Richard Roeper

I found it to be the equivalent of a free-swinging slugger who is willing to strike out once, twice, even three times — but then hits one clear out of the park. It’s worth the risk-reward ratio.

The original Studio 54 lasted for only 33 months. In 98 minutes, Studio 54 captures the club on its best nights and on its worst mornings.

There are more than enough laughs and clever surprises in this broad and sometimes violent farce to warrant a recommendation, thanks to a solidly funny script by Mark Perez, some pretty neat camera moves and choreographed action/comedic sequences from directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein — and a likable and talented ensemble cast, led by two of my favorites.

This is one of those wonderfully convoluted guilty-pleasure actioners with so many WTF moments.

While my guess is this will be pulverized by some critics and fans for its big swings and logic-defying premise, I found it to be an admittedly loopy but tightly spun, at times wickedly funny and consistently involving psychological thriller that dares to try something different.

A Hidden Life is one of the most metaphysical films ever set against the backdrop of World War II.

The great Bryan Cranston sinks his teeth into the title role and chews the scenery with such gusto I half-expected him to spit out a chunk of period-piece furniture before we were through. There’s a lot of ham and cheese in the performance, but it’s great fun to watch.

There are times when Men comes across as being trippy and bizarre for the sake of easy scares, but thanks to Garland’s keen sense of pacing, the typically outstanding work from Jessie Buckley as our heroine and a staggeringly good, multi-character performance by Rory Kinnear, this is unlike any other film this year.

We’ve known for a long time Elizabeth Banks is equally deft at handling comedy and drama, and in one of the most serious and important roles of her career, Banks comes through in powerfully effective fashion. Call Jane is a drama that carries the ring of historical truth.

Mockingjay — Part 2 is a grim, dark, trippy, violent and sometimes just plain bizarre journey, which makes for a fitting if uneven conclusion to a film series that’s always been weird.

This is an unapologetically over-the-top, blood-soaked, orgy of stylized violence filled with familiar action-movie characters going through familiar action-movie paces, with a whole lot of CGI, a bounty of epic set-pieces and a borderline exhausting number of kills.

Writer-director Fennell, who won an Oscar for her screenplay of her film “Promising Young Woman” (2020), once again proves to be a cinematic provocateur capable of creating memorable shock-value moments, though at times the candy-colored, exquisitely staged yet often brutally ugly histrionics are more about the fireworks than substance.

Unusual framing device aside, Halston is on balance a solid and affectionate tribute to an American original.

Writer-director John Ridley and star Regina King get right to it in the Netflix original film “Shirley,” a no-frills, straightforward and inspirational biopic of the iconic and pioneering Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress and the first Black candidate for a major party nomination for president.

I would like to see another movie in three or four years, about what has happened to these angry, gifted friends.

Please leave all logic and reality at the door as you settle in for a violent slice of Netflix original movie entertainment featuring an outstanding cast of first-rate actors clearly having a great time shooting up the joint.

Ferrari never quite achieves the greatness of previous Mann movies such as “Thief” and “Heat,” but it’s a solid and extremely well-filmed slice of one legendary life.

This is a movie that introduces you to a bold and original concept and asks you to just go with it, and if you’re willing to take the leap of faith (in more ways than one), you’ll find this to be a unique and special fable.

This is terrific family entertainment.

The final few scenes of The Kill Room stretch the satiric premise to the breaking point, but by then we’re content to go along with the ride and enjoy the dark humor and the fine work of the entire cast, led by Jackson and Thurman in twin knockout performances.

Dripping in fantasy sequences and popping with vibrantly rendered set pieces, this is a monumental ego trip as well as an admirably candid therapy session, and there’s even some amusing, self-deprecating stuff as well.

This is Grillo’s film to carry, and he pulls it off with a combination of brute force and light charm.

Sacha Baron Cohen remains a fearless and funny comedic force, and Maria Bakalova is hilarious and endearing as Tutar. We also get a clever twist ending and I’ll say no more than that. Borat is an idiot, but “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” ends on a pretty smart note.

Speak No Evil eventually goes full-on with the familiar horror movie blood-spattering, but the social satire in that well-executed build-up is the real strength of the film.

Like so many cautionary tales we’ve seen come out of Hollywood since there was a Hollywood, “You Don’t Know Me” is one long reminder to be careful what you wish for—because dreams that come true often arrive with tentacles attached.

I can’t tell you I bought every last twist and turn in the final act, but thanks to Niccol’s creative direction and the offbeat but effective chemistry between Owen’s emotionally damaged Sal and Seyfried’s is-she-hero-or-villain mystery woman, Anon kept me in its grips throughout.

[An] insightful and occasionally revealing look at the 88-year-old Manhattan institution where the rich and famous enjoy being rich and famous.

Superfly succeeds at it what it wants to be: an action-packed, sexy, violent, 21st century blaxploitation crime thriller with a stylish look, a downloadable soundtrack, a great-looking and talented cast, a few slick twists and even some genuinely funny moments.

Always nice to enjoy a little comfort-food movie in which almost nothing surprising or particularly fresh happens, but we’re happy to spend time with the characters and we wish them the best as the credits roll.

Disobedience comes across as a challenging but also deeply respectful and thoughtful meditation on traditions and mores that date back thousands of years.

"Dead Men” works well enough as a stand-alone, swashbuckling comedic spectacle, thanks to the terrific performances, some ingenious practical effects, impressive CGI and a steady diet of PG-13 dialogue peppered with not particularly sophisticated but (I have to admit) fairly funny sexual innuendo.

Not Okay isn’t exactly a swing and a miss. But it doesn’t quite connect in solid fashion.

There’s always been something a bit ridiculous about the whole Tarzan premise, and while the talented cast and a solid director make for a serviceable and intermittently entertaining adventure, there’s very little about this film that screams, YOU GOTTA SEE THIS.

When you’re balancing ridiculous slapstick right out of a live-action cartoon with well-written, well-acted scenes that feel completely of this world, that’s a tough balancing act, and “Tammy” isn’t quite up to the task on a consistent basis.

There’s just not enough gristle and gore on the bone of this story to make for a memorably haunting viewer experience.

