Leah Greenblatt

A raunchy, wildly off-the-rails farce from the team that more or less brought you Broad City.

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.

A gothic moodpiece masquerading as a thriller, My Cousin Rachel is a misdirected swoon of a movie—long on black-veiled romance and ravishing atmosphere and a little short, alas, on dividends.

One day, Captain’s pint-size viewers will undoubtedly move on to Marvel’s spandex universe; until then, they’ve got this sweet, silly starter kit.

What we get is the usual mash of swashbuckling nonsense and soggy mythology: There will be romance, and revelations, and some silly gold-plated cameos (hello there, Sir Paul McCartney! And whoops, goodbye). Through it all, Norwegian duo Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki) feel less like directors than shepherds.

The movie may feel minor next to Vinterberg’s more serious work, but it’s more personal, too: A messy, tender window into the world that shaped him.

An airy, half-baked meringue of a movie, Paris Can Wait is the kind of film that leaves you famished — not just for la belle vie on screen but for the stronger sustenance of plot and character.

As Snatched’s blonde-leading-the-blonde farce careens on, it stumbles into moments of deranged inspiration.

Even lush set pieces and a raft of prestige players (including Shohreh Aghdashloo, James Cromwell, and Jean Reno) can’t fulfill the movie’s pretty, ultimately empty promise.

The movie Tokyo-drifts into tedium in its more chaotic, casually gruesome chase scenes, and the “serious” dialogue is so consistently clunky it feels like it’s been carved from woodblocks with a dull butterknife. Thankfully, it’s frequently also much funnier and lighter on its feet than previous outings, and a lot of that credit goes to Statham and Johnson.

Even if the script’s psychological reach ultimately falls short, Colossal is still a clever, comic, wildly surreal ride — right up until the last sucker-punch frame.

If there’s anything Sander’s ravishing set pieces fail to sufficiently color in, it’s the movie’s emotional stakes.

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

Stewart, who appears in nearly every scene, is intensely watchable, a coiled spring. But the movie is too fragmented and tonally strange to register as more than one of Maureen’s wispy, haunted apparitions.

If the 
story’s outcome is hardly a 
mystery — the landmark case was affirmed by a 5–4 margin in June 2015 — and the look of the film itself a little docu-drab, it’s also a shrewd and frequently moving testament to the true nature of change.

For all its noble intentions, though, the movie struggles to transcend broad outlines: Its characters are strictly symbols, timeworn archetypes of good and evil as threadbare and familiar as the artfully faded calicos and denim on their backs.

The Great Wall looks like it could be a really amazing video game. Alas, it’s a movie, and kind of a brick.

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

It’s also a haunting, thought-provoking piece of work, made infinitely more powerful by all the things it chooses not to show.

Crass, senseless, and relentlessly talky, War on Everyone mostly seems like a movie at war with itself.

Purpose itself plays like a family film from another era, its gentle sensibilities a million miles removed from the winky pop culture references and meta layers of most modern all-ages entertainment. The effect is sweet, benignly retro, and just a little bit boring; a comforting Milk Bone for the soul.

Charged with streamlining Figures’ knotty real-life histories, director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) tends to paint too much in the broad, amiable strokes of a triumph-of-the-week TV movie. But even his earthbound execution can’t dim the sheer magnetic pull of an extraordinary story.

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.

Plotwise, Women is a wisp; as a mood piece, though, it’s almost irresistibly rich.

At 160 stately, glacial minutes, it’s also an endurance test — one that can feel like its own act of faith to pass.

These actors are too good to be entirely sunk by the sheer silliness of the material (with the exception of Smith, who seems fully committed to playing the role of a human frown-face emoji).

Aniston has a great time as the vampy, Krav Maga-ing Bitch Who Stole Christmas, and Miller’s willful idiocy is weirdly endearing.

In its audacious strangeness, the movie manages to do something history hardly ever gets to: surprise us.

