Owen Gleiberman

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is the kind of lavishly impassioned all-stops-out biopic you either give into or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby.

Most of us consider Marilyn Monroe a born star with modest acting skills, but Love, Marilyn deepens the argument that the ditzy, dim-bulb ''Marilyn'' was every inch a performance, and a brilliant one.

The Golden Compass is a snowbound mystical-whizbang kiddie ride that hovers somewhere between the loopy and the lugubrious.

As a piece of escapism, this deluxe, action-heavy, 2-hour-and-21-minute Robin Hood gets the job done. You’re carried along by plot, production values, and some choice supporting actors. Yet it’s a rouser without a rousing hero. Costner doesn’t disgrace himself — he has the star presence the role demands. What he’s not is an impassioned Robin Hood. And without the sense that Robin is on a humanistic mission (one that’s a pleasure to fulfill), the story has no charge.

The film hinges on too many conventional crises (a car accident, a divorce), but the fact that Burns is better at atmosphere than story isn't all bad.

The first “Jurassic World” was, quite simply, not a good ride. “Fallen Kingdom” is an improvement, but it’s the first “Jurassic” film to come close to pretending it isn’t a ride at all, and as a result it ends up being just a passable ride.

With Poetic Justice, John Singleton has (at least temporarily) lost his way, but he may have found an actor [Shakur] who can help lead him back.

Works just like a Tenacious D song. The movie feels giddy and eruptive, dopily enthralled with itself, and more or less made up on the spot.

Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.

Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.

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.

Moretti makes this ''study'' in despair a naggingly neutral, at times borderline coy experience.

The Neon Demon is a tease. It starts off as a relatively scannable, user-friendly thriller, but it turns out to be a movie made by a macabre surrealist gross-out prankster.

In Vengeance, B.J. Novak proves a born storyteller with the rare gift of using a film to say something that intoxicates us.

Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together.

Contraband, while often grungy and far-fetched, does keep you watching. And in January, that's recommendation enough.

Strenous yet flat, The Brothers Grimm is a let's-see-what-sticks spectacle that, coming from Terry Gilliam, is more grim than "Grimm."

In the title role, Michael Peña has a no-nonsense fire: He captures how Chavez borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr. but also fueled the struggle with his own improvisatory brilliance.

A far funnier movie than its predecessor.

Far too cloyingly pleased with its own humanity.

Shrewd, tough, and lively -- a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

The Net is an efficient, workmanlike thriller that, at its best, does a canny job of exploiting the more fanciful edges of computer-age dread.

The movie wants to be deadly cool, but mostly it's just deadly.

Neat as Joe looks, you do wish that someone had bothered to give him a personality.

As the school drama teacher who tries to unlock ''the real,'' Patricia Clarkson makes high theatrical solemnity funny.

This is how a fairy-tale movie gives us our money's worth today. Even if once upon a time, it was called overkill.

I'm disappointed to report that Hudson and Watts have no chemistry as sisters, perhaps because Watts never seems like the expatriate artiste she's supposed to be playing.

And when [Roberts is] on screen with Mulroney, who seems a frat-house jerk -- all dimples and a perma-tan -- we don't feel much of anything.

It's tempting to say that Mamma Mia! has the worst choreography of any big-screen musical in history, though that would imply that what happens in the film IS choreography.

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

When a kids’ flick has nothing to offer but cute special effects, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are patting themselves on the backs for their technical ingenuity. That’s not comic fantasy — that’s marketing.

Project Power has propulsion, little detonations of visual magic, the resonant setting of a still desperate New Orleans, and a better cast than a movie like this one tends to have. Yet watching it, you may find yourself aware of how patched together the whole thing is.

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."

Stupefyingly tedious and annoying.

It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.

After a while, a didactic overdeliberateness seeps into Noé's design, but there's no doubt that he's a new kind of dark film wizard: a poet of apocalyptic shock.

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

A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, but no one does it better than Myers.

For anyone who grew up with “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” The Grinch won’t replace it, yet it’s nimble and affectionate in a way that can hook today’s children, and more than a few adults, by conjuring a feeling that comes close enough.

The Price of Everything exalts in the spirt of art over commerce, yet what’s thrilling about the film — and what echoes in your mind after it’s over — is that it captures all the ways those two forces can’t be separated.