It’s not that “The Boys in the Boat” doesn’t have an inspirational impact; it’s that we’re so aware of being pushed in that direction.

As you’d expect, It’s a Wonderful Knife is filled with blood-spattered twists on holiday movie tropes. Unfortunately, there are few surprises and only a handful of genuine scares, and the film suffers from subpar lighting and occasionally clunky editing. It’s a “Knife” in need of some sharpening.

A serviceable if sometimes overwrought biography, with solid performances and the courage to spotlight not only the heroics but the appalling misdeeds committed by the iconic Ms. Mandela.

In the occasionally poignant but ham-handed and only semi-funny Where to Invade Next, Moore is at his shtickiest.

Queer is a good-looking film with moments of great promise that is much like Lee in that it wears out its welcome and tries your patience far too often.

The Two Popes is the kind of well-made but flawed release you can wait to catch on home video.

Director April Mullen shoots Wander like a kinetic horror film, which results in some pretty cool sequences but also far too many quick-cut flashbacks to the deadly auto accident, which results in us feeling more annoyed and manipulated than intrigued.

Palo Alto is a well-directed but relatively slight, only occasionally provocative and unremittingly bleak slice of life.

Although Sanctuary is stylish and initially intriguing, it’s eventually a real chore to spend an entire feature-length film (even with a relatively brief running time of 96 minutes) with two boors who are also kind of boring, despite all the histrionics and fang-baring and manipulative mind games. They find themselves and each other a lot more interesting than we do.

For all its predictability and averageness, Texas Chainsaw Massacre does have two fantastically executed shock scenes.

While the performances are solid and we do get a few touching moments, the film sinks under the weight of too many intersecting storylines and too many loud and fiery and surprisingly mediocre action sequences.

Eisenberg is a fine writer and shows clear promise as a visual storyteller, but it becomes a chore to spend even an 88-minute movie with his increasingly off-putting characters. We know they’re not supposed to be likable, but they should be more interesting.

It leans HARD into the romantic comedy tropes, to the point that you might find yourself giving into the silliness and the over-the-top embracing of so many clichés. It’s like you’re getting bombarded with rom-com snowballs for the entire movie.

Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land is filled with noble ideas about the value of listening to and learning from the “other side” in the immigration crisis, but as it becomes increasingly heavy-handed, we feel as if we’re sitting in on a lecture.

Beatriz at Dinner is entertaining enough as farce — but over the course of a feature-length film, the characters actually become more one-dimensional and less believable.

For all its stylistic flourishes, “The Silent Twins” winds up a relatively superficial entry in the genre of mental health biopics.

This might have worked as a short film or a 30-minute TV episode, but as a feature film, it grows increasingly cloying as the minutes tick on.

“Axel F” is the very definition of passable, comfort-viewing, nostalgia-tinged entertainment. It’s a good-looking film, and it’s wonderful to see Eddie Murphy returning to one of his signature roles and pumping it back to life after he sleep-walked through “Cop III.” It’s just a shame they got the band together after three decades, only to have them perform by-the-book renditions of the same old songs.

Though colorful and sweet-natured and occasionally capable of producing the mild chuckle, this is a safe, predictable, edge-free, nearly bland effort from a studio that rarely hedges its bets.

It’s an ambitious reach, and the talented cast of mostly familiar names is game for the challenge, but Crisis goes over the top with too many key plot developments. The end result is a serious case of Messaging Exhaustion.

Lansky loses steam every time the focus is on somewhere other than Lansky.

First-time feature director Dante Ariola (working from a script by Becky Johnson) has a good feel for these characters and keeps things moving along at a brisk pace.

Thanks in large part to Costner’s robust, earnest, growling, deadpan voice work as a dog who can be brilliant one moment and fantastically clueless the next, “The Art of Racing In the Rain” still comes close to winning us over … Until the final scene, which was so shameless and manipulative, I wanted a refund on every lump in the throat and teary-eyed moment I had experienced to that point.

It’s the MMA version of Million Dollar Baby meets Rocky in Halle Berry’s directorial debut Bruised, a well-acted and occasionally involving but overly long, cliché-stuffed sports film that hits all the usual notes and piles on the subplot drama to the point where we’re nearly exhausted by the viewing experience.

It’s a great-looking ride with a few legitimate jump-scares and some suitably chilling imagery, but the finale leaves us frustrated and let down, wondering: Is that all there is?

Director Seth Gordon (“Four Christmases,” “Horrible Bosses”) knows how to film fast-moving comedies with star appeal, and Diaz (who hasn’t lost an ounce of onscreen charisma) and Foxx are terrific together, but wouldn’t it have been lovely if they had tackled more creative and challenging material?

Wahlberg has grown so much as an actor we can pretty much buy him as a college professor/author. There’s just not enough depth to the character of Jim, and not much of a story arc.

Despite the stylish direction from the duo of Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and winning performances by Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder, “Novocaine” sputters to the finish line.

Though directed with great precision by Branagh, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is saddled with a boilerplate script.

At times Thor: The Dark World does fire on all cylinders, with fine work from the returning cast, a handful of hilarious sight gags and some cool action sequences. But it’s also more than a little bit silly and quite ponderous and overly reliant on special effects that are more confusing than exhilarating.

There is much to admire about “Conclave,” but in the end, all of its lofty aspirations come tumbling down due to that poorly constructed Jenga tower of a plot.

Venom: The Last Dance is dopey and silly and filled with familiar stock characters and well-worn tropes, but it’s almost never ponderous.

It Ends with Us handles the issue of domestic violence with admirable sensitivity and noble intentions, but with a far too long running time of 130 minutes and a plot that depends on not one, not two, but three major coincidences, it isn’t as impactful or resonant as it could have been.

It’s a brilliant performance by Gyllenhaal in a film that veers from dark satire to tense crime thriller before the tires come off near the end, leaving the entire vehicle just short of worth recommending.

Ordinary Love gets everything right, but there’s almost nothing in the way of a major plot revelation or insightful flashback explaining certain elements from the past.

