Owen Gleiberman

Even Watchmen fanatics may be doomed to a disappointment that results from trying to stay THIS faithful to a comic book.

A world-detonation thriller, at once urgent and lazy, that benefits from its connection to current events and also, by the end, suffers from it.

The movie is a Disneyfied contradiction: a lapsed-Catholic comedy without a whiff of true blasphemy. Still, on its own fluffy terms, it’s pleasant nunsense.

A notch more watchable than Volume I, if only because Joe, the self-destructive heroine, is now played front and center by the magnetically dyspeptic Charlotte Gainsbourg instead of the vacuous model Stacy Martin.

The picture is nearly painstaking in its traditionalism, a tale of love, war, and valor in which nostalgia for ''simpler times'' gets mashed together, almost fetishistically, with nostalgia for old movies and for the spirit of knightly self sacrifice during World War II.

If anything, Strange Days belongs to the rotters hovering around its edges: Michael Wincott, a vision of Drano-throated malevolence; Tom Sizemore, who, as Lenny’s bikerish pal, suggests Judd Nelson if he’d let the corruption ooze a little further out of his pores; and the wonderfully weaselly Richard Edson as an underground software techie.

Woody Allen has become such a beguiling travel agent that he rolls through these stories with a relaxed effervescence that is rather infectious.

I wouldn't call Catwoman incompetent, yet it has no visual grandeur, and very little surprise; you can tick off the story beats as if they'd been graphed.

As a romantic comedy, The Back-up Plan is friendly but also a bit drab.

As Benny, a small- town Irish teenager in the '50s who goes off to university in Dublin, Minnie Driver has a touchingly awkward prettiness. Her jaw may be as square as a picture frame, but her smile lights her up from within.

The most gripping performers are on the sidelines: Eric Roberts, a master of hyperbolic sliminess (he’s like Cagney playing a pimp on steroids), and Uma Thurman, who brings her underwritten role a hundred shades of curiosity, brattishness, and hopeless romantic fervor. She couldn’t be a stand-in if she tried.

With its lyrical vision of oppression, looks, if anything, milder now than it might have before the war.

White Squall is lovely to look at, but frustrating to behold.

Chain Reaction, while crisply shot, unfolds in an action-suspense-thriller void. The movie’s emblem might be the terse, bureaucratically impersonal performance of Morgan Freeman, who, as the energy project’s chief government liaison, manages to play the film’s most ambiguous character without raising its dramatic temperature one degree.

"Risky Business" had a great opening act and then descended into contrivances. This genial cardboard knockoff is contrived from the start but gets better as it goes along.

It's nifty to behold, but about the only drama in Steamboy lies in waiting for this colossal hovering machine-monster to blow a gasket.

An efficient, intense formula thriller.

Boils down to a performance film with abysmal sound in which you rarely get to see a good, revealing close-up of the stars.

Journey is just the new version of a 1950s comin'-at-ya roller coaster, with a tape measure, trilobite antennae, and giant snapping piranha thrust at the audience.

Harold and Kumar, fortunately, never lose their verbally relentless way of delivering raunch as pure common sense.

An experience you won't easily shake.

There is much to look at--it's like spending two hours in Michael Jackson's Undead Neverland--but not a lot at stake.

Whenever Sin Nombre turns violent, it seizes you with its convulsive skill, but the film's images vastly outstrip its imagination.

It's all more lightweight-likable than exciting.

While a good deal funnier than ''Deuce Bigelow,'' is still destined to get branded, if not condemned, as ''dumb.''

Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards.

In total effect, Prince Caspian feels a lot more earthbound than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

Funny? Yes, but in its slapdash way, it sounds nuttier than it plays.

A kinder, gentler teensploitation comedy, but Hartnett's Matt, at least, invites the audience to graduate to something better.

The picture itself is only mechanically breezy.

In execution, it is charming...and also a little monotonous.

Moore doesn't just act. She goes on the attack, embracing the kind of lower-rung-of-the-middle-class role that actresses from Jodie Foster to Meryl Streep have long savored. Her performance is an achievement of sorts, yet, like the movie itself, it's also strenuous and joyless.

Marcia Gay Harden is an angry vulgarian who steals shampoo off the maids' carts and bribes a lawyer to get her baby. Sayles may not have planned it this way, but Harden makes crassness as powerful as any maternal instinct.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is an utterly depersonalized thrill machine, yet it’s exactly the film’s go-go relentlessness that is likely to make boys and girls eat it up.

