Mark Feeney

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — which sounds like a Boy Scout jamboree presided over by Donald Trump — is a very traditional movie masquerading as a very odd movie. What helps make it a good movie is how well it (mostly) maintains a balance between tradition and oddity.

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.

It's a morality play, full of hopeless tosh. Still, Hitchcock manages to include a hallucination sequence and a highly suggestive spurt from a soda siphon. [12 Jan 2020]

Listening to Taylor is so compelling the screen could be blank and “Lost Tapes” would still be interesting. But director Nanette Burstein keeps things visually abundant with home movies, snapshots, film stills, film clips, newsreels, publicity photos.

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

Like Lyon balancing looking out and looking in “The Bikeriders,” Nichols balances the mythic and mundane in this version.

It’s not that any of the actors are bad. Zendaya has a screen authority that goes way beyond that imperious look. It’s just that none of them is especially compelling.

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.

Civil War can, and frequently does, put its characters through an emotional wringer. It puts viewers through one, too. But those characters seem less like people with actual feelings to be wrung than means to Garland’s filmmaking ends.

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.

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.

The Pigeon Tunnel is mannered, but one could argue that’s fitting. It’s hard to get more mannered than the le Carré prose style and plotting. Yet no character inhabiting the novels, not even George Smiley, is as riveting and memorable as David Cornwell. Anything that gets between him and the viewer is not a good thing.

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.

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

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.

This is a movie with weapons-grade mommy issues.

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

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.

GdTP starts out pretty slow and doesn’t speed up for far too long — it’s the rare movie that might accurately be described as more imaginative than good — but the occasional bit of inspiration like the tree-branch proboscis encourages the viewer to hang on. It’s a nose job like no other.

Black Enough is smart, lively, and sprawling.

Enola doesn’t just break the fourth wall. She tickles it, winks at it, and tugs at its sleeve. With another actress, this would be annoying. With Brown, it’s charming.

Jenkins has given the documentary a structure that’s largely chronological but primarily thematic. The shifting around makes for a nice flow. The film moves along crisply without ever feeling hectic or rushed.

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.

The Good Nurse is at its best as a medical police procedural. It helps that Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha, playing the cops, give solid, understated performances.

This one has a tang and texture and rare sense of everyday epiphany. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you find out you’ve figured wrong.

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.

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.

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.

Decision has real velocity without in any way feeling hectic or rushed.

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.

TÁR is ambitious, unusual, forceful, and ultimately frustrating, an emotional epic that’s also a nose-against-the-glass view of classical music and unconventional take on the #MeToo movement in that world.

Stars at Noon trades too much on a tradition of older, maybe not better but certainly more urgent movies. Somewhere deep, deep in its heart is the memory of Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum.

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.

It’s been seven years since the writer-director David O. Russell’s last movie. At its frequent best, “Amsterdam” makes it worth the wait.

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.

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

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.

Ramsey is close to a force of nature, equally skilled at conveying Birdy’s curiosity, humor, orneriness, and not-infrequent bewilderment. In other words, she’s a 14-year-old.

Combining as it does great admiration with an acknowledgment of flaws, “Sidney” is like Ethan Hawke’s recent HBO Max documentary about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, “The Last Movie Stars.”

Darling never quite ignites. The closest it gets to ignition is Pugh’s performance. Styles is perfectly fine, but it’s her movie.

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.

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

Morgen’s immersive, sometimes convulsive, visual approach justifies the format. This is filmmaking that’s anything but chaste. Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject.

Watching “Story,” one realizes that so much of what most of us most love about the movies isn’t the medium, per se, but its appurtenances: stardom and glamour and the pull of narrative. What Cousins loves is the medium. We love the effects. He loves the cause.

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.

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

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 doesn’t give the sense of McEnroe as a person that Douglas’s film does. But it gives a rather astonishing sense of him as a player. With all due respect to those other McEnroe guises, that’s the one that matters.

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

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.

Once the comedy does kick in, around the 100-minute mark, it does so quite nastily. The movie never quite recovers.

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.

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

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.

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.

The heart of the movie is the discussions among the divers and, even more, the scenes in the caves. Simply as a technical achievement, the underground and underwater filming is highly impressive.

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.

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.

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

Cumming’s performance, or presentation, is at once casual and assured, which makes it all the more compelling.

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

From start to finish, you don’t know what’s coming next in Nope. When was the last time you saw a movie where that was true? Nope is deeply strange, and Jordan Peele knows exactly what he’s doing with that strangeness. It’s designedly strange. It’s coherently strange.

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

The unhurried pace Denis maintains insures that the subplots feel less like distractions than a nod to the contradictoriness of daily life.

Visually, the movie is surprisingly inventive, with takeoffs on everything from manga to Hokusai prints. Sure, a lot of the jokes are dumb — you got a problem with that? — but “Paws” is quite smart.

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.

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.

So “Marcel” is sweet, it’s charming, it’s clever. It’s also about as long an 89 minutes as you’re likely to spend in a movie theater this summer.

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.

With his fondness for long takes and unobtrusive camerawork, Panahi has a real knack for maintaining a balance between comedy, usually courtesy of the younger son, and deeper feeling.

A good movie, Lost Illusions aspires to be a great one, but that ambition helps keep it from being a better movie. It’s overstuffed and a mite too leisurely: a self-consciously dignified film whose least dignified characters are its most compelling ones.

When Elvis is good, it’s quite good, in an awful sort of way. When it’s awful, it’s quite awful, in an entertaining sort of way. The movie can’t make up its mind if it’s chronicling a struggle for the soul of America (spoiler alert: bye-bye Beale Street, hello, Vegas) or it’s just a tabloid schlockfest.

The Spanish-Argentine comedy is about as far from being a CGI-fest as you can get, but Cruz’s hair is a very special special effect. Its oxblood abundance is torrential, jungley, diluvian, an in-your-face to the very concept of baldness. It’s also gloriously ridiculous, and ridiculousness masquerading as glory — male pomposity and artistic pretension, too — is what “Official Competition” is all about.

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.

All the actors are very good, though Raiff, who’s in almost every scene, can get a little wearying with his combination of high energy and touch of winsomeness.

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

This is a movie that’s definitely got game. But what’s richest and best about Hustle is how, yes, it’s a character study. It’s not in the same league as “Hoop Dreams” or “High Flying Bird” or even “Hoosiers” (1986) — what is it about basketball-movie titles and the letter “h”? — but it’s smart and agreeable and, emotionally, it gives a true bounce.

Benediction has at least three things in common with its immediate predecessor, “A Quiet Passion” (2016). Both are biographies of poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Emily Dickinson, respectively. Both are suffused with great feeling. And despite having much to recommend them, both don’t really work.

Crimes of the Future works better as sort-of treatise than sort-of thriller. It’s a paradoxical thing to say about a filmmaker as intensely visual as Cronenberg, but his ideas are even more shocking than his images.

There are many twists and turns to the story, and the documentary is consistently surprising.

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

The editing of the action sequences — and let’s face it, they’re the heart of the movie — is terrifically effective. Speed is one thing. Clarity is another. Top Gun: Maverick has both.

Hurwitz takes a terrific subject and treats it with undisguised, and justified, affection.

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

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

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

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.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

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.

It’s a happy task to report that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a marked improvement on “Crimes.”

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.

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.