Michael Phillips

With that kind of financial imperative it's something of a miracle the Potter films have been, on the whole, good. One or two, very good. One or two (the first two), less good. This one's good.

It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

Pure, witless discombobulation.

The film's pretty good about saying why so much in the culture encourages a political life in the closet, either tacitly or directly. But even The Advocate had a problem with calling it a brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy.

Here and there, the actor invests the kind of feeling that makes The Way come alive in human terms.

Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work.

The film's emotional claustrophobia may not be for everyone.

Sunshine is near-classic modern science fiction, hobbled only by a chaotic final reel and some casting missteps in the white-male department.

The movie doesn’t quite stick the landing, piling on while lingering at the gate for an extra 10 minutes or so. The gore level may not be a shock to fans of Alvarez’s previous features, but for the casual franchise fan, well, it’s gory. But the best of Alien: Romulus reminds us that some franchises are more open to a variety of directorial approaches than others.

The movie itself occasionally gets lost in those woods, but finds its way back out again.

Garcia's calm, steady guidance behind the camera, along with his nicely finessed faith in a very good cast, makes Mother and Child a fuller and more satisfying example of this storytelling style than we've seen lately.

There's a numbing aspect to Goat. But the best of it, I'd say, is honorably harsh; the subject should be difficult to watch, or the filmmakers aren't being honest about the way we operate as a culture, and what we allow and encourage our young men (and the young women who suffer the fallout) to put up with, still.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

What are Jolie and Freeman and McAvoy doing here, besides acting cooler than Clive Owen in "Shoot ’Em Up"? Cashing a check, that's what. Bekmametov may have talent, but the arrested-adolescent "escapism" of this picture emits a pretty bad odor.

Though Sitting in Bars with Cake goes in a clearly charted direction, there’s enough going on between the plot points to make it feel like there’s something real at stake between these women.

The film sags in the middle section, and it's more a novelty item than a fully formed work . But it's very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.

It’s fun. In various ways, some better than others, you can tell the film was made by people who weren’t mapping out their entire careers to lead to the big moment when they tackle a Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise.

The best of Dolphin Tale takes it easy. Led by Connick and Judd, plus the crucially empathetic Gamble and Zuehlsdorff, the cast includes Kris Kristofferson as the seafaring old salt of a grandpa. The acting has a nice, low-pressure vibe, in contrast to the film's high-pressure peril.

The script’s conflicts and obstacles get their tidy share of the available 90 minutes. I’d love to see a two-hour version of Rose’s film, aired out to some degree, with a more unpredictable rhythm and some conversations allowing us to hang out with these people without worrying about advancing the story.

Will The Innkeepers be enough for the young folk? These days there's little middle ground between the determined lack of gore in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise and the determined overabundance offered by so much else. West works in that No Man's Land, intelligently.

The material settles for amiably familiar observations about the difficulties of growing old and the glories of being surrounded by beautiful music.

The best of Prometheus is nonverbal and purely atmospheric: Fassbender's "Lawrence of Arabia"-loving character bouncing a basketball as he patrols the spaceship while his human cohorts finish up their two-year nap.

In every good way, thanks primarily to Wong and Park and their chemistry, Always Be My Maybe is pure commercial product, yet it feels authentically alive where it counts.

It is a tour de force for the actress, needless to say. Iranian Golshifteh Farahani is wonderful in the role.

While the film is roughly half grit and half sugar, it works because Smith sticks to a tougher, more rewarding recipe of 99.9 percent grit and only .1 percent sugar.

However freely fictionalized, I like my docudramas with as much moral complication and human shading as filmmakers can provide. Years from now, it’d be wonderful to look back at something more than good actors, with or without wizardly prosthetics, taking our mind off what’s not quite right with the stories at hand.

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

Swift, sharp adaptation of Stephen King's short story (from the "Everything's Eventual" collection).

The movie's fun, a lot of it having nothing to do with its specific subject.

Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D.

The results offer a collective shiver (not a lot of shrieks here) for those in the mood for sprightly, short-form misfortune.

Its pace is oddly arrhythmic and the tone is every which way but assured.