The Killer Inside Me may be the darkest film noir ever made.

A shudder-by-numbers pseudo-J-horror gothic, full of supernatural stunts you feel as if you've seen before the movie even gets to them.

Spawn doesn't make a lot of sense, but the imagery whooshes by in glitzy psychedelic torrents.

Mo’ Better Blues repeatedly draws back from its characters, exchanging intimacy for shtick and, in the end, lapsing into half-baked psychodrama.

This is basically a nerd-loosening-his-tie romantic comedy done in the manic-compulsive mode of "Liar Liar."

If there's such a thing as joyless competence, it's exemplified by the grimly sensational kidnap thriller Don't Say a Word.

For today’s filmmakers, the addiction to kinetic overkill has become a disease in itself.

The truth is that Undertow is like a conventional Hollywood movie operating on half its cylinders.

The movie itself is too cautious and unimaginative to bring off what a great magic trick — or comedy — should do: make us laugh out loud with surprise.

The movie is cranked up somewhere between stylish and proudly stupid, dusted with sunniness from Amy Smart (as Chev's sleepy girlfriend) -- and guaranteed to be out of your system by the time the lights come up.

The film's most memorable performance is also its most incongruous: As Jimmy, the teen sap who falls hard for Suzanne, Joaquin Phoenix is dead-eyed yet touchingly vulnerable -- a mush-mouthed angel.

Perhaps the first sports movie ever made in which the characters talked as good a game as they played.

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is watchable but also stiff and remote.

Hook is jam-packed with ''entertainment value,'' enough to give you your money's worth, and to guarantee (in all probability) that Spielberg earns his. Yet something has clouded this director's vision... The problem isn't that Spielberg has lost his gift for fantasy. It's that he no longer seems to know (or care) about anything else.

Spader and Sarandon make White Palace worth seeing, but too often they’re fighting the movie’s smugness.

The movie itself, with the exception of a few scenes, doesn't really have the wit it's aiming for, and among Steve Martin vehicles it's middle-drawer, at best. Yet that mood of silly exuberance reigns through most of the picture.

Cadillac Man, like the recent I Love You to Death, starts out as comedy on a human scale and turns into canned farce. For an actor like Robin Williams, that’s the movie equivalent of being muzzled.

The film gets a little ''We can fix this!'' inspirational for a chronicle of such staggering darkness.

It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.

Spider-Man 3 has terrific moments, but after the danger and majesty and romantic brio of "Spider-Man 2," those adrenalized rooftop ballets feel, more than ever, like sequences.

At the end, when the grandson, in drag, enters a little-girl beauty contest, the movie far outdoes the crowning moment of "Little Miss Sunshine." But most of Bad Grandpa lacks that delirious mad kick of surprise.

Hiddleston, with pleading eyes and a mad-dog grin, plays Loki as a wounded sociopath who's cackling at the world but seething on the inside. Which makes you realize he's just about the only character in the movie who has an inside.

A little bit obsessed with replication.

Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau makes the mistake of treating Cyrano de Bergerac as though it were some lost Shakespearean tragedy instead of the wonderfully gimmicky (and familiar) tearjerker it is.

Braveheart features some of the most enthralling combat sequences in years, and the excessive ferocity of the violence is part of the thrill.

As a romantic comedy, the picture is pleasant, predictable, and utterly weightless.

As it becomes clear that Ball, in essence, has just restaged American Beauty with a socially conscious paint job, the sensationalism of Towelhead looks more and more like a dramatic tic.

Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.

It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.

Though the movie is sometimes too mannered (during one unaccountable stretch, Penn suddenly turns into Diane Arbus and peppers the screen with small-town grotesques), it has an accomplished rhythmic flow, a sense of people’s destinies unfolding step by step.

Now that the series is, it can be said that the most disturbing thing about the Saw films is the way that they turn torture into a wink of megaplex vengeance. They're made, and consumed, as a big bloody joke, and that's scary.

Think Like a Man is so busy tracking courtship as if it were a science project that the bite-size love stories lack spontaneity.

The dance-film equivalent of a female impersonator: The movie is absurd and sincere at the same time-it offers an insolent facsimile of grand passion.