Chastain fully commits to her boss-bitch persona, even if we only obliquely learn why she might have chosen such a lonely, mercenary life.

It turns out that Rules Don’t Apply is hardly about Hughes at all. Instead, it’s a small-scale, lovingly filmed study of the blossoming romance between two fictional show-business newbies.

The movie’s lofty narrative ambitions never quite catch up with its aesthetics, but it’s still a fantastic beast of a film, intoxicating and strange.

Thankfully, Fremon Craig’s script is smart and sensitive enough not to gloss over the real pain lurking beneath Nadine’s bravado as she deals with the aftermath of her dad’s death, her best friend’s betrayal, and the fact that the right guy (Hayden Szeto) might not be the one with the best bangs.

That’s the movie’s greatest feint, though: Ultimately, it’s far less interested in galactic destiny than the infinite, uncharted landscape of the human heart.

Trolls doesn’t reach for the emotional resonance of DreamWorks’ more ambitious efforts; its lessons of loyalty and kindness are standard-issue, and tear ducts remain untapped. Still, the movie’s serotonin pumps like a fire hose. It’s almost impossible not to surrender to the bliss.

Despite its promise, Hacksaw never really delves into the moral grays; it’s just black and white and red all over.

As hard as they work to add nuance, Connelly is trapped in mad-housewife hysteria, Fanning’s a brat, and McGregor never really rises above a strange, stunned blandness. It’s a noble effort, almost completely lost in translation; give it an American pass.

Shot in the goldenrod-and-avocado palette of the ’70s and dabbed with incongruous soft-rock lullabies, the movie itself is both painfully intimate and strangely opaque on the subject of mental illness, taking us deep inside Christine’s disintegration even as it never quite figures out what it wants to say about it.

The whole thing’s ludicrous, down to the last loony twist, but it’s also a lot more fun than Batman v Superman.

A big, unabashedly ambitious picture, heavy with the weight of history. But its best moments turn out to be the smaller human ones.

[Taylor] deftly translates the bleak, raw-boned menace and tricky time signatures of Train’s intertwined plotlines, and draws remarkably vivid performances from his cast, particularly his two female leads.

For the most part it succeeds, gorgeously — though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.

Sadly, it’s hamstrung by a patchy script (by David Hare) and an oddly flat-footed performance by Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt.

What works almost disturbingly well is the way Berg calibrates his delivery of the disaster while still holding on to the human scale of it.

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

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

The result, alas, is totally bolloxed, as a Brit might say, by execution.

Even when the film fails to ask so many of the questions its narrative begs, Author is still a tricky, fascinating look at the strange nexus of art, artifice, and the intoxicating cult of celebrity.

The whole thing is feverishly earnest and more than a little manipulative, but it’s also possibly the prettiest two hours of emotional ­masochism so far this year.

Southside doesn’t hang on epiphanies; instead, it delivers something more modest: a tender, unrushed love story.

A lot of what makes War Dogs work comes down to Hill, who is operating at maximum density here physically (he reportedly gained weight specifically for the role) but whose unhinged charisma also anchors the movie.

A visually stunning, richly imagined oasis in a sea of candy-colored safety, and one of the first truly original movies of the year so far.

It would be easy to mine Jenkins’ story for silly farce and 1940s set pieces and let it coast from there, but director Stephen Frears (Philomena, The Queen) is too kind, and too nuanced, to do that. Even when she’s murdering a high C, his Florence finds the melody.

Conceived by the conjoined comedic minds of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Evan Goldberg and baked (in more ways than one) for more than eight years, the movie looks like Pixar but plays like "Pineapple Express" unleashed among actual pineapples.

At its inventive best—like the creation of a little cloth fox who never speaks but steals almost every scene he’s in—it does capture the odd, tender wonder of his world.

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.

Ultimately though, it’s all secondary to Saunders and Lumley’s riotous chemistry together.

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.

