Michael Phillips

A movie can be unreasonably formulaic and still be reasonably diverting, and A Bad Moms Christmas is the proof.

Feels different from most recovering-train-wreck stories. The movie is a tidy relaying of a messy situation involving two reasonably functional middle-class LA alcoholics, one of whom gets serious about cleaning up a lot sooner than the other.

Frequently maddening in its reiteration and circularity, Song to Song nonetheless offers more of interest (along with the hooey) than I found in "Knight of Cups" or "Voyage of Time," his recent IMAX cosmos travelogue.

While Lunacy leaves you with the impression that Svankmajer is more expressive with cutlets than he is with his atypically human-dominated dreamscape, some of the images are doozies.

Stupid but fun.

Near the end, we hear Cobain reveal his disdain for adults who “can’t even pretend, or at least have enough courtesy for their children, to talk to one another civilly.” A painful and unexpected moment.

Too often the movie’s franchise mechanics and green-screen overload have a way of dragging “The Marvels” into generic sequeldom. But the stars give us something to hang onto, even if Larson — so good in so many films — has yet to master the useful trick of looking neutral yet invested in her many, many reaction shots.

There's a good movie in this story. The one that got made is roughly half-good.

Hedges is a determined romantic and a bit of a saphead. He's also humane.

When the secrets of David's circumstances and motives start spilling into the daylight along with more and more blood, The Guest does a strange thing. It becomes flat-footed and a bit dull.

Made with the full cooperation of the Pentagon, Brothers at War makes the war on-screen seem eminently winnable, eminently noble. Rademacher's desire to prove himself to himself, and to his soldier brothers, may stir different reactions among different audience members. And that's as it should be.

A glass three-fifths full, writer-director Lynn Shelton’s affable comedy Sword of Trust gets by on the improvisational wiles of its cast.

The way director and co-adapter Armfield shoots it, the film's awfully pretty in its grimness, in the way "Leaving Las Vegas" managed to make train-wreck alcoholism more fake-lyrical than grungy.

Thing is, Levy is a hard-sell man. He pushes the material so hard, it's as if he were working on commission.

By the time Watanabe encounters a holy senile fool in the forest, the film has foregone contemporary urban “King Lear” territory for something a lot closer to the Lifetime Channel.

With The Way Back, Ben Affleck didn’t have to deliver his biggest or most attention-getting performance, simply — and simplicity is hard — his truest.

Around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching.

Has its satisfactions, thanks mainly to a cast skillful enough to finesse what is effectively two films sharing the same screen.

At its best, this uneven work represents Moore at the peak of his argumentative skills.

At least there's Cage, who has become an astute voice actor, finding some odd, clever, energetic line readings consistently fresher than The Croods itself.

It's big, brash and dramatically it goes in circles. The first two may be enough for most people, especially if they're into Formula One racing, to overlook the third.

This one's a margin Western. Frustratingly uneven, rarely dull.

The movie is a paradox. It's ostentatiously restrained. You cannot say Corbijn lacks rigor. You can, however, say that when a talented director's approach too precisely mirrors the tightly calibrated performance strategy of his leading player, a movie risks stalling out completely.

This one's a step down from the original.

They never quite got the script right, but director Kormakur toggles well enough. And Woodley sees it through.

If it has the edge over the 2018 and 2020 movies, the reason is simple though her talent certainly isn’t: Lupita Nyong’o.

The second film lingers less determinedly on the degradation of Lisbeth and concentrates more on moving the narrative furniture around. The relationship between the main characters is the glue holding the balsa wood together.

The filmmaker's access was impressive, the results moderately entertaining.

Jim Carrey is good as Scrooge. There’s surprisingly little shtick in his performance.

Bailed out by a few good jolts, Jurassic World gets by, barely, as a marauding-dinosaurs narrative designed for a more jaded audience than the one "Jurassic Park" conquered back in 1993.

Unlike a few other well-drilled young actress-singers we could name, such as the one whose name rhymes with "Riley Myrus," Gomez knows how to relax on camera.

There's something off in its scenes of Arterton's romantically unlucky loner showing up at Arthur's home, in the rain, distraught. If the movie weren't so determined to placate, you'd think you're in for a daring exploration of an affair between a 30-something emotional cripple and a 70-something sexy beast, unchained at last.

Role Models wouldn't be anything without Mintz-Plasse, whose character occasions what may be the cinema's first really funny Marvin Hamlisch joke, and whose camera presence is at once unfailingly modest and distinctive.

It's a very small film, undermined by a puttering rhythm and Pinter-worthy pauses in the second half and a resolution neither satisfyingly oblique nor conventionally pleasing.

