Owen Gleiberman

A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".

You may go into Flatliners hoping for a psychedelic mindblower, but the film is about as exciting as staring at a lava lamp for two hours.

Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in Take the Lead he lays on the old-world panache so thick - the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance - that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin.

The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.

What we’re seeing in Club Zero is the formation of a cult. And what makes Hausner, who is from Austria (this is her second English-language film), such a skillful and daring filmmaker is that she draws you into the cult mentality in all its interwoven layers of obsession, insecurity, conformity and faith.

When You're Strange, a documentary history of the Doors directed by Tom DiCillo, is for people like me who can stumble onto the scrappiest Doors video on VH1 at 3 a.m. and sit there, mesmerized.

This sweetly downtrodden, punch-drunk Rocky is often appealing to watch. Yet as a character, he doesn’t have much drive — and neither, I’m afraid, does the movie.

Modest and prosaic, with an unfortunate fairy-tale ending (yes, it features Tom Jones).

Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.

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.

The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.

The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.

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.

The film offers true insight into the patterns of war crimes, even if the songs sound disquietingly close to a call to violence.

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

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.

The director's famously over-deliberate, pause-laden style verges, for the first time, on amateurville, and that gives us too much time to linger on the movie's more bizarre details.

A lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart).

Olsen, moody and apple-cheeked and intellectually avid, proves a true star: She turns being wiser than her years into an authentic generational state.

The pleasure of The Good Liar, and it’s a major one, is the chance to watch Mirren and McKellen act together in a cat-and-mouse duet that turns into an elegant waltz of affection and deception.

It's obligatory for a horror film to feature exploitative sex as an appetizer, but Roth, even as he fulfills the sleaze imperative, does something shrewder: He mocks his heroes, presenting them as cold-eyed horndog jerks who fail to see that they've wandered into an entire country of exploitation.

Chastain and Garfield give performances that are brashly entertaining but also canny and layered, as the characters get caught up in something far bigger than themselves. The Bakkers were hucksters of a grand order, and the film uses their spectacular greedhead soap opera to tell the larger American story of how Christianity got turned into showbiz.

So why is “Bardo,” for all its skill, reach-for-the-stars aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confounding, and — okay, I’ll just say it — monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.

Pride doesn't have much surprise, but it's a formula picture of genuine feeling.

What holds the movie together, however, is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.

Slick, reasonably amusing, never asking its audience to swallow anything too wild for consumption.

Kindred is a demonstration of how a naturalistic horror film can be derivative, in the most flagrant and shameless way, and still work.

The movie is a total trifle, but it’s often a diverting one — a wide-eyed sci-fi adventure with a screwball buoyancy.

Idlewild is a romp, a ticket to rowdy good times.

The new Hellraiser works as metaphor, as flesh-annihilating spectacle. Yet it doesn’t work as a story.

Cool, assured, emotionally remote, Merchant Ivory's Surviving Picasso is never less than watchable, but it's also a cinematic paradox, a movie that works to capture Picasso from every angle yet somehow misses the fire in his belly.

Under the Silver Lake gets its hooks in you, but it’s a good-bad movie: an academic stab at making the darkness visible.

Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary “Risk” was a close-up portrait of Assange, shot during his early years of infamy and as fascinating, in a squirmy way, as Assange himself. “Ithaka” is less about the man than the cause — how the continued prosecution of Assange fits into the issue of free speech. It’s a more morally clean-cut watch. But it’s a lot less dramatic.

It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.

This is the sort of movie in which everyone on screen is swathed in gauzy benevolence. You practically have time to say a prayer in the dead spaces between lines.

A magical-realist sitcom war farce that ends up being about nothing but its own slovenly smugness.

Higher Learning starts out as a liberal message movie, but it turns into a demagogic rabble-rouser, a shrewdly incendiary exploitation of these wayward days of rage.

Passion turns into vintage De Palma — which is to say, the film seems almost engineered to get you giggling at the extravagance of its absurdity. Any enthusiasm in the viewer is bound to be a shadow of the film's passion for itself.