Overtones are about all there is to Poison Ivy. The movie isn’t smart, but it never achieves true sleaziness either.

A tricky-bordering-on-gimmicky film noir with a glaze of soft-core kink.

Land of the Lost has stray amusing tidbits, but overall it leaves you feeling splattered.

And that’s what this overly eager, fractious, Burtonized but standardized, loudly comic but ultimately rather mirthless remake does to Dumbo. It transforms a miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need. The character of Dumbo is still touching, but the tale of entrapment and rescue that surrounds him is not. It’s arduous and forgettable, done in busy italicized strokes, and apart from that FX elephant the movie doesn’t come up with a single character who hooks us emotionally.

Rough Night, a bachelorette-party-from-hell thriller comedy that’s got some push and some laughs, despite its essentially formulaic nature, is a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers.

It doesn’t sentimentalize Theo’s illness (much) or pull back from how disconnected he can be. “Lost Transmissions” may even sound like it deserves props for its straight-up, objective view of mental illness. Except for one small detail: That stance ends up removing the basic dramatic motor of the film.

Has a loosey-goosey, what-the-hell spirit that's easy and fun to hook into.

An Australian crime caper that's one part ''Sexy Beast,'' one part ''The Full Monty,'' and three parts very flat soda.

Linklater, as brilliant a filmmaker as he is, is a kind of Zen rationalist; his shot language and essential humanity invite us to look at Bernadette and think, “You need help.” But that stops the character, even in her baroquely witty lashing out, from becoming a projection of a larger passion.

Ritchie, working from a script he cowrote with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, has taken all of this and transformed it into a movie that’s so clever and airy yet grounded, so sparkling with devil-may-care bravado, so poised right where you want it to be ­— a step ahead of the audience but also leading us right along — that it gives off the charge of a great screwball comedy.

Vapid, cutesy, knockabout Western.

The director, Tom Kalin, stages acid duels, but he should have provided more psychological structure. Though Moore, a great actress, turns fury into verbal music, we're never quite sure what's driving her.

One of those tepid, genteel biopics that's far too busy ennobling its hero to bother giving him any recklessly interesting personality traits.

The movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.

The Woman in the Yard never musters the imagination to horrify or even jolt you. It’s a tale of one-note inner demons.

It’s a movie that’s unapologetically basic and wholesome and, at 94 minutes, refreshingly stripped down. In its formulaic way, it works as an antidote to the bloat and clutter of your average “high-powered” teenage/kiddie flick.

A hit-or-miss affair that starts out wobbly and then gathers comic momentum.

From what we can tell, Brown was a dancer, all right, in life as well as on the field -- a dancer with a powerful forearm, one that Lee covers in protective padding.

Yet for all its surface pleasures, it’s a likable but underimagined one, with more enthusiasm than surprise and, at the same time, an overprogrammed sense of its own thematic destiny.

Norah Jones, making her big-screen debut as a wistful wanderer, is a beautiful blank, and the fragments barely add up to a movie.

Fails to recapture the elemental magic of Star Wars, and that, ironically, is because it represents the coarse culmination of the original film's adrenaline aesthetic.

Though it isn’t even trying to scare you, this is a very nifty black-comic horror movie, one of the rare entries in the genre with some genuine wit and affection.

A dawdling, myopic drama.

Acting doesn't get more personal, or much greater.

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.

When Christmas movies cease to be special (when they’re all scooped out of the same river of nonstop product), there’s something almost reassuring about a Christmas movie that lifts you up by knowingly dumbing Christmas down.

A little bit obsessed with replication.

When Kidman slithers into a bathtub with her young ''husband,'' the scene, in its soft-pedaled way, is the definition of exploitation: It appears to have been cooked up for no other purpose than to conjure creepy child-porn overtones.

The role of a former star of the "golden age" of porn sounds perfect for Kim Cattrall, and she handles it nicely - at least, in the rare moments when this indie comedy isn't terminally contrived.

Going the Distance may be a minor movie, but it's also the rare romantic comedy in which you can actually believe what you're seeing.

What’s funny and winning about Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is that it’s a comedy of equal-opportunity raunch, where everyone in sight is right at home inside the animal house.

Anxiety is a fair response to a midlife crisis, but that hardly means that we want to see the heroine of a movie spend scene after scene trapped in a nervous dither of indecision. That's exactly what happens in Lucia, Lucia.