The script is half-a-fortune at best, and visually the picture is staid. But you stick with it, because it's Williams and because certainly no one since Williams has written this sort of embroidered dialogue.

To what degree does Zoo test our limits of tolerance? In the end, not much, which is why Devor's strange, carefully composed objet d'art is a limited achievement.

At heart, though, odd as it sounds, Gray has created a pocket-sized version of “Apocalypse Now.” Ad Astra bends the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam-era extravagance, about the rogue commander, Kurtz, and the errand boy, Willard, into its own thing. Like Coppola’s film, and the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart of Darkness," the new film examines the limits of colonialist hubris. It’s also, and primarily, a father/son parable of betrayal, confrontation and forgiveness.

Wysocki is a genuine talent, as is Jacobs, but the subject of Terri remains a pleasant blur.

The Butler tells a lot of different stories, some more effectively than others.

The movie, a formidable technical and design achievement, has everything going for it except a sense of Jobs' inner life.

The movie version of that life, directed by Richard J. Lewis, gives the adaptation an earnest go. But the script lacks juice.

The film doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a story of one woman overcoming low expectations. Gugino and Burstyn and the young performers playing the young players do likewise.

It's a reasonably efficient baby sitter, done up in 3-D computer-generated animation of no special distinction. But the first one's weird mixture of James Bond bombast and hyperactive pill-shaped Minions (the protagonist Gru's goggle-clad helpers) had the element of surprise in its favor.

100 percent right about our corrupt and hypocritical industry-controlled movie ratings system. Being right, however, doesn't automatically make for a strong documentary. I enjoyed a lot of it. Yet fully half of what's on screen is beside its own point.

The result is a brisk trot through a story that is, at heart, a tough slog.

A handful of films, from "The Battle of Algiers" to Paul Greengrass' splendid "Bloody Sunday," have met the challenge of dramatizing civil unrest and law enforcement outrages, memorably. Detroit comes close.

The one true amazement in “Dark Fate”? That’s easy: the magical transference of biceps from Hamilton to Mackenzie Davis’s tank-topped, genetically enhanced soldier of the future. In a heavily digitized enterprise, they’re the most conspicuous human camera subject.

The Cabin in the Woods is pure mechanics, as if the shadowy Dharma Initiative of "Lost" switched agents and found itself at the center of a brain-bending ensemble drama.

The way Moncrieff has structured The Dead Girl, it's catnip for actors: Divided into five chapters, the script affords juicy roles requiring only a few days' work from each member of its impressive ensemble.

A grandly kitschy rendering of Genghis Khan's early years.

Rates as more determinedly heartfelt than the first and not as witty as the second (and best). Also, no Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart in jodhpurs this time around.

Cameo appearances by everyone from James Franco (as Hugh Hefner, putting the moves on Lovelace at her own premiere) to Hank Azaria (as a film "investor") dot the grimy landscape.

Whitaker's performance is the rock here. Even when the confrontations and evasions get a little ridiculous, he's neither wholly saint nor sinner, but something like a human being.

Going in Style stays in the safe zone every second, nervous about risking any audience discomfort, as opposed to Brest's quietly nervy ode to old age and its discontents. Times change.

Lofing and Cluff certainly know the found-footage ropes, and the tropes; we'll see if their next project reveals a little more imagination.

Parts of The Birth of a Nation are bluntly effective and beautifully acted, though one of the drawbacks, ironically, is Parker's own performance. Even the rape victims of the screenplay have a hard time getting their fair share of the screen time; everything in the story, by design, keeps the focus and the anguished close-ups strictly on Parker.

Still, the deadliest single element in this film can be traced not to Bacon's character, but to composer Henry Jackson, whose music seems determined to kill us all with waves of dramatic nothingness.

Richard Jewell is a sincere and extremely well-acted irritant from 89-year-old director Clint Eastwood. It’s destined to get under the hides of different moviegoers in radically different ways.

The new film seems a little nervous about the religious content; it's more interested in the swoony bits between Charles and Julia.

Too much of “John Wick 4″ mistakes grandiloquence for excitement. But yes, as bloody diversion goes, the audience gets its money’s worth.

I wish the movie were messier, more surprising. But as with most of what we see, made on small budgets and large: The performances are not the problem.

Rough Night is good one minute, weak or stilted or wince-y the next, though even with seriously uneven pacing and inventiveness it's a somewhat better low comedy than "Snatched" or "Bad Moms," or (here's where I part company with the world) the "Hangover" pictures. Yes, even the first one.

The Raid is maniacal in its pacing and assault tactics. It's also, absurdly, rated R. Fantastic. I love that a film this gory secured the same Motion Picture Association of America rating as "The King's Speech."