Che is Soderbergh's most interesting film in years, defiantly eccentric and absorbing at its best.

Instead of dramatizing this subject’s life, it dramatizes the extravagance of moviemaking. The script shoves the dicey stuff off to the side: race, infidelity, a complicated figure’s inner demons.

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.

Leoni is one of the truly distinctive comic actresses we have in the movies today, a tough broad with murderously effective timing and phrasing.

Killing Them Softly isn't anything major. But it's a pungent minor film only vaguely resembling the one The Weinstein Co. is advertising, and that's fine with me.

Wiig and Mumolo work so easily and smoothly together, you feel like an ingrate for not enjoying their efforts more in these script circumstances (especially since they wrote it). Now and then, though, the payoffs arrive.

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

It's worth seeing, on balance, simply for what Mark Ruffalo does in a hundred different, discrete, telling ways as he creates a character who was a capital-A Character, outlandish one minute, scarily unpredictable the next.

It’s dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.

The reason I like Miles Ahead, despite its problems, has everything to do with Cheadle both behind and in front of the camera.

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

It's easy to watch.

Everything about it flows and pays off better than the ’84 original.

The best thing about the film is Viggo Mortensen’s performance. A stealth talent of many shadings, Mortensen has a way of fitting easily into nearly any period, any milieu.

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

The film is distinguished by the grubby velocity of his foot chases, and the effectiveness of its craft.

Maybe this review is more about me than about Conan O'Brien, but I really couldn't get past the odor of self-congratulation emanating from nearly every scene in Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

Sollett works easily and well with Cera and Dennings, and lends a touch of awkward realism to what, from a screenwriting perspective, is pure formula.

The plot's the same old thing. Mad, mad, mad, mad science; imminent apocalypse; parent/child issues; blah blah blaggidy blah. The tone of Ant-Man, however, is relatively light and predominantly comic.

Not everything in “Mockingjay” is dynamic or remarkable. Director Lawrence, working from Peter Craig and Danny Strong's screenplay, occasionally mistakes somnambulance for solemnity.

The film is entertaining and disingenuous, which doesn't make it wrong.

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

When the actors get their chances, Crown Heights rises above the routine.

Gigante represents the sort of artful low-budget accomplishment that could, and should, be coming out of distressingly stingy Chicago once a year — whatever the subject, whatever the sensibility.

Fundamentally Blades of Glory works; it's full of laughs both subtle and ridiculous.

It has a rich premise and no lack of amazements. What it lacks in any sort of dramatic shape.

State of Play isn't a kinetic fireball like the second or third "Bourne" installment; like its protagonist, it's defiantly old school, "Three Days of the Condor" bleeding into "All the President's Men."

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.

For all the boozed and abusive amusement provided by the great Bill Murray in the good-enough St. Vincent, the moment I liked best was Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, manhandling a vacuum across the Murray character's ancient carpet. In movies as in life, it's the little things.

It's less a western than a loping buddy picture.

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.

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.

It’s not a movie, really. It’s a commemorative “Downton Abbey” throw pillow.

Not so much character-driven as character-dragged--against its will.

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

Betzer's title suggests a hardy spirit and the resilience of childhood; the story, which unfolds in elliptical but often intriguing chapters, indicates the healing might be a little more complicated and difficult.

A vital and wily seriocomic odyssey. And Gere has never been better, more alive, on screen.

Truly, this is a movie dependent on managed expectations and a forgiving attitude toward its tendency to overserve.

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.

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.

Spielberg’s control of pacing, rhythm, action dynamics and tonal juggling is so astute that the story of Wade never quite gets lost in all the fly-by jokes and references. Sheridan’s highly skillful, as is Cooke.

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.

Amiable if frustrating picture.

A weirdly old-fashioned affair. If it weren't for the explicit sexual encounters, this could be an Ibsen or a Strindberg play, unclothed and unmoored from the late 19th or early 20th century.

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

It’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

It's refreshing to see a non-mainstream movie that wears its heart and lust on its sleeve, and has anything but violence on its mind.

