Mark Feeney

Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.

Assured and well made (Dominic Cooke directed), The Courier offers bits of tradecraft — Penkovsky photographing documents with a miniature camera, a special tie clip used as identity-establishing bona fide — and a high-stakes extraction plan gets put in motion. But it’s less about what gets done than the persons doing it.

Jig is involving, if at times overly slick.

Even if it ultimately doesn’t quite take off, it’s a marvel of craft and care and detail. It’s also not quite like anything else.

Even when events get intense, even violent, and they do, there’s nothing abrupt. Corpus Christi never erupts. It unfolds.

What Allied increasingly offers is insincere sincerity: As the emotional quotient rises, so does the phoniness.

To the movie’s credit, it tries to balance action and thrills with domestic conflict. Perhaps not surprisingly, the family stuff feels seriously subsidiary to the scary stuff. Beast is going through the motions with father-daughter tension. The humans-as-prey tension, that’s a different story.

The documentary really lays on the praise and sentiment. That may not be unusual in such an enterprise, but it gets tired sooner rather than later.

The chief problem is the documentary’s misapprehension of the artistic personality.

What Emily the Criminal really is is a character study; and this is where Plaza comes in. She’s the really good thing the movie has going for it. Over the course of 96 minutes, Emily will do some surprising things. Plaza makes them seem as natural as swiping a credit card, and in both senses of the verb.

Full of energy and attitude, it’s the sort of movie that likes to startle, if not necessarily shock. No wonder Dope was an audience favorite at Sundance last winter.

Till avoids all flash. That makes it a bit didactic at times, but didacticism is a form of commitment: not so much political, though there’s certainly that, but also to emotional truth and simple human decency.

Demonstrating a mastery of euphemism and understatement, Ringo recalls how the Byrds “introduced us to a hallucinogenic situation, and we had a really good time.” Consistently amiable, if a bit wandery, Echo in the Canyon provides a good time, too.

The only real tension the documentary has, once Steinbauer has his first meeting with Rebney, is whether the filmmaker is celebrating him more than exploiting him.

Ed Harris, who voices Blade Ranger, the no-nonsense helicopter who heads the fire-and-rescue operation, doesn’t lay it on too strong. Julie Bowen, as Lil’ Dipper, an air tanker, does.

Journal is Canedy’s story, but it’s Michael B. Jordan’s movie. Stalwart, quietly forceful, he seems positively . . . Denzelian.

It’s amiable and unpretentious, if also slack and diffuse.

A better title might have been “All the Movies in the World.” We get a thriller, of sorts, and a crime movie, of sorts (Romain Duris, as a kidnapper, gives the most appealing performance). It’s also a morality tale crossed with family melodrama.

Gloria Bell is so comfortable in its skin because it’s a second skin. The talented Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio has done this before.

With Johnson’s arrival, “Jungle Cruise” enters “Raiders of the Lost Ark” territory. It’s not just the cascading action adventure in an exotic setting. It’s also James Howard Newton’s score sounding so much like John Williams that Williams should get royalties.

This is the rare movie that might benefit from silence. Partly that’s because of the squeezed syrup of Randy Newman’s score.

Hardy once again shows what quiet force and phenomenal range he has.

Crump has directed Troublemakers with assurance and energy. Perhaps too much so.

The Beast is an unusual film: challenging, ambitious, and inward. Even when inscrutable, as it often is, it holds the attention, though less so the longer it lasts, and it lasts nearly 2½ hours.

The problem is that the heart of the movie is McGowan. He's just not a very compelling figure. He's a bit doughy and inert.

The effect is less video-game-turned-movie than zombie movie minus zombies: stilted, static, s-l-o-o-o-w. The ending couldn’t set up a sequel more clearly if “To be continued” appeared on a title card. Don’t count on it. Game on? Game over.

Sacrifice wants to have it both ways. It's willing neither to give itself up to the goofy sincerity of genre conventions nor to make the demands on viewers that serious drama requires. The sacrifices Chen's characters make would signify that much more if he'd made a sacrifice or two himself.

