Rex Reed

The four stars deserve better material, but even they seem to enjoy themselves (and each other). Call Book Club: The Next Chapter the rare sequel that looks like an all-expense-paid vacation.

It’s not much to examine at length, much less remember, but if you’re in the mood for a Hallmark card to revive your faith in gooey rom-coms, Love Again is not the one.

The movie piles on one damned thing after another, often turning a truly original life story into a Rabelaisian soap opera replete with powdered wigs and violin concertos.

For the most part, To Catch a Killer is a thriller that thrills more than other similar films do, and Shailene Woodley adds another laurel to her already impressive resume.

The worst film since Babylon, this surfeit of loud, obnoxious, violent junk audaciously claims to call itself a vampire farce, but there isn’t a genuine shred of originality anywhere in sight and it’s as witty as an ambulance with a flat tire.

Written and directed by the prolific François Ozon, Everything Went Fine is an exemplary work that intelligently explores the pros and cons of euthanasia with the kind of love, truthfulness and power that is rarely captured on film.

A lumbering bore called Inside is a crucially wooden and mechanical vehicle for the peculiar talents of Willem Dafoe that amounts to nothing more than nearly two hours of pretentious bilge.

Not a great film, but Moving On is a pleasurable enough way to kill an hour and a half without regret.

Bad movies waste time, but a contrived, empty-headed dinosaur movie called 65 wastes more of it than anything I’ve seen lately.

Despite its visual appeal, its concentrated star performance by Emma Mackey and the dedicated obsession of Australian actress Frances O’Connor, making her debut as a writer-director, it gets almost everything wrong and seems more like a work of fiction than a believable biopic.

I prefer to think of Juniper as chamber music—muted, soft, with a certain ache that lingers.

Liam Neeson is the dullest denizen of this particularly unctuous Hollywood After Dark. As Marlowe, he uncovers the usual blackmail, grand larceny, homicide and other crimes corrupting the klieg light rays of Southern California, without much energy or wit.

With terrific Appalachian ambience and moments of carefully constructed action, Devil’s Peak is not a terrible movie, but in the bigger picture, it’s not a particularly memorable one, either. It just lies there on the table, like day-old grits.

Even for a third-rate farce with two stars who appear together onscreen for no more than a total of five minutes, it’s derivative and preposterous—worse than a rejected TV pilot, and about as romantic and funny as a root canal.

The Quiet Girl, made with sensitivity and care by first-time writer-director Colm Bairead, combines serene editing, quiet reserves of strength, and subdued performances that allow you to think and feel instead of just watch.

Belgian writer-director Lukas Dhont sustains the balance of mood and physical beauty with a thrilling eloquence and Eden Dambrine as Leo and Gustav DeWaele as Remi are stunning young discoveries who will not easily be forgotten.

One of the classiest intellectual thrillers in ages.

Talky, labored and lost in mediocrity, Maybe I Do is another sad example of what happens to seasoned pros when they hang around long enough to end up in material that is regrettably beneath them.

As it unfolds, The Man in the Basement is as provocative, intelligent and suspenseful as anything you are likely to see this year.

This movie goes downhill so fast it turns inadvertently from horror to comedy, but when they see the box-office grosses, I don’t think director Brad Anderson or screenwriter Will Honley will be the ones who laugh.

There’s always room for another first-rate action thriller, and Plane breathlessly packs its punches in spades.

Despite the cynicism that permeates any film about family values, Dog Gone takes great pains to avoid sentimentality. It’s a tearjerker with mature intentions.

The revenge narrative may be worn rope-thin by archives of forgotten shoot-’em-ups, but Mr. Cage and director Donowho pull enough sub-themes out of old Bud Boetticher movies to inject the kind of suspense and true grit that still works.

Watching the misguided artistry at work in Empire of Light, it’s hard to fathom just what attracted so many top-tier talents to a project of such torpor.

The Whale has moments that touch the heart and passages that engage the mind, but the insufferable parallels it constantly draws between Charlie’s obesity and Moby Dick, Charlie’s favorite book, may have worked better in the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter than they do in his screen adaptation, where they merely ring false and drag the pace to a crawl.

Causeway is a disappointment, but the thing you take home is Jennifer Lawrence’s nuanced performance as she shows every shifting emotion and contrast in the life of a woman soldier searching for definition who doesn’t feel at ease in either world—war or peace.

The third and final entry in French writer-director Florian Zeller’s acclaimed trilogy of plays about conflicted family values in perpetual crisis, The Son is a bold, harrowing and unflinchingly sobering film that is admittedly not for every taste, but an unavoidably intelligent piece of filmmaking for mature viewers that I highly recommend.

It’s a preposterous debacle that might work better as a Halloween skit on Saturday Night Live, but it takes itself seriously, which makes it seem even sillier. I found the result too sick and disgusting to describe, but not interesting enough to care.