It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.

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.

In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.

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.

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.

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.

Propulsively outandish thriller.

Step Brothers is a Judd Apatow production and it's the closest that the Apatow factory has come to spitting out a dumb-and-dumber high-concept comedy.

Romeo Is Bleeding just ends up flaunting its Grand Guignol outrageousness, rubbing our noses in its desire to be a gaudy hipster freak show. By the end, the film has become so mired in pointless sensation that it ceases to be any fun at all.

It's really a one-joke movie, but the joke is a good one.

Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.

It’s hard to say what the title of Trespass Against Us actually means, but then it’s hard to know what anything in this movie thinks it’s about. Even Ed Wood would have said, “Needs work.”

Top-heavy with whimsy, so muddled it makes Mission: Impossible look like a model of narrative cohesion, The Saint is the apo-theosis of the new incoherence, with the cliches of espionage and action thrillers jammed together like bumper cars.

A little too programmed in its despair, but it coasts along on the jagged music of the modern lothario's song.

It’s a drama of dour and often impenetrable obscurity. ... Yet everything about it that’s unsatisfying is also weirdly intentional.

Anderson has made a zombie movie without the zombies.

The movie recapitulates the absurdist tabloid-redneck comedy of the great, original Chainsaw without a hint of its primal terror.

Moves along with a quietude, a scruffy direct plainness that has long gone out of style.

The movie is also brisk and wholehearted and smarter than you expect.

The director, Bill Duke ("A Rage in Harlem"), stages all of this with proficient confidence, yet he never truly summons the operatic power of the genre -- the pulp tragedy of ambition built on (and drowned in) blood.

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.

As much as we go into Last Christmas eager to see a nicely wrapped package of acerbic fun, the film falls short of that. It’s not so much clever, toasty, and affectionate as it is the faux version of those things. It’s twee, it’s precious, it’s forced. And it’s light on true romance, maybe because the movie itself is a little too in love with itself.

The Shadow, like 1991’s The Rocketeer, tries to pass off its retro thinness as a quasi joke, but it’s a desperate strategy. The filmmakers seem to be kidding everyone — the audience and themselves — and that just leaves us waiting for this particular flashback to fizzle away.

The climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.

The director, Nia DaCosta (who made the intriguing remake of “Candyman”), stages the action efficiently, but she doesn’t center the narrative; the film is a series of goals in search of a higher mission.

Falls short of its source.

It has a chillingly matter-of-fact cynicism that is very au courant.

Adam Scott has a controlled, almost overly impeccable charisma. Handsome, with small precise facial features, he has a witty, hiply downcast delivery that, on screen, can make him seem like a unit unto himself.

Mostly about the prospect of getting your skin ripped by fishhooks.

But when it comes to that great puppy pilgrimage, the movie, which was written and produced by John Hughes, falls astoundingly flat.

Wallace, unfortunately, writes lazy, anachronistic dialogue, and the picture is abysmally shot (by Peter Suschitzky), with a prosaic, low-budget look that never allows you to experience the enraptured majesty of a fairy-tale historical setting.

The dialogue veers into digressions about ADHD, the cruddiness of mainstream dog food, and much else. That these asides prove more fun than the central action is what gives Hit & Run its flavor: tasty at times, even if the film evaporates as you watch it.

If nothing else, Shaft is spicy fast food.

Are there surprises? A couple of big money ones, notably the ludicrous would-be jaw-dropper of a finale.

The cast is a pitch-perfect assemblage of pretty young things, but James Van Der Beek, as a slit-eyed dorm stud, proves that he can be an actor of cruel force.

As long as Close is acting up an award-worthy storm (her performance is actually quite meticulous), Hillbilly Elegy is never less than alive. Adams does some showpiece acting of her own, but as skillful as her performance is, she never gets us to look at Bev with pity and terror.

The most irritating thing about Hoffa is that even after you've sat through Danny DeVito's turgid, meaninglessly sprawling account of the Teamster boss' rise and fall, you still won't have any idea who Jimmy Hoffa was.

It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it.

The trouble with Guillaume Canet's French gloss on "The Big Chill" is that it has no underlying chill.

The movie settles into a mode of nice, sweet, safe, and -- sorry, I have to say it -- slightly dull family fun.

As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature.

Passionate and saucy comedy.

