Mark Feeney

What's most vexing about Portrait of Wally is its lack of nuance.

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.

Under a different set of circumstances - in a different society - the development might have flourished. But The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary, not fantasy.

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.

Flat-footed and far too broad, it’s a reminder why “Saturday Night Live” skits don’t run two hours and 18 minutes.

Lively, if overlong, documentary.

Both Pryce and Hopkins are fine. But on the basis of the rest of the movie they shouldn’t have a prayer.

The Outfit would be a splendid thing if limited to Rylance’s voiceover and long lingering shots of him working with fabrics.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Dust has several things to recommend it. It’s decidedly different, and that is no small accomplishment in this day and age. Snyder’s direction has real assurance, though not enough to overcome the films self-conscious — maybe self-congratulatory — weirdness.

Okonedo and Bening fare best among the surprisingly lackluster cast.

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

You feel embarrassed for Streep and Jones (Streep especially) because of the situations, often sexual, they're put in. They're definitely not mailing in their performances.

Mastering subtlety, you won't be surprised to hear, remains on Moore’s to-do list.

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).

Uncharted is big on isn’t-badness. Quite competently done (Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland, is the director), it’s mostly diverting, but not especially inspired.

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

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

Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original.

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

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.

The best thing about the movie is its look. The great Dick Pope, Leigh’s go-to cinematographer, returns to the 19th century he so masterfully re-created in “Mr. Turner,” earning an Oscar nomination. The colors in Peterloo are rich but not at all sumptuous. They look lived in. The moviemaking line between beauty that’s absorbing and beauty that’s distracting is thread-thin. Pope, who also served as chief camera operator, makes sure that the thread never breaks.

Everything is leaden, solemn, portentous. When the writing’s not wooden, it’s clumsily demotic.

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.

For all that “Eddington” variously concerns itself with politics and conspiracy theories and violence and the Western landscape, what it’s really about is social media.

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.

Premium Rush has a lot of energy - too much, it's kind of exhausting.

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 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.

Robot & Frank isn't sure whether it's a comedy or drama, buddy movie or sci-fi fantasy, family melodrama or social satire.

For a stylish thriller to work, it needs to be at least a little bit stylish and offer an occasional thrill. Deep Water does neither.

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.

Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off.

The dialogue is as pedestrian as the plotting is far-fetched.

As for other voices, the most notable are Adam Sandler, whose capuchin monkey wears out his welcome pretty quickly; Maya Rudolph, whose jivey giraffe comes perilously close to aural blackface; and Nick Nolte's gorilla.

The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.

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.

The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.

The first step in getting beyond preaching to the converted is letting the other side show how wrong it might be.

When the best thing about a movie is the title, that’s never a good sign. It’s all downhill from there? Exactly, and that’s the case with Downhill.

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.

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

Well, even on automatic pilot, as he is here, Jackson is always good company. Maggie Q’s blend of grace and gravity translates into a quiet authority. Keaton completes the trio. He’s quite droll here. No one’s better at playing a low-key wiseass. The pleasure of such company isn’t enough to compensate for watching a succession of scenes that are like recruitment ads for abattoir work.

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.

Bertrand does his jelly-belly best to keep Starbuck a comedy. But even the broadest shtick can’t prevent a movie that features a Busby Berkeley-style group hug from becoming a male weepie. Or a testimonial to Planned Parenthood.

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.

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

The humor is crass when it isn’t forced. The violence, which barely pauses for reloading, feels even more mechanical than it does mindless, and it’s very mindless. How can a movie so full of action feel so tired?

It swoops, it pans, it noses around. The camerawork is almost as agitated as the editing. The directors seem to be trying to compensate for all the speechifying with as much random motion as possible.

School is endlessly talky, with dialogue that has the consistency of melted licorice (red or black, your choice). The one thing to be said for Theodore Shapiro’s muscularly egregious score is that the music makes it marginally easier to miss what the characters are saying.