Cry Macho may be fond and foolish in equal measure, but it has a few grace notes to remember, in addition to a fine gallery of images of Eastwood in silhouette, at dusk, against a big sky, alone with his thoughts.

Even when the movie loses its way narratively, Washington’s in there, slugging, building a living, breathing character out of Gilroy’s knight-errant.

Each time a character gets tossed in the air by some manifestation or another, the effect is cheesy. Still, I've seen worse. For the record, the violence in Annabelle is far less copious and sadistic than the stuff in the Denzel Washington movie everybody's going to.

Gemini Man isn’t bad, but two Will Smiths — when one of them’s computer-animated — somehow feels like 66-75 percent of a real movie.

Even if Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour represents a triumph of novel distribution more than a triumph of the concert-movie form, its impact will be fascinating to chart.

Eragon is a bit cheesy, but I rather liked it. It's sincere cheese... The special effects -- which include glowing-eyed heroes and villains, and flights over the mythical land of Alagaesia depicted in "dragon vision" -- are refreshing in their slightly out-of-date air.

Snyder films the violence in Man of Steel the way he films most of the rest of the picture: Like a man chasing tornadoes and not even trying to keep subjects in frame. It's a choice, and not a bad one, necessarily — the Smallville farm scenes, in particular, respond well to the approach — but by the end it's a visually limiting one.

The performances of Holly Hunter and Ron Silver had something Stone’s and Carell’s lack: true drive and animal energy, a sense of athletic competitors who mean business even when they’re kidding, or saying they are.

Dermot Mulroney takes the largest male role, that of the driven ex-soccer star and patriarch of the onscreen family. From certain angles he looks like a Shue too.

The script is just so-so, but Ball’s directorial eye, clear in the first “Maze Runner” film though largely AWOL in the second, saves the third and final adventure from its own bloat.

The film, which really is sloppy, slips around in terms of tone and goes every which way.

When the songs themselves take center stage the movie works. What remains in the wings constitutes another, fuller story.

The tweaks are interesting, even if they can’t do anything about larger narrative frustrations.

Cassavetes, who wrote the script, proves her skill with actors in this woozy push-and-pull of slurred compliments and shaky hopes for whatever lies beyond the next day.

How you respond to the totality of Exodus: Gods and Kings will, I suspect, relate directly to how you responded to Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood" from 2010. Square, a little heavy on its feet, much of that film held me, even when its bigness trumped its goodness. Same with this one.

The best of the movie lies in its hangout factor, when Levi and Grazer are discovering what Billy can do with electricity, or when the young actors playing Billy’s step-siblings — Grace Fulton, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand and Faithe Herman —get a chance to establish a rapport.

Draft Day feels like a play, and I don't mean a football play. It feels like a play-play at its sporadic best, in the same way J.C. Chandor's 2011 "Margin Call" felt that way.

12 Strong sticks to the basics, without much interest in the differentiating specifics of the men involved, or anything on a geopolitical scale beyond the impulse these Special Forces veterans shared in the wake of 9/11. It seems to me a qualified, limited success.

We often take a talent like Scott’s for granted. He’s truly gifted in the realm of period pictures, all kinds; next up is a Napoleon epic starring Joaquin Phoenix. In House of Gucci, he sees the material as a cautionary, globe-trotting tale of greed, no less, no more. The movie does the job without diving too far beneath any of its lovely surfaces.

Amid this conundrum of a movie, the actors provide what the facile screenplay cannot: a human pulse, shrewdly underscored by composer Alexandre Desplat’s time-traveling musical landscape.

The results are corny beyond measure. Yet there's something sweet about them, in part because there's something sweet about hearing the line "Congratulations! Why didn't you tell me you pledged?" outside the realm of comedy.

For a good hour, this is the picture Kevin Smith was trying to make with "Cop Out."

Wilson does amusingly steely work, while Page goes bonkers, giving her gleeful nut job one of the more memorable horselaughs in recent American film history.

The material, limited payoff; the performer at the center, never less than arresting.

Now comes The Dark Knight Rises, which makes "The Dark Knight" look like "Dora the Explorer" and is more of a 164-minute anxiety disorder than a movie.

A crowd-pleasing hit at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the movie may not be accurate history (welcome to the movies!). It may not even be particularly interested in one of its two main characters, for various reasons.

The film doesn’t hold together. But it’s the work of a real director, however fantastic his sensibility.

Mother of Tears can't rival the David Lynchian otherworldliness of "Suspiria," but at least you know you're in the hands of a director.