The songs of the South African freedom fighters were a literal call to arms. The music succeeded -- magnificently. The movie, on the other hand, is only so-so.

Along Came Polly is nothing if not a chick flick for guys.

The routines are charged, even between jokes, with anticipatory hilarity.

Bana and McAdams are sweet together, with matching dimples and starry eyes, and we grow eager to see them remain in the same place. In the end, that's all there is to the movie, really. It's a time-travel fantasy in search of a cozy love seat.

Diary of the Dead isn't bad; it's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one.

Thanks to Vaughn, Favreau, and the stray sharp lines that pop out of everyone else, the film at least offers the lively sound of egos that still know how to swing.

Crooklyn has a warm, nostalgic, spilling-over-the-edges effusiveness that is new to Lee's work. At the same time, the movie often seems every bit as high-strung as the family it's about.

The movie isn't terrible; it's just low-rent and reductive.

The writer-director, Alice Wu, fudges a lot of the basics -- I never believed the heroine was really a physician -- but the final, proudly public girl-on-girl smooch still jerks a tear.

The Best Man Holiday is an eggnog that's sticky-sweet and heavy at the same time.

There's a fair amount of filler in The Italian Job, but it all boils down to the big heist, which has been staged as if it were Fort Knox being robbed by Evel Knievel.

The icy whimsy of Kitchen Stories is certainly well sustained, but you don't laugh at the movie so much as wait for the joke to thaw.

If anything, the real surprise here is how affecting he makes the Grinch's ultimate big hearted turnaround, as Carrey the actor sneaks up on Carrey the wild man dervish. In whichever mode, he carreys the movie.

The best thing about it is Peck, who shows you the sweet, virginal kid hiding inside the outlaw poseur.

Cyrus, an apple-cheeked dumpling, resembles Pia Zadora, but when she exhorts the crowd, it's with the martial efficiency of Hillary Clinton.

One of those sanctifying docs that rambles when it should explore.

Kicking & Screaming may be a prefab cartoon out of the "Bad News Bears" cookie cutter, but Ferrell doesn't just save this junk -- he rules it.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is too long, and it's ersatz magic, but at least it casts an ersatz spell.

Crossing Over is so eager to go for the emotional jugular that it never quite forges an enlightening point of view.

Departures is tender and, at times, rather squishy. It's sure to squeeze the tear ducts of anyone who has lost a parent.

The actors are charming, but the movie is like a helium balloon with a leak in it.

That Griffin tells some of the most intolerant jokes since Andrew Dice Clay should hardly obscure his talent, even if it does tarnish it.

The Two Jakes is competent and watchable.

The movie is a somber, smoothly crafted drama about a wily adolescent who senses there's something rotten going on in his country but can't quite put a finger on it.

The truth is that we're way past being outraged by these sorts of Crimes of the One Percent, not because they don't happen, but because the real version is so much more interesting.

Michael Sheen and Maria Bello both have wrenching moments in this quiet, oblique drama. Yet the movie isn't really convincing.

It seems pompous and scattershot now -- a tweaking of privileged European smugness that unfolds with a playful daisy-chain logic but has the tone of a quaint, doddering lecture.

In its mingling of horniness and disgust, Tomcats attains a convoluted cleverness.

Double Team becomes an enjoyably decadent spectacle of gymnastic preposterousness.

Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three.

Half-baked Herzog, though it has twinkles of theatrical purity that remind you of when his vision was grand.

Hoffman and Thompson are each good enough to bring out a glow in the other.

The teensploitation premise is like something a porn filmmaker from the '70s might have come up with. But Fired Up! has one added quirk: The script, credited to Freedom Jones, is a riot of tongue-twisting ironic sleaze -- it sounds like the first (and last) collaboration between Diablo Cody and Artie Lange.

But Philadelphia turns out to be a scattershot liberal message movie, one that ties itself in knots trying to render its subject matter acceptable to a mass audience.

It's a cautionary tale about the excesses of jingoist paranoia, and the folly of it all is that the more the film descends into somber liberal chest thumping, the less engrossing it becomes.

The funniest moments in Groundhog Day come when Phil takes sneaky advantage of his predicament-by, say, pumping a sexy woman in the local coffee shop for facts about her past and then, ''the next day,'' using the information to lure her into bed. What the movie lacks is the ingenious, lapidary comic structure that could have made these moments fuse into something tricky and wild.