Unbroken is an ambitious, sometimes moving film that suffers from a little too much self-conscious nobility, and far too many scenes of sadistic brutality.

It’s a competently made, traditional biopic about a man who disdained those terms.

Though Light of My Life is a well-filmed and occasionally brutally effective piece of work, Affleck dilutes the power of the story with too many self-indulgent, patience-testing scenes.

This is a revenge Western we’ve seen dozens of times before, and the villains aren’t nearly as intimidating and pitch-black evil as they need to be. The end result is a passably entertaining shoot-’em-up with very few surprises.

The cinematography, the set design, the costumes, the overall feel of Loving: all first-rate. Negga and Edgerton are undeniably good. I was impressed. I just wish I’d been more deeply moved.

This is a well-made, well-acted but unexceptional film about one of the most exceptional figures of the last half-century.

Writer-director DuVall is a talented filmmaker and she keeps the mostly superficial story humming along at an entertaining pace, and the cast is terrific and gets the maximum value out of the material.

Despite the strong performances and more than a few audience-pleasing moments where peace and love triumph over stupidity and bigotry, the film travels such an obvious path and falls into such a predictable rhythm, it doesn’t quite carry the emotional resonance such a powerful true-life story should convey.

This is a movie with a deeply split personality, and despite some flashes of creativity from a talented director and cast, neither the straightforward biography nor the flights of creative fancy are particularly resonant.

There are so many Wes-ian constructs at play here, so many deliberate attempts to keep us at a distance, it’s as if we’re standing on a sidewalk in the rain, looking through a thick window at a painting hanging on a distant wall. We’re too busy thinking about what we’re seeing to feel much of anything at all.

Adam Driver (who has now played a French squire and an Italian fashion heir in consecutive Ridley Scott movies) and Lady Gaga have legit chemistry together, and it’s still a kick to see Al Pacino roaring like a lion in winter. But Hayek and Irons are playing cardboard-thin characters, Leto flounders about as if he’s in a movie all his own, and “House of Gucci” feels coldly calculating when it should have been flush and warm with scandalous sensationalism.

Based on the novel of the same name by M.T. Anderson, the third effort from the talented Finley (“Thoroughbreds,” “Bad Education”) features some impressively staged sequences and terrific performances, but awkwardly straddles the fence between biting social commentary and dark humor, never quite finding its footing and ending on a curiously flat note.

Just about every scene in Ghost in the Shell is a visual wonder to behold — and you’ll have ample to time to soak in all that background eye candy, because the plot machinations and the action in the foreground are largely of the ho-hum retread variety.

While never losing its visual dazzle-factor, Epic keeps returning to overly familiar themes and characters.

For at least half a movie, it’s a wildly entertaining concept with some pretty good payoffs and there was a chance we’d have the best B-movie in recent memory, but then the story takes the easy way out and we’re left wondering why they didn’t ride the original idea all the way to the finish line.

Worth falls just short of having enough strength in the screenplay to warrant a recommendation.

The long-delayed biopic Gotti is an entertaining and well-acted but uneven B-movie.

From Streep and DiCaprio and Lawrence through the supporting players, Don’t Look Up is filled with greatly talented actors really and truly selling this material — but the volume remains at 11 throughout the story when some changes in tone here and there might have more effectively carried the day.

The cast is uniformly excellent, with Ariana DeBose leading the way. For a relatively small-budget film, the visuals and sets are better than good. Ultimately, though, “I.S.S.” runs out of big ideas and sputters across the finish line.

With an intriguing premise, the magnetic Daisy Ridley (Rey in the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy) in the lead and a stellar supporting cast including Naomi Watts in a dual role, Ophelia has its moments of inspiration and beauty.

As the body count piles up and the action gets bigger and bigger, even the great John Luther comes perilously close to being overwhelmed by the spectacle in an increasingly ludicrous storyline that favors admittedly stunning and often gruesome visuals in favor of anything approaching plausibility.

There’s no denying the talents of director Domee Shi (Oscar winner for the 2018 animated short “Bao”) and the infectious, energetic performances of the voice cast, particularly Rosalie Chiang as Meilin. The problems are mostly with the script, which often requires Meilin to be almost irritatingly obnoxious.

While the spectacularly gifted and enormously likable cast has the firepower and charisma to match the testosterone-fueled ensembles of those earlier films, Ocean’s 8 is more of a smooth glide than an exhilarating adventure.

The awkwardly titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a mixed bag that plays like a cross between a “Mission: Impossible” movie and “Get Shorty,” and there are some moments of hilariously dark humor and a few nifty fight sequences. But the plot is so convoluted it feels as if chunks of different scripts were all fed into some kind of A.I. blender, with the result being an inconsequential serving of empty cinematic calories.

Nightbitch positions itself as an edgy, body-horror film with shock-value imagery, and there’s no denying the validity of its premise that even in 2024, the sacrifices of motherhood are taken for granted and underexamined.

12 Strong winds up being an almost-good film about some great American soldiers.

White Men Can’t Jump 2023 is the second remake for director Calmatic this year, following the disastrous “House Party” from last January, and while it’s not as clumsy or weirdly tone-deaf as that bomb, the screenplay by Kenya Barris (“black-ish”) and Doug Hall misses a couple of major opportunities, including the decision to have the most dramatic development of the entire movie take place offscreen.

The movie they made is the movie they made, and while there are some genuinely moving moments, and filmmakers Josh Tickell and Rebecca Tickell clearly took great care in respecting Indigenous People culture and getting the details right, too much of On Sacred Ground focuses on William Mapother’s cliché-riddled Daniel.

This is a well-intentioned and sometimes quite sharp high school movie that falls just short of the mark due to a few way-off-the-mark scenes and too much heavy-handed preaching.

Weird has the ingredients of a brilliant half-hour special stretched too thin.

This is a paint-by-numbers procedural that expects the audience to know the history of Watergate, hits the ground running—but then feels more like a steady jog through the past than a fast-paced thriller.