Provides some compensatory satisfactions, thanks mostly to the actors, as they make the most of a series of pencil sketches.

I like it up to a point — not a specific story point, but to a certain degree throughout. It's engaging but thin, and I couldn't buy screenwriter Brice's idea of Charlotte's antidote for her 10-year itch.

Many will find Apollo 18 silly and derivative. It is. Yet it's also a break from the usual hyperbolic, down-your-throat brand of silly and derivative scare movies.

There isn't a sophisticated or "adult" perspective to be found in The Rum Diary.

The stakes are high and the excitement's there and the results, as previously stated, are messy but fairly entertaining.

I wish it were truly special instead of an interesting near-miss.

There’s no way to experience Becoming apolitically, not now. You don’t have to consider it first-rate documentary filmmaking of any sort to feel something watching it.

The movie is ALL revenge, all the time

Amiable if frustrating picture.

The latest “Purge” is an erratic, fairly absorbing and righteously angry prequel.

A different editing rhythm (and a less narcotic musical score) would substantially change the personality of this movie, for better or worse.

It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an especially impressionable period in his rise.

Watching bear cubs and walrus pups struggling to survive against increasingly tough odds, and on ever-slushier ice shelves, has both its shamelessly manipulative side and its dramatically necessary side, as handled here. This proves one thing: Unlike global warming, some stories really do have two sides.

The Armstrong Lie gets going, and gets pretty good, when Gibney is able to focus on the 2009 Tour de France itself, a race fraught with old rivalries and backstage dramas. It's the movie he set out to make in the beginning, after all. But getting there is tough going.

Then there's screenwriter Steve Conrad. He's interesting. He likes his protagonists to suffer a little en route to finding a better place, and not in the usual sitcomic ways.

Schoenaerts is often affecting and just as often scarily intense. The film's intensity, by contrast, beams on and off.

Like Tarantino, Goddard is a clever structuralist. He attracts strong actors, and lets them stretch out and try things, and gives them juicy dialogue.

Originally titled "Orchestra Seats," Montaigne takes a page from the "Amelie" playbook, without the fancy visuals or magical realism.

Anonymous is ridiculous, and like Oliver Stone's "JFK" it sells its political conspiracy theories by weight and by volume. But dull, it's not.

Glib and charming in roughly equal measure.

The result is a Jewish “Death Wish,” to borrow Pauline Kael’s description of “Marathon Man,” amped up to epoch-changing proportions, made by a gentile writer-director with an unlimited appetite for celluloid, right down to its highly flammable properties.

I wish there were as many big payoffs and clever jokes as there are Bosleys in this movie. But Stewart and company have their fun, and we have a reasonable percentage of theirs.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

Rebecca Hall makes Maggie’s past and present states scarifyingly real. The film is often good; never for a moment is Hall’s performance anything less.

The drawback of the film's visual approach, however, is a considerable one. The relentless first-person shooting in End of Watch - figurative and literal - is less about YouTube factuality than it is about Xbox gaming reconfigured for the movies.

I like a lot of the film despite its drawbacks; its violence isn't rote or numbing, and there's a simplicity and elegance to the digital-countdown effect.

The cast is enjoyable, with Jason Segel (as Gulliver's lil' pal, Horatio) and Emily Blunt (the local princess) a witty cut above for this sort of thing.

The film moves along, in its paradoxically static way, at a pretty fair clip. I look forward to Green's follow-up.

There are times when the facile flimsiness of Hello I Must Be Going threatens to float right off the screen. But Lynskey has her ways of surprising us, even when nothing in the script itself is doing so.

The actors are more or less saving this franchise's bacon. Insurgent is a tick or two livelier than the first one.

It's an up-and-down movie, honest one minute and a fraud the next, but you stick with it mainly because of Hahn.

Entertaining as much of Avengers 2 is, especially when it's just hanging out with the gang in between scuffles (the "Guardians of the Galaxy" lesson, learned), Whedon’s picture meets expectations without exceeding them.

The title of The Hunting Party doesn’t evoke much in particular. “War Correspondents Gone WILD!” would be more like it if the film itself--messy, but fairly stimulating--had more of the scamp in its soul.

Wasikowska is a fine, intriguing actress, though I'm not sure anyone could make actual psychological sense of this woman. Nobody on screen — not Kidman, not Goode, not Wasikowska, not Jacki Weaver as Auntie Gin — seems entirely at home in the chosen (or guessed-at) style.

The original “Mary Poppins” was exuberant, fueled by terrific Sherman brothers songs. Mary Poppins Returns is often just pushy.

So how's this "Thor" sequel? It's fairly entertaining. Same old threats of galaxy annihilation, spiced with fish-out-of-water jokes.