At times, the movie could have been called "Me and You and Every One of the Bastards We Know," but Krasinski preserves Wallace's whooshing roller coasters of words, powered by the fuel of confession.

It's basically a zombie movie with machines instead of the walking dead.

What About Bob? is just funny enough to make you wish it had been wilder and less predictable.

It's one of those woozy Jungian art jobs, a series of elliptical, nearly wordless vignettes that are meant to strike a universal symbolist chord. Director Mike Figgis frames the movie with his baroquely contemporary documentary-like version of the Fall.

Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, though, Basic Instinct is mechanical and routine, a muddle of Hitchcockian red herrings and standard cop-thriller ballistics.

Cocaine Cowboys, which at times seems like it could have been edited by someone on coke, comes at you as a vast bloody river of underworld information.

The trouble is, he's preaching to the choir -- or, at least, to a culture, profoundly influenced by Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," that has already absorbed the lesson that ''the Good War,'' while it may have been noble, was never less than hell.

Sober and honorable, yet it's far from searching.

Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the Oscar-winning coproducer of Driving Miss Daisy (it’s her first time behind the camera), Rush has a raw surface authenticity. But that’s about all it has.

Night Falls on Manhattan makes you nostalgic for Lumet's truly first-rate corruption movies, like the great, underrated "Q&A" (1990).

Watching this film, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that Hitchens' obsession with Kissinger is, at bottom, a sophisticated flower child's desire to purge the world of the tooth and claw of human power. The movie isn't, finally, an argument. It's a long angry ''Boo!''

Webber has a knack for bringing out actors at their showiest, but he palms off too much first-draft sketchiness as ''ambiguity.''

A routine Will Smith cop-on-the-hunt thriller at heart, I, Robot lacks imaginative excitement.

You may roll your eyes a bit at the glib, transparent, indie-grunge romanticism.

For a while, the movie looks like "Couples Retreat" or a Tyler Perry house party, only instead of cookie-cutter conflicts, everyone just grows happier and more relaxed.

The one figure in Revenge of the Sith who taps the true spirit of Star Wars is Ewan McGregor: With his beautiful light, clipped delivery, he plays Alec Guinness' playfulness, making Obi-Wan a marvel of benevolent moxie.

The movie is zippier than Tim Burton's oddly lifeless 2001 "Planet of the Apes" remake, but unlike good sci-fi, it doesn't signify anything, or really even try to.

The Freshman has its moments — I enjoyed Paul Benedict’s performance as a pompously self-infatuated film professor — but mostly it plods along like that lizard. Still, whenever Brando shows up the screen just about twinkles.

Without the music, the movie might have been painful, but the songs, Auto-Tuned and processed as they are, generate a hooky bliss. They're the chewy center of this ultra-synthetic hard candy.

For all its music-trivia affection, High Fidelity is finally a pretty thin melody.

A bad movie so over-the-top that at moments it's almost good - or, at least, more arresting than it has any right to be.

Director John Maybury has a feel for shock rhythms, and he's skillful at keeping you guessing, but after a while you want your questions to cohere into compelling answers, and in The Jacket they don't, quite.

Despite its logy, red-herring structure, the film has enough enigma and weirdness that it gradually stirs to life.

Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage inject tasty bits of personality into their roles.

Carrey isn't afraid to go happily psycho, like Peter Sellers or Eminem on his funniest tracks, and that's his edge.

Lonergan's dialogue can sweep you up in a whoosh of personality and ideas, but it's hard to see what, apart from ego, convinced him that this story was so epic.

The Daytrippers has some of the wacky dysfunctional chic that made David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster such a grating experience, but writer-director Greg Mottola has a lighter, warmer touch; his characters don’t have to act like pigs in order to prove they’re human.

In Henry & June, Kaufman, trying to deepen the erotic explorations of Unbearable Lightness, ends up with a triangle movie that’s watchable but also arty and rather stilted.

There are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris.

What the film leaves unexplained is how this joyous musical outpouring, which predated the revolution, could fare under a system with a pathological distrust of beauty.

If anything holds Dragon together, it’s Jason Scott Lee’s intensely likable performance.

The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men.

In the course of City Hall, Calhoun doesn’t just get to the bottom of a scandal. He grows up, and watching Cusack enact the transformation, I thought I glimpsed this gifted young actor growing into a star.

