Leah Greenblatt

Without much dramatic tension beyond the will-he-or-won't-he of Cameron's final choice, the film feels oddly inert, a melancholic iPhone ad stretched to feature-length.

A showcase mostly for Boyega and Beharie, whose tense, delicate interplay makes up much of the movie's emotional core.

He (Hill) makes Mid90s resonate with universal poignancy and electric energy; his kids are the best, messiest kind of real, and they’re alright.

If its aim to inspire and educate inevitably leaves the movie feeling a little classroom-bound, Harriet is still an impassioned, edifying portrait of a remarkable life, and a fitting showcase for the considerable talents of its star, Tony-winning British actress Cynthia Erivo.

It’s in Deadpool’s DNA to channel the wild id of a 12-year-old boy — a very clever one who happens to love boobs, Enya, and blowing stuff up. Which is dizzy fun for a while, like eating Twinkies on a Gravitron. Eventually, though, it just wears you out.

Affleck keeps the movie anchored with his rumpled, unshowy performance: a man killing himself to live, until he can start to believe that maybe there's a better way.

Director Marc Turtletaub pulls thoughtful, carefully shaded performances from Denman, Khan, and, most of all, Scottish actress Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men), who refuses to let Agnes be an easy avatar for midlife longing and suburban discontent.

Pike . . . feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. As the mercenary Marla — cool-eyed and indomitable, a razor blade poured into a buttercream blazer — she's delicious, a shiny-haired nihilist who couldn't care less if she tried.

Spoonfuls of sugar always help the movie magic go down; if only this Mary had gotten a necessary twist of lemon, too.

It’s their quiet devotion and enduring dignity that give A United Kingdom not just a romantic center, but its soul.

Soho is one hell of a half of a movie: a wildly styled neon reverie whose spooky bedazzlement only crashes to earth when it succumbs to bog-standard horror in the final act.

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.

The screenplay, by Matt Lopez, leans bright and broad, but there are sweetly specific moments scattered throughout, from a whisper-fight over dominoes at the local social club to the frequent snatches of Spanish woven into the dialogue.

Despite the source material's similar popularity, though, the movie drags, a confluence of silly plot points and mile-wide archetypes with too little natural chemistry between its ridiculously good-looking leads.

Mostly, the joy comes from watching Reeves and Winter on screen, two holy fools just doing their best to bring light and love and non-heinous riffs — and remind the bleary-eyed citizens of 2020, perhaps, of a simpler, sweeter world gone by.

It’s a minor-key tale by any measure: a May-December romance played out in the fading shadow of Old Hollywood glamour. But it also has the benefit of a thoughtful script, sensitive direction, and leads gifted enough to breathe fresh air into nearly every moment.

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.

The movie is disappointingly flat-footed about both rock and journalism, and its shaggy plot sheds logic as it goes. Still, the actors are excellent; they’re triple crème slathered on an odd little undercooked biscuit of a script.

Unexpected isn’t particularly interested in driving the plot forward or holding its leads up as avatars for a cinematic lecture on poverty and white privilege. Instead, it just lets them live and breathe and make mistakes — not for the aim of any greater message or grand epiphanies, but because that’s what people do.

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

With its political power struggles and prodigious body count, all rendered in a thousand shades of wintry greige, the movie feels less like teen entertainment than a sort of Hunger Games of Thrones.

Ironbark might not be a great film in the end, but it is a satisfying good one — a story that’s at its best when it colors outside the black and white (or Communist red, as it were) lines of war and hones in on the real, fallible men and women who fight it, one quiet inglorious step at a time.

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.

In the final third, as the plot accelerates and moves toward more purely outrageous acts, Casey’s awakening should feel like freedom from the stultifying smallness of his old life. Instead, it mostly just feels like another kind of box, and an ugly one, too; less artful, all offense.

Meneghetti, a first-time but remarkably assured filmmaker, gives Two a dreamlike realism, letting the score go ragged in its tensest moments and swooping in artfully on aching closeups and empty spaces.

It feels like a faint insult to say that The Good Nurse could be a premium-cable product from long ago, one of those lightly prestige-y Sunday-night movies Showtime or HBO used to make. But it's also one crafted with sturdy, consummate skill, burnished by two Oscar winners who don't stint on their performances just because most people will end up seeing Nurse on a small screen.

Even as the pacing falters, Majors is impossible to look away from: a man who desperately needs the world to see him — and if they refuse, to feel his pain.

Blunt but brutally effective little slice of supernatural horror.