Mark Feeney

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.

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

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.

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.

High Tech, Low Life has a nice easy rhythm. It feels neither hurried nor emphatic. There’s no narration. Zola and Tiger do most of the talking.

Jig is involving, if at times overly slick.

It’s not hard to see the script’s appeal for the actors, John David Washington and Zendaya. Playing the only characters in the movie, they get a very serious workout and give seriously good performances.

Okonedo and Bening fare best among the surprisingly lackluster cast.

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

Lively, if overlong, documentary.

A treatment of Foster so reverential it verges on camp.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

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.

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

The best thing about the picture (unless you like exploding cars, in which case the rest of the movie is just so many interruptions between getting to see all these big old '70s boats going boom) is its proudly hammy supporting cast.

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.

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

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

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.