The best thing in the movie is Pratt. Firmly established in not one but two franchises — Guardians of the Galaxy and the Jurassic Park reboot — he’s come a long way from Parks and Recreation. He alternates here between charming wise guy and sensitive family man: Peter Quill domesticated.

Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.

A lot of talent gets wasted in Wilson: not just Harrelson, Dern, and Clowes.

The best thing about The Last Duel is its very handsome look, courtesy of Scott’s go-to cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski.

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 idea behind Girl Rising is strikingly simple and even more strikingly imaginative.

The first hour or so is lively, a bit crude, and more fun than it has any right to be. Expect double crosses, switcheroos, serious spoiler-level plot twists. Most are ridiculous, but that’s OK. The excitement starts to feel mechanical, even stale, during the second hour.

Along the way, good food is eaten, the scenery is fabulous, and when the son and a local woman meet cute she not only speaks excellent English but is gorgeous and endlessly understanding. There are some laughs. There are some tears. There’s even a little swearing. Made in Italy has been saddled with what must be the year’s least-deserved R rating.

More to the point, the title doubles as accusation. Progress is dangerous and requires survival tactics, just as a hurricane or avalanche does.

The biggest problem with Where’s My Roy Cohn? is the documentary’s attitude toward its subject: not that it’s critical (an uncritical approach to Cohn would be about as interesting as a daytime visit to Studio 54), but that it so thoroughly accepts his view of himself.

Priest is based on a series of Korean graphic novels. What it's really based on, though, is other movies - a whole lot of other movies.

When the film keeps things simple, it’s at its best: uncluttered and assured.

A deeply felt, and numbingly partisan, documentary about how the Mormon Church both bankrolled and masterminded passage of the initiative.

As directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Old Guard is assured and textureless: competence doing the work of inspiration. The movie is like an extended trailer for itself.

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

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

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.

The constant sense of low-grade menace that helps make the first quarter of The Card Counter intriguing and effective gets put on hold, in a good way, whenever Haddish is on screen.

Ad Astra is moody, meditative, and slow (though not the knife fight or rover demolition derby).

New York looks very appealing: uptown, downtown, even the little bit of Brooklyn we see. Think of “Boy” as a Bridges highlight reel and Gotham travelogue, instead of precious coming-of-age story, and it’s not half bad. But it isn’t, so it is.

The movie emphasizes personal relationships as other Marvel movies haven’t, and it has a vaguely religioso quality.

The movie is mostly grim, largely nasty, and gloatingly violent. (It is never a good idea to start a film with a child subjected to violence.) Really, what Harder is is glorified, post-Tarantino violence punctuated by exposition.

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.

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.

You marvel all the more at Litondo's and Harris's performances, considering how much claptrap Ann Peacock's script requires them to put up with.

Café Society is a romantic comedy where the romance is lackluster and the comedy an afterthought.

The biggest problem One for the Money faces is trying to have it both ways: gritty-ethnic inner city vs. girly-girly comic.

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.

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.

A treatment of Foster so reverential it verges on camp.

She (Seyfried) provides some real charm, something the movie otherwise lacks. She also seems like a plausible part of the action in a way that Kunis never did.

Overall the results are amiable, if also slack and talky.

Anyone much over the age of 15 who saw the earlier movies knew they were silly. That didn’t matter. What mattered is that they didn’t feel silly. “Resurrections” does.

It has its moments, most of them owing to a quite-phenomenal Mckenna Grace,as a 12-year-old techno wiz, and Paul Rudd, as an easygoing science teacher, but they don’t make up for a general flat-footedness and tendency to wobble.

It’s never a good sign when the most dramatic scene in a movie owes its power to C-SPAN footage. That’s the case with The Report.

It’s McKellen’s and Mirren’s. Their back-and-forth provides a satisfaction akin to watching two masters volley at Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the ball these masters are playing with manages the perplexing trick of being worn and waterlogged while also far too bouncy: stodginess and over-plotting is not a good combination.

Chazz Palminteri's the best thing in the movie. He now has the look of a slightly beefier Steve Buscemi. But where Buscemi is all nerves on edge and something bad waiting to happen, Palminteri has a winning ease.

The Cotton Club does look terrific and has its moments. It’s certainly not an embarrassment. It’s just not . . . very good.