It says a lot for Joel Schumacher's Flawless that you can see the picture's high-concept heart a mile away and still be won over by it.

It understands, in a way that speaks forcefully enough about the mechanisms of poverty to transcend the rather simplistic filmmaking.

If only director George P. Cosmatos (Rambo) knew how to do something with cliches other than throw them into the pot and stir. A preposterously inflated 135 minutes long, Tombstone plays like a three-hour rough cut that’s been trimmed down to a slightly shorter rough cut.

It’s a badly shot one-joke movie that sits there and goes thud.

The title translates, roughly, as ''This & That,'' a confectionary shrug that pretty well sums up the blasé inconsequentiality of it all.

Face becomes a study of the immigrant embrace of freedom in America - a bridge built over time and generations.

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.

In a few of the action sequences, director Kevin Hooks evokes the entertaining preposterousness of the James Bond series. Still, as high-wire action melodrama Passenger 57 is almost laughably implausible.

Will Miss Perfect fall for the Leader of the Pack? It helps that he's played by Thomas McDonell, who's not only a dead ringer for the young Johnny Depp but also has a comparable charisma.

Last Night is on to something fascinating. It meditates on the meaning of adultery: the purposes it serves, beyond sex.

The film enunciates its raw themes — punk means individuality! the aliens are all about conformity! — but never begins to figure out how to embody those themes in a narrative that could lure in the audience.

The whole thing becomes drenched in a kind of downbeat sentimental martyrdom that feels oppressively old-fashioned and moribund.

Sports betting is a great subject for a movie, but Two for the Money is short on the number-crunching nitty-gritty.

It’s like watching a romantic comedy while strapped to a roller-coaster with a VR headset on. Jungle Cruise is at once a love story, a made-for-4DX action movie, a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style fairy tale featuring a ghostly conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) and his pewter-armored henchman with digital snakes slithering through them, and God knows what else.

Isn't it time Steve Zahn grew up? Ever since the '90s, this walking quirk of an actor has pushed his dazed solipsistic zaniness (he's like Michael J. Fox’s hillbilly cousin), but he's 41 now, and it no longer looks cute on him.

The Boss Baby, the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (it’s being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.

I've seen far worse thrillers than A Perfect Murder, but the movie is ultimately more competent than pleasurable.

Knightley's Elizabeth becomes a pirate captain this time. You know a franchise has run its course when it has a buccaneer heroine who looks as if she'd hate to get her face smudged.

It's a tale soggy with the kind of race/class lessons that Madea, the director-star's battle-ax alter ego, doles out far more handily (and entertainingly) in a single church-lady-from-hell zinger.

Boundaries, to be sure, delivers you to a place you know you’re going, but there should always be room for a movie that does that this well.

If a diagram were the same thing as a script, then Therapy for a Vampire might be a smashingly silly lark. But as written and directed by Daniel Ruehl, the film is a blueprint of mild anemic kitsch.

Shainberg reduces this most disturbing of all photographers to a portraitist of Halloween.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn't let those other players in the political process off the hook: the voters.

There's something uniquely embarrassing about a rock & roll fable that is no more authentic (and no less coy) than an episode of ''The Monkees'' yet insists on presenting itself as the epitome of rebel-yell cool.

The trouble with Newness — and the reason it’s shot in such a clinical vérité fashion — is that it’s a thesis movie, heady and ambitious yet overly thought out.

Devious and inspired enough to juice you past any weak spots. Thou shalt be amused.

It's "Bewitched" meets "Fatal Attraction," with one funny bedroom scene, but it was a miscalculation to make Thurman the antagonist.

Burn Your Maps is one of those movies that’s glib and facile and threadbare all the way through, then the ending sort of gets to you (you’d have to be made of pretty stern stuff if it didn’t), so you think back over what you’ve seen — and it’s still a crock.

At times, Now You See Me suggests Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" made with a throwaway wink.

The movie actually makes you long for the rockin’ entertainment value of a good catechism session.

Ritter, who's like the young Ethan Hawke on a bender of violence, is an actor to watch.

A classy romantic cocktail distinguished by its tart yet breezy bite.

Rory O'Shea Was Here gazes at the physically afflicted and just about begs for our sympathy long after we've grown restless and eager to feel something else.

The sly beauty of The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it’s a wicked satire of white people that’s also an empathetic satire of Black people.

Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.

Sugar Hill wants to tear up our insides, but I’m afraid the movie leaves us hooting with disbelief instead.

Cowboys & Aliens has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers.

With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?

Never lets Grant develop his pidgin-Italian nice-guy-gone-sociopath routine.

It may be an accidental historical parallel that, at times, we seem to be watching a 19th-century version of ''The John Walker Lindh Story,'' but the fluke is only enhanced by the weird anonymity of Ledger's performance.

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

The new Alfie is so irresistible that he hardly requires contempt. Without it, the movie is little more than a feature-length roll in the hay.

What lies beneath Things Heard & Seen are clichés.

You can’t take a movie like this too seriously, but it’s still one of the rare slasher films that offers a holiday from bloodshed for its own sake.

Allen's latest, Cassandra's Dream, is one of his debonair ''small'' entertainments, the closest that he has come to doing a tidy, no-frills, down-and-dirty genre thriller.

The film is Moore's story, and she acts the hell out of one sexy scene, but most of Chloe is plodding and drab.

In Wilson, Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.

By the end, the main thing that's been abused is the audience's intelligence.

Really, who needs a bad guy who's this guilty about being bad?

Guess Who, with its PG-13 putdowns, turns into the kind of love story that Hollywood feels most comfortable with: a buddy movie, salt-and-pepper variety. All that's missing is the cop car.

Seth Green is uproarious as an Amish farmer who speaks in sentences so passive-aggressive, they're like tiny slaps.

The movie IS a provocation, but not a glib or ideologically myopic one.

Far and Away looks like an epic, but it lacks flavor and texture. It's so predigested there's nothing left to chew on.

The fact that Ed's life has been channeled into entertainment never achieves much tension or comic zest. That's because Howard thinks in cookie-cutter ''situations'' to begin with.

What’s depressing about the current Hollywood mania to literalize old cartoon series isn’t that a show like Casper is such bad source material. It’s that the movie version is like the cartoon without innocence — a fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.

“American Woman” tries to give us a fresh angle on a familiar subject, but the film is listless and desultory. It sketches in the scuzzy power dynamics of these characters but fails, in most cases, to dramatize what made them tick.

A fake street drama that keeps telling you things instead of showing them, though Mekhi Phifer, playing a hustler who loves the life, is electric and true.

Belushi certainly proves that he can play an uncharismatic lout with conviction, but the talented Shakur is — literally — wasted in his final screen performance.

But the thoughts she overhears don’t, for the most part, have the snap of comic surprise. They just fill in the walking alpha blanks we already know.

The sequel, more successfully (if less innocently), injects you into a luminous technological wonderland and asks you to be happy with the ride.

It's a veritable Greek chorus of wry therapeutic chatter, the touchy-feely pensées skittering over the stock dualities of adultery and fidelity, lust and devotion, narcissism and intimacy, blah, blah, blah.

A bit of a clone itself, but it's got a crackerjack helicopter chase, a semblance of a script, and a sotto voce performance by Robert Duvall as a biotech genius who murmurs sweet nothings to his dying cloned wife.

The Fifth Estate is flawed (it grips the brain but not the heart), yet it feverishly exposes the tenor of whistle-blowing in the brave new world, with the Internet as a billboard for anyone out to spill secrets. Call it the anti-social network.

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.

As a big-screen comedy, Coneheads isn’t all that funny either, yet it’s blithe and inventive and surprisingly light on its feet.

American Reunion is about the comedy of middle-class men who can't be satisfied with sex until it looks like porn.

Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction.

People Like Us demonstrates how a drama can be heartfelt and bogus at the same time.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.

Its pulpy violent excess will tip over...into slightly more excessive excess. That's its silly, scuzzball joy.

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.

Plays like an unusually ritzy festival circuit audition film, though McQuarrie, it must be said, aces the audition.

A horror film that consists of virtually nothing but don't-go-in-the-attic suspense scenes strung together with a reasonable degree of brooding mood and a minimum of logic.

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

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

The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.

The film keeps throwing things at you, like a colorful ape pirate (Peter Dinklage) and a fun hallucination sequence. That said, the laughs are starting to feel prehistoric.

The fight scenes are vicious, demagogic, and thoroughly exciting.