Call The Grey "Deliverance" Lite, with snow, and wolves. And call it a solid January surprise.

Linklater's working-class mosaic is seriously interested in how most of this country gets by for a living. And that, sadly, makes it distinctive.

Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.

The results take neither the high road nor the low road, settling instead for an oddly bland middle course.

Monsters is a sharp little low-fi monster movie operating from a tantalizing premise.

Even with its story hiccups — and by the end, they’re practically contagious — The Creator creates images of the future you have not seen before, at least not quite this way. The movie is messy and knotty but co-writer and director Gareth Edwards has yet to make an uninteresting piece of science fiction.

But by not "saying" ANYTHING about the lives behind all the lovely, easygoing footage of infants making their way to their first steps and beyond, Babies feels a tad dodgy (and repetitive) by the hour mark.

The movie’s a rom-com at heart, but there is no other one like it.

When the story’s twist arrives, you half-expect Twohy to throw in a couple of reels from "Dead Again," plus outtakes from "The Usual Suspects." It’s a lulu; I'm just not sure if it's the sort of lulu that will lead to great word-of-mouth.

Scott Thomas can play these sorts of ice queens in her sleep, but I've long thought she's a more effective and nuanced performer in French-language projects than in English-language ones. The performance is laced with just enough wit to make it sting.

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.

Even when it's stiff and staid in moviemaking terms, Peyton Place has every kind of performance working for it, or against it. Over here, there's Turner's gliding charisma; over there, you get the powerful skill of Oscar nominees Varsi and Hope Lange. Through it all, Lloyd Nolan anchors the frothy seas as the sensible, seen-it-all town doctor, the one who knows all and tells some, depending on the needs of the story. [31 Mar 2020, p.C1]

Weisz and the sharpest supporting players lift My Cousin Rachel to a higher plane. Holliday Granger as Philip's smitten family friend; Simon Russell Beale, a truly great actor, as the skeptical family solicitor; Tim Barlow, tottering around as the sublimely crusty servant: These are choice turns.

Some of the action (and violence) in A Cat in Paris borders on the jarring, and the slam-bang finale - set atop Notre Dame Cathedral - favors bombast over wit. But getting there is a lot of fun, in part because the animators take time to make Dino a truly charismatic animal.

Affleck, in particular, finds something fierce and noble in uneven material and in his character's rage. He's not like any other actor in American movies.

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.

It's a two-hour lesson in how to act like a frenemy to your alleged friends. And it's not funny enough.

At its mean, snakelike best, it’s also a brutally assured commercial action picture, unburdened by the moral qualms or unnerving ambiguity of its predecessor.

As an actor (not onscreen here), Kravitz is so effortless, you rarely detect any overt planning or determination in her performances. Her movie’s a different case: a precise visual telling of a tale heading somewhere awful, but also cathartic.

The film's surprising, enveloping jazz score is often deliberately at odds with Niko's moody outlook.

Mainly it’s a very solid dance picture, which is the point.

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.

I enjoy both Timberlake and Kunis; just this side of manic, they seem right together.

The result is both a success and a disappointment. It's Kind of a Funny Story, divided into neat little daylong chapters in Craig's stay, lacks the staying power and bittersweet layering of "Half Nelson" and "Sugar."

It's well-crafted, but I wish the film showed us an additional dimension or two of the central figure, who once said the great challenge in writing, any kind of writing, is "to write the same way you are."

The camera bobs and weaves like a drunk, frantically. So you have hammering close-ups, combined with woozy insecurity each time more than two people are in the frame. Twenty minutes into the retelling of fugitive Valjean, his monomaniacal pursuer Javert, the torch singers Fantine and Eponine and the rest, I wanted somebody to just nail the damn camera to the ground.

Accomplishes what "Snakes on a Plane" did not: It offers a merrily idiotic movie to go with its willfully idiotic title.

Changeling fundamentally works; it holds you. But these issues of texture and detail matter too, and they hold clues as to why Eastwood's latest is a good, solid achievement rather than a great, grieving one.

Knock at the Cabin is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.

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.

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.

