Mark Jenkins

We're supposed to be awed, but a more reasonable response is to giggle. How does a Kevlar tie kill? And if it can, why hasn't the CIA sent a Kevlar scarf to Osama bin Laden?

Shot in New Mexico on a limited budget, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a credible depiction of the tedium, frustration and humiliation of wartime service. (Jack gets coated in human excrement not once but twice.) Naturalistic scenes of boxing, bantering and masturbation, set to a rap and hard-rock score, emphasize that these boys are young American everymen.

If that's the best Hollywood screenwriters can do, maybe they should sign up for a self-help seminar. Nothing focuses the mind like a little firewalking.

A disastrous father-son endeavor about a calamitous father-son expedition, After Earth doesn't play to the strengths of any of its major participants.

Aside from the giggles induced by the romance-novel bits, the movie's principal hazard is exhaustion. There are too many characters, and too many of them spend too much time morphing into something else. Five more like this? That would be demonic.

Neither innovative nor profound, but it is kinetic, visceral and sometimes moving.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

It's a strange sort of film that casts Gallic tough guy Jean Reno as a clean-fingernailed mogul while employing cross-dressing comic Tyler Perry as a guy capable of hand-to-hand combat with someone called The Butcher of Sligo.

Rickman is too theatrical, and too British, to vanish entirely into the person of Hilly Kristal. But he's entertaining to watch, and ultimately one of the more persuasive actors in a movie that suffers from as many odd casting decisions as Lee Daniels' The Butler.

The movie is unsurprising and not especially ambitious, but it’s agile enough to vault over most of its flaws.

Indeed, despite occasional attempts at plot and character, this is basically a roast with scenery.

At every turn, the movie is less moving than the real-life events that inspired it.

Although Boniadi makes Shirin nearly as likable as she’s supposed to be, writer-director Ramin Niami’s movie is crudely contrived and sloppily edited.

As the loosely aligned band of survivors turns into a pack of sociopathic loners, the only reasonable conclusion is that they were all pretty rotten to begin with.

Style can be a risky thing in a movie like this, which aspires above all to inoffensiveness. Originally titled "Playing the Field," which was deemed too racy, this rom-com would have been more aptly renamed "Running Out the Clock."

The story of an insurgent Indian woman certainly seems timely in 2019. Too bad the new account of her uprising, The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, is as stodgy as a movie from 1958, if not earlier.

Intriguingly, Jinn makes a plea for understanding and cooperation between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Disappointingly, writer-director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad does all too good a job burying that message within a blustering supernatural thriller.

Never before has a movie's direction and script lagged so far behind the actor's hapless persona. If Fraser's character is a human Wile E. Coyote, director Roger Kumble is barely Elmer Fudd.

First-time feature director Peter Billingsley could have enlivened the action with more vigorous editing. Everything takes too long, and the slapstick sequences are particularly lethargic.

This movie, like all of Sandler's, insists on its star's likability.

Snow Zou’s directorial debut does have a few noteworthy attributes: attractive stars, sun-dappled cinematography and an audacious payoff.

America is less successful as a debate, since it isn’t one. D’Souza controls the conversation, and thus goes unchallenged when he tries to make real-world points with make-believe scenarios.

Most of the time, though, the movie is too busy being saucy or sappy to even look at its target.

It’s just a question of what route Angie and Marco will take to happiness. Yet their unsurprising journey is lively and entertaining, thanks in equal measure to the movie’s star and its director.

The thing that really doesn’t translate is the movie’s melodramatic sensibility. What New York New York presents as profound tragedy may strike non-Chinese viewers as simple bad timing.

This engagingly goofy romantic comedy speaks the international language of food.

Breakneck chases, high-altitude jeopardy and split-second rescues upstage everything save for a flowery moral: No technological breakthrough is more disruptive than a mother’s love.

This movie’s condensed telling is somewhat bewildering, although the essentials eventually become clear. But then they’re really just a pretext for such fairy-tale wonders as an underwater city, a living island and a hummingbird air force.