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.