Efron and Devine are an endearingly loony duo, and as much as Plaza and Kendrick never quite sell their vixen shtick, the supporting cast is wickedly stacked. It’s like riding a roller coaster fueled by Red Bull and grain alcohol: kind of gross but pretty fun, too.

It’s a testament to writer-director Matt Ross, who is probably best known as an actor on shows like Big Love and Silicon Valley, that Captain skirts cliché as well as it does; his indictments of both contemporary emptiness and misguided idealism feel earned, even if it all ties up a little too Sundance-tidy in the end.

You just wish — after two solid but oddly joyless hours — that Legend strained less to hit its marks, and swung a little more.

Caring may be fundamental, but it never quite feels necessary.

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.

The movie — dutifully shot in shades of old-timey sepia — does get better as its staginess falls away, but far too much drama stays on the page.

Jon M. Chu (several Step Up movies) has taken over directing duties from Louis Leterrier, and he has a lighter, goofier touch. He seems to get that the silliness is baked in.

If it’s not exactly unforgettable, it’s still pretty fun.

Sometimes that tips too far into silliness (the final scene, especially, works strenuously towards an end-cute); still, its mildly subversive rom-com sensibilities are just sour-sweet enough to pull it off.

The 3-D animated film delivers a mildly diverting mix of winky meta-jokes and moral lessons, cannily aimed at both the next generation of tiny consumers and their more sophisticated parents.

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.

As a solid B-movie elevated by A-list talent and pushed along by a brisk running time — it’s only 98 minutes—Money has its own rewards.

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.

Based on the best-selling 2011 novel, Fang is directed by Bateman with a sensitivity that the story’s sour whimsy doesn’t quite deserve.

Havana’s crumbling trapped-in-time beauty also plays a starring role, but it’s Medina who provides the movie’s raw, tender heart.

As a surreal slice of history served up nearly half a century later, it feels oddly satisfying: A reminder not just of simpler times, but of all the other wild untold stories we may never know, just because no camera was there to capture them.

Her character, reportedly based on writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s own mother, isn’t drawn with any particular depth or nuance (and the broad New Yawk accent Sarandon tries on is about as authentically Brooklyn as a Sara Lee bagel).

It’s like a lost John Hughes movie with Irish brogues and cars that just happen to drive on the other side of the road. It’s also, sadly, exactly the kind of sweet little film that too often gets buried in a box office ruled by broader comedies and bloated superhero epics

Even when it falls short of its aim to get every last Beyoncé joke and Big Idea onscreen, the movie still offers what any barbershop worth its repeat customers provides: An hour or two of good company, and the feeling that you’re leaving a little sharper than when you came in.

A few moments are fantastically bonkers, but granting director duties to McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, feels more like an act of love than wisdom.

Copy celebrates a brilliant storyteller and her lacerating wit...but also recalls a woman who could be bossy, presumptuous, and sometimes mean. To the end, though, she was adored.

The Bronze has a loony Napoleon Dynamite–meets–Talladega Nights-on-the-balance-beam charm. Hope may be a giant jackass, but she’s America’s jackass.

Aaron Paul has key scenes as the drone pilot who actually has to pull the trigger, but it’s the late Alan Rickman, as Mirren’s superior, who steals the film.

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.

Touched With Fire has something to say about a thorny, serious subject, but the light it shines doesn’t really illuminate anything new.

How to Be Single is a lot like its Jager-bombing, romance-seeking protagonists: Cute and goofy and kind of a mess.

It's Coen lite, basically, but still filled with their best signatures: cracked humor, indelible characters, and cinematography so rich and saturated you want to dunk a cookie in it.

Dirty Grandpa feels like spending 100-plus minutes with a scatalogical toddler, proudly showing you what he made in his diaper. Don’t look if you don’t have to.

Based on a lauded 2011 novel of the same name, Lamb is about as strange as it sounds: a Lolita story almost more unsettling for the lines it doesn’t explicitly cross.

The cast (which includes Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Kristen Stewart, and Corey Stoll) is strong, but the movie itself is a little exhausting, like a New York cousin to Paul Haggis’ Crash, with a smaller budget and a bigger vocabulary.

