Leah Greenblatt

Jones reportedly did nearly all the stunts herself in a real balloon, and she makes the stakes feel fretfully real despite the dreamy, almost painterly quality of George Steel’s cinematography. By the time the story comes back to earth, though, that urgency is largely gone with the wind, and the film returns to what it was: a whimsical, oddly airless curiosity.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Fee steers Cars 3 like the sleek piece of movie machinery it is—a standard ride with a half-full tank, a gorgeous paint job, and not much at all under the hood.

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.

If the plot tends to outline its intentions in Sharpie — and veer into pure silliness by the final third — their presence pulls all that ridiculosity over the finish line: hardly a home run, but still a brittle, nasty bit of fun.

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.

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.

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.

Director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) seems to know how to set up his outrageous set pieces, then get out of the way often enough to let his stars do what they need to do: Joke, chokehold, kiss, and smash until the helicopters come home.

[Perry] also has a way of making even the most telegraphed twists and overheated dialogue ring with conviction, a consummate entertainer to the end.

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.

Powell and Majors, both born with surfeits of natural charisma, strain mightily to imbue their scant dialogue with deeper meaning, but Devotion, earnest and determinedly earthbound to the end, never really captures the air up there.

The last 15 minutes are frankly devastating — catharsis, thy name is ugly-cry! — but it all feels a little manipulative and thinly told in the end; Nancy Meyers reset in the key of tragedy.

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.

It's a fascinating story, this clash of 1960s idealism with the cold realities of modern science, though not one that director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Story of Arthur Russell) is fully able to bite off and chew in Spaceship Earth, his fitfully enthralling but frustratingly incomplete documentary.

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.

Amidst all his meta tricks — the winky callouts to Wikipedia, the deliberately kitsch sets and incongruous soundtrack — Tesla’s own story ultimately fades; a small, bright light lost in the bigger spectacle.

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.

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.

For all its earnest sentiment and questionable science, though, Adam barrels along on movie stars and charm, from futures past and back again.

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.

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?

Even at the movie's silliest and most unsteady moments, she's (Wasikowska) the ballast: a Judy bruised but unbowed — and finally, fully ready to punch back.