Moira Macdonald

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

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.

It’s all good, goofy fun; make it an air-conditioned double feature with “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” and you might just have the very definition of “summer movies.”

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

It isn’t “Working Girl” — Second Act is more earnest and less funny — but it’s a pleasant enough diversion, helped along immensely by Lopez’s warm screen presence and by a first-rate Sassy Best Friend performance by Leah Remini.

It’s bland and forgettable, and director Falcone still hasn’t figured out how not to sabotage his supporting cast (why hire the hilarious Chris Parnell if you’re not going to let him be funny?), but it’s a movie a lot like the presence of McCarthy herself — there’s an inner sweetness that shines through.

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.

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

You watch wondering what good actors like Lively, Law, Jeffrey and Sterling K. Brown (as a former C.I.A. officer) saw in this muddy screenplay, and why Morano, best known for the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” couldn’t find a way to make them spark.

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.

You sense that this woman has spent a lifetime not saying things, and that all she wants is to quietly be allowed to fade away.

Only two things need to be said about Rampage: It’s really terrible, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Kidnap has a tossed-together sameness to it, like a salad made up only of tired lettuce.

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

Barney's Great Adventure may be a magical journey of emotion for the little ones, it's rather a puzzlement for uninitiated adults. [03 Apr 1998, p.G9]

I found myself admiring The Bronze for its stalwart refusal to soften Hope, and for Rauch’s carefully detailed performance.... But admiring isn’t quite the same as liking. This film is a comedy wrapped in barbed wire; approach with caution.

The whole purpose of this teen horror movie is to show creatively gruesome deaths. If you prefer your horror flicks with a dash of wit or suspense, look elsewhere.

You watch hoping that the always-splendid Condon, an Oscar nominee last year for “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is getting a really good paycheck, and wondering why writer/director Bryce McGuire saw fit to expand his very effective four-minute 2014 film “Night Swim” into this soggy mess. Don’t go in the water, indeed.

The Angry Birds Movie is unnecessary but cute, like a bonnet on a cat — and there are certainly worse recommendations than that.

The fun of this movie — aside from the glorious and very velvet-forward costumes, by Ellen Mirojnick — is the performances of the two Hollywood pros at its center, both perfectly cast.

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

There’s actually quite a bit to enjoy here, not least of which is Black and Rudd’s funny chemistry, some amusing sight gags involving that enormous CGI snake (who has a diva’s sense of timing), the term “snake funeral” and a rather sweet message about following your dreams. It’s all very, very silly.

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

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.

A deeply uninspired sequel to last year’s surprise (and surprisingly sweet) hit “Bad Moms,” this movie was made in a hurry and it shows.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” lumbers on for more than two hours, weighed down with oversized elephants, excessively populated action sequences, and weirdly sudden occurrence of slow motion, as if the film is yawning.

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

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

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

A soggy thriller in which every scene, even a daytime one early on at the newspaper where Lo works, seems to take place in ominously blue darkness.

Rodriguez does just enough to keep things mildly interesting.

In the cast, only Isaac makes a vivid impression, in a swaggery, relaxed turn that seems to imply that he’s in on the joke, or at least having a good time.

It just feels like a pretty idea that didn’t get fully developed; an origin story that we didn’t need.

McCarthy’s trademark blend of chipper likability and treble-voiced rage just isn’t quite enough to carry things through.

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

Every scene in this film, which stars Robert De Niro as the washed-up title character, is dragged out — kicking and screaming — far longer than it needs to be.

It’s just the same movie over and over, until the end of time and everybody dies, in which case “Pitch Perfect 45: A-Ca-Wait-Are-We-Dead?” might be a thing.

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

An enjoyably nutty more-is-more family holiday extravaganza.

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

If Brooks could have mustered up a screenplay half as good as “Broadcast News,” this movie would have been a delight; instead, it disappears into agreeable blandness and earnest platitudes. It’s not at all unpleasant spending two hours with Ella and her family and colleagues, but it leaves you feeling a little nostalgic for what it could have been.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (“Kon-Tiki”) seem to not have the slightest idea how to make this material sing; instead, it’s mostly a noisy, dark 3D blur in which the characters run around a lot, seemingly looking for the exits

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.

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.

Gemini Man is full of the expected action and bullets, none of which is especially thrilling, but you leave thinking about those two faces — and about how movie magic keeps finding new tricks.

You feel for the actors, who you know are better than this stuff, and you wonder if director F. Gary Gray (“Straight Outta Compton”) just threw up his hands. And you wonder if, somewhere, Smith and Jones are chuckling. At least somebody was.

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.

It’s all instantly forgettable. Except for the tulips — which, for the record, look stellar.

We don’t even see that much of Cuba. Most of the action takes place at Hemingway’s estate there — the actual house, a vanilla-ice-cream-colored mansion (now a Hemingway museum), which gives a restrained, elegant performance. Pity the rest of the movie doesn’t rise to its standard.

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.

Let’s just say that things aren’t always what they seem, and that there is not enough popcorn in the world to make this particular twist go down.

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

The Huntsman is a flabby mess — yet another sequel with no reason to exist.

Toula and Ian are sweet and bland; their relatives are predictably wisecracky, and the whole thing just feels like watching someone’s extremely well-produced vacation video.

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.

Hathaway and Wilson, instead of exuding odd-couple comic chemistry, seem to barely be in the same movie; they don’t click, with each other or with a bland Alex Sharp as their tech-bro mark.

The ever-game Dormer and that lovely green forest — which is, according to the press notes, played by a photogenic woodland in Serbia — deserve better.

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

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

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.

It’s not a terribly good idea to base a movie on a book in which almost nothing happens for 500 pages, but that’s what we have here.

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

“Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way.

Johnson and Dornan’s performances are wooden and their chemistry nonexistent (particularly in the movie’s more-of-the-same sex scenes), but think of it all as ultra-deadpan entertainment and it kind of works.

Eventually, the film muddles its way into a self-indulgent, overlong mess, complete with a flowerlike beating heart, a miraculous new life and a lot of soccer. Long before anyone in Ma Ma expires, the movie does.

Sadly, Friend Request is not even the first movie to travel that harrowing Dead Girl Who Still Maintains an Active Facebook Presence road.

Because so few movies focus on stories about women, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this strong cast drifting away on a tide of soap bubbles — there’s no movie here, just scene after scene of melodramatic cliché.

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

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.

Collateral Beauty is a pretty terrible movie, but it left me with one overarching thought: My life, and surely yours, too, would be vastly improved if only Helen Mirren were perpetually lurking nearby, offering advice.

Sometimes, all the pieces are there, but it just isn’t worth putting the puzzle together. Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman.

It’s a lazy movie that fades from memory the instant the credits start to roll; a blandly pretty cog in a studio wheel. Moms deserve better. So do moviegoers.

Should you decide to watch all of Blackway, a decision I cannot endorse, you’ll get to know Lillian (Julia Stiles), a determined if rather personality-free woman who’s moved back to the small Oregon logging town where she grew up.

Filmed during three separate trips to the Auschwitz site starting in 2010, the result is a movie so intensely personal that it amounts to an extended selfie.