A documentary about comedy needs to be funny. The old guys, as noted, have definitely lost a lot off their collective fastball.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Beer Run is tonal haphazardness. Sometimes it’s meant to be funny — other times serious — other times even solemn. (Alternate title: “Chickie Learns About the Horrors of War.”) The few jokes that are clearly intentional tend to fall flat.

Andy Serkis directed. Serkis, who’s given so many memorable acting performances (Gollum! Caesar the chimpanzee!), doesn’t elicit any here. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the movie, which makes its lack of visual texture all the more dispiriting.

Beyond the Black Rainbow has a doomy, dreamy, druggy, draggy feel that's impressively sustained - until it becomes oppressive, then pointless, then laughable.

To those of us in the audience who might be strangers in paranormal precincts, it looks suspiciously like a séance.

The Leisure Seeker is slack and episodic in a way that only a committee could love. The sense of energy and surprise that one expects from a road movie is nowhere to be found. The pleasure of Mirren and Sutherland’s company is considerable, but not that considerable.

This is a movie with weapons-grade mommy issues.

Jamie Foxx is always interesting to watch. His latest movie isn’t. With “Day Shift,” reach for the garlic, not the remote.

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.

As morally engaged as the movie is, it’s also argumentatively slack. Precisely because it’s so easy to agree that hunger is bad, it’s hard to agree what to do.

Where the Crawdads Sing, based on Delia Owens’s best-selling novel, is long on setting and atmosphere. It’s short on most everything else. Droopy in pace, it’s increasingly drippy in feeling.

Its anti-abortion stance aside, October Baby looks and feels like a Lifetime movie waiting not to happen.

Moore shows newsreel footage of Hitler delivering a speech. Only it’s not Hitler’s voice we hear. It’s Trump’s. Get it? Sure you do, and as you do the documentary slips the surly bonds of sanity — even of agitprop — to enter a realm of its own polemical making. Words cannot do justice to such an editorial decision. Well, maybe five can: intellectually null and morally contemptible.

The neatness of the plotting becomes almost comical after a while. Construction is one thing; contrivance is another.

In his last movie, The King of Staten Island (2020), Apatow was stretching, both emotionally and tonally, and it largely worked. Here he isn’t, and it doesn’t.

All kinds of stuff happens. Much of it is loud, confusing, and badly paced. From a superhero-movie perspective, it’s the last one of those three that’s most problematic. Leaden and flaccid are a bad combination.

His Unhinged character is a pill-popping mouth breather with a sweaty beard and big, big gut. He combines the cruelty of a bear-baiter with the appearance of an actual bear. It’s kind of a neat trick, actually: the unbearable bearishness of Russell Crowe. If Disney goes the “Jungle Book” route again, consider him a lock for Baloo.

In fairness, putting holiness onscreen is an enormous challenge. It can be done, as several directors have shown, most notably Dreyer and Bresson. Bad enough that Joffe is the poor man's Lean. He's also the nonbelieving man's Dreyer and Bresson.

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.

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.

What the movie lacks in wit it makes up for with variety.

Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).

It's always raining or snowing or misting. This makes for a nice visual, but it also makes the scenes look interchangeable. This is even more of a problem because the writer-director, Michael J. Bassett, imparts no shape to the story. Many movies suffer from worse problems, but not many waste the talents of Max von Sydow, as Solomon's father, or Pete Postlethwaite.

Is Borgman a fable? A fairy tale? A parable? An allegory? A burlesque of Western bourgeois life in the 21st century? One thing Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s film isn’t is a black comedy, even if that’s what it’s meant to be. The movie’s black, all right, but a comedy has to be funny.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie earns itself a footnote in any comprehensive history of local movie exhibition. This has got to be the first time a wedgie has been inflicted onscreen at the Kendall.

The problem with this numbskull travesty isn't that it's fatuous and smug (which it is). It's that it's slack and dull.