The trouble is, it's all too exhibitionistic to ring true. The impotent folly of Antichrist is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked.

It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.

It's like "Deathtrap" crossed with "Cribs" as staged by Stanley Kubrick.

The hero remains such an exhibitionistically cocky, walled-off jerk that Flannel Pajamas' glib conversational ''candor'' yields no mystery. And that's a problem in two hours of talk.

It's like a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

The story worked brilliantly before. In Downhill, it works…well enough. The new movie is a teasing trifle with something real on its mind.

A chintzy melodrama gussied up as hair-trigger combat ''reality,'' but there's no denying the vividness with which the French cowriter-director Elie Chouraqui has visualized the chaos of Croatia.

Branagh, for all his craftsmanship, hasn’t succeeded in tapping the morbid core of the material, the feeling that Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in creating ”life” is really a mask for his obsession with death (indeed, he can no longer tell the difference).

[Sluizer's] original, pitch-black ending would have sent people out of the theater giddy with shock; it’s doubtful anyone will remember his new one long enough to tell their friends.

The Last Picture Show was a mood piece drenched in acrid despair. Texasville is two hours of flat, Southern Gothic whimsy. The movie has the form of a soaper without the juicy content.

As a novel, Lord of the Flies never was much more than a Brat Pack Heart of Darkness. It’s doubtful a screen version could be any better than this one.

Reminders of Him is notably restrained — a good thing more than not, even if the film does get a bit languid at times. It tells its story without making us feel used.

Some motion pictures portray ultimate passion; others create ultimate thrills. Men in Black II achieves ultimate insignificance -- it's the sci-fi comedy spectacle as Whiffle-Ball epic.

The film is more than a little in love with the corruption it finds under the floorboards -- and that, of course, is perfectly dandy. I wouldn't trust a film noir that wasn't enthralled by decadence.

It doesn’t help that the special effects are second-rate; the squishy primal horror of Alien has been replaced by a kind of mechanized yuckiness. The team of B-movie scientists tracking the monster includes Ben Kingsley doing his over-deliberate American accent, Alfred Molina sporting a haircut that’s scarier than the creature, and Forest Whitaker as an empath so sensitive he can’t let anyone sneeze without making a dewy-eyed psychic pronouncement.

"Mark Felt,” despite bits of bureaucratic cloak-and-dagger intrigue and a commanding lead performance by Liam Neeson, is a film that pings off relevance more than it feels charged with it.

It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.

It's like "Schindler's List" crossed with "The Sound of Music," and Roger Spottiswoode directs it in a stiff, lifeless, utterly dated style of international squareness.

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.

But overall, this lazy, sweet trifle seems to express the banality of well-being.

CB4 would like to be a savage hip-hop lampoon, but, in fact, the film strikes a cautious balance between satire and homage. It can’t decide whether it wants to ridicule CB4 or hold the group up as role models. What we’re left with is a soggy catalog of rap cliches.

Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up.

The Chaperone leaves you wanting to see a movie about the star Louise Brooks became, on camera and off. It could be the great movie that has yet to be made about the silent era, and about the things that women in Hollywood have always faced. Especially one who was unlike any woman the world had seen.

The numbers, while lively, remain cluttered and stage-bound. The women, however, are spirited and sexy.

Soul Men could have done with less amped-up abrasiveness and more soft-shoe charm.

The Quick and the Dead is too light to pack the dramatic punch of a true Western and too flat to pass as cheeky revisionism. It ends up in its own amiable, slowpoke limbo.

The Best of Enemies while not nearly as good as “Green Book,” is a rock-solid movie: squarely deliberate, a little long and predictable, but honest and thoughtful enough, precise in its period and locale, with very strong performances.

It may seem harmless, to some, that our movies have never entirely abandoned the land of Poitier-ville, but as Hart's War demonstrates, it's an insult that they haven't.

Turns into a grab-bag freak show as desperate as it is arbitrary.

As it is, The Mechanic is ham-fisted pulp, like Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" taking itself seriously.

Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, one that’s going to leave anything too dark or messy or random on the cutting-room floor. Yet what matters is that the things we do see ring true. In “Miss Americana,” the vision Taylor Swift presents of herself is just chancy and sincere enough to draw us in.

Army of Thieves is one of those bombastically blithe and fanciful Netflix action movies, in this case with a romantic heart.