The kinds of connections that Take Your Pills makes, between the culture of information overload and a radically tightened job market and heightened personal performance and the chemical itch that fuels this whole late-stage capitalist dynamic, may strike some as too speculative for comfort. Yet it’s precisely by making connections like these that a documentary can fire up your perceptions enough to burn through the cumulative effects of advertising.

I had a pretty good time at Volcano. The reason I didn't have a better time is that the characters aren't just schlocky, they're boring.

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

There's precious little in Luc Besson's solemnly inflated, battle-weary historical epic.

There's something sweet about the way that Murphy throws himself into this piffle. Thomas Haden Church does too.

Out from behind his Captain America shield, Chris Evans proves a quirky and compelling actor as Mike Weiss, a personal-injury lawyer who spends most of his time doing drugs.

What makes The Hunting Party an original, gonzo treat is the way that Shepard plants the movie's tone somewhere between hair-trigger investigative danger and the from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire glee of a Hope/Crosby picture.

The Simple Favor films fill a niche, one that they helped create: the knowing synthetic thriller rooted in the angst of contempo motherhood. But this one both diverts and drags on.

One Missed Call is so unoriginal that the movie could almost be a parody of J-horror tropes, yet Miike, for a while at least, stages it with a dread-soaked visual flair that allows you to enjoy being manipulated.

The mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good.

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.

Stuart Saves His Family is a hit-or-miss satire in which Stuart, for too many scenes, comes off simply as a goofy neurotic butterball.

It's a crackerjack B movie worthy of comparison to such stylishly low-down, smart-meets-dumb, hyper-violent entertainments as the 1997 Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown," Clint Eastwood's infamous police bloodbath "The Gauntlet," John Carpenter's original "Assault on Precinct 13," and Arnold's own overlooked 1986 outing "Raw Deal."

In the scurrilously enjoyable documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, we get to know the man whom Al Goldstein dubbed ''the hedgehog of porn."

What's infectious about Groove is the friendly, almost innocent way that its brat pack of digital-age bohemians seek liberation in a world where there is nothing left to rebel against.

Seems populated yet uninhabited; the only real star is the gloom.

A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.

Its title aside, this slow, clunky omnibus film feels more like a TV show than a movie. It’s not very scary, and there isn’t much contrast among the episodes.

The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.

Po goes through the motions, but I’m sorry, the kick is gone.

His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."

Although the film's frenetic rhythm is reminiscent of an "Indiana Jones" picture, visually Schumacher directs it like a musical, turning each image into eye candy, weaving one lush set piece into the next, as if he were the Vincente Minnelli of blockbusters.

One of Dafoe's deadbeat friends observes, ''The world's been ending ever since it started, man,'' and you may think the same thing about this movie.

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.

Hill knows how to zing the audience, and his ”existential” approach to action remains edgy and enjoyable. But it also seems guided, more than ever, by a blockbuster imperative: Whatever happens, don’t let that roller coaster stop.

Sparkle is never more than an overheated mediocrity. The one thing it isn't, however, is dull.

Zombie doesn't pretend to be on the side of the victims. He makes no bones about his identification with the sexy outlaw serial killers.

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.

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?

The opening title says “Based on an absurd but true story,” yet there’s nothing absurd about the facts. Improbable? Yes. Hapless and desperate? Most definitely. But the absurdity — the impulse to giggle — is mostly there in the eye of the writer-director, Robert Budreau, who collaborated with Hawke two years ago on the entrancing Chet Baker biopic “Born to Be Blue” but here comes off as a far less sure-handed filmmaker.

On its own terms, the film is watchable enough, but it’s blunt and stolid and under-characterized, and at 130 minutes it plods.

The best reason to see Melinda and Melinda is Radha Mitchell, who has her grabbiest role (or two of them) since she broke through with "High Art."

Busch, looking like a depressed Stockard Channing, throws his tantrums with breathy ''aristocratic'' hauteur. Yet the movie winds up walking a line between put-on pastiche and kitsch passion, and Jason Priestley is perfect as a brooding lunkhead of Tab Hunter gigolo-osity.

As a movie, Hamlet 2 is lively, energetically daft, and very, very scrappy -- a broader, more loony-tunes knockoff of "Waiting for Guffman."