Branagh is a world-class actor and a fine director, and he scores stylistic points on both counts here, but this “Orient Express” loses steam just when it should be gaining speed and racing to its putatively shocking conclusion, which isn’t all that surprising — even if you haven’t read the book or seen the 1974 movie

We’re only about 20 minutes into the half-baked, ultra-lightweight, almost instantly forgettable rom-com “Ticket to Paradise” when our hearts start to sink, as we realize this big-screen re-teaming of Julia Roberts and George Clooney is quite likely going to be sideswiped and eventually sunk by a leaden screenplay that doesn’t come close to maximizing their massive respective star power.

If only Deadpool were as clever, dark and funny as it believes itself to be.

Despite the undeniable importance of this story and the obvious passion of those involved in telling it, Emancipation is more than anything a relatively standard-issue, period-piece action film — and that’s a shame, because we see glimpses of how it could have been something much more than that.

What we have is the movie, and it’s a well-intentioned, well-acted and sometimes visually arresting picture that unfortunately features a primary character who is so foul and irredeemable it’s virtually impossible to believe certain happy-ending developments late in the film. It feels contrived and forced.

Despite Redford's sure-handed (but typically stolid) direction, an intriguing premise and a cast filled with top-line talent both veteran and relatively new, nearly every scene had me asking questions about what just transpired when I should have been absorbing what was happening next.

In a way (and maybe it was a conscious choice), some of Almereyda’s flourishes mirror Milgram’s flamboyance — but in both cases, when you have such a provocative foundation and such rich material to work with, pushing it to the next level isn’t necessarily the best choice.

Ultimately, though, the sequel has very little new to say about Arthur Fleck and his place in this world, and the musical interludes start to feel like gratuitous self-indulgence rather than insightful and illuminating passages that advance or enhance the material.

From the opening scene right until the wholly expected finale, Lonely Planet is pure romantic-drama escapism. It’s so thin that if the original material had been in book form, that book would have been a pamphlet.

Despite the best efforts of the talented director/co-writer Paul King (who gifted us with the “Paddington” movies) and the wonderful ensemble cast, Wonka is like one of those enticing-looking chocolates with a smooth and silky and delicious coating — but inside, you taste dry coconut instead of caramel or a cherry, what a bummer!

After a setup worthy of a John le Carre adaptation, the main storyline is an admittedly well-filmed and well-acted but disappointingly lightweight journey more akin to a lesser Bond movie (there’s more than one reference to “Moonraker” along the way), with a cartoonishly forgettable villain and far too much time devoted to domestic soap opera antics played for easy laughs and unconvincing sentimentality.

The intentions and performances are irrefutably sincere and noble. The execution almost always feels a little bit forced and a little bit false.

While The Greyhound pays great attention to detail and feels authentic, especially in the claustrophobic and intense scenes in the bowels of the ship, the battle sequences that look like something straight out of a video game dominate the movie and keep us at a safe distance from getting emotionally involved on a level this story deserves.

The talented young leads acquit themselves well here, but this is also the kind of movie that provides the forum for not one but two of our finest character actors to deliver performances so hammy you’ll be reaching for the spicy mustard sauce.

Shyamalan being Shyamalan, Glass does have a distinctive look and some pretty cool moments, and a half-decent twist or two. Mostly, though, it’s an underwhelming, half-baked, slightly sour and even off-putting finale.

From start to finish, Judy feels more like a stylized tribute act than an insightful interpretation of the real thing.

As Karla turns into Super Mom, brushing off multiple car accidents and more than one attempt on her life, Kidnap provides some easy applause-getting moments but grows increasingly over-the-top.

Dafoe’s Vincent is a tormented, almost childlike soul who is never comfortable in his own skin, and veers from being monumentally needy to frighteningly rash. It’s a mesmerizing performance in an inconsistent and uneven film.

Live From New York! is a solid, pleasant 82-minute walk down memory lane. But given that we’ve just been through the 40th anniversary celebration, cresting with that marathon of a TV special, it just doesn’t feel particularly necessary.

Carey Mulligan is terrific, even when the script calls for Jeanette to make a quick, not entirely plausible transition from a repressed housewife from the Eisenhower era into a diva from an overwrought B-movie. It’s a great performance in an almost-good movie.

For the first 45 minutes or so of this well-filmed and creatively staged production, “The Heretic” flashes the potential to be one of the most memorably insane horror films of the year; unfortunately, it all comes crashing down via some increasingly outrageous, credibility-smashing twists and turns, and a disappointing reliance on well-worn horror movie tropes in the stretch run.

South of Heaven devolves into a rote thriller, with henchmen upon henchmen upon henchmen falling by the wayside until the inevitable showdown — which plays out in underwhelming fashion.

Ultimately, though, Settlers is more about setting a mood and painting a picture of hopelessness than explaining what happened before the story, what’s happening beyond the borders of the compound and what lies ahead for Remmy. It feels incomplete.

Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, Pain Hustlers aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.

There’s nothing inherently wrong in leaving some things open-ended, but Happily opts out of giving us answers in such a flippant, off-hand manner that we feel betrayed for investing in the story to that moment.

These neat little notes are dropped like so many breadcrumbs along the trail and offer some clever hints about the larger storyline, but that brings us to where Biosphere falls short: The Big Picture it is painting remains a bit too fuzzy and frustratingly ambiguous to the end.

Alas, Gran Turismo ultimately feels like a tribute to marketing campaigns and brand ambassadorships more than “Rocky” on the racetrack.

At times Jimi: All Is By My Side feels pure authentic. More often, though, it’s meandering and melodramatic, with far too many scenes of Hendrix jabbering and squabbling with two key female figures in his life, and not enough of the music.

Words on Bathroom Walls has its moments and its heart is in the right place, but the missteps are too many and too big for the story to carry the day.

Wan retains his touch for ratcheting up the tension, providing doses of comic relief and then BOOM!, delivering another gotcha moment that will leave audiences jumping in their seats and then giggling at the visceral thrill ride — but the scary moments aren’t as fresh this time around, and with a running time of 2 hours, 13 minutes, The Conjuring 2 is at least a half hour too long. At least.

Gerwig is a magnetic actress, but it feels as if she’s overplaying it here. Even in Brooke’s best moments, she’s not all that charming or interesting.

