Mark Feeney

The Bad Guys takes the cute kid with a fishing pole in the DreamWorks logo and replaces him with a rather raffish-looking wolf who sneaks his way up onto that crescent moon. Right off the bat, we’re being told to expect irreverence and inventiveness. Those expectations will be met.

The first two-thirds is lively in pace, all of it is amiable in tone and sun-splashed in appearance. The final half hour gets a bit gushy. It’s mostly devoted to Alpert’s blissful second marriage, to singer Lani Hall — they’ve been married nearly 50 years — and his philanthropic largess. But since there’s a lot to gush about, that’s okay.

You may not recognize the Vignelli name, but you certainly recognize their designs.

The Guilty gets less and less plausible, not least of all in how neatly it ties together various plot elements. For its first 40 minutes or so, the movie shows how much Gyllenhaal and Fuqua can do with little. Confinement becomes a dramatic launching pad. Then melodrama kicks in, and what had been a gripping offbeat thriller becomes a morality tale (including a truly shameless plot twist).

From Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Strange, Cumberbatch has excelled at playing oddball heroes. Wain extends that line. As noted, though, things darken once oddball behavior becomes something more than that, and this darkening makes the second half of the movie feel slightly stilted and increasingly grim.

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.

The documentary has a pleasing offhandedness. The same cannot be said of its subject. Christo, who turns 84 on June 13, is precise and highly directed.

The Eamery, as some called it, was highly successful as a business - and, more important, as an exercise in tastemaking. "We wanted to make the best for the most for the least,'' the Eameses like to say.

The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.

Precise, expert execution can’t compensate for forced situations and an unenforced imaginative rigor. It’s not so much that all the characters are so unsympathetic. It’s that they’re all so uninteresting. Caricature without gusto is shrink wrap covering . . . shrink wrap.

All in all, Beaton could have been a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel — both belonged to the Bright Young Things, in ’20s London — except that he and Waugh detested each other.

Normal, as you’ve no doubt gathered by now, is pretty abnormal, and the extended reveal of the abnormality wastes much of what was good about the first half of the movie.

For much of its first half, Chef Flynn feels like an after-school special with a difference — a big, big difference.

This is a movie with weapons-grade mommy issues.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to its two leads, The Good House very much succeeds as character study. As narrative, it doesn’t fare anywhere near as well.

Put Christian Bale behind the wheel, and Hit & Run would make a billion bucks - except then there'd be no room for Shepard, and that movie would hardly be worth watching.

It can seem sometimes that Hollywood has a monopoly on stupid, obnoxious comedy. Anyone who sees Klown will learn otherwise. Comedy can be just as stupid and obnoxious in Danish.

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.

The filmmaking is stylish yet impersonal — or can true style be impersonal? Maybe that’s why proficiency is a better word. A general slickness obtains.

Sometimes Free Guy expands on its predecessors, just as often it doesn’t. In such an uninspired movie summer, derivativeness may not be as much of a problem, and the movie does have its moments.

Eva Vitija’s documentary is lean and lucid and even at 84 minutes never feels hurried.

Rodney Ascher directed Glitch. He’s best known for Room 237 (2012), an inspired look at several bizarre theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Glitch ups the ante on that documentary and then some. It looks at a bizarre theory about everything. The result is lively, playful, and busy — in a very good way.

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.

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.

Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique. Her thoughtful presence is a very welcome departure from the standard rock-doc formula. She provides the kind of reality check — an under-the-influence Manuel almost got her killed when he totaled her Mustang, with her in the passenger seat — rarely found in such films. In that sense, it isn’t just the Band that was different but “Once Were Brothers” is, too.

Babylon is a labor of love that never feels laborious. But as the allusions and inside jokes pile up, they become distracting. Or they do if you care about old movies.

The turbulence of the life and the wondrousness of the talent are an irresistible combination. Striking a balance between the two isn’t easy, but at its conclusion Respect finds a way to bring together woman and artist in a way that does justice to both.

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.

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.

Strange’s superpowers are many. So are Cumberbatch’s, and one of them is making sneering seem practically jolly.

Whenever Ronan’s not on the screen, “See” seems to lose something. It’s no mystery why.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

Oranges and Sunshine is like a Mike Leigh movie drained of all its bodily fluids.

In other words, it’s hopeless tosh — but expertly done hopeless tosh.

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

Lightyear overcomes gravity of the physical sort. That’s what Space Command specializes in. It has a harder time with the emotional kind.

What’s best about the movie is mood and texture, and the ensemble cast (the second best thing about the movie) mostly defers to those qualities. In that sense, Motherless Brooklyn might be described as novelistic, and in a good way.

Bride Flight is pretty predictable once the basic situation gets established.

The quality of the acting makes it easy to overlook how increasingly leaden Stillwater becomes — but not easy enough.

A line gets crossed. It isn’t the one between California and Nevada. It’s the one from “Bad” to worse.

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.

Full of slick editing and various zippy technical tricks: split screens, sped-up footage, song lyrics and other text (in wild fonts) superimposed on the screen. Sometimes it's fun. More often it's distracting.

What is offensive is how the masquerade punks these other people - and to no seeming purpose, other than to provide Gandhi with footage for this documentary.

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

Like the title characters and the performances that go with them, Being the Ricardos has real zip. It’s a virtue of Sorkin’s tendency to glibness. His writing can be irritatingly slick, but never boring.

