Moira Macdonald

The film doesn’t have much to say about its central questions, and its ending feels inevitable but also unearned.

Powell’s charm, along with some fun rich-person interiors (there’s a library near the end that gives a stellar performance), does a lot to get “How to Make a Killing” to the finish line. But you may well lose interest, as I did, before the murder countdown concludes; this one feels more like a rough draft than a truly well-thought-out movie.

There are moments now and then that register, particularly early in the movie when we meet the regulars on the musical-impersonator circuit.

It’s not terrible, but it’s an elegantly filmed stumble.

The plot’s a mess, the run time is overlong and ultimately the movie feels like a slew of good actors trapped in a gorgeous place, wearing beautiful clothes and gazing at the impossibly blue water.

Horror comedy, alas, is a tricky balance, and making a movie dance on a unicorn’s horn is trickier still; this one clearly needed a little more unicorn dust.

Ultimately, it’s a wild experiment that mostly falls flat.

Awkwafina and Cena, who gamely tolerate everything this movie throws at them, deserve better. Would somebody please make them a smart rom-com, soon?

Someday, someone will pair up Johansson and Tatum in a better movie. In the meantime, watch this one with low expectations, and dream.

Ultimately, Argylle is mostly bad CGI, action sequences that go by so fast you wonder what Vaughn is trying to hide, and a lot of strange tangents.

Mostly Next Goal Wins just plods along, agreeable and familiar and instantly forgettable.

Ultimately, Haunted Mansion feels like the ghost of a movie — just a fleeting shadow, one you can barely remember in the morning.

I don’t know about you, but this particular time in history does not seem like the moment for a movie that will leave you a) miserable and b) wondering why nobody in Gotham City seems to have heard of light bulbs. Your mileage may vary, but for me — who loved both the Tim Burton and the Christopher Nolan “Batman” universes — this one feels like an earnest but bloated misfire.

French Exit isn’t without its pleasures; but you watch it dreaming of the movie it might have been.

We can’t travel these days, so it’s fun to wallow in the scenery and its vivid colors. Want a great movie? Go watch the original Rebecca instead, but you probably knew that already.

If Like a Boss had a decent screenplay, and was competently directed, it might have been pretty good.

Ultimately, the film’s unwillingness to go deeper makes it fall flat.

Its central characters never find much chemistry — Clarke’s Kate is a one-note character, which is one note more than Golding’s character gets — and I left Last Christmas with many, many questions, none of which I can share here without giving away too much. The elf costume, though? Just right.

Motherless Brooklyn is lovely to look at — the cast, in addition to their acting talents, all look great in ’50s styles — and I enjoyed the noir-y jazz of the dialogue. (“Everybody looks like everybody to me,” a bartender tells Lionel, who’s looking for someone in the shadows of a club.) But it’s easily half an hour longer than it needs to be, and it’s full of moments that don’t go anywhere.

While Portman’s performance is skilled, she doesn’t have enough to work with — the character, as written, just isn’t there.

The Goldfinch feels like a series of often-elegant moments, in service to a story that never quite comes into focus.

Like Bernadette, the movie’s lost; you’ll need to read the book to truly find her.

If “golden retriever voiced by Kevin Costner” rings any alarm bells for you, steer clear.

Ultimately, despite Nanjiani’s best efforts, it’s a disposable fast-car summer movie, neither terrible or good, for those biding their time before the next “Fast & Furious” installment.

It’s a haunting, heartbreaking story, told by a movie that never quite makes a case for itself to exist.

There’s exactly one good jump-scare, which probably would have caused me to drop my popcorn if I hadn’t finished it already; otherwise it’s fairly uninspired. But something about Quaid’s delivery had me giggling throughout — or, at least, until things got rather too dark in the final minutes.

Greta is a disappointment from Jordan, who’s made far better movies (“The Crying Game,” “The End of the Affair” and, more recently, the elegant vampire film “Byzantium”), but Huppert seizes hold of the film and chills it, in a way that’s both shiver-inducing and bracing.

Rodriguez does just enough to keep things mildly interesting.

The Aspern Papers, brief as it is, needed more of a lightness of touch; if you weigh down melodrama too much, it dies.

While it’s often great fun to look at, “Crimes of Grindelwald” fails at what should be Rowling’s great strength: storytelling. Three more to go, and an infusion of magic is desperately needed.

You don’t really watch Suspiria, you endure it.

Except for its songs, Bohemian Rhapsody too quickly becomes forgettable; something the real-life man at its center, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1991 at the age of 45, never was. Watch the real footage; you’ll see.

In between all of these delights is an awful lot of filler

Political satire is one of the trickiest of genres; this one, running out of steam and nerve, ultimately becomes a too-familiar example of another genre: the 93-minute movie that feels way, way too long.

Happy anniversary, Little Women, but I think I prefer you back in the 19th century; dreamy professors aside.

Skyscraper, which lacks the lunkheaded charm of “Rampage,” isn’t the ideal vehicle — its special effects are murky (I saw it in 2D; it’s probably even muddier in 3D), and a bit of wit wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Nobody in this film has a personality; they’re just evil, stoic, mildly badass (particularly Neve Campbell, as Will’s resourceful wife) or The Rock.

Even the heavenly chorus that’s working overtime on the soundtrack can’t drown out the lack of chemistry between Howard and Pratt. And the movie too often defaults to people running around screaming — which is, to be fair, the backbone of this franchise, but it gets awfully old here.