The movie is a toxic dart aimed at the spangly new heart of American hypocrisy: our fake-tolerant, fake-charitable, fake-liberated-yet-still madly-closeted fame culture.

These two actors, with nothing matching but their goatees, have a spiky bromantic chemistry. They don’t just ping off one another’s lines — they lock and load each other.

The plot, which spins around Allegra's lovers having just been an item, is awkward bedroom farce, but the tone is Woody Allen-meets-"The L Word," with a patina of literary cuteness that now seems like the sound of a vanished Manhattan.

If anyone steals the movie, though, it's Sylvie Testud, who never lets on whether the sexy French country maid she's playing is mournfully obtuse or embodies the wisdom of the ages.

Too scattershot to take hold.

Sensational and accomplished.

The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”

The folly of Blue Chips is that the film makes this greased-palm corruption seem an even bigger sin than it is. (It's like a political drama made by someone who is shocked, shocked at the sleaze of campaign financing.)

A nice cookie-cutter comedy, no more and no less, but Dempsey, with his relaxed charm, and Monaghan, with her soft and peachy sensual spark, rise to the challenge of making friendship look like the wellspring of true love.

In the history of bad ideas, George Romero’s decision to produce a color remake of his disturbingly frenzied 1968 zombiefest Night of the Living Dead has to rank right up there with New Coke.

Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide.

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

Bobby coasts along on a dread, and sorrow, it doesn't earn.

Why watch Screened Out? Because it shows you something you didn’t know.

There are moments of lewd hilarity, like a game of footsie that turns genderifically confused. But Booty Call loses its dirty-minded, how-low-will-they-go-to-get-laid edge when the boys venture out into the New York night to buy condoms.

The new movie, for all its huffing and puffing, explores very little, even if some of it is sexy in a Howard Stern-meets-"9 1?2Weeks" way.

You wish that Malena's inner life had been given as much accent as her outer charms.

The movie, in its mud-on-the-doily way, is amusing enough to get by. But it never shocks you into laughter.

Dare, a sweetly sexed-up high school triangle movie, is like a John Hughes comedy trying to pass itself off as ''transgressive.''

U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.

The Boys in the Boat is a gentleman’s sports movie, with Clooney working hard to make one “like they used to.” He brings it off, even if there’s a lingering quaintness to it all.

The trouble with a film like Spies in Disguise isn’t that it’s less than sparklingly animated but that as technically bravura as it is, there is never anything at stake.

The House of Yes is knowingly overripe, a kitsch melodrama that dares to make incest sexy.

A sprightly, lovingly researched, rather misty-eyed sports documentary that's steeped in ethnic pride.

Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.

Perry is of the spell-everything-in-capital-letters and act-it-out-loudly schools. Yet his sensitivity to women is a tonic.

Michael Moore In TrumpLand turns out to be a tossed hand grenade that doesn’t fully detonate.

Blue Steel lacks sustained storytelling craftsmanship, and it never approaches the saturnine intensity of the film it sometimes recalls, Michael Mann’s Manhunter (the greatest thriller of the past decade). But it makes you eager to see what Bigelow could do with a good script.

A sentimental epic that forgets to include the sentiment

The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium.

Cocaine Bear is less formulaic than a slasher film and more stylishly made. It’s a true oddball, one that mixes yocks and mock desperation and disembodied limbs. So when it’s over you can say, “Well, we definitely saw that.”

Fuqua is trying for John Ford meets Sergio Leone: a funky classical sweep, with room for delirious shootouts. The trouble is that he mimics the trademarks of those directors without their élan, and the plot that was once catchy is now rote.

This sort of clinical detective movie hinges on creating a feeling of revelation, a kind of horror-saturated awe. The Little Things is just a warmed-over set of serial-killer-thriller clichés, like crime-scene photos we’ve seen before. And some of it doesn’t track all that well.

Agreeably skewed fun.

Williams gives an inspired comic performance. Unfortunately, he outclasses the movie, which is basically a patchwork rip-off of Tootsie.

Shephard has a lively eye for the neurotic ripples of high-school society, but her most audacious gambit is to dare to place the audience in a grey zone between innocence and judgment regarding a relationship that plays out more sympathetically than it should.

