Richard Roeper

Back in the day, Gigi & Nate would have been a prime-time network “Movie of the Week” or an “ABC Afterschool Special,” in that it has a pleasant but not particularly striking look; endearing performances from a familiar cast of esteemed veterans and earnest newcomers, and a storyline designed to provide a few initial chuckles, some light romance, a devastating family setback and finally, a happy ending.

Here’s the thing about bad bosses: they rarely realize they are bad bosses. Even if they’re manipulative, inflexible, uncaring, incompetent, out of touch and generally terrible at virtually every facet of the position, they think they’re doing a fantastic job. So it goes with Javier Bardem’s charming, hands-on, seemingly caring Blanco in writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa’s wickedly warped comedy/drama The Good Boss.

Played as a satire, it offers far too few genuine laughs, and we’re left somewhere between mockumentary and depressing character study.

Writer-director John Hamburg (writer of “Meet the Parents,” director of “Along Came Polly” and “I Love You, Man”) has the ability to wring big laughs out of absurdist situations, but in Me Time, nearly everybody delivers their lines in the forced manner of 1980s sitcoms, the situations bear little resemblance to anything that would occur in the real world.

This is an entertaining B-movie bolstered by performances from a cast that often rises above the predictable material.

Williams delivers another in a series of great performances in a supporting role, but the weight of the film rests on the shoulders of John Boyega, who alternates between moments of heartbreakingly quiet introspection, and startling fits of anger and rage as Brian Brown-Easley, who in January of 2017 walked into a Wells Fargo Bank in Marietta, Georgia, withdrew $25 from his sparse bank account and then handed the teller a note saying, “I have a bomb.”

Three Thousand Years of Longing actually ends on a creative high note, but the path to that conclusion is filled with muddled adventures that play like something out of a 1980s B-movie. We find ourselves longing for the credits to roll.

Fueled by the smart and knowing script, the sure-handed direction and a true star performance by Reinhart, “Look Both Ways” is a comfort-viewing experience with authentic and likable characters.

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.

Clocking in at just 93 minutes and yet still feeling a bit stretched out, “Beast” features a wonderful cast and some gorgeous location photography in South Africa, but the screenplay requires everyone in this story to behave like the dopiest characters in the schlockiest of horror B-movies.

There’s no narrator, no interviews, no dramatic re-creations of events—simply an admittedly well-edited but ultimately unenlightening mash-up of archival footage, person-on-the-street interviews from the time, snippets from chat shows and audio and video clips of various newscasters and pundits. We’re left wondering: What. Is. The. Point.

Unremarkable and disposable.

Rossi and Plaza make for a sizzling team; we believe every syllable of their dialogue, every development in their relationship. It’s almost criminal, how good these two are together.

With clever and assured direction filled with striking visuals by the Dutch actor-writer-filmmaker Halina Reijn (adapting Sarah DeLappe’s screenplay, which is based on a story by Kristen Roupenian) and a cast of talented and great-looking young actors throwing themselves into the wonderfully twisted material, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” plays like a slasher-film update of “And Then There Were None,” with a dash of the classic “Twilight Episode” episode titled “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” sprinkled in.

Sharp Stick is a rather sour and troublesome film—a strange hybrid that sometimes plays like a Fractured Fairy Tale and is populated by razor-thin characters who behave in an inconsistent manner and exist in a world that alternates between gritty reality and some kind of bizarro alternative world where things just don’t add up.

Occasionally creative but mostly distasteful and thuddingly unfunny, this is the kind of story that asks us to take wild leaps of faith at every turn—and then buy into a redemption story arc that is neither plausible nor earned.

With Midthunderr’s blazing screen presence in “Prey”—moving with athletic grace through the wild, delivering her lines with power and wit and style, there’s little doubt we are witnessing the ascension of a true star.

As a director, Logan knows how to put us through the horror genre paces, from jump scares and mysterious sounds in the woods, to the obligatory gruesome kills. Time and again, though, we’re reminded that real monster in “They/Them” is bigotry and intolerance.

Unlike so many of the cookie-cutter, wisecracking-assassin movies in recent memory, Bullet Train acknowledges its outlandishness from the beginning and yet also manages to connect so many dots in creative, gotcha fashion.

Writer-director-star Katie Holmes perfectly captures those early pandemic days in the occasionally heartbreaking and mostly sweet and lovely romantic drama Alone Together.

Ron Howard’s claustrophobically intense and captivating “Thirteen Lives” is one of those movies where you find yourself marveling at the daunting logistics involved in re-creating one of the most famed and complex rescue efforts in recent history—but with an excessive running time of 147 minutes, by the time the story wraps up, we’re almost too exhausted to fully appreciate what we’ve just experienced.

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

In writer-director-star Novak’s scathing social satire “Vengeance,” he plays a character who isn’t all that different from Ryan—only this guy might be even more cynical, more immersed in his smart phone, more of an opportunistic narcissist. It’s a smart and insightful performance in a film that has a lot to say about the personal disconnect we feel in today’s Wi-Fi world; the stereotypes held by Blue Staters about Red Staters and vice versa, and the manner in which millions of us consider every waking moment as potential material, to be memorialized in a selfie or a tweet or a Tik-Tok video or a podcast.

The four main players are all excellent, with Amber Midthunder delivering particularly outstanding work that shows she is a young actor capable of great things.

You know all those sports documentaries about fallen heroes who had enormous talent but squandered it away through a combination of bad breaks and bad decisions, injuries and/or snorting enough cocaine to fill a first-base line? “Facing Nolan” is the antithesis of those cautionary tales, in that Ryan was a straight shooter on and off the field.

The darkly beautiful sci-fi film manages to feel bold and original while paying homage to countless great movies.

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