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

So the big surprise about White Boy Rick is how well the movie works. It’s one thing to know a story is based on nonfiction. Being made to believe its plausibility is something else. White Boy Rick you believe.

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.

Rapt is smooth, cool, and efficient. It's a movie with very little wasted motion - or, for much of its length, wasted emotion.

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

Visually as well as emotionally, there’s more energy here than in some action movies.

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

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.

Emotionally, the movie is a mess. It can be even messier tonally. As storytelling, though, “Dad” moves right along. Viewers may look away at times, but they don’t look at their watches.

There’s some scary bad-guy stuff in the movie, but nothing to compare for fearfulness with its climactic forest fire.

It's the movie "Yellow Submarine'' should have been but didn't know how to be.

Kohl-eyed and in command, she vamps, she camps, she stamps — and not just her foot. If Stone put any more spin on her line readings, she could audition to play a gyroscope.

Nobility with little pacing, imagination, or energy tends not to work too well on the screen. Rahim has the eyes of the young Mandy Patinkin. If only he had some of the wildness.

Usually loud and almost always ridiculous, F9 is action-packed enough to make your carburetors seize up.

The novel is extremely funny. It's hilarious as well as horrific (all sorts of bad things are going on outside the limo - and a few inside of it, too). Yet whenever the movie is funny, it feels like a mistake. Comedy has never been a Cronenberg strength.

There’s a reason the names in the title don’t appear in alphabetical order. Abdul is the far more interesting character, but it’s her majesty the movie dotes on. God save the queen? Oh yes, and God help the rest of us.

Old Clint is still Clint, but he definitely looks a little stooped and more than a little frail. There’s an unexpected benefit to that frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.

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.

Lawless is very bloody - but the scenery and production design are a whole lot nicer.

All the animals are computer-generated, not that you’d know it by looking at them. Their interactions with the human characters are seamless — and, it must be said, at times the animal characters come across as less cartoony than the human ones.

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 movie has elements of road picture, social satire, and odd-couple romance, but mostly it's about lack of pacing and tone. Somewhere very (very) deep in here is a whiff of "Citizen Ruth," and who knows what Alexander Payne might have done with this material. Instead we know what writer-director Robbie Pickering has done with it, and that ain't much.

Is the movie any good, and does Irving embarrass himself? The answers are: sort of, and nowhere near.

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.

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.

Finch pretty quickly settles into a buddy picture. It’s a dog picture, too, of course, Goodyear, a mutt, being so good at mugging for the camera. The whole thing is as sentimental as it is implausible, and it’s very implausible.

Joffe's biggest mistake isn't visual, it's chronological. What makes Pinkie so terrifying in the novel is that he's just 17.

The biggest problem with the documentary, besides the overexposure of its namesake, is length.

Hill’s braying-bro performance is indelible. Unfortunately. Go ahead, try to forget his more-more-more grin as he fires away, testing those Chinese bullets. He’s so grotesque you can’t take your eyes off of him. He’s also so grotesque you really want to.

Slick, loud, assured, overplotted (way overplotted), fairly diverting, and pretty much empty.

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.

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.

It treats the Bakkers as something between grotesques and simpletons, which does rather limit the biopic angle. Satirizing televangelism is such low-hanging fruit it’s windfall. As for camp, it’s hard to avoid in a movie with Tammy Faye as its title character.

Manages to be both compelling and unsatisfying. But what limits it isn't lack of execution. The movie is many things, but a mess isn't one of them. Estes knows exactly what he wants. Whether it's worth wanting is another matter.

Ridiculous even by superhero standards, it remains more or less coherent.

One of the best things about the documentary is their interaction, as Depp visits Steadman at his home in the English countryside — surely, it has a garden? — watching him draw and paint (and splatter) in his studio while asking him questions about his life and work.

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.

Debt is bad, we can all agree, as is its conceptual cousin, greed. It would have been intellectually bracing, though, to have a Gordon Gekko equivalent on hand to argue otherwise.

The movie is what it is: relentless, shameless, and purely as an exercise in technique almost dementedly skilled. A Bay explosion explodes, a Bay collision collides, and Ambulance has both in abundance. For some viewers, the result will be 2 hours and 16 minutes of movie heaven. It might make others want to call for an ambulance.

This is movie as inundation. It’s daring, dashing, often delirious — except that the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels, as they like to bill themselves) keeps the delirium under just enough control.

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

The action gets increasingly overblown, even by superhero-movie standards. Bad as smash-crash-bash can be, portentous smash-crash-bash is far worse.

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.

With so much going on, that means a lot of balls need to be kept in the air. Some of them drop. Of course they do: The Adam Project is entertaining but no masterpiece. What’s unusual, and impressive, is that the dropped balls often keep bouncing. That’s a tribute to the movie’s wit, energy, and imaginativeness.

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 movie’s heart is completely in the right place, which, frankly, can make it a bit of a chore to watch. Moral righteousness makes the world a better place, but filmic it’s not.

Oblivion is a lot like its star: clean, cold, efficient, increasingly overblown, and not a little inexplicable.

Profile is one big gimmick, but the gimmickiness, you might say, is that in a very real sense it’s shot entirely on location. Is it a great movie? No, but it’s something rare in any medium, film or otherwise: a work in which form really is content.

Tight close-ups, jittery hand-held camera — lots and lots of jittery hand-held camera. The idea, presumably, is to impart urgency, immediacy, dynamism. Instead it causes visual exhaustion.

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.