A Worthy Companion is a lacerating snapshot of what abuse really does: how it can tear away someone’s identity.

The Exorcist III has the feel of a nightmare catechism lesson, or a horror movie made by a depressed monk.

The film asks us to indulge and share the privacy of its characters. That’s its moody, free-floating allure.

Knox Goes Away doesn’t traffic in comedy — or exaggerated reality. In addition to being a noir that holds you exactly the way a noir should, it may be one of the best dramas about dementia I’ve ever seen.

Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.

Volatile yet fairly lunkheaded.

Vacancy is a schlock surprise: a no-frills motel-hell slasher film -- with a bit of soul.

"Dark Fate” is a lean, tough, and absorbing sequel that taps back into the enthralling surface of the “Terminator” series’ comic-book kinetics as well as the sinister sweet spot of its grandiose pulp mythology.

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

It's a pleasure to encounter a confectionary love story in which a man and woman of age and experience discover feelings that youth, more and more, has a patent on in Hollywood.

The film is a sobering chronicle of the depressing circus of persecution and pseudo-scandal that was the Clinton years. But why did the President provoke such ire? A movie with insight into that might actually feel new.

The movie is too cute to lose its head in the music. It never generates its own ecstasy.

Even when nothing is happening, the often dead-silent shots tend to grow scarier the more you look at them.

The Dead Don’t Die fancies itself a cutting-edge macabre comedy, but the truth is that it’s behind the curve of pop culture. That’s why it’s a disappointing trifle.

I knew perfectly well, after a while, what Sinister was going to scare me with. But I got scared anyway.

In the film's rather humdrum 3-D, the place doesn't dazzle — it droops.

The more I sat through it, the more it won me over in its very benign high-concept way. It's like "City Slickers" remade for the Discovery Channel.

When I say it’s a soap opera, I mean that as praise. Based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel (the script is by Christy Hall) and directed by Justin Baldoni (who is one of the film’s costars), it’s an avid and emotional movie that pulls you right along. If you go in not knowing what it’s about, and are therefore all the more surprised by where it goes, it may be even more effective.

As you watch the film, though, it’s amazing how things that should mean a lot could come to so little, including the return of Daniel Day-Lewis.

None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.

Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.

A feel-good movie that never stops feeling good. The film is based on a true story (it was adapted from a nonfiction best-seller by Michael Lewis), but you never feel that Hancock has honestly captured what's true about it.

Soul Surfer, while formulaic in design, is an authentic and heartfelt movie.

With “Axel F.,” a parade of watchable clichés (not just retro-cop-thriller clichés but Eddie Murphy clichés) staged by director Mark Molloy in a slovenly utilitarian style, the series comes full circle: the product/schlock of the ’80s meets the product/schlock of Netflix. Welcome to nostalgia minus the soul!

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.

You can expect a lot of shredding and gurgling. 30 Days of Night is relentless, but it's also relentlessly one-note.

A movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

The Rise of Skywalker is, to me, the most elegant, emotionally rounded, and gratifying “Star Wars” adventure since the glory days of “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” (I mean that, but given the last eight films, the bar isn’t that high

The Handmaid’s Tale is watchable, but it’s also paranoid poppycock — just like the book.

Midas Man is never less than watchable, and it does capture something about Brian Epstein that’s honest and affecting.

The movie isn't racist; it's just lame. If Brooks truly cared about Muslims or how their funny bones worked, Looking for Comedy might have had some zing, but all his character is interested in is the 500-page report he has to deliver - a homework assignment from hell.

Is it possible for an actor to go through the motions even as he's going over the top? In Being Flynn, Robert De Niro does phoned-in scenery chewing.

A thriller that holds less interest - and less water - the more it reveals about what's actually going on.

Damon is a magical actor. His mind, as sharp and focused as a laser, beams out of the face of a vivacious choirboy, and, in nearly every scene, he invites you to share the jet-propelled pleasure of his precocious agility.

The ultimate crime of this paranoid enemy-of-the-state pulp, directed with more style than brains by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), is how dull it is.

Name your fear trigger, and it’s probably there, somewhere, in Annabelle Comes Home. It looks like a horror film, but it’s really the horror equivalent of speed dating.

