds.

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.

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.

As Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) piles on the coincidences and misdirections, the movie finally collapses under its own schematic weight, and wilts to the ground.

Aniston and Sandler, paired before in 2011’s "Just Go With It," relax into their roles as if their only stake in Mystery is to enjoy the free trip to Italy and have fun running down cobblestones.

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.

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.

For a lot of its runtime, Velvet is fun and silly and enjoyably outrageous. It’s hard, though, to walk away with a real sense of anything more than blood on the canvas and a blank where your feelings — beyond mild bemusement, and a sudden appetite for prime Los Angeles real estate — should be.

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).

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.

Swedish-Chilean director Daniel Espinosa (Life) gives it all a dark sheen, and shoots the pair's inevitable confrontations less like traditional comic-book clashes than something from The Matrix.

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.

For better or worse, Looking Glass loses none of the first film’s muchness, with Bobin mimicking both his predecessor’s wildly saturated style and his general disregard for plot and substance.

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

Sound titillating? It's not.

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++.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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).

Dirty Grandpa feels like spending 100-plus minutes with a scatalogical toddler, proudly showing you what he made in his diaper. Don’t look if you don’t have to.