Leah Greenblatt

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.

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.

Pete is no kind of fairytale; instead, it’s something far sadder and better and more real.

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

Ejiofor’s performance make the movie; the rest, you may just have to take on faith.

The performances are strong and the story is absorbing; a smart diversion for adult attention spans.

What the movie doesn’t do, until it’s nearly over, is make any real case for why so much of America continued to put their faith in Kennedy long after the facts of the case were revealed.

When A Quiet Place has one finger on the panic button and the other on mute, it’s a nervy, terrifying thrill.

All style and mood, signifying not much.

The movie’s darker allegory of persecution and internment isn’t hard to miss, though, and the dogs themselves, with their tactile tufts of fur and Buster Keaton eyes, have an endearing, complicated humanity.

There’s some real, weird fun in secondary characters like Tony Hale’s desperate-to-be-down principal, Natasha Rothwell’s exasperated drama teacher, and Logan Miller’s Martin, a theater kid so eager to please he practically turns himself inside out.

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.

Despite the rich settings and crowded cast, the film can’t help feeling a little airless too: These players aren’t history’s masterminds, they’re wasps trapped in a jar, bumbling against the glass in sting-or-be-stung chaos.

What begins as a gleefully nasty piece of work gradually picks up more nuance as it goes, adding dimensions to characters who could easily have coasted on the story’s arched-eyebrow burlesque.

It’s the kind of film that leaves you dazzled and a little shell-shocked — and not entirely sure whether your own moviegoing DNA hasn’t been altered a little in the process.

McAdams, whose comedic skills have gone unsung for way too long, is dizzy fun. The whole movie is, actually, even if it pretty much evaporates on impact — a kooky, vicarious loop of Mad Libs meets Cards Against Humanity, where whoever’s holding the popcorn last wins.

The title of Loveless is no misnomer: It might just be the feel-bad movie of the year. A new word should be invented for the particular kind of poetic, politically-charged bleakness acclaimed filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, The Return) brings to the screen, some Cyrillic-alphabet cousin to the Germans with their weltschmerz and schadenfreude.

[Coogler] infuses nearly every frame with soul and style, and makes the radical case that a comic-book movie can actually have something meaningful — beyond boom or kapow or America — to say. In that context, Panther’s nuanced celebration of pride and identity and personal responsibility doesn’t just feel like a fresh direction for the genre, it’s the movie’s own true superpower.

It’s heartbreaking, illuminating, and yes, fantastic, just to watch her (Marina) live.

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

In the Fade is a flawed filmgoing experience, but still a viscerally affecting one.

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.

A smart, eminently watchable thriller, taut and stylish, and Plummer is remarkably good in it.

The result is a dadaist swirl of satire, pie-eyed whimsy, and speculative futurism — like "Gulliver’s Travels" through the wrong end of a telescope.

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.

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.

The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love.

It feels only appropriate that James Franco, an actor and director for whom weirdness is next to godliness, would be the one to tell his story.