Courtenay is a gruff and gratifyingly knotty presence, but in the end it’s Rampling’s movie. In a quiet, beautifully calibrated performance completely stripped of actressy tricks, she’s a revelation.

Director Peter Landesman, who also helmed last year’s political thriller "Kill the Messenger", doesn’t color much outside the lines of conventional drama. But his straightforward telling actually serves the strong cast and taut script — and a story that would be deemed too outrageous to believe if it wasn’t true.

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.

If only Russell trusted Mangano’s true story. Instead, he’s turned her life into a over-staged mess of awkward exposition, contrived dialogue, and characters so willfully unreal they feel acrylic.

The portrait that emerges is one of a brash, talented girl who grew up an outcast in her small Texas town.

In Ray’s hands, it’s essentially a grim procedural with too many moments of untapped potential and a moderately shocking twist. Save his version for a rainy day or a long airplane ride; or better yet, go rent the original.

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.

It’s not hard to see why Mustang has been dubbed the “Turkish Virgin Suicides.” Like Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, unsettling 1999 debut, it’s another first film by a young female director that focuses in feverish close-up on the adolescent awakening of five restless, radiant sisters — and the ruin that follows when their family tries to contain it.

An inspired fantasy sequence midway through hints at the more intriguing movie The 33 might have been; instead, its tragedy-to-triumph narrative aims mostly for width, not depth.

Jolie Pitt, who also wrote and directed, shows a lot of skin (her own and her cast’s) without ever really getting under it. Misery doesn’t just love good-looking company; it needs an emotional center and a satisfying narrative arc, too.

A movie about love and loss that doesn’t dissolve into soft focus when the hard parts start.

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.

Subverting expected narratives may have been Silva’s aim all along; still, the turn isn’t just nasty, it’s confounding.

As silly and sometimes nonsensical as it is, the movie is surprisingly sweet and well-intentioned.

Your enjoyment of all this will probably depend heavily on your willingness to let the words romp and Taliban coexist for approximately two hours. The movie itself is slight and sometimes outright offensive, though it’s also intermittently amusing and not entirely unself-aware.

Cary Fukunaga’s stark, beautifully shot drama was likely never meant to be a blockbuster; its brutal account of a child soldier in an unnamed African country is far too discomfiting for wider audiences. It absolutely does belong on a big screen, though, and more important, it just deserves to be seen.

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.

Hathaway’s take on the underwritten Jules is refreshingly unshowy, but De Niro seems a little lost.

It’s a smart, flawed movie about smart, flawed people.

Their odd couple interplay propels a series of shambling, expletive-laden mishaps that aim more for easy laughs than Wild epiphanies.

The result is chilling and beautifully composed, a stylish study of disintegration that is easier to admire than enjoy.

Sam Elliott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Judy Greer supply sharp cameos, but this is Tomlin’s movie, and she obliges with a spiky, refreshingly unvarnished performance.

She’s Funny That Way is posted as a love letter to the classic screwball comedies of Hollywood’s golden age, but delivers ersatz Woody Allen instead; it’s like "Bullets Over Broadway" minus the mob plot and 90 percent of the charm.

Noah Baumbach’s latest wisp of privileged New York whimsy vaporizes on arrival.

Check your brain at the popcorn-butter pump in the lobby and enjoy it.

As unsettling as Marielle Heller’s feature-film debut can be — there are moments you’ll ache for Minnie and other ones where you’ll want to lock her away — it rings much truer than most coming-of-age stories.

Director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Diablo Cody, both Oscar winners, have made far better films. Still, Ricki raises smart questions about why a mother’s musical ambitions are so much more selfish than, say, seven-time dad Mick Jagger’s.

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.

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.

Director Gregory Jacobs worked under original Magic Mike helmer Steven Soderberg for years, but sadly he has almost none of his former boss’s ability to elevate material that is essentially one lamé thong away from a TLC reality series.