Partly real and partly, increasingly, fantastic and outlandish in its wishful thinking.

Wasikowska struggles to activate a vague notion of female disenfranchisement and victimhood, triumphant. She and Pattinson fill in as many blanks as they can, where they can.

Even when it falters, Master Gardener speaks from a place the filmmaker has always worked, with one foot in the character-building of “slow cinema,” and the other in spasms of violence. It may be hard to buy where this movie lands. But even an unstuck landing isn’t enough to un-recommend it.

If it gets people thinking about which light bulbs they buy and their current gas mileage and such, then it's good to have it in the world. It is, however, a panicky blur as documentaries go.

It’s a grubby, fairly intriguing genre exercise given a weird, did-it-myself-in-a-hurry visual quality.

Style is a tricky, elusive thing, and this film doesn’t so much have it as strive for it, constantly. But something in Watson’s story endures: The wish-fulfillment truly satisfies. And with the war clouds gathering by story’s end, the fairy tale acquires a bittersweet edge, nicely cutting all that whipped cream.

Starts out like a salacious, rump-centric and blithely bare-breasted hip-hop video and ends up in the realm of scary and inspired trash. That's not meant negatively.

Writer-director Tilman Singer casts a trancelike swirl incorporating elements of hypnosis, demonic transference, memories of sexual abuse and one of the furthest-out, least by-the-book police procedurals put on film.

The movie isn't dull, exactly; the problem lies in the other, antsy direction.

A 1960s-set Western laden with big skies, steady gazes and slow-roasted narrative corn, Let Him Go gets by on the strength of its female leads, Diane Lane and Lesley Manville. Kevin Costner’s effective, too, and he’s right in his taciturn sweet spot, muttering about this and that.

Things We Lost in the Fire finds Bier at an interesting juncture, half-Dogmatic, half traditionalist.

Director Morelli and editor Daniel Rezende know how to set up complex lines of action and keep the screws tight.

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

Staggers and wanders and feels far longer than its 85 minutes, and it's best considered a calling card for better things to come.

Berge is a meticulous and intriguing host, though one gets the feeling he's relaying, very selectively, only so much of the messier side of his life with Saint Laurent. So be it.

Overstuffed, formulaic but very easy to take.

The best of Laggies, both in the writing and the playing, comes in the square-offs between Knightley and Rockwell.

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.

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.

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

Moderately funny though immoderately derivative.

Clooney remains as game as ever, but the way he and McDormand push the energy here, you feel the strain. Pitt, just floating through, comes off best. He doesn't judge the moron he's playing; he just is.

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.

A scenic, well-behaved account of Potter's life and times.

In a very full and riveting 85 minutes, One Child Nation assembles a huge story together from many small, crucial pieces.

It’s an unnerving portrait in forbidden desire and matched wills, sometimes acting as one barely controlled organism, often at fierce odds.

The actors, by and large, are first-rate. And the songs don’t hurt.

I’d place Thanksgiving halfway between “fair” and “good.” Inevitably, Roth can’t keep his baser storytelling and filmmaking instincts at bay forever.

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

Porter and his ingratiating actors do all they can to humanize the material. The movie works because a lot of that material is engaging and genuinely humane to begin with.

I prefer my horror with a chaser of wit, and Severance, a modest but very lively British import, serves it up in harsh but high style.

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.

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."

Alden Ehrenreich resembles a young, somewhat graver Robert Wagner, though he’s a better actor than the young Robert Wagner was. Ehrenreich’s contained, methodical brand of swagger matches up pretty well with the Han Solo we know from the ’77-’83 Harrison Ford edition.

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.

Treats its now-mythic Brooklyn Dodger with respect, reverence and love. But who's in there, underneath the mythology?

With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

Hit & Run is pretty rancid as comedy. Worse, the chases are strictly amateur hour, all shortcut editing and no gut satisfaction.

The director thinks visually, which sounds redundant until you realize how many monster movies are flat, effects-dependent factory jobs. Edwards knows how to use great heights for great effect.

Based on Glenn Stout’s nonfiction account of the same title, “Young Woman and the Sea” gets by on the careful engineering of clichés, Daisy Ridley and a really good piece of irresistibly rousing history.