There are times when this film feels absolutely real and lived-in, as when Paul’s extended family gathers for dinners where everyone talks at once and nobody is listening, and you can feel the tensions but also the enduring and abiding love at the table. Unfortunately, Gray’s central young character isn’t as sympathetic or likable as the talented filmmaker must have intended, and the constant lecturing about white guilt among liberals is delivered in all caps, with exclamation points.

Good Time is a hallucinatory and often gripping one-night stand of mishaps, mayhem and madness. Ultimately, though, the sometimes clever story runs out of steam and limps across the finish line, and the in-your-face characters and camerawork, not to mention the in-your-ears score, left me not all that involved and a bit exhausted.

This is a serviceable, suitably gory and intermittently scary film with some solid action sequences.

While there are some sparks of creativity in the script by Michael Mitnick and some strong performances (most notably from Shannon and Waterston), it fizzles out under the weight of a pompous and meandering storyline that includes cryptic flashbacks to a wartime encounter, and a strange subplot about the advent of the electric chair.

IF never quite soars, never fully grabs our hearts, never fully captivates our imagination.

Not even the star power of Clooney and Pitt can elevate this beyond the level of a passable, disposable thriller.

Wild Mountain Thyme comes close to winning our hearts based on the performances and the lush County Mayo scenery and the sheer romanticism of it all, but writer-director Shanley keeps us at arm’s distance in the climactic sequences, when we should be swept up in the story of Rosemary and Anthony but we’re left exasperated at the forced eccentricity of it all.

Some misfires are far more interesting than others, and that’s certainly the case with director/co-writer Jeff Baena’s “Spin Me Round,” a restaurant-themed romp that starts off in rom-com land, veers off into territory hinting at the strange and disturbing darkness of a “Midsommar” or an “Eyes Wide Shut,” and winds up somewhere in between, coming across as half-baked and undercooked.

Fatman skids and slides and careens between genres and never finds solid footing in any one place, and ultimately winds up as an interesting failed experiment.

Joe Bell never quite packs the dramatic punch the real-life story deserves.

Sometimes you see a play and you can imagine it being a movie. Sometimes you see a small movie like this, and you can imagine it working better as an intimate stage play.

Gareth Edwards’ ambitious and visually striking AI parable “The Creator” is a mashup of familiar elements from so many science fiction and war movies that we’re tempted to say it actually could have been written by AI. But I’m not sure artificial intelligence is capable of creating such a shamelessly schmaltzy, cornball script that at times makes Michael Bay’s films feel subtle by comparison.

Matrix Resurrections is a great-looking film and Reeves and Moss remind us of what an iconic team they made in the trilogy, but the themes of finding one’s identity, free will, taking leaps of faith in order to serve the greater good, humans against machines — we already hashed all that out back in the day, and ultimately this feels more like a warmed-over tribute to the past than a bold and fresh new chapter.

The good news: Hardy creates two memorable characters, making some bold and always entertaining if not entirely successful choices. The bad news: Somehow, the fictionalized version of the terrifying, violent and twisted Krays manages to be pedestrian and derivative for long stretches.

Stretched over 135 minutes and overloaded with shout-to-the-rafters confrontations, Her Smell has too much talking and squawking, and not enough rocking and rolling.

While Gun’s story is certainly worth telling and this is a well-intentioned, solid film with fine work from Knightley, Official Secrets is too heavy-handed and drab, and falls far short of procedural thrillers such as “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight” and “The Post” or broadly entertaining whistleblower stories such as “Erin Brockovich.”

The Family Plan exists in a world that defies all logic and reality. Granted, this is an over-the-top comedy, and yes, there are a few dark laughs, but this is basically a live-action cartoon with a deadly premise.

Every character in the Netflix teenage rom-com “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” is just so nice that we wish them all well, but we’re not fully convinced there’s enough here for an actual movie.

Sandra Bullock has starred in only seven films in the last decade, and along with Gravity in 2013, her two most intriguing roles by far have been courtesy of the streaming giant Netflix: first with the smash hit horror film Bird Box (2018) and now with The Unforgivable, which has prestige credentials, a brilliant, A-list cast and a few moments of near-greatness, but is ultimately a disappointing and frustrating viewing experience due mostly to script and editing problems.

It aims straight for our hearts, sometimes hitting the target, especially in some of the quieter scenes with Conor and his mother. But then the preachy tree rears its thorny head, and it keeps on talking and explaining, long after we get it, we get it, we get it.

Fletch needed an actor more interested in playing the character than in playing himself.

A curiously unfocused Prohibition-era gangster epic with some well-choreographed action scenes, a few provocative plot threads — but an increasingly meandering main story line that goes from intriguing to confounding to preachy to what exactly are we even watching here?

There’s no denying that Torres (a former writer on “Saturday Night Live” and the co-creator of the HBO series “Los Espookys”) is a unique talent; it’s just that his first feature film, while featuring some clever ideas, has a repetitive nature that grows more irksome as we go along, and the humor dissipates into heavy-handed social commentary.

Freeheld is a classic example of a well-made, well-acted film with the best of intentions — but a disappointingly heavy-handed method of delivering its message.

While it’s great to see a Latino hero from the DC Universe get center stage in the form of Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle, and the dynamic among the loving and fiercely protective extended Reyes family is the highlight of the film, this is a mostly by-the-numbers origin story with underwhelming VFX, a disappointingly cartoonish villain and a final battle sequence and epilogue that follow the pattern of a dozen or more previous superhero origin stories.

Unfortunately, “Y2K” fizzles out somewhere around the halfway point, in part because the characters aren’t fleshed out much beyond familiar tropes, and the screenplay seems not quite finished. It’s as if the filmmakers ran out of fresh ideas at some point but just plowed ahead anyway.

Director Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump are clearly playing much of as pitch-black satire, but High-Rise keeps hammering home the same points, and not even the wealth of strong performances from Hiddleston, Miller and Irons are enough to salvage the day.

Perhaps this story would be better told in a limited non-fiction series as well, as Queenpins relies too much on scatological humor, farcical sequences and a not entirely convincing message that these women were feminist, Robin Hood heroes.