Confused? So is Miral, a film that makes bits and pieces of the Palestinian experience come alive without assembling them into a coherent vision.

If you're going to say the unsayable and stay charming while doing so, it helps to look more like Sarah Silverman than Andrew Dice Clay.

This pleasantly rote movie will rouse you.

Isn't a very funny movie (it preaches nonconformity in the rote style of an overlit sitcom), but Wilson, at least, keeps it afloat.

Unknown White Male is framed as a look at the mystery of identity, but there's a bizarre neutrality to the movie, since it makes Bruce's life just as detached and remote to us as it seems to him.

Though the events have a rambling overfamiliarity, there's a real story between the lines: the resentment over the U.S. occupation on the part of non-insurgent Iraqis.

The film evokes how homicide became the ultimate orgasm for kids who had turned themselves into zombies of flesh.

Homicide is engrossing, at least for a while, but the truly personal movie it wants to be remains locked up in Mamet’s head.

As heavy with message as any Hollywood delinquent drama of the late '50s.

Zwick offers excitingly staged moments, but once you get past the novelty of WWII Jews acting this heroically macho, Defiance bogs down in a not very well-developed script.

Too poky and contrived to be a good movie, but its lushly serene atmospherics, given current events, make it a pure slice of sentimental comfort food.

There are fine, fresh observational moments, but the film is much ado about not so much.

The Myth of the American Sleepover has fresh, lovely moments, but it could have used more psychological heft.

In her sassy but scrubbed way, Bynes is a real charmer, and What a Girl Wants is a likable throwaway.

Through the character of a saddened priest, Malick seems to be saying that the reason for our breakups, for our fragmented lives and relationships, is that we can no longer see God. If we could, we would be whole again. That may be true, but in To the Wonder, it's Terrence Malick who isn't letting his characters be whole.

To take the playfully convoluted, semi-nonsensical aggression of Rumsfeld's language and make it the whole point of a movie is to fall into the trap of mistaking the spin for the story.

Perry holds back on the finger-wagging, eye-bulging tantrums. There were moments when I was grateful for that. There were others, like the kissy scenes between Perry and Newton, when I began to miss them.

Never underestimate the importance of guy-on-guy sentimentality in the Adam Sandler universe. It's his way of making his fans feel as if he's high-fiving them, or maybe giving them a group hug. But Sandler, bottom line, is too good at playing louts like Donny to spend this much energy getting us to like them.

Feminist sanctimony, it turns out, looks much the same forward and backward.

The movie is cheesy, tacky, and gimmicky. But as directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), it's also prankish and inventive enough to be kind of fun.

You giggle every so often, but you never give yourself over to the characters.

For all the nimbleness of its first half and the chemical zing of Pitt and Jolie, the film devolves into a fractious and explosive mess, hitting the same note of ''ironic'' violence over and over.

Compared with a superior potboiler like "Salt," which messed with your brain in entertainingly far-fetched ways, Safe House is action-movie porridge gussied up into a less-clever-than-it-seems mystery.

Easy A has some agreeable fast banter, but it's so self-consciously stylized that it wears you out.

The two stars are like cool kids pretending to be tortured poets pretending to be cool. Neither can match the screen presence — the shameless self-infatuated ebullience — of Matthew Lillard, who does a wickedly grotesque turn as Brock Hudson, a kind of goggle-eyed Puck manqué in the film's dead-on send-up of "The Real World."

Shot in vivid black and white, the movie is like "Village of the Damned" directed by Ingmar Bergman, only without Bergman's intensity.

In its low grade way, this blithely brutal cops and drugs thriller is an efficient hot wire entertainment.

The movie is a footnote as well, a minor reference back to the days when people yearned for a cinema that was serious and erotic at the same time.

If it's possible to be a rip-off with wit, Disturbia qualifies.

This is just silliness run mildly wild.

Gerwig is adorable, but that's both good and bad, as the movie can't stop cuing us to see that Lola's winsomeness will rescue her.

At once brasher and more frivolous, she's a lot less compelling fighting for the welfare of lab-test animals than she was crusading for her own dignity.

It's not every day that one of our rogues' gallery of iconic psycho killers gets to be played by a creepy and fascinating actor -- in this case, Jackie Earle Haley taking on the role of Freddy Krueger.

Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.

The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.