I did like seeing the (fakey-looking) sheep take flying neck-high leaps at various human throats, in scenes recalling the killer rabbit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And I enjoyed the Kiwi dialects. And I suspect King's next film will be better.

Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity.

It's passable.

The line between cool and cold is a thin one, however. Cool isn't the word for "Thirteen"; it's just smug.

A lot of Beautiful Boy is necessarily hard to take, though the script softens the roughest of Nic’s travails. Is this why the movie’s anguish feels more indicated than inhabited? Still: You can’t fault the performers much. Or Chalamet, at all.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.

The Keanes' story is one of eventual triumph over adversity for Margaret, but Big Eyes struggles on the page to make much of her as a character. Adams struggles as well; she's acting in one movie, a sincere, often anguished one, while Waltz (mugging up a storm) works in an entirely different key.

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

Any movie with the sense, the wit and the visual instincts to introduce Kong the way this one does is fine with me.

Most of the clues in Veronica Mars pertain either to Internet sex tapes or the various surveillance uses of the latest tablets. Anybody who works in tech support will probably enjoy the film a tad more than I did.

If you have any curiosity at all about how a fellow like George Hamilton became a fellow like George Hamilton, My One and Only answers the question by looking, fondly, at his primary caregiver.

Don't expect miracles. Not every biopic needs to reinvent the form. Sometimes it's enough to inhabit it, engagingly.

There's something very right with Off the Black in terms of pure emotion and performance craft.

The Photograph treats all its characters with some decency and understanding, in a genre where straw villains and cardboard adversaries typically run rampant. The plaintive, jazz-inflected musical score by Robert Glasper establishes the right vibe and level of drama, which is to say: more like life and less like the movies.

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."

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.

You can find this clever, or you can find it lazy, and this is why MacFarlane is the biggest mixed blessing in contemporary TV comedy: He is both.

Piven's performance basically made the series, and to the degree the new film works, which is a little, he makes that too.

This movie also offers less: less wit, less charm, and only a few scraps of the old movie’s crucial songs (though “Baby Mine” receives its moment, in a campfire rendition).

If the key performances in Beautiful Boy were any less honest, the film's half-formed suppositions would undo it utterly.

Death, dying, hearts in winter, the thrill of a sexual reawakening: Sandra’s life, as “One Fine Morning” delineates, makes room for it all because it must. Hers is an ordinary life, in the end, full of small, extraordinary grace notes. Thanks to both filmmaker and star, it’s a consistently screenworthy one.

The film, a handsome nerve-jangler co-produced under the storied Hammer horror banner, amps up the scares without turning them into something completely stupid. Success!

A triumph of ambience, Rachel Getting Married is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme that feels like a party--bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.

As in last year's "Bridesmaids," an authentic, dimensional human element animates the jokes and the characters with whom we spend a couple of highly satisfying hours.

In a rom-com, there's no rom without the com. Hart and Hall give it their all.

Director Jason Orley (”Big Time Adolescence”) handles it all well enough. It’s Day and Slate who make the very best of it.

For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality.

It’s the junky, janky mid-winter Liam Neeson thriller we used to get with that first flip of the calendar, only this one stars Gerard Butler, and is directed by Jean-Francois Richet, whose two-part gangster biopic “Mesrine” was pretty juicy. This one’s more pulp than juice, but it’s enjoyable.

Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.

The film may be slight, but it is not stupid, and director Robert Cary keeps both stickiness and shtickiness at bay.

The ending is very different from the novella, and I was surprised at its shameless, ruthless emotional effectiveness.

It starts out good and turns out dumb, ditching a promising, nicely suggestive first half for second-half payoffs (revealed in the trailer) taking director Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut into lame and lamer slasher-film territory.

It’s a lot. Seyfried, who has worked with writer-director Egoyan before on the super-ripe erotic drama “Chloe” (2009), finesses some zig-zaggy tonal swerves confidently and well. The writing, however, wobbles.