Until a leaden third act, it IS reasonably entertaining.

Something has gone slightly awry, however, en route from the 11-minute film to the 79-minute edition of 9.

It’s nearly impossible not to respond to The Color Purple and Celie’s odyssey, in any version. But it’s also possible to wish for a movie that felt more like real life, and real lives, in all their emotional colors, without so much showbiz.

Modest and good-looking, the film starts as dark comedy and ends in pathos. Director Alvarez makes the Oregon scenery a character unto itself.

The best thing in Diggers, besides the close-up of the back end of the Vista Cruiser, is the interplay between Rudd and Tierney. They really do seem like brother and sister, adults yet not entirely grown up.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Ferrari again sometime just for Cruz, and for a few of Mann’s most gratifying examples of classical Hollywood technique, done his way. The movie reinvents no wheels. But it sure knows how to film ‘em.

Vanessa Kirby of “The Crown” and “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” is the primary reason “Hobbs & Shaw” rises above pure formula and borderline-contemptible familiarity.

The movie slam-jams its overpacked story in a frenetic, needlessly complicated manner. It lacks for nothing in setting and atmosphere but comes up short where it counts: the characters.

Cross-cutting between son and mother, and their constant efforts to reunite among the carnage, flames and rubble before it’s too late, director McQueen keeps the screws tight, blowing past realism for a trickier realm of historically grounded but highly stylized imagination.

The climax of Transformers contains all that is proficient and slick and all that is drecky and soulless in Bay's work.

The film is reasonably effective all the same, though Affleck has yet to learn how to conduct each scene like a musical score, paying attention to matters of tempo and dynamics.

A Little Help settles for familiar and modest payoffs. It's not much. Yet Fischer clearly relishes the chance to play someone who's a demurely reckless mess.

It's refreshing to hear some old-fashioned percussive tension in service of a director who knows what he's doing. Even when the screenwriter is losing his way.

An estimated 4 million Latinas leave one or more children behind when they travel north to find work. They deserve a more nuanced film, but this one’s often affecting.

For some reason I was under the impression Jim Carrey already made his penguin movie. Doesn't it seem like it?

It's pleasant as far as it goes. For all the blithe interaction among the central three performers, however, the material's conventional and predictable.

Timberlake is not afraid to make himself look like an idiot. He is, in fact, already the comic actor Diaz may yet become: a looker who knows how to use his looks to get away with murder.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin'-headed but it's not soul-crushing.

As a performance vehicle The Drop does the job. As a story, and an uncertainly padded script, the movie lurches and lets us get out ahead of its developments.

It displays a growing sense of fluidity and craft [from Apatow]. ... But much of the script feels oddly dishonest and dodgy.

And it's too bad The Skeleton Twins settles for tidy, slightly hollow narrative developments. The performers are ready to rip. For many they'll be enough.

The actors do a lot to dimensionalize the material. Parker's Chavis is especially sharp, creating a man with a subtly burning fuse.

It's quite thin, but at least Black Rock plays its "kills" for more than stupid gamer's diversions.

The sequel's not bad; it's not slovenly. Some of the jolts are effectively staged and filmed, and Wan is getting better and better at figuring out what to do with the camera, and maneuvering actors within a shot for maximum suspense, while letting his design collaborators do the rest. But Leigh Whannell's script is a bit of a jumble.

McQuarrie... is a real writer; his banter has snap and bite. His directorial skills are still catching up with his writing skills; the movie loses steam in the final half-hour.

Foster's direction, aided by cinematographer Matthew Libatique's sharp, clean light, is the most fluid and well-considered of her career. The script is an asset, too. Until it becomes a mixed-bag liability.

Thanks to the director, what they do makes for painless “avoidance viewing” — something to kill 100 minutes or so while you’re avoiding something else, delivered in an impersonal but not unskillful manner.

The actors do most of their best work in between the lines. Krieps, especially, provides a subtle symphony of feeling, even as her role confines her to a prescribed range of narrative support. Director Peck’s work is handsome; what it lacks is a true sense of danger, a feeling of history roiling in the present tense.

The movie ends up being just sharp enough at its peaks to be frustrating in its valleys. But the laughs are there.

Take the theatrical flourish away from this story, however, and the story's thinness becomes apparent.

Favreau's masterly light touch as an actor hasn't yet translated to a similarly deft offhandedness behind the camera. The movie, slick and shallow, is fairly entertaining anyway.

The interviews are often revealing and funny. And much of the music is tremendous.