I’m all for pushing the limits of taste in the name of edgy laughs and portrayals of teen life that don’t sugarcoat the realities of teen life, but while Incoming easily earns its R rating, it has a bit of foul odor about it and features far too many cheap gross-out gags and the inclusion of some genuinely creepy characters whose actions range from the morally questionable to flat-out criminal.

Director Todd Phillips has delivered a film so different from the first two, one could even ask if this is even supposed to be a comedy. I'm not saying it's an unfunny comedy wannabe; I'm saying it plays more like a straightforward, real-world thriller with a few laughs than a hard-R slapstick farce.

Things play out in predictable fashion, and we’re more than ready to bid farewell to these people and feel grateful they don’t live on our block.

This whole movie is crazy, with all sorts of well-known folks stumbling and bumbling about in search of a character. At times Reach Me is undeniably intriguing, mostly because it’s just so weird and disconnected. Eventually, though, it just becomes tiresome.

Director Johannes Roberts is clearly a fan of films such as “Christine” and “Halloween.” The production elements are first-rate, including the expansive setting that includes multiple cabins, a playground and a swimming pool.

Deadly serious people are involved in deadly serious business in “Wasp Network,” and there’s an air of importance and urgency to their every move, and we should be utterly immersed in this story — but we’re not. Not even close.

Technically impressive but listless and tedious.

The tantalizing enticement of Goldie Hawn pairing with Amy Schumer for a mother-daughter, road-trip buddy comedy has some moments, but never fulfills its promise. As their onscreen adventures and antics grow zanier and broader, the laughs actually grow softer and more sporadic.

This is a well-made thriller traveling over awfully familiar turf.

This is a competently made film with decent cinematography and production design, and the casting is never less than ... interesting, but it favors a simplistic approach and a narrative that verges on adoration.

A depressingly uninspired superhero adventure sequel that leans heavily on plot points and battle sequences we’ve seen in at least a dozen other films in the genre — and almost always done better.

Emma Roberts and Dave Franco are just fine, but there’s no huge onscreen spark between them. Most of the supporting roles are thinly drawn and forgettable.

Arriving in theaters nearly three decades after Will Smith and Martin Lawrence proved to be a hilariously likable duo in the original “Bad Boys” and four years after the entertaining, midlife-crisis threequel, the bombastic and cartoonishly over-the-top “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” is one loud misfire.

It’s like a strange and misguided takeoff on “All That Jazz” as funneled through “Rock of Ages,” and while there’s no denying the heart and effort behind the presentation, that finale is representative of the movie itself in that it has an uncanny way of hitting the wrong notes.

Unfortunately, not even Gordon-Levitt’s stellar work can sustain a well-made but ultimately underwhelming docudrama from first-time German writer-director Patrick Vollrath.

From its juvenile double entendre title to its fascination with prison rape and homophobic humor, “Get Hard” practically announces itself as an offensive, tired and unimaginative comedy in nearly every scene. And yet I didn’t hate it because Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart had such terrific comedic chemistry.

The Shack is a well-acted and sometimes moving but far too often slow-paced and unconvincing spiritual journey.

It’s essentially a stand-alone film, though it doesn’t really stand so much as it wobbles and careens all over the place before exploding in an overwrought orgy of grotesque images, religious psychobabble and second-rate CGI nonsense.

Run is stopped dead in its tracks by a howler of a screenplay that regularly calls for various characters to behave as stupidly as the dumbest victim in a splatter movie.

Nymphomaniac Part 1 grows flat and monotonous, and comes across as just what it is: half a film.

Strives hard to replicate the screwball comedy but ends up being a lot more screwball than comedy.

A sometimes wickedly funny but ultimately sour, loud, draining tale of one of the most dysfunctional families in modern American drama. And that’s saying a lot.

The Tomorrow War is an earnest effort to bring something new to the time-travel action genre, but this movie is a 2021 vehicle made of parts from the 2010s and the 1990s and 1980s.

In the stylishly directed but gratuitously nasty and cliché-riddled Peppermint, Garner plays essentially two characters cut from the same person.

This is dicey material for a screwball comedy, even one with dark undertones, and despite the best efforts of the ensemble, She Came to Me drifts further and further away from anything approaching reality or relatability. Nearly every major character in this film is exhausting to be around and/or thinly drawn.

It spirals downward into a ludicrous, dumbed-down horror story more concerned with grossing out the audience than in providing any compelling reason for this long-running franchise to keep chugging along, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.

Unremarkable and disposable.

More times than not, The Benefactor takes the less interesting fork in the road.

Davis (who was an executive producer on the film) gives a strong performance, as if she were acting in one of those many prestige projects lighting up her resume. It’s a noble try, but this dreck is beyond saving.

Frantically overcooked, bursting with headache-inducing, rapid-cut action sequences and only half as clever as it fancies itself, Bloodshot is an ambitious and intermittently entertaining minor-league superhero film.

Despite the fine performance by Witherspoon and a number of the supporting players, Devil’s Knot comes across as a cinematic, slightly dramatized Cliffs Notes edition of a story that’s been told often, and almost always more effectively, in other formats.

It’s shiny trash that begins with promise but quickly gets tripped up by its own screenplay and grows increasingly ludicrous and melodramatic, to the point where I was barely able to suppress a chuckle at some of the final scenes.

We’ll eventually see dozens if not hundreds of projects using the pandemic as a plot point. Songbird will be among the least memorable.

Despite the sometimes clever and surely deliberately anachronistic dialogue from the terrific screenwriter Beau Willimon (“The Ides of March,” the Netflix series “House of Cards”), capable direction from Josie Rourke and strong performances from Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots often comes across as stultified and stagnant.

Alas, the basketball scenes and the basketball talk in this basketball movie continually bounce the wrong way, and there’s no overcoming that.

Even when Mary finally gets her due, the film badly fumbles the moment.

There’s a memorable movie to be made about the amazing, inspiration and controversial life of Jesse Owens. This is not a bad film and it’s a decent history lesson for those that don’t know the story of Owens and the ’36 Games, but it’s a long, long way from greatness.