While I hope Perkins doesn’t lean into jokey sadism as a dominant creative impulse — we have too many jokey sadists with movie deals as is — The Monkey asserts his stealth versatility as well as his confident technique.

The attitudes evinced by most of the characters, and the movie itself, are those of the admiring tourist, and as two-hour tours go, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel goes smoothly.

When everything and anything is possible, nothing feels urgent or truly dramatic. The movie devolves into a melange of digital effects and sequences of glamorous slaughter, as Lucy swaggers around, with that big brain, and slouches toward becoming a full-lipped deity.

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 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.

The comedy works some of the time; the pathos, more so. There's an undertow of grief in 2 Days in New York relating to the passing of Marion's (and Delpy's) mother, who died in 2009.

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

It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.

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

Big Miracle tells its sort-of-true version of events in a democratic and humane fashion, by way of a rangy, lively group of competing interests who actually do on occasion act like real people.

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.

Too often the film itself simply shuffles the postcards of Tibetan scenery, Buddhist rituals and the Tibetan people (many amazing faces on view, to be sure).

The Boxtrolls remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.

The director, New Zealander Christine Jeffs ("Sylvia"), loosens the plotting as best she can, letting the interactions breathe. Her work, and the film, is strictly about the performers.

It's not a frenzied head-trip, the way Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" was, nor does the movie have half the energy and nightmarish allure of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." It's best taken, I think, as a jape and a wry male-centric fable on transgression and desire.

Besides being super-duper gory, of course, the new movie is jaunty, good-looking and full of what you might call esprit de corpses.

This is an inspirational true story worried less about turning dramatic screws than earning its feeling through character.

Maybe if I liked the first "Anchorman" a little less, I'd like Anchorman 2 a little more. Still, I laughed.

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.

The clever and nicely gory Sputnik comes from Russia with love, slime, and an impressive lesson in efficient, low-cost pulp filmmaking.

Loosely entwining a half-dozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen.

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.

The director and co-writer David Lowery has made nothing but interesting features, six so far, and while his latest (co-written by Toby Halbrooks) turns into a bit of a Lost Boy here and there in its brooding investigation of why Captain Hook, played by a happily camp-averse Jude Law, got that way, it’s a stirring adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s fantasy.

Uber-raunchy but pretty interesting as sex comedies go.

Director and co-writer Eytan Fox is going for a sexually democratic, politically aware variation on story themes familiar to "Sex and the City" viewers. (At one point Lulu is referred to as "Miss Israeli Carrie Bradshaw.") Surprisingly, it works, and the entire cast is excellent.

This one's a certifiable soul-sucker, dining out on its characters' venalities while wagging a finger at the horror, the horror.

Ladron plays like a telenovela without the melodrama. The characters are brightly drawn archetypes, and the humor's very broad. But the tone is nice and brash.

It retains the original's sunny, democratic vibe and refreshing lack of meanness, as well as Soderbergh's interest (if not his precision) in keeping several of the ensemble members in frame, interacting, without a lot of routine close-ups.

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.

The visual style is typical, ultra crisp computer animation, bright, sharp, somewhat clinical.

What Vice says, and how it says it, will have half its audience nodding in angry, contemptuous agreement, and the other half calling it a liberal smear. In other words it’s like everything else in the culture right now.

It’s smooth, and far from inept. But it isn’t much fun. That’s all you want from a certain kind of heist picture, isn’t it? Fun?

Respect runs into trouble when its own respect toward Aretha Franklin, the woman who gave us the voice of a century, settles for garden-variety adoration. But longtime stage director Liesl Tommy’s debut feature, working from a screenplay by dramatist and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson, offers plenty of compensations amid its biopic conventions.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

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

Secretariat isn't bad but it's precisely what you'd expect.

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

A sleekly fashioned true-crime story without much on its mind.

Part of the problem here is one of proportion: The movie throws a misjudged majority of the material to the villains and lets the unfashionably sincere and sweet-natured Muppets fend for themselves.

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

The funniest American comedy of the summer.

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.

While not autobiographical, The Kite Runner feels authentic in its ethnic tensions, even when the narrative itself, with its handily reappearing and easily avenged villain, undermines that authenticity.