Spontaneous allows Langford’s Mara, blasé swagger incarnate, and Plummer’s stealth charmer enough unaffected sincerity to make it stick. Onto that sticky stuff, the script applies comforting reminders: Stuff happens. We don’t know how long we have. Seize the day.

Branagh’s portrayal of a somewhat older and wearier Poirot, muted but carefully calibrated, remains two steps ahead of Branagh’s direction.

This is digital fake-ism all the way. Audiences bought it the first time; they're likely to buy it a second time.

It's a relief — even though the movie isn't much — to see Danner in a leading role on screen again.

The picture, intelligent but mild, has more of a 10-volt hum than a true spark.

At its best, Seasons shakes off its predecessors and captures the simple, grand ideas it's after purely visually.

Pap, but easygoing pap with a cast you can live with for a couple of hours.

Cafe Society is a good-looking nothing, but there are times — thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade — when "nothing" is sufficient.

The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.

Director Espinosa shoots virtually everything in tight but wobbly close-up, and the human and vehicular combat often brakes right at the edge of visual incoherence. Just as often the brakes give out completely.

If You’re Cordially Invited strains to bring its amped-up, often wearying feud to a satisfying conclusion, the stars give it their best shot, while the ringers do their thing with blithe assurance.

127 Hours never calms down. You suspect you're only getting half the truth of what this ordeal must've been like.

It's a better-than-average gay relationship film, largely because neither plot mechanics nor the same old camp intrude much.

It's fairly absorbing though, increasingly, a bit of an eye-roller, and it's designed, photographed and edited to make you itchy with paranoia.

At its fizziest, the camaraderie among the principals buoys the picture. Hemsworth and Thompson in particular toss off their lines with throwaway aplomb. Waititi’s heart plainly belongs to the muttered asides and the eccentric details; the action sequences, meanwhile, squeak by, and barely.

I admired the craft more than I loved the results. But The Tales of Despereaux is still better-than-average animation.

I prefer [HBO's Hitchcock biopic] "The Girl," not because of its salaciousness but because it gets at something underneath the great (truly, great) director's skin.

Youth in Revolt isn't bad -- the cast is too good for it to be bad.

McKinnon’s apparent improvisations and inventions create a second, better movie in the margins.

The film's not as good as its cast, but The Way, Way Back has its moments.

Everyone on screen is good enough to do this sort of thing in their sleep, which isn’t to say Harrelson, Eisenberg, Stone, Breslin and Deutch laze through the assignment. The first “Zombieland” remains director Fleischer’s best movie by a mile; this one acknowledges, brazenly, the familiarity of it all.

The second half of The Mother settles for the usual. But getting there makes for a fairly diverting series of melees in the name of child protection, with services rendered by a tough-love mom who does it all.

It’s Blocker’s story, and Bale’s very good. But for Hostiles to fully make sense of its introductory on-screen D.H. Lawrence quotation — “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” — we’d need a tougher, less comforting ending than the one Cooper provides.

By accident or design the film is seriously unbalanced.

If director Fabian’s touch is a little heavy and coy, the actors lighten it every preordained step of the way. A lot of folks will enjoy the wish-fulfillment. We need it: Not a lot in the real world right now is fully cooperating in that regard.

Many will forgive all the contrivances and a muted ending that doesn't quite come off. It is, after all, a submarine picture.

The results go only so far. Yet already Ferrell has come a long way as a seriocomic screen presence.

When it works it’s enjoyable; when it doesn’t, it falls into a generic sort of bustle, missing the darker, more troubling layers underneath.

It is a film of many ploooooches, meaning: stake in the chest? Ploooooch goes the sound effect. Yank it out again: ploooooch. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat.

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

Much of Puzzle feels schematic and, in the convenient solution to the family’s financial problems, a bit lazy. Yet Macdonald is so good, on her own or with a scene partner, director Marc Turtletaub’s movie refuses to fall apart.

Even if the film should be retitled "For a Fairly Good Time, Call ..." at least we're not back on the couch with another variation on the same old group of arrested-development young adult males, hanging on to their adolescence with as much determination as their marijuana intake allows.

It’s absorbing. The world came perilously close to losing so many Rembrandts, so many Klimts. The cultural casualties, near and actual, may be dwarfed by the millions slaughtered in the same churn of history. But we are what we create, and when emblems of a civilization are reduced to pawns of wartime, there is no victor.

Vol. II turns into a battle (like most von Trier films) between the filmmaker's baser instincts and his searching ones.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

Where Surf's Up falls down is in its central relationships. (A few more jokes wouldn't have hurt either).

The film is likable. Its messages, many of them Lord-oriented, are all equally heartfelt.

Olsen is pretty good, too, though with her bald-faced, moon-eyed disdain for everyone around her, the material loses some of its tension between repressed surface and roiling underbelly.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.

