Michael Phillips

A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."

Napoleon was many things, and with this dutiful career highlights reel, Phoenix and his director deliver glancing blows to as many aspects of the warrior-tyrant-genius-fool-lonely heart as cinematically possible in two and a half hours.

But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.

Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.

The relative success or failure of Adult Beginners, directed with a steady, nonjudgmental hand by Ross Katz, depends on how funny you find Kroll. I find him funny-ish.

The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.

Pacific Rim: Uprising may be not be much, but in the spirit of the film itself, let’s be realistic. It’s better than any of the “Transformers” movies, and shorter.

By the two-hour mark the fun had oozed out of the movie for me. It's long. Or feels it.

Keaton is the one who brings both effortless gravity and subtle levity to a film that, without him, wouldn’t have much of either.

Midway isn’t bad, really. Certainly, it gets a lot more done than the cinematic cinder block that was the 1976 historical drama also titled “Midway.”

Levy surely knew that the script at hand didn't warrant a full two-hour running time; even if you enjoy The Internship, as my son did, it feels 20 minutes over-full at least. Cut out half of the "Flashdance" and "X-Men" references, and you're halfway there.

The Proposal reworks "Two Weeks Notice" with the genders switched.

Savage Grace comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular.

It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.

It’s a strange, grimly comic collection offering many grotesque sight gags, the occasional moment of seriousness and a general wash of melancholic, photogenic, elegiac Old West atmosphere. I liked the least jokey tale the best; by the time it came along, in the fifth-out-of-six slot, I’d had it with the kidding.

Feels constrained and rather dutiful, no matter how passionate these people are about what they're observing.

She tackled "The Tempest" on stage, years ago. On screen I wish she'd (Taymor) adapted it with a freer hand, and then directed it with a more considered one.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.

An Israeli-on-Arab version of "Shampoo," You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking. But politically it's sort of interesting.

Logan is deadly serious, and while its gamer-style killing sprees are meant to be excitingly brutal, I found them numbing and, in the climax, borderline offensive.

Fans of “The Room” — they’re everywhere — will get something out of it, though I’d argue not enough; director Franco’s camera sense is neither quite in synch with Wiseau’s (thank God) or quite distinct enough in its own style.

The flaw in Death of a President isn't one of morality. It's one of dramatic interest.

Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.

The supporting players in Man on a Ledge bring more to the party than the leads, and my suspension of disbelief seems to have gotten hung up in traffic while attempting to cross the suspension-of-disbelief bridge from the Brooklyn side.

They put the "obvious" in "obvious."

A satisfying heist movie, animated or live-action, requires more selectivity and less clutter than this one. The movie dashes by door after door, but it lacks the key.

Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.

The movie's benumbed by its own parade of bad behavior. Like some of Scorsese's other second-tier works — "Casino," "Bringing Out the Dead" — the gulf between virtuoso technical facility and impoverished material cannot be bridged. It's diverting, sort of, to see DiCaprio doing lines off a stripper's posterior, but after the 90th time it's like, enough already with heinous capitalistic extremes.

In his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting.

The problems here, I think, are weirdly simple. The movie takes our knowledge and our interest in the material for granted. It zips from one number to another, throwing a ton of frenetically edited eye candy at the screen, charmlessly.

John Wick 2 stages its gun-fu melees sleekly and sometimes well, from the catacombs of Rome to the subway platforms of New York City.

The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script as crucial to the quality of a thriller.

After the fourth electrocution gag, the 10th smack in the face and the 12th assault on a wee rodent crotch, we could all use something quiet.

The very elements of Eat Pray Love that helped make it a success in 40 languages -- the breezy prose, the relentless sorting-through of dissatisfactions, a steady stream of intriguing sights -- turn the film into a travelogue with a little spiritual questing on the side.

Seeing what may be Coppola’s least compelling film has a way of reminding you of all her better ones, especially in the seriocomic vein. Those include the aforementioned “Lost in Translation,” along with “The Bling Ring,” “Somewhere,” even the playfully anachronistic “Marie Antoinette.” If they’re new to you, have at them.

Too often, though, the magic in Wicked remains stubbornly unmagical. And whenever Erivo isn’t around to make us believe, and take the mechanics of Wicked to heart, Part I reveals what’s behind the curtain, an adequate set-up for next November’s second act.

Wind River is roughly 50 percent strengths, 50 percent contrivances. Often they collide in the same scene.

Just about everything in the video-gamey World War I picture Flyboys rings false, although the planes certainly are terrific.

The film is rarely dull; it's one life-and-death sequence after another, and the filmmaking's efficient, crisply delivered. But Eastwood honors his subject without really getting under his skin.

Eastwood's foursquare directorial aesthetic tends to heighten, rather than camouflage, a screenplay's shortcomings.

I didn't laugh much, nor did my 10-year-old companions, but nobody had their soul crushed by the experience. This is the film industry's Hippocratic oath: First, crush no souls.

Routine cinema but rich history.

Kasdan has inherited much of his father's surface skills; he knows how to round out a scene and keep things on story point. But In the Land of Women doesn't for a moment feel messy and chaotic where it counts.

The teaming of Robinson and Rudd periodically gets Friendship in gear. But the film’s primary comic impulse equates to the sound of gears grinding, in an attempt to shift from second to third.

The film disappoints particularly in relation to "Young Adam," an earlier picture about sexual obsession from writer-director David Mackenzie; this one's more in line with the creamy tones and surface readings of "Asylum."

Many of the original film's booby-trap scenarios are repeated here, but without Milius' grandiosity and nihilism. There's less of both in the new Red Dawn. It's not a disaster. It's just drab.

A fine and moving film could be made from this story, which was inspired, loosely, by events and situations in the lives of Kurtzman and Orci. But the script sets an awfully low bar for Sam's redemption.

