Mark Kennedy

Amsterdam reaches for something contemporary to say about race relations, concentration of wealth, veterans and fascism but ends up with a plodding, mannerist noise.

Reminders of Him is a well-crafted, well-acted sad-happy Hoover adaptation.

Spenser Confidential is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

It’s a film no one really demanded and yet is loads of fun.

Part of the problem of “Chapter 1” is that in addition to overstuffing it with too many characters, the editing is pretty bad. Viewers will struggle with some violent cuts in which Costner has jumped the action forward months within the same chapter without any clues.

Golda has seeds of interesting insights, like the suggestion that she was betrayed by some of the men she relied on during the war and yet protected them. Or how false intelligence is nothing new when it comes to Middle Eastern conflicts. Or how female leaders inevitably face catch-22s. But none of these is taken.

Black’s filmmaking is old-school, grounded in ’80s humor, reveling at its over-the-topness and often gleefully thumbing its nose at political correctness. That might be refreshing, but it also can lead to questionable decisions.

At the film’s center is Q but there is a hollowness there. She can rappel down a staircase using a fire hose, endure waterboarding and use a dinner tray as an assault weapon, but there’s little insight in her inner life or emotions and her backstory appears too late.

How do you go back and yet forward at the same time? The filmmakers have rather cleverly done that by incorporating plot points from the first two movies and building out with new characters and blurring the divide between flesh and digital worlds.

Director William Eubank keeps the action taut and the look of the film is realistically impressive and dark, with grimy, dirty workers donning cool dive suits that make them each look like Transformers. His camera often goes tight on the shocked faces inside the helmets. Stewart, in particular, shines with a combination of steely nerves and harrowing expressions.

It’s a winking, self-aware horror movie that will make you laugh even when things are drenched in blood.

The tagline for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is “Some things are meant to stay buried.” That also applies to the misguided “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” which should definitely stay deep underground for eternity.

The little blue alien who can sprint quicker than the speed of light has ironically benefited from slowing it down, taking a pit stop to retool and emerge this month as a total crowd-pleaser.

This is pure lazy storytelling, like thinking that just showing us a clip of Bob Ross painting is somehow uproariously funny.

A new directing and writing team fails to shock or scare with a color-by-numbers plot and a meandering, languid wannabe frightfest.

Nostalgia is not a perfect film but it is moving and sensitive. You leave with your head in the clouds and a new view of your precious stuff.

Few films in memory have squandered so much acting talent in such a cliche-ridden, exploitative and dishonest way.

Honest Thief, co-written and directed by Mark Williams, is a predictable and slack affair, relying on eerie music, dark sets and smoke to create tension. There is no particular set of skills here.

Wandering aimlessly in the well-worn corridors of 1980s puerile frat flicks, Life of the Party wobbles to a predictable end and then sort of finishes without a bang.

Writer-director Florian Zeller’s second installment in his trilogy examining mental health is an emotional wrecking ball almost exquisite in its destructive power.

Paramount’s limp, animated remake actually triggers new stereotypes in the service of trying to expose racism for a pre-teen audience. The studio seems to have reached for legitimacy by bringing the venerated Brooks along for the bumpy ride, darkening both legacies. What emerged sits uneasily at the corner of tribute, parody, theft and laziness.

The Jared Hess-directed action-adventure artfully straddles the line between delighting preteen gamers and keeping their parents awake.

Wonder Park has a great premise about a spunky kid engineer and a world she constructs taking flight, but takes a few too many dark loop-de-loops and crashes hard. If you pass this amusement park, skip it.

It is more like half a movie, standing in the shadow of its parent. It is a film made to sell us more lunchboxes.

If the “Insidious” franchise is your jam, by all means go and see the original Fab Four of the Lambert family battle hollow-eyed demons for perhaps the last time. But for everyone else, why not let the past stay in the past?

Overly long, bombastic and poorly focused.

More concrete examples of how mushrooms or dropping acid aided life are sorely needed.

Next Goal Wins isn’t a tale of “woe” or “woah!” but “meh.”