Leah Greenblatt

Cruella comes off as a curious animal, eager to change its spots and trying a little bit of everything along the way.

As a reverent highlight reel and a history lesson, The Glorias gets the job done; as a movie, though, it rarely sings.

A clever, sharp-fanged mélange of classic midnight-movie horror and modern indie ingenuity.

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.

Director Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93) has always had a taste for the topical and political, and his third Bourne outing augments the usual truth-and-justice talking points with a strenuously current nod to digital privacy issues via a Zuckerberg-like social-media mogul (Riz Ahmed). If anything, he underplays those assets, shorting deeper story development for exotic zip codes, bang-up fisticuffs, and adrenalized chase scenes.

Uneven but endearing.

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.

There’s really no not-terrible term for smart, silly female-bonding movies that are somehow considered subversive just for acing the Bechdel Test.... Sisters earns a spot in that pantheon, however it’s defined—even if it’s never quite as good as its leads.

There are several arresting visual set pieces . . . And there's the more ordinary pleasure, too, of seeing this many good actors, snug and earnest in their jumpsuits, go to work. But the film often feels less like its own distinct narrative than a sort of greatest-hits amalgam of movies like The Martian, Gravity, Interstellar, Ad Astra, and all the others that came before.

Waititi ... finds such strange, sweet humor in his storytelling that the movie somehow maintains its ballast, even when the tone inevitably (and it feels, necessarily) shifts.

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

The movie has its moments, some of them genuinely delightful. Still, there's a world where The High Note could have struck a stronger, deeper chord, and resonated.

If Bening’s genteel British accent sometimes feels a little wobbly, her character is by far the most vivid force in the film.

In its own druggy, dick-pic way, it’s also a pretty endearing tribute to male friendship — hammy and crude and more baked than a fruitcake, but with a sweetly squishy holiday heart at its center.

Writer-director Drew Pearce must have done something right to get a cast like this to sign on for what is essentially a loving, highly stylized homage to the kind of camp apocalyptia John Carpenter used to make; the only thing missing here is an Ernest Borgnine cameo and Kurt Russell scowling in an eye patch.

If a motley crew of movie stars is what it takes to shine more light on government malfeasance, then let Meryl carry that torch in a wig and a bucket hat. But as a pure movie-going experience, it’s all kind of a wash.

Even at its most engaging (those cubs!), Zookeeper can’t help evoking the dozens of films that have told these stories before, and better.

The phrase “low-key thriller” might be an oxymoron, but it also feels like the best description of The Wedding Guest.

For all its eerie scene-setting and squishy entrails, Antlers never really exposes the emotional guts of its narrative beyond the scope of midnight-movie horror; without that, it's just another nightmare fairytale leaning hard on heavy vibes and jump scares, and losing the forest for the trees.

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.

Riz Ahmed takes Encounter a long way. But he can't single-handedly carry a film that never quite figures out what it wants to be — stark sci-fi paranoia? Psychological family drama? Desert road-trip apocalypse?

The script is wispy, but the performances (including Patrick Chesnais as Caroline’s prideful, devastated husband) shine.

What work better in the movie are mostly smaller moments: the jokes that land, the rapport between the reporters, and all the weirdly ordinary ways people manage to find a new normal, even in the most WTF circumstances.

The film, while gorgeously shot, is schematic and wholly implausible. But Skarsgård saves it; wild and funny and ferociously alive, he’s a crucial bolt of color in all that tasteful gray.

Even in Valhalla or Paradise City, though, there is still love and loss; Thor dutifully delivers both, and catharsis in a climax that inevitably doubles as a setup for the next installment.

There's a low-key charm to the movie's knowing spin on familiar beats, and far more chaotic non-sexual nudity than Julia Roberts would ever allow in her contract.

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.

It works its own sort of magic. After all, who doesn't want to believe that the soul does have a window, and that if it closes we might open it again?