It's outlandishly gory and bluntly political, the latter being more interesting than the former. It wears out its welcome, though, long before la revolucion and sequels are promised.

Partly, I think, the problem lies in Kurzel and his key performers being so determined to make the language conversational and naturalistic, they forgot to make the individual scenes move.

While many will find Revoir Paris moving, for me it’s because the performances do the heavy lifting, effortlessly, while the material lays everything out too neatly. The mess of life, the anguish of what Mia is going through, deserves a clear-eyed exploration and a little less gloss.

The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.

The skillful quartet at the center of Drinking Buddies reveals the weaknesses in the material.

What are they trying to accomplish and is this really the best way to accomplish it?

The acting’s uniformly strong, and the script is distressingly weak.

Why isn’t the film better? Guggenheim doesn’t seem to have prodded his subjects in any interesting directions.

Swanberg may be one of the few American filmmakers who'd benefit from reading one of those "10 Rules for Mediocre Hollywood Screenwriting" how-to books. Many find a kind of truth and life and rough domestic magic in his films. Here and there, now and then, I see what they're talking about.

Ashes of Time Redux remains a hermetic and rather frustrating work, dotted by lonely, windblown figures dwarfed by the sand dunes of western China.

The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.

That narrative change works fine in principle. The larger question is one of rhythm, and the diminishing returns of one jump scare after another.

The actors save it, periodically, from itself, simply by setting a natural tone and finding some truth in an extended sketch.

Roughly the same as the first in terms of quality and style. It delivers without much visual dynamism, and with a determined emphasis on combat. In the 1951 novel the climactic battle between the good Narnians and the bad Telmarines lasted a few pages. The film version of the same battle feels like "The Longest Day."

I wish Tenet exploited its own ideas more dynamically. Nolan’s a prodigious talent. But no major director, I suppose, can avoid going sideways from time to time.

Wendell & Wild may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”

How did an apparently sincere tribute turn into such a weirdly clueless vanity project?

Woodley is an ace at handling laughter through tears — "my favorite emotion," as a character in "Steel Magnolias" once said. She improves with each new film, even when the films themselves aren't much.

This is the "Babel" or "Crash" of ensemble romantic comedies, with screenwriter Dan Fogelman mapping out several narrative surprises that throw you for little loops as they're delivered.

With "Braveheart," "Passion" and now Apocalypto, Gibson clearly has established his priorities as a director. History is gore, plus a few hearthside family interludes. The trick is instilling the audience with enough rageful bloodlust to make the story work.

I laughed at a good deal of the movie, but a good deal more of it left me with (Cohen’s intention, probably) the taste of ashes in the mouth.

I fear Spielberg and Jackson hitched their wagon to the wrong technological star here.

All the movie has, really, is Tilda Swinton acting up a storm, which is more than enough for some. For me, given what's up with the rest of the picture, it's not quite.

The Hateful Eight is an ultrawide bore.

The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction.

The acting is quite deft, if extremely broad, but screenwriter Kundo Koyama seesaws uncertainly between jokes and grief.

You find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would've improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

It is less a film than a puny trampoline -- an occasion, though a grim one, for this most fervently movie-mad of American directors to show off his love for the various pulp genres mooshed together by the 2003 Dennis Lehane novel.

It's an intriguing premise, weakened by a script lacking in strong forward motion.

It is well made as far as it goes. I wish it went beyond its own carefully prescribed limits of the commercially acceptable.

Chappaquiddick misses that target. But it’s a fairly intriguing mixture of strengths and weaknesses, a case of a sharp cast and a careful director toning up a script best described as “a good try.”

The movie, let it be said, is not awful, but the kinetic battles are chaotic, and the look of the Quantum Realm is oddly drab in its interweaving of digital and VFX elements, seeming at times to be more like several first drafts of a new “Star Wars” franchise instead of a natural extension of this one. Midway through, as everyone on screen was restating their interest in getting home again, I thought: Same!

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

The movie's all right, if you can take its rampant artificiality - and I'm not even talking about Parton's face yet.

It's not very funny, but your kids might like it.

The directive behind this sequel, clearly, was non-stop action. Let's think about that phrase a second. Do we really want our action movies to deliver action that does not stop? Ever? I get a little tired of action sequences that won't stop.

Not even the film's occasional bursts of ultra-violence, or the endlessly oozing red clay, or Hiddleston crying a red tear, or Chastain swanning around in one flaming crimson ball gown after another, can infuse this gorgeous bore with anything like red-blooded suspense.

The movie, full of talented performers in search of a more propulsive vehicle, settles for workmanlike cover-band status, which makes this a cover-band tribute to a jukebox musical - a long way from true, trashy exhilaration.

The film feels dodgy, tentative and uncertain as to how to frame its own protagonist in a complicated story of journalistic compromise (and worse).

It's the big stuff that doesn't really work, at least well enough to be called special.

Those looking for some human interest in their human interest may be equally frustrated.

In Pieces of a Woman Kirby never seems to be building up artificial climaxes or big reveals; she works on a quieter, truer level. Too much going on around her ends up working against her.

Vivid in bits and pieces, Mid90s feels like a research scrapbook for a movie, not a movie. The more Hill throws you around in the name of creating a harsh, immediate impression, the more the impressions blur.

Aubrey Plaza is so deadpan she's undeadpan, and not just in her new zombie movie.

While White plays it supercool, Tommy Davidson and Arsenio Hall (as Cream Corn and Tasty Freeze, respectively) swing for the fences, without much in the way of a bat.

Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.

Too often The Express sidelines its own main character in favor of the lemon-sucking, jaw-jutting glower patented by Quaid.

Does not know when to quit. Nor does it extract much fun from a cockamamie story provided by George Lucas.