Blood Father is trash, but it does capture what an accomplished and winning actor Mel Gibson can be. Just because he lost his bearings, and his career, doesn’t mean that he lost his talent.

It’s clear the filmmaker has never lost that besotted hero worship. The Stones and Brian Jones digs deep into the Jones mystique, trying to make the case for him as a misunderstood “genius.”

It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.

Victoria & Abdul is a pleasant enough entertainment, and it will bring the inevitable awards chatter Dench’s way (is her acting ever less than pinpoint? Never). But as prestige period pieces go, it’s far from top-drawer (more like second drawer, or even third), because its cozy lack of enlightenment is echoed in the standard but far from scintillating play of its drama.

Irresistible scores points yet feels behind the curve. You wish it were a bold satirical bulletin, or maybe just Stewart’s pricelessly amusing version of a Christopher Guest movie. Instead, the film is a lot like a politician: It makes a big show of leading the viewer, but without rocking the boat.

The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.

At heart, though, it’s a knowingly eccentric goof of a movie, to the point that it’s hard, for a while, not to find it agreeable, even as you register what a preposterous piece of fluff it is. Unfortunately, it’s also an arduous piece of fluff. It’s full of blow-you-away action scenes, and it’s also full of rules — a satirical vampire cosmology that’s fun, until it starts to be just convoluted enough to give you a headache, especially when the rules are applied as inconsistently as they are here.

Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.

Going in Style coasts along on the testy spiky charms of its leading men, who have 246 years of life on earth between them (Caine is 84, Freeman 79, and Arkin 83), but it’s nothing more than an amiable connect-the-dots movie.

The interviews are illuminating; Summer’s family members speak of her with complicated reverence, and with an appreciation for the currents of despair that she nurtured in private.

As you watch “The Last Dance,” the film obliterates any distinction between shooting the works and jumping the shark and just saying, “WTF, let’s do it!”

Den of Thieves is better at set-up than follow-through. The movie is clever enough, until it cheats. It tries to fill in its characters, until reducing them to plot devices.

It’s so removed from having a dark side that you know you’re getting the feel-good version of a Tom Petty portrait.

Voyage of Time has too many spellbinding images to count, but as a movie it’s just okay.

Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.

Stitch Head, while it remains visually clever, has a bare-bones script that makes it feel like a Pixar movie the writers forgot to add enough jokes to.

The 355” is a vigorous formula action spy flick with an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire plot that mostly holds your attention, periodically revs the senses, and gives its actors just enough to work with to put a basic feminine spin on the genre. I make a point of that because the film does too.

The movie gives us bits and pieces of drama, but in a larger way it doesn’t invite us in.

I Am Heath Ledger is a catchy and seductive portrait of an extraordinary artist, but it leaves you wanting more, because you know it’s not close to being all of Heath Ledger.

Captain Underpants isn’t out to be more than a trifle; that’s part of its appeal. It’s not so much potty-mouthed as it is a potty-minded kiddie burlesque, one that finds the supreme innocence in naughtiness.

A documentary that recaps Hamilton’s life in compelling fashion without adding anything of special novelty or depth (though much of the surfing footage is spectacular), it can feel like you’re seeing a perfectly fine devotional sports biography that doesn’t elevate the saga it’s telling to the next level.

You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.

The torture set pieces in the “Saw” films are lavish gifts of baroque horror presented to the audience. They are, quite simply, the reason we came. Tobin Bell, with his stare of pitiless wisdom, is also a draw, but “Saw X” raises the issue of how much of John Kramer’s hand-wringing is too much. In the eyes of a lot of “Saw” fans, hand-wringing < hands cut off with mechanized garden shears.

Most of The Whale simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.

M3GAN 2.0 is amusing at moments, overblown at others. Here’s hoping that “M3GAN 3.0” is brasher, funkier, crazier.

The new film, while just okay enough to get by, takes a step back from the audacity of “Bad Moms” to something more cautiously conventional.

Even if you see through the benign (manipulative) strategies of The Miracle Season, which isn’t hard to do, resistance is futile. You will surrender. You’ll feel the tear on your cheek, the lump in your throat, the reverent huggy glory of it all.

Ballerina is a worthy entry in the “John Wick” canon, though I say that as someone who doesn’t think the “John Wick” canon is all that. By the end, Ana de Armas has proved that fighting like a girl and fighting like a guy need not be appreciably different, especially if they’re all fighting like a video game.

