Leah Greenblatt

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.

A loony psychodrama so steeped in winking, twinkly-toed camp that it almost (almost!) escapes the leaden tropes of the genre.

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.

Luckiest Girl is the kind of rainy-day thriller Netflix was made for: lurid, entertaining, patently silly. It's also kind of a mess, though at least some of that likely comes from condensing the busy, grisly events of a best-selling book into less than two hours of screen time.

This Seven’s just silly, solid entertainment: multiplex fun by numbers.

In the absence of a clean ending, then, what's left is the familiar intrigue of smart men squinting dolefully at distant horizons and bloodied crime scenes, an ocean of bottled-up feeling, and a movie that takes a good half of its secrets to the grave.

The story works well enough in its own moodily familiar way, but it’s not only the movie’s palette that’s stylishly leached of color: Its main characters’ backstories feel perfunctory, the dialogue leans heavy on exposition and hard-boiled cliché, and even Owen looks worn down.

Harris, eyes blazing, brings a humanity and an urgency that serve the story maybe more than it deserves: a performance above and beyond the call of duty.

Colman, her eyes darting between hope and devastation, is so lit-up and specific (and funny, a quality that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough) that she lifts nearly every scene.

In an industry that defines “mature audiences” as anyone old enough to vote, a movie centered entirely on women over 65 — a sex comedy, no less — feels like some kind of small Hollywood miracle.

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.

Watch it sincerely or as a curiosity; at least you know you won't forget it.

Eventually, it’s Wealth‘s inherent too-muchness that undoes its own best intentions.

Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) gives the movie both the global sweep of a thriller and the more granular details of a procedural, though in the end hardly any of it takes place in a courtroom.

[Smith's] conviction carries Emancipation a long way, elevating what is essentially a B movie to the realm of something better than its outsize premise: a blunt instrument, maybe, but a brutally affecting one too.

Even as the story descends into full bloody camp at its crescendo, Spencer holds the more ludicrous plot threads together.

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.

Samba finds a much stronger rhythm when it stops contriving and simply shines a light on the joy and pain (and musical interludes) of lives lived in the margins.

The movie’s arc is too conventional by half, but the appeal of the two main actors keeps it (sorry) afloat, maybe more than it should.

What makes it more than a slick impersonation of sociopathy, though, is the layers he peels — Bundy’s desperation, his endless calculations and longing for connection. He also has some great interplay with John Malkovich, as the Tallahassee judge who engages in a sort of folksy, combative back-and-forth with him in court that nearly verges on buddy comedy.

In a post-Knives Out world, is a movie like this meant to be a classic whodunit for the whole family, or something more deliberately meta and modern? Branagh mostly lands on the former: a sort of sumptuous dinner-theater redux studded with stray bits of caricature, camp, and many CG pyramids.

The looping flashback structure and relaxed, intimate pacing has the odd effect of making the fate of the free world feel a lot less urgent than it probably should; the movie frequently comes off less like a standard MCU tentpole than a metaphysical family drama whose black sheep just happens to be Thanos.