Greenland: Migration is a dystopian dud. It’s like the boring middle section of a picaresque disaster film, minus the showy kickoff and catchy climax.

There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But “Horizon,” simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries. Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction.

The idiocy of the plot is the tip-off that writer-director Roger Avary is really just interested in random displays of nihilistic decadence (e.g., heroin-shooting, prostitute-bashing, lotsa blood).

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.

Like its two predecessors, Scary Movie 3 is a hit-or-miss affair, but the gags that connect really connect.

In the end, the most impressive performance may be Spike Lee's. He uses skill without gimmickry, flash without fuss, to tap the mesmerizing soul of this pulp.

There's always something to look at (an octopus holding his eyeballs aloft, the petulant Jane assaulted by pixie dust), but the story is weak tea.

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

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.

Angel-A shows how director Luc Besson can be French in a way that even the French might despise...Quel ick. And très tedious.

Simon Pegg has what it takes, but he's saddled himself with a script (co-written by Pegg and Michael Ian Black) that Adam Sandler wouldn't have pulled out of his bottom drawer.

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

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 Lot Like Love is a lot like a romantic comedy, except that all that's keeping these two kids apart is the trivially insufferable movie they're in.

Ready to Wear is messy and vaguely nasty -- a blur with attitude.

Golda is a good drama about Israel. But it will take a great drama about Israel to dig into the nation’s long-simmering moral ambiguities.

Titan A.E. is ''Star Wars'' pulped and mashed into flavorless kiddie corn.

Has a voyeuristic tug, but all in all it's a lot less sensational than it wants to be.

Denzel Washington, by now, could do this sort of role in his sleep.

Yet here, as before, part of the movie's perversely cheeky design is that it throws away its own cleverness.

Switch leaves one feeling that Blake Edwards is more than a little confused.

The plot is more confusing than clever, and the only actor who seems to be having any fun is Silver, who's at his best throwing masochistic hissy fits at his younger, not-quite-so-evil self.

Modine, as a morosely self-involved actor, looks as if he's about to strangle someone -- and the movie, an attack on superficiality, never quite makes it out of the shallow end.

It's no insult to Melville to say that he wrote, in effect, the original ''Dilbert.'' This movie, unfortunately, makes ''Dilbert'' look like Melville.

Admit it: It's not every horror film that can make you feel preached at and slimed at the same time.

Woodley, through the delicate power of her acting, does something compelling: She shows you what a prickly, fearful, yet daring personality looks like when it's nestled deep within the kind of modest, bookish girl who shouldn't even like gym class.

The director, Michael Gracey, is an Australian maker of commercials who has never directed a feature before, and he works with an exuberant sincerity that can’t be faked. The Greatest Showman is a concoction, the kind of film where the pieces all click into place, yet at an hour and 45 minutes it flies by, and the link it draws between P.T. Barnum and the spirit of today is more than hype.

After a while, you truly start to see the formula gears churning, but given that, it helps to have an actress like Mary Steenburgen, who at 60 still possesses an amazing glow, as well as a snappier comic timing than ever.

As a comedy, 50 First Dates is standard Sandler, but as a love story it left me pleasantly buzzed, if not quite punch-drunk.

Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world.

At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature.

Ritchie made a movie that never pretends to be more than a guilty pleasure of soft-core kitsch, and Madonna and Giannini (son of Giancarlo, costar of the original) achieve a lively S&M chemistry.

Divided into chapters, the film jumps around in time, which means that we get to observe Shimizu's utter failure to develop his characters from endless narrative angles.

To call Demon Knight a popcorn movie is to give it too much credit — I doubt it would raise the pulse of Orville Redenbacher.

Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.

A silly, amusing trifle.

Underwater is a stupefying entertainment in which every claustrophobic space and apocalyptic crash of water registers as a slick visual trigger, yet it’s all built on top of a dramatic void. It’s boredom in Sensurround.

Did Scott, too, get hooked by the 1998 Spanish film ''Open Your Eyes?'' Intentionally or not, he has made ''Overcast Vanilla Sky.''

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.

An ingratiatingly scrappy little movie. It's been cobbled together out of a great many conventional crises (drugs, abusive boyfriends, heartless girlfriends, a looming record deal), yet there's a tough and appealing vitality to the way that it embraces the petty ego-tripping and party-down squalor of the rock lifestyle and stands apart from it at the same time.