The Lego Batman Movie offers more mayhem and less funny.

For all the splurch and head-lopping, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is monotonal. It turns its action sequences into a noisy blur.

In its way Campion’s film is a thing of beauty, but its characters’ inner lives must be taken on faith.

Maudie works valiantly, and not entirely convincingly, to suggest a happy-ish marriage, all things considered.

The second half’s a letdown — the audience knows where the movie’s going, and gets there before the movie does. Nonetheless it bodes nicely for longtime horror producer Travis Stevens, here making his feature debut behind the camera.

An uneven but strongly acted debut feature from co-writer and director Sheldon Candis.

The film may be a silly thing, with manic swings from intimate (and pretty rough) violence to abrupt comic relief. But Fahy and Sklenar provide the glue.

For an hour The Rite, as scripted by Michael Petroni, delivers the expected, but with panache.

At one point King, as Chisholm, resists the advisors’ pleas to simplify her “messaging” (was that word in circulation 52 years ago?) by saying: “I am not leaving out the nuance!” In “Shirley,” the top-shelf actors aren’t, either. Even if their material does.

Levine has a strong instinct as a packager of moments, ladling on the alt-rock just so before ladling on another ladle's worth.

It's not without its payoffs; I enjoyed a lot of it. But overall last year's "Avengers" delivered the bombastic goods more efficiently than this year's Marvel.

The actors — including Patton as Bobby's DEA colleague and sometime fling — cannot act what is not there. But with Washington, Wahlberg, Olmos and Paxton around jockeying for dominance, the standoffs have their moments.

It's junk, and it's excessively violent, which is a given. Approach it as a Stallone movie (which it is) or as a Hill movie (which it is), but it's more interesting as a Hill movie. If it gets this director back into the hard-driving action game, then it will have done its duty.

A fine ensemble, some gorgeous Italian Riviera locales, intermittent flashes of magic amid a more manufactured air of whimsy.

Won't change your world, but it's attractive and Smith the Elder, lowering his voice to subterranean James Earl Jones levels, delivers a shrewd minimalist performance. His son may get there yet.

The tone of "Hail, Caesar!" is even and assured, yet the comic inspiration is sporadic.

The movie's far from dull. But first-time feature director Tim Miller's film serves as critique as well an example of what ails the superhero movie industry.

Roughly half the scenes are terrible, nervously edited and predictable. The other half transcend the innate shrugginess of the script. At the end there's a dose of voice-over narration assigned to Johnson that is so, so very Carrie Bradshaw, you half-expect Sarah Jessica Parker to show up with a lawsuit.

A pleasantly nutty thriller about a crafty, high-end toy, M3GAN exploits a child’s grief for the greater good of the killer-doll genre. That may be enough for 100 minutes of your early January.

The results are visually exacting if ideologically muddled. Biller's trying to find ways to make the old misogyny usefully ironic. But the acting is so amateurish, partly by accident and partly by design, that the film remains confined to an exercise in replicative style.

Noisy, unsubtle, but it gets the job done.

With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi.

The superfast running effects, with Edward dashing up mountains, or rival, evil vampires swooping here and there at amazing speed, look genuinely cheesy, like the guy running the race in the smart-phone ad. I'm surprised Hardwicke and her colleagues couldn't solve this one more effectively. Set pieces such as a vampire baseball game fall flat as well.

I enjoyed seeing Joss Ackland as well. The veteran character actor with the world’s lowest voice plays the diamond company chairman, and when he rumbles out orders, it’s like Sensurround never left us.

For an hour or so, aided by the autumnal glow of Ben Seresin's cinematography, director Hughes maintains a firm handle on the story's turnabouts. Then the script goes a little nuts with coincidence and improbability.

Extracting three generously proportioned films from Tolkien's books made sense. But turning the relatively slim 1937 volume 'The Hobbit' into a trilogy, peddling seven or eight hours of cine-mythology, suggests a better deal for the producers than for audiences.

The film version stars a wonderful Swedish-Icelandic actress named Noomi Rapace as the hacker and Michael Nyqvist as the reporter. They are excellent and subtle and honest.

The Wall may be fictional, but at its occasional, patient best it feels truthfully scary.

At its most frantic the cutting and staging here veers perilously close to Baz Luhrmann "Moulin Rouge!" territory for comfort. ... I'd rather have seen Wright's carefully elaborated production on a stage, instead of in a movie partly on a stage.

The music's the best thing ... But it isn't enough to lift this middlebrow, middleweight and middling project ... above its misjudgments and limitations.