It will keep reminding you of better movies in the same genre.

Writer-director Victor Levin takes an interesting although ultimately tedious and distracting approach to nearly every scene.

On more than one occasion, this looks and feels like a parody.

Firth and Stone, appealing as they are as actors, are so disconnected as potential romantic leads it sometimes appears as if they’re barely in the same scene together.

At times, it’s really funny. More often, it’s “shocking” for the sake of shock value, gross for the sake of being gross, and stupid-goofy without much of a payoff.

[A] disappointingly listless thriller, in which at least four of the titular seven days feel like place-holders, with everyone holding their positions and regurgitating the same concerns and regrets and debates.

For all its obvious love of movies and of the shared experience of watching movies, Empire of Light is a decidedly downbeat effort that tries to say too much and ultimately winds up saying very little.

The Mean One has a handful of inspired lines, e.g., “Time to roast this beast!” but the production values, editing, score and photography are average at best, and we’re left with a film that will be remembered mostly for a cleverly twisted marketing hook.

It’s almost as if Halloween Kills is an inconsistent, sloppy mess.

Beneath its glossy surface, this is nothing more than a cheap parlor trick, with heavy-handed messaging about female empowerment, and a final act that is neither surprising nor remotely plausible, and not nearly as shocking as it was surely intended to be.

For a movie called The Marksman, we rarely Jim actually demonstrating his marksmanship, as we’re left with Neeson again doing extended, hand-to-hand combat with a much younger, cockier foe who has no idea what he’s up against.

From time to time you’ll laugh and maybe shed a tear But this isn’t the kind of “Grinch” you’ll want to see each year.

At times The Girl in the Spider’s Web almost feels like a superhero movie, with Lisbeth as Bat Girl.

This movie is pure cotton candy — sweet and brightly colored and a bit of a guilty pleasure, but it’s not intended to be something you can sink your teeth into, and five minutes after consuming it, it’s like it never happened.

Stiller is very good at playing this kind of character. The issue is whether we’re tired of him playing this kind of character.

Over all, Noelle is subpar — but it’s silly, harmless fun. It’s so forgettable it’ll be virtually erased from your memory five minutes after the end credits roll.

With Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx as the lead pups, Strays delivers a handful of solid chuckles and a few laugh-out-loud moments — but it’s a premise that turns out to be awfully thin for a feature-length film.

The Good Dinosaur is wildly uneven, but you have to give it points for trying to be something different.

Writer-director Kerem Sanga has a knack for delivering arresting, noir-like visuals, especially from medium- and long-shot distance, and the talented cast gamely tries to sell the material, but The Violent Heart is so muddled there are times we have to remind ourselves of the connection between certain characters, and the histrionics so over the top we’re hoping everyone will just take a deep breath and CALM THE HECK DOWN.

Again and again, Death Wish feels anything but real.

The mystery is muddled, the romance is tepid and scenes that should be electric with tension are almost dull.

The acting, practical and special effects and production design are all superb. The script is repetitive, tedious and a whole lot of ho-hum.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. has pockets of intrigue, and writer-director Gilroy and Washington have teamed up to create a promising dramatic character. We just never get full delivery on that promise.

When it’s time to answer the question of Who ya gonna call, Ghostbusters: Afterlife comes across as a well-intentioned and sincere but unfortunate misdial.

The satire becomes almost numbingly obvious over the far too long running time of 140 minutes, and with all due appreciation for the strong work by the leads, the horrifically impressive VFX and prosthetics, and a few moments of pitch-black humor, we exit the film feeling more pummeled than enlightened.

Dial of Destiny has a few clever ideas and some well-crafted action sequences, but the main plot line is creaky, corny and contrived, and the final action twist lands the story in such disastrous, B-movie territory that not even Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones can rescue it from collapsing in a dusty heap of mediocrity.

Despite the invaluable comedic/dramatic gifts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, who do their best to inject some life and energy into the proceedings, Downhill is a pale, tame, broad and soft-edged remake of the far superior 2014 Swedish film “Force Majeure.”

The problem with Ferrell’s character is he goes from bland to desperate to off the rails — and very little about that transition is genuinely funny. The problem with Wahlberg’s character is he never seems all that dangerous or mysterious.

Clocking in at a bloated and self-indulgent 2 hours and 19 minutes, filled with VFX sequences so cheesy you wonder if they’re supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and bogged down by a plot so convoluted you’ll be reaching for the aspirin, “Argylle” is a bright shining pile of mediocrity.

Every Secret Thing is a small, well-crafted film with a few chilling moments and some fine performances, but it’s a muddled, pedestrian crime thriller.

All due respect to Lopez’ longevity and acknowledging that some of these films have their diehard fans, J. Lo has never scored with a classic romantic comedy, and though she once again gives it her all and dives into another ludicrous premise, there’s no salvaging this deliberately over-the-top, mixed-genre effort that plays like a slapstick take on “Die Hard” at a wedding.

It’s a morose and slow-paced and off-putting drama, in which even the joyous moments seem brittle and draped in melancholy.

The Choice is classic Sparks, and by that I mean it’s a mediocre, well-photographed, undeniably heart-tugging, annoyingly manipulative and dramatically predictable star-crossed romance.

There’s some first-rate camerawork aboard the sub, that strong lead performance from Law and one nifty plot twist. It’s a shame the script gives us one of the most incompetent and ridiculous submarine crews this side of “Down Periscope.”

The presentation is gorgeous. The actual meal is nothing but empty calories.

After an intriguing setup, “Runner Runner” devolves into a by-the-books thriller.

The great and usually fantastically innovative Werner Herzog has turned Bell’s story into a conventional, cliché-riddled, overly talky and plodding biopic where very little happens for long stretches of time, and we have to endure deadly-dull voice-over narration while looking at admittedly gorgeous scenery and, well, camels.

The remake bounces all over the place with a convoluted storyline, a number of superfluous characters and two main villains who are sorely lacking — one because he’s a bland nothing, the other because he's so far over the top it’s like he’s in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Alas, you can spend nearly two hours watching the slick, cynical, vapid and brain-numbing actioner “Ghosted” on Apple TV+ and find yourself regretting the decision pretty much every predictable and overblown step of the way.