A more threatening embodiment of that idea, of new times that seem like old times, comes to subtly provocative life in Transit, one of the most intriguing films of the new year. Written and directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s an audacious reminder that there’s more than one way to adapt a so-called “period” novel for a new era.

Until the last 20 minutes, which stumble around in an attempt to set up a sequel, The Incredible Hulk keeps slamming everything forward, satisfyingly.

While Blue Beetle isn’t the same representation achievement the first “Black Panther” was for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the movie works on a canvas broad enough to include some wrenching emotional sequences along with the usual superhero selling points.

A lot of people have no use for Carnage, especially in its unapologetically hemmed-in film version. And yet there isn't a sloppily or casually considered shot in any of the 80 minutes.

For a while, Trance had me guessing, and more or less hooked. Then the violence, motivations, double-crosses and fantasy/reality tangles became tedious.

Outside the bedroom, the wartime swirl of intrigue never develops beyond postcard imagery, however. This is one of the major disappointments of the film-going year.

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

May have a dull title, but it's lively, idiotic fun, at least until it goes too far past "too far" into the realm of "far too far."

A roughly mixed but interestingly plotted offshoot of "Death of a Salesman."

"The Bourne Identity." "The Bourne Supremacy." "The Bourne Ultimatum." And now, "The Pointless, Confused and Then, For the Last Half-Hour, Exciting Bourne Sequel, After a Fashion," more commonly known as The Bourne Legacy.

With most films, that'd be enough to cut out half the potential American audience. But effective, evocative science fiction, which Elysium is, has a way of getting by with an ILA (Insidious Liberal Agenda) in the guise of worst-case dystopia.

The movie’s good even when it goes in too many directions at once, because it gets the kids right.

It's simply a more focused scenario than usual, full of violence done up with a little more coherence and visceral impact than usual.

Jackie Chan co-stars in Morita's old role of the humble maintenance man who coaches the Bullied One. The older Chan gets, the simpler and truer he becomes as a performer.

I hate hidden-camera gags on principle and have since “Candid Camera.” It takes something at least as funny as the first “Borat” (and, at its sharpest and sweetest, the second one), or this movie, for my jaw to unclench long enough to enjoy the brutal slapstick and the faux human misery.

Silly, sadistic and finally a little galling, Kingsman: The Secret Service answers the question: What would Colin Firth have been like if he'd played James Bond?

In 2024 a movie about a live-TV countdown to destiny, once upon a time in ’75, needs more than moderately skillful reverence, and reaction shots of people cracking up at colleagues, to show us what it might’ve been like to be there.

50 percent good and 50 percent close.

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

Larsson's leading characters have less to do in this wrap-up chapter. As Larsson wrote it and screenwriter and exposition-condenser Ulf Rydberg adapted it, it's a rather wobbly blend of courtroom drama and loose ends tied, albeit rather leisurely.

For all its workmanlike devotion to out-of-control helicopters, “Spectre” works best when everyone’s on the ground, doing his or her job, driving expensive fast cars heedlessly, detonating the occasional wisecrack, enjoying themselves and their beautiful clothes.

The script’s a messy sort of mess. There are also clear signs of a nervy director at work.

It's sweet, and low-key. It's very '70s in its vibe, which helps when the script veers in and out of formula.

It’s not perfect, but Anora is a touching comic and dramatic odyssey, driven by a terrific performance by Mikey Madison in the title role.

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

Strange is a word that pops up frequently in Claire’s Camera, a lovely doodle and the latest from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo. The strangeness extends to and suffuses most of the human interactions, which never go entirely smoothly.

Does it matter that Wolfs is about literally nothing except itself and its star packaging? Maybe not. On the other hand, Watts hasn’t written a single fleshed-out character. It’s about genre tropes, distilled to minimalist quipping amid maximalist mayhem.

As with the series, the best scenes here remain slightly off-plot yet wholly on-target and devoted to the characters as well as matters of corrupted, corrosive character.