An excellently clear-eyed primer on the woman whose talent carried her from an impoverished childhood in Tryon, N.C., to the world’s most rarefied stages—and whose political defiance nearly ended her career.

Somewhere along the way Earl eases up on the suburban–Wes Anderson whimsy and starts to find its heart, infusing the story’s self-conscious cleverness and trick-shot set pieces with something sweeter, sadder, and even a little bit profound. In other words, it grows up.

PP2 sometimes feels less like a movie than a two-hour episode of Glee ghostwritten by Amy Schumer; jokes fly like they’re being shot from T-shirt guns at a gonzo pep rally, and not all of them stick the landing.

What’s spanglish for déjà vu? There’s hardly a single moment in Hot Pursuit that won’t remind you of scenes you’ve seen at the multiplex a thousand times before. (The movie’s original title was Don’t Mess With Texas, probably because Thelma & Louise Ride the Pineapple Express All the Way to Jump Street — and They’ve Got Lethal Weapons, Y’all! was just too long.)

Lively looks fantastic in every era’s fashion as it passes, and she does a nice job of conveying Adaline’s old-world diction and reserve; there’s no Gossip in this girl.

Even Helen Mirren, the Queen Midas of class acting, can’t fix this well-intentioned miss.

Heartbreaking, infuriating, and unmissable.

The movie is too odd and randy to play for kids on an Austin Powers level, and too broad to really work as farce. But Depp, god bless him, fully commits, and finds a few genuinely funny moments amidst all the outsize mugging and mild sociopathy.

Boy's premise reeks of stalker-movie mothballs, and it's too timid to fully dive into the high camp it hints at. Instead, this cookie just crumbles.

Sound titillating? It's not.

A quiet, intermittently poignant portrait of two people who've lost each other and aren't sure they want to find their way back.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan also penned the acclaimed 2005 indie "Junebug," and he aims for the same kind of gentle absurdity here.

Both Mbatha-Raw and Parker are appealing, expressive actors, and writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) lets them breathe, filling in the boilerplate bones of the story with smartly nuanced commentary.

An ill-judged twist pitches the story sideways, but Crudup's performance holds the center. His pain isn't soggy or showy; it just feels true.

The movie finds real power in its climax, a party that turns into a nightmarish orgy of leering white kids in blackface. And the end-credit photos of real parties just like it at schools across the country are a stark reminder of the ugliness that Dear White People, flawed as it is, wants to confront.

Huppert is a wonder, inhabiting every iota of rage and froideur and helplessness; if only the movie's motives were as lucid as her performance.

It's clumsy and wacky and intermittently amusing, and Rob Lowe looks like he's having a great time playing Real-Life Ned Flanders With a Deeply Weird Side once again.

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?

It's a broad, helter-skelter farce whose best bits hinge almost entirely on the considerable charms of its star.

Like the guys who gyrate on La Bare’s stage every night, the movie is luggish, good-hearted, and a little bit sad.

A raft of fine actors – including Amy Adams, Richard Jenkins, and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay – are wasted in a sour, callow family drama that mistakes constant yelling for emotional tension and fortune-cookie aphorisms for wisdom.

The movie borders on hagiography, but Gordon is a charmingly voluble storyteller; he’s like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World recast as a balding Jewish guy from Long Island.

Despite a few too-cute moments (and many fantastically graphic vagina jokes), the movie is both smarter and more sympathetic than that glib shorthand.

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.

This one has its own wonky charm and intermittent moments of genuine, depraved hilarity; it's like "Bridesmaids" drawn in crayon.

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

You won't respect yourself in the morning, but you might have some dumb, lizard-brain fun.

Blue's raw portrayal of infatuation and heartbreak is both devastating and sublime. It's unforgettable.

The East is still a compelling portrait of what gets lost (and found) when a cause becomes an obsession.

But here they’re all still young and flannel-y and full of hope—and nobody needs an app for that.