Director Marc Webb moves it along, with a rock-solid lead, very well sung, courtesy of Rachel Zegler.

Veber's early stage training serves him well both as an adapter (he wrote the "La Cage aux Folles" screenplay) and as a maker of originals though, truth be told, The Valet isn't especially original.

The easiest thing you can say about Silence is that it's a labor of love, made by a valiant soldier for his chosen storytelling medium.

When you see and hear so many fans of so many backgrounds expounding on what "Firework" means to them, you realize that while a song may or may not be for you, it most certainly is for others.

The movie shoves McCarthy and Sarandon in a car together quickly, without much in the way of expository set-up.

Even though the film shows very little of the rough stuff, it's still fairly traumatizing. By the end you may feel like seeing a documentary about a more fair-minded and evenhanded treatment of a society's citizens.

Is it fun? Parts, yes, and many will get exactly what they wanted from The Nice Guys.

Jersey Boys the movie is a different, more sedate animal than "Jersey Boys" the Broadway musical.

The movie doesn't really work, but it's fascinating in the ways it doesn't. Then again, I enjoyed the spacey insanity of the Wachowskis' "Speed Racer," which they didn't even like in Asia.

I love Pete Postlethwaite as a rule, but here - as a murderous florist who pulls all the strings - he overacts his key scene so badly it's as if he did it on a dare. Also, Jon Hamm may rule on "Mad Men," but here he's stuck as a rather dimwitted FBI agent who's two beats behind the action, always.

Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste.

Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality. I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them.

The movie is hit-and-miss in an unusually clear-cut way. It's funny for 45-50 minutes. Then it's strained and abrasive and entirely too devoted to action-movie tropes for 45-50 minutes, minus end credits. I can recommend the first half.

Wobbles between its comic and dramatic concerns; even those who buy the film more wholeheartedly than I might consider the overall tone uncertain.

Much of this wordplay is clever, though there’s something off with the plotting.

The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror. They’re also a bit of a plod — especially in the second half, when whatever kind of horror film you’re making should not, you know, plod.

Does it work? It’s one busy movie, though without much variety in its rhythm or much breathing room in its perils.

Even when the film's cheating, Firth refuses to tidy up the fictionalized Lomax's emotional state. The actor, so good at playing stalwart men contending with inner demons, can utter a simple line — "I don't think I can be put back together" — and break your heart, legitimately, without histrionics.

Phoenix acts his ass off, often entertainingly, and from the hoariest of ancient dark-comic tactics, Aster pulls off the occasional little miracle here and there, especially when LuPone and Posey are around.

Director Stupnitsky lacks finesse and an eye for framing at this stage of his directorial career. He is, however, well-attuned to catching moments on the fly.

A movie like this can handle a large character roster, but it helps if the story retains clean lines and a sense of propulsion. Iron Man 2 sags and wanders in its midsection

I wish Learning to Drive imagined a fuller, more dimensional inner life for Wendy, but Clarkson develops a push-pull rapport with Kingsley that fills in the blanks — or, rather, mitigates the script's on-the-nose tendencies.

A fairly good, extremely grueling movie as far as it goes — tracks the true-life fortunes of a battered group of climbers to the highest place on Earth. Yet somehow it doesn't go far enough.

A handful of revisions, tweaks and adjustments, along with a musical score less bombastically grandiose, might've made this a film to remember.

This weird marriage of indie earnestness and matter-of-fact fantasy gives Colossal its moderately engaging distinction.

Rhino Season unapologetically favors poetry over prose, layering its images and time frames in elegantly wrought detail. At times the visual landscape feels fussy. [12 Oct 2012, p.C3]

The tunes are so good, you can’t believe the film itself doesn’t amount to more, especially with the rightness of the casting. Still, a few laughs are better than none.

Someday, if we’re all good little boys and girls, the world will hand us a Dr. Seuss film half as wonderful as one of the books. Meantime we have the competent, clinical computer animation and relative inoffensiveness of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! to pass the time.

A fairly entertaining gloss of a docudrama elevated by its cast.

There's a delayed-secret hitch in the narrative that hijacks the movie, for better or worse. You don't have to believe any of it to enjoy a lot of it, however.

Outlandish weddings aren't much of a satiric target, but Confetti isn't really going for satire; mild-mannered japes are more its style.

This is the story of a complicated and fraught friendship, and I'm not sure Wright and his collaborators figured out how much Hollywood baloney and how much naturalistic grunge to apply to it.

Bird has serious promise outside the animation realm; in "Ghost Protocol" he errs, I think, by shoving the camera too close to the bodies in the frame, so that the momentum and spatial relationships become awfully hard to parse.