Mark Feeney

A date movie “Monkey Man” is not.

There are many complaints to be made about “Wicked Little Letters” — its forced humor, its even more forced moral lessons, its tonal unevenness (flat-footed jokiness here, cheap sentimentality there) — but chief among them is wasting Buckley.

It’s a movie full of grotesques behaving more or less grotesquely. There’s a school of thought that thinks unpleasantness in a movie qualifies as moral candor and high seriousness. Executed well enough and conceived imaginatively enough, it can be. Here it’s simply unpleasantness.

Why Branagh and the screenwriter, Michael Green (he also did the two earlier Poirot adaptations), would want to bring actual, real-life horror into a mystery movie masquerading as a horror movie is a mystery beyond the powers of even Poirot to solve.

Rom-com turning into bomb-com (there are lots of explosions) is a funny idea. But since neither the rom-com nor the bomb-com is much to speak of, Ghosted isn’t either.

The Quantum Realm is definitely where the action is. Too much of it.

Banshees is like a short story trying to be a novel. The extra pages get filled with the postcard views. There are bits of wit — again, this is Martin McDonagh we’re talking about — but overall “Banshees” is lugubrious and slow.

Ticket is automatic-pilot smooth and formulaic familiar. It’s a romantic comedy, yes, and a star vehicle. But the category it most belongs to is airline movie — as in, a pleasure to watch in flight but less so on the ground.

A lot of skill and imagination went into making Blonde. It’s just that they’re misplaced. The movie has its own cracked integrity. That long runtime allows Dominik to give it a slow, inexorable rhythm. Everything has a slightly underwater quality. Stardom here has more to do with miasma than glamour.

That’s the ultimate dividedness of “The Silent Twins.” What feels most fresh and true in it is, literally, imaginary, June and Jennifer’s flights of fancy. What feels most leaden and movie-phony is based on fact.

The remake is poky and overstuffed. It’s also 17 minutes longer than the 1940 original. Granted, eight minutes of that is closing credits, but still. Pinocchio’s nose isn’t all that’s wooden and too long here.

Formally, mockumentary is something of a cliché, as is intercutting of news coverage. That’s not great. It’s worse when the clichés aren’t just stylistic.

Secret Headquarters is uneven but consistently lively. There are moments of real wit (when was the last time you saw a movie use Pig Latin?), though not enough to compensate for the fairly tired, somewhat confused action sequences.

Luck is a somewhat confounding blend of past, present, and future. The confoundedness comes of throwback elements and visionary never quite cohering — that, and an increasingly cluttered plot turning a sweet-natured film into a bit of a slog.

Pitt’s presence makes a borderline-odious piece of work watchable.

A remarkable subject, the Kraffts cry out for a remarkable filmmaker.

The movie feels increasingly tired. All that gunplay, all that traveling, all that sneering from Lloyd: Everything gets a bit . . . much.

High-seas adventure meets message movie. The adventures are good. So’s the message. The problem is that they’re sailing in different directions.

A little Waititi can go a long way, and the arch self-awareness that gave “Ragnarok” its kickiness feels increasingly tired here: more schtick than kick.

The Forgiven wants to have things both ways. Oh, look at how odiously these odious people behave — and let’s keep gawking at their odiousness. Sneering at slick emptiness becomes itself a kind of slick emptiness, only worse, since it’s self-congratulatory.

It’s nasty and clumsy, tonally erratic, lacking in texture, and pretty stupid.

The movie is alternately preposterous and predictable, forced in humor and saccharine in emotion, and it’s not exactly steady in striking a balance between the two.

What a waste of a superb actress. Buckley almost makes Men worth sitting through. Almost.

Nicolas Cage has had one of the stranger careers in Hollywood history. Considering Hollywood history, that’s saying something. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, with its splendidly winking title, trades on that strangeness.

Ultimately, Father Stu is a movie about faith, but some kinds of faith have limits. So does casting. Wahlberg as a seminarian is one kind of stretch.

Even at 104 minutes, practically a short by superhero-movie standards, Morbius feels draggy.

Sometimes it works — let’s say 12 percent of the time — and The Lost City can actually be deft and imaginative. Unfortunately, that leaves 88 percent which doesn’t.

Not to get all Aristotelian about it, but for a plot to be more than just a succession of incidents, it needs some kind of mindful opposition to the protagonist’s efforts. This “Infinite Storm” lacks.