It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.

In “Something Beautiful,” with the songs employed as catwalk power anthems, you see how Miley Cyrus, in elevating her erotic aura, is trying to be a performer of mystery — to let her beauty singe our eyeballs, to let it vibrate into the cosmos. Yet it’s all a little insular.

It’s like a Wes Anderson movie set during the Third Reich. ... And yet it’s not as if it’s a terrible movie; it’s actually a studiously conventional movie dressed up in the self-congratulatory “daring” of its look!-let’s-prank-the-Nazis cachet.

Monday, shot with a mostly Greek crew, has been made with some liveliness and skill, and the two actors really fuse. . . . But Papadimitropoulos treats most of the film as if he were making “Blue Valentine” or “Head-On”: a study in masculine narcissism.

It’s a heady, engrossing, indulgently sprawling profile of a modern athlete in all his glory and contradiction, but it’s also a film that leaves you with more questions than it should.

The Hustle, fun as some of it is, is a tall fizzy drink in which the fizz never completely rises to the top of the glass.

Simply put, this is not a movie about Michael Jackson’s dark side. Yet the surprise of “Michael” is how well it plays, and what an engrossing middle-of-the-road biopic it is. It’s basically an ’80s-TV-movie version of the Michael Jackson story with sharper acting and snazzier photography. It

It’s fine — and true enough to Marvel — to make a “Spider-Man” movie about a young adult, but Spider-Man: Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavor.

Happy Death Day 2U is more complicated than the first “Happy Death Day,” but in this case more complicated means less fun.

We go into “F1” excited about being excited, and the film makes good on that. It’s nothing if not an adrenaline high. Yet it’s a high that may leave you feeling a bit empty afterwards.

The movie, though it pretends to reveal how power works, is ultimately content to remain on the outside, sticking its finger in the eye of power.

Gets the job done, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching a routinely conceived, rather generic boxing flick. It’s utterly competent, yet it makes Duran’s story seem a little so-what?

Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.

There are a few surprises in Frankie, and the movie, in its placid way, wants to deliver a tug of revelation of what life is about. The trouble is, life at the end of this day doesn’t look very much different than it did at the start of the day.

Is Arquette a has-been actor trumping up his biggest failure so that he can exploit it? Or is he a lionhearted wrestler who finds triumph by going the distance? The weird thing is that there’s no difference.

There’s a better, tighter, more emotionally focused movie hidden somewhere in the sprawl of “I Love You, Daddy.” It’s a movie that’s just as rude, funny, and observant as this one but that doesn’t tie itself in knots trying to “say” something.

At once a punchy celebration of Swift’s artistry and a piece of promotion that just exposes aspects of the album that may not wear so well over time.

Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.

It has a few traumatic and bedazzling scenes of combat, but mostly it’s about the backroom bureaucratic gamesmanship of war.

Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.

Okoro has bent over backwards not to make the poverty-row version of a glib crime thriller, but he shouldn’t have bent so far.

Luca, set in Italy in the ’50s, is modest to a fault, and at times it feels generic enough to be an animated feature from almost any studio. But it’s a visually beguiling small-town nostalgia trip, as well as a perfectly pleasant fish-out-of-water fable — literally, since it’s about a boy sea monster who longs to go ashore.

For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.

Directing her first studio feature, Cathy Yan keeps it all hurtling along with impeccable ferocity. Her action scenes have a deftly detonating visual spaciousness, capped by crowd-pleasing moments.

It transitions Hart from playfully scowling cutup to earnest heartfelt actor, and it does so in a way that, at times, is genuinely touching, even as the audience can see every sanded-down conflict and market-tested beat falling into place.

Were the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, in some rollicking sex-positive way, an intrinsic part of the feminist revolution? Or did they represent one step forward and one high kick back? You could make the case either way, but the film pushes the clean and forceful — if highly ironic — argument that the Cheerleaders were nothing more or less than empowered entertainers who seized control of their sexuality and, in doing so, advanced the liberation of women.

A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.

You might say that “Frozen Empire” has to work even harder to invent a reason for itself to exist. Yet it’s a livelier movie than “Afterlife.”

The film presents itself as lavishly somber and important and includes several not-so-veiled references to the rise of intolerance, and the need to maintain international standards of justice, in the world today. But Nuremberg, competent and watchable as it is, isn’t big on psychological tension or insight.