The battles are grainy and ''existential,'' but what they aren't is thrilling. They're surging crowd scenes with streams of arrows and flecks of blood, and Crowe, slashing his way through them, is a glorified extra. He's so grimly possessed with purpose that he's a bore, and so is the movie.

Since Foster plays warming-up-for-a-straitjacket panic with a clenched intensity rare to behold in a Hollywood actress, I, for one, was rooting for the radical -- that is, nuthouse -- option.

Ritchie concocts a crime-jungle demimonde that's organically linked to the real world, and it's a damn fun one to visit.

A weakly scripted shambles.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

I call Piranha 3D ''exploitation,'' rather than a quality scare movie, because it serves up well-timed gross-outs instead of genuine suspense and because the movie has no pretense of providing character, plot, acting, or dialogue that's anything more than boilerplate.

As a satirical demagogic action movie, The Forever Purge is blatant, bare-bones, and entertainingly brutal.

You can’t take Ma seriously. It’s a squalid formula picture that’s too busy connecting dots, hitting beats, engineering situations designed to make you squirm. But you will squirm.

Evokes the intimacies of teenage girls with unusual delicacy, and Perabo's performance is a geyser of emotion.

De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man.

Then there's Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation.

Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.

We’re invited to laugh at what we’re seeing, yet Miller works in such a heartfelt and unassuming way that we’re never standing outside the quirks.

Narrow Margin, despite a sturdy turn by Gene Hackman as a cynical assistant DA, is a thinly scripted procession of train-movie clichés.

Even telling the story of this scarred, flawed, barely together family, Penn creates honest notes of nostalgia.

We Are Marshall has little of the bone-crunchingsincerity of the recent pigskin rouser "Invincible." This one is more like Unconvincing.

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.

For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.

Has a topsy-turvy sense of injustice.

On a Magical Night is whimsically cute, provocative in a coy way, and more than a little in love with itself.

Finding Steve McQueen is a ramshackle indie heist drama that has a little bit (but not much) to do with Steve McQueen.

The Journey, thanks to its buddy-movie structure, is destined to feel a little corny, but the movie gets at something real. It’s a celebration, by two splendid actors, of the art of political theater.

The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday.

There’s one funny bit in Another Stakeout — a dysfunctional dinner party — but director John Badham puts more energy into high-tech chase sequences featuring the neighborhood pets than he does into refining the comic chemistry of his stars.

Cage’s Dracula, sipping blood out of a martini glass, is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.

For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.

Sharp Stick, in its quick verbal exchanges, its naked sexuality, its general air of busting taboos as if they were oversize balloons, is recognizably a Lena Dunham movie. But it’s the first one of her projects in which the parts don’t quite add up, because it seems as if what we’re watching hasn’t been so much created as contrived.

If you can watch Popper's most trusted penguin finally get to fly and feel like you're soaring right up there with her, then you may just let this likable trifle whisk you back to childhood.

The way a movie like “Goosebumps 2” works, even a weary adult will be grateful, by the time it finally kicks in, for all the brainless whirling distraction. I almost wrote fun, but that would be pushing it. To achieve that F-word, the film would have to ground its amusing effects in a story that was less skittery yet leaden.

“Stormy” shows you what the scandal looks like from inside the sensationalist bubble of fame, and by the end of the film you may be a little bit ashamed of us all.

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

The only brazen thing about the film is how shamelessly it rips off "School of Rock."

Yet if Bachelorette takes the form of a romantic ensemble comedy, it's purged of any true romantic feeling. You'll laugh, maybe a lot, but you won't feel great about it in the morning.

The Muppets were once devilish and sly, but this ploddingly whimsical musical caper, which uses too many ’70s soul songs to signify its rainbow-demographic cred, is enough to make you want to see them get slapped around by the Teletubbies (at this point, a far funkier crew).

Every movie about cuddly dwarf statues in an English garden should have music this big.

The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.

I actually think The Moment should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charli xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.

Washington immerses himself, even more than he did in "Malcolm X," in a stare of unforgiving outrage.

Zookeeper (I can't believe I'm even writing this) is a dumbed-down "Paul Blart."