Director Jose Padilha (the “Elite Squad” movies) knows how to create slick, sometimes clever fast-moving battle sequences... But other than Keaton’s Sellars, the bad guys are mostly generic nitwits.

That incredible cast is utterly wasted, with major talents such as Perlman, Jones, Molina, Rhames and Hauser stuck in small supporting roles, playing underwritten, clichéd characters who drift in and out of the movie for a scene or two and then are forgotten.

The result is a well-acted, competently made, utterly tedious bore of a film lacking in creative spark, unwilling to take chances and determined to grind Tolkien through the muck and the blood of war and death at the expense of providing much insight into his creative process.

This is a well-made, topical thriller with a top-notch cast — but the script and the directorial/editing choices undercut nearly every pivotal scene, and every plot twist we can see coming two scenes in advance.

The Giver doesn’t seem entirely consistent about its own rules and races far too quickly to a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion that raises three questions for each answer it provides.

Carrey and Daniels throw themselves into the characters they inhabited 20 years ago, whether it means allowing their crotches to be doused, using their rear ends as comedic weapons, or just saying really stupid things. Sometimes it’s pretty damn funny. Almost always, it feels just a little bit desperate.

Midnight Sun is cheesy and implausible and manipulative, but it did chip away at my cynicism through the sheer force of its corny and sincere heart.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (best known for the Liam Neeson actioners Unknown, Non-Stop and The Commuter) is far too enamored with the CGI possibilities of an epic fantasy adventure, while the team of writers sacrifice character development in favor of banter heavy on groan-inducing puns and recurring punchlines that actually don’t pack much of a punch.

A middling sitcom.

The problem — and it’s an insurmountable, deadly, comedy-killing, consistent problem throughout — is a tired, uninspired, derivative screenplay that brings everyone to Vegas for a wedding and incorporates nearly every weekend-in-Vegas cliche explored in dozens of previous films.

By the time we reach the insanely dubious final twist of The Voyeurs, we’d rather just look the other way.

For one of the few times in Eastwood’s career as a director, he seems indecisive about what kind of movie he wanted to make.

The exploration of gender politics grows tedious as the gender dynamic between the two leads reverses, and the same points are hammered home again and again.

Watching this movie is like having a particularly unsatisfying Wordle session. You start off in promising fashion but in a few quick moves, nothing is in the right place.

The special effects are first-rate and the performances are way over the top yet entertaining, but The Witches is far too disturbing for young children and not edgy enough to captivate adults.

The action and the scale of the acting are often more befitting an elaborate stage play than a film.

Now comes the loony, murky and muddled sci-fi action semi-thriller 65, with A-list star Adam Driver and the talented writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who collaborated with John Krasinski on “A Quiet Place”) taking a detour through B-Movie Lane in a film that isn’t compelling enough to make for silly popcorn entertainment but isn’t terrible enough to be labeled a disaster.

Despite an intriguing premise, it ultimately falls apart as the gimmick wears thin and the plot veers into ludicrous territory, with the heroine making a series of increasingly rash and idiotic decisions.

It’s an intermittently entertaining endeavor thanks mostly to the effortlessly suave lead performance by Pierce Brosnan as a career thief who looks like he wakes up wearing a jacket with a pocket square and with his hair perfectly coiffed, but the action sequences are ho-hum, the editing is stunningly clumsy, and the main heist is so cartoonishly ridiculous we don’t even believe the actors believe it’s possible.

The performances and the production design are first-rate, but even at 74 minutes, Guest Artist is an overly talky, at times outdated and cliché-riddled two-hander that wears out its welcome by the halfway mark.

In a rare weak performance for Cate Blanchett, she plays an aggravating, off-putting wife and mother in Richard Linklater’s disappointing book adaptation.

Once you get past the amazement this thing was made at all, the movie itself is an intermittently clever but mostly tedious, convoluted David Lynch knockoff that wanders all over the place.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Adam DeVine’s work, he’s played variations on this same guy for nearly two decades now (he’s 39) and the man-child act is getting tiresome.

Lisa Frankenstein has some surface similarities to films such as “Weird Science” and “Edward Scissorhands,” but the gross-out gags involving Zombie Boy are more disgusting than hilarious and the scares are few and far between. Turns out Lisa Frankenstein’s creation might have been more interesting in her imagination than he is as a walking corpse.

An “Escape From New York”-meets-“Mad Max” ripoff that desperately wants to be a bonkers, midnight drive-in cult classic but doesn’t have the camp value or the memorably off-the-wall storyline to make the cut.

Unfortunately, “He Went That Way” never finds a steady tone, veers off into some bizarre subplots and features two surprisingly underwhelming performances from the talented lead duo.

By the halfway mark of the screen-popping and kinetic but ultimately tiresome and borderline dopey AI thriller “Mercy,” I found myself yearning for a wireless mouse so I could log off.

Alas, the songs are more on the level of Lara Trump than Taylor Swift in this corny romance between Bowyn and Laith Wallschleger’s pro football star.

Sure, we get the obligatory slapstick dog-shtick in the form of overturned food carts and disastrous dinner scenes and wacky chases, and there are some uplifting moments — but the overall mood of Lasse Hallstrom’s pup-point-of-view film is … melancholy, sometimes even grim.

It’s just a muddled, overcrowded, trigger-happy heist movie brimming with clichés while constantly trying our patience.

Whenever Pacific Rim Uprising gives itself the chance to do something fresh or unique or original, it passes up that opportunity to embrace the cliché.

Instant Family has heart and good intentions. It’s a shame the journey is such a bumpy ride as it takes us all over the map.

Despite the best efforts of McGovern et al., The Chaperone is lightweight trifle.

If you’re a Chiefs fan, you’ll probably get a kick of out the whole thing.

Clocking in at a slow-jog time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, filled with howlingly bad CGI creations, green-screen scenes that would have looked rudimentary in the early 2000s and clunky dialogue, “Kraven” doesn’t even provide much in the way of camp value. It’s just an undercooked pile of steaming mediocrity.