The bar for rom-coms is not high, and this one, ludicrous as it often is, inches over the bar. But I would no more call it a good movie than I’d pretend fast food is high in nutrients.

The film is sharply written and crafted, lavishly photographed, impeccably acted, with lots of twists and turns — yet for all that, it somehow lacks zing.

You won’t feel cheated; at stray moments, you’ll feel the wonder. But for every high point, there’s a moment when the thrill threatens to leak away.

Despite a brief action interlude here or there, The Last Duel turns out to be a lavishly convoluted and, at times, rather interesting medieval soap opera.

Damsel is a comedy of attitude made with the indulgent touch of an art Western. That’s a refreshingly original thing, though it’s not as blow-you-away cool as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Sleeping Dogs, starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.

For all the purity of its pedigree, and as agreeable and lightly touching as it sometimes is, I wish that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile didn’t still seem, at heart, like a likable movie that had come out of the processor.

Big Time Adolescence isn’t bad, but it’s a trifle.

What’s good about the movie is that Crystal, who co-wrote and directed it, has an inside knowledge of the showbiz comedy world (as he demonstrated in 1992 when he directed and starred in the acerbically accomplished “Mr. Saturday Night”), and the prickly vivacity with which he portrays it roots the movie in something real.

Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.

Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

It’s a horror ride that holds you, and it should have no trouble carving out an audience, but I didn’t find it particularly scary.

It’s prosaic and conventional and a touch stolid, but it stays true to the facts and the spirit of the man (he’s both sinner and saint), and the saga they add up to is singular in the history of sports.

An amiable time-killer of an espionage comedy.

Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.

Fonte, it must be said, gives an expert performance as a saintly scamp who “blooms” into a butterfly of vengeance. I might have bought what he’s doing in a different film, but the one that Garrone has made strains too hard to have it both ways.

For its first half, “The Apprentice” is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting. Yet I have an issue with the movie, and it all pivots around the mystery of Trump. I don’t think “The Apprentice” ever penetrates it.

It has a pleasing brawn and sweep, and you get caught up in it. As meat-and-potatoes escapism, it’s good diner food served with extra ketchup.

It’s not another unhinged Bridget bash — more like a hearts-and-flowers finale.

The film simply examines the prejudice that’s standing right in front of it. It’s chilling, but it’s the tip of the iceberg.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

Even as The Wizard of the Kremlin flirts with being a movie of ideas, it flits in and out of things. It rarely stays in one place long enough to let us suck in our breath at how Putin’s Russia heralded what may turn out to be the new autocratic world.

Nobody is a thoroughly over-the-top and, at times, loony-tunes entry in the live-and-let-die vengeance-is-mine genre. Is it a good movie? Not exactly. But its 90 minutes fly by, and it’s a canny vehicle for Odenkirk, the unlikeliest star of a righteous macho bloodbath since Dustin Hoffman got his bear trap on in “Straw Dogs.”

It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.

A Minecraft Movie never stops goofing on itself, and that’s appealing.

Howery’s line readings sound improvised, and that’s a good thing. He’s the ebullient, fast-talking spark plug of a formula comedy with a cheap engine, though one that putters along harmlessly enough.

The Elephant and the Butterfly is a movie too cool-headed and present tense for backstory.

Let the Canary Sing does an excellent job of tracing how Cyndi Lauper came to be…Cyndi Lauper. Yet it’s sort of an idiosyncratic movie, because that’s all it does.

The Spy Who Dumped Me is no debacle, but it’s an over-the-top and weirdly combustible entertainment, a movie that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a light comedy caper or a top-heavy exercise in B-movie mega-violence.

“Quantumania” is fun, as well as bedazzling, relentless and numbing, then fun again just when you think you’ve had enough; all of that gets mashed together.

I found “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be fun in a slightly flat way. But because the movie has so little pretense, it’s basically an invitation to wallow in the lite “Star Wars” nostalgia that’s there in every frame.

Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.

Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.

Copshop is a processed slice of genre meatloaf with the gravy occasionally dribbled in ornate patterns. It’s junky and synthetic, but it fills you up.

The movie is a fable of winning, of beating the house every time, without much of a dark side. In that way, it’s fun; it allows us to coast along on our vicarious desire to get rich by beating the system