A small, shrewd movie about large, messy emotions and regrets. It is a grown-up work about people who grow up the hard way, leaving one heart in disrepair and the other in reckless forward motion. It's a sad piece, but not maudlin.

In a movie built around two characters, Pitt does not hold up his 50 percent.

Calling Dredd 3D a movie is sort of a lie. It's a premise, and there are levels to reach, and always there's another grimy hallway to stalk, and then you turn right or left, and then kill some more.

What's striking about the picture, I think, is its lack of violent threat.

I wish this movie offered a little less running commentary and a little more running — anything, really, to get itself off the treadmill of self-critique and self-congratulation and actually going somewhere new.

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

Lightyear’s dazzling first half showcases the wittiest comic action from the Pixar folks in many years.

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.

I love what The Whale is doing for Fraser’s career. But not since John Wells blanded out the movie version of “August: Osage County” has a well-regarded play looked quite so at sea on screen.

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

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

It's nice to see a movie that is, well, nice. Nice but not dumb. It's also a comfortable fit for Costner.

Stillwater feels like a movie filmed in a slightly blurry state of mind, then reshaped in the editing stage into a whole new blur. You don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a plus. Yet director and co-writer Tom McCarthy’s drama is as uncertain as his good movies, “Spotlight” highest among them, are quietly confident in going about their business.

The core human/bear connection is treated with respect. Pooh’s wisdom and kindness cannot be denied. The same impulses worked for the two “Paddington” movies, God knows. Christopher Robin isn’t quite in their league, but it’s affecting nonetheless.

It’s a moderately diverting sequel. That means it’s also a distinct drop down from the 2017 origin story.

It’s uneven and, in many instances, avoidably cheesy.

At its sharpest, The Heat actually moves and banters like a comedy, with sharply timed and edited dialogue sequences driven by a couple of pros ensuring a purposeful sense of momentum.

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

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.

Small as it is, the film itself functions as a catchy, bittersweet waltz. You've heard it before, but the dancers are fun to watch.

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.

Red starts repeating itself and spinning its wheels and looking for an ending, well before the ending arrives. The actors have considerable fun with it, though.

Occasionally very funny, and moderately funny the rest of the time. In mathematical terms that adds up to pretty funny or "funny enough."

There’s not much kick to Isn’t It Romantic, even after it goes over the rainbow. It gets by, and commercially it may well be a modest hit — but has more to do with Valentine’s Day timing than the film itself.

Director Jodie Foster's film reasserts the feverish, defiant, often gripping talent of actor Mel Gibson.

So it's a bit squishy at the center. But the film is sleek, purposeful and extremely well acted.

His (Schwimmer) film deserves some attention for the remarkable performance from Liana Liberato as Annie.

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

This contrived mashup of "Proof" (earth-shaking algorithms), "Kramer vs. Kramer" (nerve-wracking custody battles) and "Little Man Tate" really isn't much.

Wahlberg remains one of our most reliable and least actorly of movie stars, innately macho but vulnerable enough to seem like a human being caught in an inhuman situation.

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.

Who would have believed a film with this much skin and reckless, life-threatening excess could end up a rather dull muddle?

Bad Moms keeps settling for less than it should, given the talent on screen. It's lazy, and tonally indistinct; half the time you wish it went further, and risked something with the Kunis character. The other half of the time you may find yourself frustrated with the puerile caricatures filling in the margins.

Jones is first-rate (and her fellow writer McCormack is fun as the wild-eyed pot dealer, Skillz). The film has a conventional fake-documentary look, but underneath it is an honest concern about how to learn to treat people well and kindly after the end. Or to get to an ending, or a new beginning, in the first place.

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.

All the astute acting in the world can’t bring such a preposterous story into the station on time and intact.

It’s harder than it should be to describe Kent Jones’ Diane in a way that makes it sound distinctive or special, which it is.

Beowulf is all right as far as it goes, and it goes pretty far for a PG-13 rating: Dismemberment, “300”-style blood globules comin’ atcha, and a digitally futzed and, for all practical purposes, completely naked!!!

You want big wows with this sort of entertainment, and the wows here are medium.

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