House of Gucci is pretty much can’t-miss. Except that it does.

Everyone in the documentary agrees that the undertaking was truly terrible and misconceived. The extensive footage here does nothing to contradict such a view.

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

Maybe the most inexplicable thing among the movie’s many inexplicabilities is the near-complete waste it makes of an actress as gifted as Cotillard.

Reviewing a Tyler Perry movie is a bit like reviewing the weather report. People who want to watch it are going to do so, regardless of what anyone says about it. And that's not even factoring in Charlie Sheen.

When MacArthur stands side by side with Hirohito (Takatarô Kataoka), it’s the ultimate in victor-vanquished encounters. That’s also true whenever Jones shares a scene with Fox.

So it’s no small tribute to Feldstein — who really is something — to say that she’s the very best thing in How to Build a Girl despite being so wildly miscast. Her performance is a tour de force, even if it’s too forceful for either its own good or that of the movie.

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

Fatiguing for grown-ups, “TWT” may well scare, or at least unsettle, kids under 6. And kids much over 6 are likely to tire of the unrelenting cutesiness.

The best thing about Money for Nothing is the many talking heads trying to explain what monetary policy is and what the Fed does: controlling the supply of money and, with any luck, guiding the economy.

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.

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.

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

The editing of the action sequences is an insult to the idea of narrative clarity.

Hunter has a scene with Pacino in a cafeteria where she expresses a degree of emotional pain, just through how she looks at him and holds her head, that’s at once awful to see and magnificent. It’s hard to figure out what Pacino saw in the script. What Hunter saw was this scene and getting to act with Pacino.

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.

One wonders if a director more playful than Kenneth Branagh might have come up with something less hectic and more fun — or even just as hectic and more fun. Taika Waititi, anyone? Jojo Rabbit is almost as odd a name as Artemis Fowl.

A date movie “Monkey Man” is not.

History is just one big playpen for The King’s Man, but some games are less fun than others. Maybe using a glimpse of Hitler for a cheap thrill wouldn’t seem quite so grotesque in a movie that were more entertaining, but The King’s Man isn’t so it does.

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.

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.

The moral weight of Hitler's Children is unmistakable. So is that weight's inertness.

The Children Act isn’t all that interesting a movie, despite the many talented people involved and the generally high level of work they do. The most interesting thing about it is how it presents a case study in the very different way style can determine what works on the screen vs. what works on the page.

That Morgan Freeman voice! It’s so rich and full and authoritative that even when he’s telling Judah, “OK, OK,” you almost believe people used that word in the year 33. If they were very progressive.

Their (Danner/Lithgow) being together feels more like a device — there’d be no movie without their relationship — than it does a romance. There’s a lack of chemistry that makes for a listlessness of narrative.

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 best thing about Akin’s film is the dance stuff. The movie begins with arresting black-and-white archival footage of Georgian dancing. The rehearsals in the dance studio come alive, thanks in no small part to the drum-and-accordion accompaniment. Kinetically, the style of dance is percussive and assertive. It doesn’t so much flow as boil.

Balloon manages to combine slickness and sentimentality, predictability and implausibility. The fact that it’s based on a true story — the closing credits include photographs of the actual families — does not make up for the amassing of red herrings, close calls, and occasions for head-scratching.

The situation provides a framework for the writer-director, Kogonada (“Columbus,” 2017), to dwell on the workings of memory and the various meanings of mortality and family. This is rich and challenging material. “After Yang,” while pleasant enough and certainly distinctive, isn’t altogether up to the challenge.

Titane is deeply unpleasant, and its narrative borders on the inexplicable — not just the sex and pregnancy — but Ducournau knows what’s she’s doing, even if the audience doesn’t know why she’s doing it.

The Forger wants to be many things: gritty crime thriller, heist picture, domestic drama. Family bonds get “forged,” too, right? Director Philip Martin, who’s mainly done British TV work, is best known for “Prime Suspect 7.” Martin keeps things moving a little too briskly, perhaps. Scenes generally feel underdeveloped, and transitions abrupt.

A bland, insistently amiable comedy that doubles as road movie.