The first part of the film gets some airy momentum going. Then, however, we learn the secret of what the characters have in common, and it gives you that slightly sinking feeling of one contrivance too many.

Emperor explores the delicate postwar dance of revenge, justice, and realpolitik, yet its focus on the issue of Hirohito's guilt or innocence (did he order the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or did he, in fact, oppose the Japanese military machine?)

The movie is full of vine-swinging, bow-and-arrow-shooting, ancient-spirit-meeting action, but most of it is staged on a convincing human scale, one that’s been expertly tailored to its star’s understated directness.

A highly calculated act of mischief that sounds like a stunt cooked up for Howard Stern's radio show.

What you see a movie like Noelle, what the experience comes down to is: It’s something you’re not watching in a theater because most of us wouldn’t watch it in a theater. It wouldn’t be worth the effort. Whatever your idea of a sentimental connect-the-dots Christmas comedy is, this is sub that.

The fun of 21 is the way that this sharp, hyperaware star in the making, his face as readable as a mood ring, pours us into an adrenalized cocktail of fear, desire, and mental buzz.

The whole thing is oppressive and, in an odd way, not very interesting.

There’s an innocence to this one, and a surprise authenticity. It’s like a “Fast and Furious” movie made without cynicism, and it gets to you.

By laying on disasters with a trowel, misses the chance to sweep us up into a more elegant fantasy of primitive mountaintop terror.

It's a schlockier ''Armageddon'' crossed with ''Fantastic Voyage,'' minus the fun.

Imagine two movies...The first is a moody thriller about two brothers who pull off a bank job, take a family hostage, and head for Mexico. The second is a garish horror freak-out. The deranged hook of From Dusk Till Dawn is that it starts out as the first movie and turns, on a dime, into the second.

The things that once made Neil LaBute's movies seem like tossed grenades — the loutish protagonists, the sadism toward women — now come off as more dated than scandalous.

There’s every indication that director John Carpenter (Halloween) was trying for more than another rinky-dink Chevy Chase comedy. Except for the effects, though, Memoirs of an Invisible Man comes disappointingly close to being just that.

As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.

An artful piece of exploitation vérité.

As a big-screen thriller, The Girl on a Train is just so-so, but taken as 112 minutes of upscale psychodramatic confessional bad-behavior porn, it generates a voyeuristic zing that’s sure to carry audiences along.

Serves up the sort of shrill ''satire'' of middle-class Jewish vulgarity in which the mere mention of words like ''brisket'' and ''klezmer'' is automatically presumed to be hilarious.

This is very much a ''woman's picture,'' driven by a twin rudder of anxiety and empowerment.

It's all very sincere, but watching a dweebish depressive learn that Life Is Good is a lesson of diminishing returns.

Mr. Magorium, who is 243 years old (so are his jokes), is a cross between Willy Wonka and Geppetto, but Hoffman plays him with little more than a goofy dumb lisp, achieved by tucking his lower lip under his upper teeth, so that he looks just as rabbity-stoopid as he sounds.

For a while, the movie has a cat-and-mouse appeal - it's like "Hard Candy" crossed with a smaller-scale "Deathtrap." Pierce acts with an enjoyably testy flamboyance, but by the time he starts to imagine that his guests have arrived even though dinner's been canceled, the film has given him one loose screw too many.

Is there anything more dull than an ineptly cynical fairy tale?

Admission, a likably breezy campus movie directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy), is blissfully non-insulting.

“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.

“Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.

For all the wholesome cheesiness of much of the film, you’d have to have a pretty hard heart not to be touched by it.

The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.

The movie itself is convoluted and almost unbelievably lackluster.

You could call the film a slightly absurd corruption thriller, an action movie with not enough action, or a by-the-numbers father-son bonding movie. Yet here’s what’s weird about it. The Last Mercenary thinks it’s a comedy, but not because anything in it is actually funny.

The dedicated entertainment junkie now has more options than ever before. So if you’re wondering which logy, derivative, visually pedestrian piece of made-for-Netflix pulp you should avoid at all costs this week, it would be hard to top In the Shadow of the Moon.

There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.

Director Jon Turteltaub has fun with Indian glyphs, giant stone pulleys, and an Indy Jones-worthy City of Gold located beneath the rocky shoals of Mount Rushmore.