The film’s most distinctive, if obnoxious, feature is the coy, look-at-what- an-adorable-doofus-I-am clowning of Adam Sandler, who here, as on Saturday Night Live, parades his ironic infantilism.

Angarano has the showpiece role, but it’s Cera who proves himself, more than ever, to be a major actor.

The Lucky Ones isn't dull, and the actors do quite nicely, especially McAdams, who's feisty, gorgeous, and as mercurial as a mood ring.

A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.

In The Quarry, sin has its wages, but that’s all it has. It’s too dry to offer anything like temptation.

To an astonishing degree, O gets the tragic Shakespeare mood, that somber stentorian passion born of hidden slivers of ambition and betrayal.

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

The boys-in-the-Italian-hood clichés were penned by "Sopranos" scribe Terence Winter, so they have snap, if not freshness.

The most frightening thing about this movie is that King and Romero actually thought it was scary.

It's a boisterous and amiable movie but not, in the end, a very funny one.

A marvelously designed piece of cartoon kinetics.

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

It's the rare portrait of a happy marriage that is honest about the complex currents of desire, and the drama is beautifully played by Bale, who gawks with soulful sweetness, and Watson, who does her most piercing work since "Breaking the Waves."

If Point of No Return is trash, it’s slick, diverting trash.

There’s a grand paradox at work in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The film isn’t simply a technological experiment; it’s also a highly original, heartfelt, and engrossing story. And part of the power of it lies in the way that those two things are connected.

Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music.

Wilson has a scene near the end with Marley that's the most wrenchingly tender acting of his career.

A send-up of rap personality in which no one actually has a personality. The joke, alas, is on the movie.

Agreeably mindless generation-next trash, but it leaves you hungry for a movie in which the characters are more than walking screenwriter index cards.

Lawrence, in this movie, shows you what true screen stardom is all about. She cues each scene to a different mood, leaving the audience in a dangling state of discovery. We’re on her side, but more than that we’re in her head. Even when (of course) we’re being played.

But now we're a lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through special effects, and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized, shoot-the-works way, Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated member of the X-Men team. She blows stuff up real good, in a way that would make the devil — or Bruce Willis — proud.

There’s a purity and natural-born dazzle to EPiC. What you see is what you get: Elvis in the raw, driven by the awareness that it doesn’t get any better than that.

The movie, I'm sad to report, has a majorly disappointing follow-through. It turns into a noisy, squalling chase movie.

For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.

Watching Bounce, you look at him (Affleck) and believe how much he's got at stake, and you look at Paltrow and know why.

Charlie's Angels is finally Cameron Diaz's movie. Her Natalie has a heart as insecure as her body is smokin'.

In Monster Theron undergoes one of the most startling transformations in the history of movies.

The film forgets that Bond's most dangerous actions have always been his quietest ones, in which he uses his charisma to turn his enemies against themselves.

Levine, who wrote the script, knows how to stage an energized intellectual battle, but adapting “The Blue Angel” to a 21st-century setting turns out to be a distinctly musty and unrewarding idea.

The Nativity Story is a film of tame picture-book sincerity, but that's not the same thing as devotion. The movie is too tepid to feel, or see, the light.

Glum and depersonalized, as if Eastwood couldn't muster the energy to guide us through this maze of improbable twists. [14 Feb 1997, p. 39]

The rapper and actor Common has become a highly skilled screen star, but this touchy-feely dud does him wrong.

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.

In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.

In my judgment, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is an honestly unsettling and authentic inquiry into the question of who Ted Bundy was, how he operated, what his capture and trial and ongoing infamy has meant, and what, if anything, his existence tells us about our individual relationship to toxic evil.

The only thing that makes this ludicrous botch even borderline watchable is Alec Baldwin’s enjoyably supercilious performance as a leering stud surgeon who thinks nothing of belting back shots of bourbon before going in to perform an operation.

Could have used more of the shimmering elegance of the Day-Hudson comedies. Those movies had a true sparkle. This one's a likable piece of costume jewelry.

Jaglom's scruffy style doesn't carry it through. He puts enough toxic insincerity on screen to singe, though.