The cast is a likable bunch, and I can see how Tag might go down nicely with a couple of beers beforehand; it’s definitely funny in spots, in a we’re-making-this-up-as-we-go-along sort of way.

Despite this rich emotional material (not to mention some gloriously shabby drawing rooms), the film feels surprisingly dull and conventional — two things its heroine most definitely was not.

The sweet-natured rom-com I Feel Pretty has a well-meaning message, but it gets lost in the telling.

Lesser actors would have drowned in the muck, but these two almost sell it.

Much as I’d like to love a movie that encompasses ballet, spectacular hotel rooms, a Mary-Louise Parker drunk scene, and Rampling standing grimly in the snow like an unbreakable icicle, the movie’s focus on sexual violence against Lawrence’s character ultimately feels repellent.

The Lodgers is never particularly scary, or even logical, but it’s always gorgeous to look at; you can see where it’s going, but you might not mind watching it go there.

The movie relies rather too heavily on McAdams’ charm, sort of like a limp cheeseburger that’s saved by some really good bacon. But hey, sometimes a fast-food cheeseburger satisfies, more or less.

The Greatest Showman isn’t interested in tiny stories or character or nuance; it’s about being the biggest. In doing so, it becomes strangely small; like a magician’s rabbit, it quickly disappears.

Danny Strong’s film, which stars Nicholas Hoult as Salinger...isn’t terrible; it’s just one of those period films that never catches a spark — you find yourself admiring the elegantly lit rooms and the meticulous 1940s costumes, rather than becoming immersed in the drama.

Nobody’s behavior here resembles that of an actual person, and the directing is often awkward.

The Mummy starts off light and very quickly goes dark — fading rapidly, along with our hopes that this latest monster mash might possibly be any good.

Everything, Everything is watchable and not unpleasant, in its moony way, thanks to the chemistry of two leads, both of whom exude a genuine sweetness in the face of an absurd plotline.

Snatched is one of those movies that feels like a rough draft of itself. A few more rewrites, a few more laughs, a little (well, a lot) more attention, and maybe it would have been an amusing summer comedy.

That Unforgettable is watchable, at least before it disintegrates into generic violence near the end, is due to the touches of wit in the directing, and to the two lead performances.

I’ll admit to a weakness for this sort of thing (which Merchant-Ivory, a couple of decades back, made into elegant art), but even I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this one, a tepid love triangle set in the Ottoman Empire in the early days of World War I.

Even Deutch’s charming radiance (she never entirely sells Sam’s nasty side) can’t quite get us through the slog of this plot.

If Verbinski could have trimmed about an hour from the film (which weighs in at a portly 146 minutes), he might have had something.

You can see why McAvoy was drawn to the role — it’s as if he’s playing every character in a very populated if not particularly well-scripted play — and he demonstrates a shellacked creepiness that’s effective. But Shyamalan can’t find much else that’s new or appealing in this overlong girls-in-peril exercise.

There are several ways you can watch Elle, only one of which is mildly enjoyable.

Passengers turns out to be a very strange journey indeed; here’s hoping these two team up again, in something more worthy of them.

It’s fun to spend time with these performers, but you wish they were invited to a better party.

The first-rate cast — right down to that infant, who displays Streep-like instincts for the camera — toils mightily. But sadly, they’re trapped in what becomes a sort of A-list Nicholas Sparks melodrama Down Under.

Ultimately, her run and Roseanne for President! meet the same fate: not quite entertaining enough to qualify as comedy, nor quite thoughtful enough to take seriously.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers — busily splashing the film in crayon-colored light, vaguely sinister pop music and jittery camerawork — forgot to give Vee and Handsome Stranger (his name’s Ian) much personality.

Like so many small-screen-to-big-screen efforts, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie isn’t really a movie, just a stretched-out TV episode with a parade of cameos and boatloads of Champagne.

You’ve seen this cheery, slapdash blend of raunch, cocktails and summer dresses before.

You wish Perkins would have shown up with his red pencil during the screenwriting stage, when he might have done some good.

The blend of Johnson’s laid-back hero-dudeness and Hart’s whippet-fast comic timing should have been good fun. But somebody, alas, had an idea, though not a good one: Make Johnson the comedian and Hart the straight man.

Try to remember this movie, a few days after seeing it, and you’ll find that — like magic — it’s disappeared.

Alice Through the Looking Glass isn’t without pleasures, but this empowerment-meets-fantasy mixture could have used a few more sprinklings of quirk.

All of this is sporadically funny and cheerfully tasteless in its low-budget way, but it’s also unevenly acted, a bit overlong and never quite as daring as it seems to want to be.

None of this has any real reason for being; even the tiniest bit of drama that Vardalos’ screenplay scares up...gets wrapped up by the hour mark. But Vardalos has created a community of characters and players so likable, it seems almost mean to criticize.

A mostly agreeable but empty-headed mess. It’s sort of the movie equivalent of Derek Zoolander himself.

The film feels long and slow, and the subject matter familiar. We never quite get caught up in it, despite the appealing cast; a thriller directed at a snail's pace simply isn't very thrilling.

Unfortunately, King Arthur is somewhat less compelling than the "Lord of the Rings" movies; there's serious intent here, but an often thudding execution.