The dialogue has a perky synthetic sheen, and with the exception of Diaz, Meyers brings out the best in her actors.

Happy Gilmore 2 is a happy orgy of raucously well-executed Adam Sandler fan service. It’s a pointed exercise in nostalgia, but with a present-tense edge. It’s not some fake update of the clever/dumb brand of slob comedy that made Sandler a superstar in the ’90s. It’s the genuine article, a true revival of Sandler’s Jerry Lewis-meets-rock ‘n’ roll rage. A sequel to his fabled 1996 golf comedy, it extends that movie’s anarchy-on-the-putting-green spirit as blithely as if the original had been made yesterday.

Splendidly crafted as it is, the new Disney is a luscious impasto of visual invention that never quite finds its heart.

The oddity of the movie — and this is baked into the way Eastwood conceived it, sticking to the facts and not over-hyping anything — is that this vision of real-life heroism is so much less charged than the Hollywood version might be that it often feels as if a dramatic spark plug is missing.

It hangs together and mostly obeys the rules of mainstream commercial cinema. Yet it’s clear that what drew Wright to the project was his infatuation with the sci-fi sociology of a retro-future USA.

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

It's made with deftly unsettling genre flair.

Altogether too faithful to its source. The makers of this ponderously middlebrow Canadian production have re-created the Gospel of John in its pristine entirety -- word for word, miracle for miracle.

In the history of rock-star indulgence on film, I would rank it somewhere between Bob Dylan's epic carnival of pretension ''Renaldo & Clara'' and the overblown messianic doldrums of 1982's ''Pink Floyd The Wall.''

The only performer I enjoyed watching was Martin Short, who plays a bitch dandy music teacher with a smile so fake that the comedian seems to be acting with his gums.

Del Toro lays on the operatic head-trip gore, but his heavy-handed embrace of the ''Blade'' mythology allows Wesley Snipes to give more of a performance than he did in the first film.

It omits a crucial detail of the “Play” success story (that the album took off through the licensing of songs for commercials — not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it captures the astonishing ride to icon status it put Moby on. He didn’t stop drinking and drugging; that would take years. But he found a groove he could stay on, even after the mega-sales cooled.

Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.

Squeezes fresh laughs out of what is, in essence, a rather startlingly post-Freudian, nature-trumps-nurture view of child development.

Takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.

Parades itself as an ''honest'' message movie, a call for troubled kids to choose life over street nihilism, but the picture is so earnest that it leaves out the easy, old-school pleasure conjured by the last few years of Disney sports flicks (Invincible, Miracle, The Rookie).

It's so shameless, so psychotically nervous about keeping you ''thrilled,'' that the phrase over the top won't do it justice. It's like a drug designed for people who've done every drug and now want to be jet-propelled into numbness.

There isn't much to the characters in this morose thriller.

Asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.

It’s a moderately diverting dessert that carries you right along. It never transcends the feeling that you’re seeing a relic injected with life serum, but that, in a way, is part of its minor-league charm.

An animated fairy tale made with simple, elegant conviction.

Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.

This is gripping stuff, to be sure, yet the movie, volatile as it is, lacks a full dramatic center and the momentum that would flow out of it.

Every time Housesitter seems about to turn wild, it gets waterlogged with heart.

Where Craven and his director, Alexandre Aja, may have miscalculated is in making the genetically damaged demons, with their flesh-potato foreheads and minimal verbal skills, into monster action figures who take vengeance on the world that created them. They're not scary because they're victims themselves.

Magnus, it turns out, is the anti-Bobby: a fascinatingly “normalized” prodigy.

Johansson, however, while she does a perfectly efficient job of directing, doesn’t hone the tone of her scenes. She keeps the whole thing earnest and rather neutral in a plot-driven way, with Squibb as her wild card.

The movie is intelligent yet lifeless; it's all wisps and abstractions.

The story has more holes than the bodies do, but the shocks are efficient, and Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt knows how to scream with soul.

It's an okay brat movie.

The movie is relentless, it’s pulpy and exciting, it’s unabashedly derivative, and at an hour and 58 minutes it’s a little too much of a rousingly of-the-moment feministic but still rather standard-issue thing.

It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.

Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that’s less sensually stylish than you’d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.

You miss the knockabout edge of "Bend It Like Beckham" -- though the ending, in its Pavlovian sports-flick way, pumps you up.

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.

In its nothing's-quite-at-stake way, Mars Attacks! has Tim Burton's flaked-out spirit -- it makes you feel like a very knowing 8-year-old, seeing through the artifice yet believing in it at the same time.

The future-shock details are witty, the sets and skyscapes spectacular. Besson may not be a good director, exactly, but he's a wizard at retrofitting cliches.

Anyone But You is a rom-com for the age of antipathy. It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.

When it stays in the classroom, Detachment is a scrappy testament - to the futility of even trying to reach students who are cut off from the possibilities of knowledge, and to the way that our teachers are slowly being driven nuts.

It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”

A haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I've seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it's that unsettling.

That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.

Jeff Prosserman's riveting documentary takes a question that haunted the Bernie Madoff scandal - how did he fool everyone for so long? - and answers it with a decisive "He didn't."

Showcases a trio of terrific performances.

After the Hunt has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it’s also a weirdly muddled experience — a tale that’s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That’s why, in the end, it’s a less than satisfying movie.

A solidly enjoyable formula thriller.

The movie is sensationally exciting, but its hey-kids-let s-put-on-a-war! story line plays like Beverly Hills, 90210 recast as a military-recruitment film for the Third Reich.

I'm not sure what it all adds up to, but The Devil's Double puts its hooks in you and keeps them there.

Breaking Dawn - Part 2 starts off slow but gathers momentum, and that's because, with Bella and Edward united against the Volturi, the picture has a real threat.

The Last Boy Scout is a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I’ve seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren’t this much fun.

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.

Has my eye, seduced by the devious and tactile delights of ''Shrek,'' already evolved in tandem with the technological leaps in computer animation? Or is Atlantis simply a Disney dud?

A melancholy romance that has the distinction of being the first film set among San Francisco dotcommers that knows it's about the end of the boom.

If this is what it sounds like when a new millennium goes pop, I'll take it.

A lurid hodgepodge of the ''subversive'' and the secondhand, the movie lacks the primal pop pleasures of Lynch's best work.

There’s a playfulness to Every Day, to how the film says to its audience — through the very structure of its Afterschool Special sci-fi design — that if you want to find love, you’ve got to look beyond the surface.

If you take the film on its own terms, as a kind of Elvis movie dipped in guacamole, it's quirkily engrossing. Ferrell is a good straight actor for the same reason that he's an inspired comedian: He commits himself to every moment.

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.

The film's cumulative effect is as exhausting as it is exciting.

As a lissome art restorer, Asia Argento (the director's daughter) comes off as the sanest human on screen, which is pretty scary.

In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.

It gradually loses wattage. Robertson, however, is a real sparkler.

The Monuments Men sounds like a what's-not-to-like? movie, but it turns out to be a bizarre failure.

The film gently sends up the messiness of modern matrimony, and Alda has assembled an appealing group of actors and given them plenty of breathing room.

You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.

So riddled with cultural stereotypes, woe-is-me neurotic mopiness, and glib therapeutic compassion that by the end all it leaves you with is a waxy buildup of falseness.

Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.

May find an audience, but I found it to be a leftover John Hughes triangle.

Carries little in the way of passion or revelatory charge.

John August directs it briskly, as a gossip-era "Twilight Zone" of image and reality.

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.

With Ethan and Janie sharing folkie duets, it has a certain small, wan charm, like a father-daughter gloss on "Once." Breslin is a clear-eyed delight.

Director Tina Gordon Chism keeps the innocuous class-meets-crass jokes bubbling, and the actors are amiable, but Peeples often seems to want to turn these characters into benignly goofy role models. Maybe that's why the basic comic collision never explodes.

The film has lots of energized mayhem, and Murphy's unraveling of the conspiracy against him isn't dumbed down, yet it's as if the comic-book action poetry of the original has been encased in a suit of generic armor.

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

Beautiful Creatures, more than the "Twilight" films, lacks danger and momentum. The audience, like Ethan, spends way too much time waiting around for Lena to learn whether she's a good girl or a bad girl.