Scott Foundas

If the movie never quite masters the feel of messy, grown-up life, it at least makes a few promising salvos in that direction... The actors help a lot.

Ponderously overlong and not even half as much fun as it should have been, The Equalizer still gets a lot of mileage out of Washington’s unassailable star presence.

Fronted by a vibrant, deeply committed Al Pacino performance and very fine support from Greta Gerwig, this uneven but captivating film deserves to find its own audience, though doing so will surely prove to be an uphill climb.

So innately compelling is Turing’s story — to say nothing of Benedict Cumberbatch’s masterful performance — it’s hard not to get caught up in this well-told tale and its skillful manipulations.

Stewart’s confident, superbly acted debut feature works as both a stirring account of human endurance and a topical reminder of the risks faced by journalists in pursuit of the truth.

Anchored by Keener’s understated, psychologically acute performance, director Mark Jackson’s spare, quietly powerful sophomore feature demonstrates an impressive control of mood and tone and the ability to tell a story largely without words.

Wetlands might have landed with the thud of empty shock value were Helen not such an innately engaging character, or Juri so commanding in the role.

An inspirational sports drama that goes long on rectitudinous sermonizing but comes up short on gridiron thrills or genuine love for the game.

The Giver reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull.

Into the Storm can make it rain like nobody’s business, but when it tries to be smart, it comes out all wet.

Even at its most purplish and highfalutin (mostly in the “Her” section), “Eleanor Rigby” always aims for something sincere, and when Benson pulls back a bit — and stops trying to show us how much Freud he’s read and how many Bergman films he’s seen — the movie becomes vastly more engaging.

At its core is a most affecting portrait of two people who love each other, but may no longer be able to live as one, and it is mostly a pleasure to spend two, or three, or five hours in their company.

Fittingly, though, given the uniformly regurgitated feel, the projectile-vomit effects are superb.

It’s the trench imagery itself that’s the primary attraction here, and it proves more than worth the wait.

Boseman is an empathic presence, and nothing he does smacks of mimicry. He feels Brown from the inside out, the way Brown felt his own distinctive rhythms, and even when the movie itself seems to be on autopilot, Boseman never leaves the captain’s chair.

An enjoyable if never electrifying record of his Unity Through Laughter stand-up tour.

Director James Gunn’s presumptive franchise-starter is overlong, overstuffed and sometimes too eager to please, but the cheeky comic tone keeps things buoyant — as does Chris Pratt’s winning performance as the most blissfully spaced-out space crusader this side of Buckaroo Banzai.

It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size (or as human as you can get while still being played by Dwayne Johnson).

Whenever Firth and Stone are onscreen together, the movie sings; the rest of the time it’s never less than a breezy divertissement.

For all of its 93 minutes, you never feel anything significant is at stake for anyone — save for a paycheck.

A fast-paced valentine to Russell and his quixotic vision so rife with underdog victors and hairpin twists of fortune that, if it weren’t all true, no one would believe it.

"Whitey” emerges as yet another of Berlinger’s gripping, irony-laced snapshots of the American criminal justice system, in which his eponymous subject comes across as an incontestable monster who may, nevertheless, also be an unwitting patsy.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net... But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends.

Skillfully made first feature by writer-director Katrin Gebbe has some undeniably striking passages and performances, but ultimately spirals toward a gruesome third act that is no less monotonous for supposedly being based on true events.

Bearing a distinctly musty odor confirmed by its 2011 copyright date, this day-and-date Lionsgate pickup never achieves dramatic liftoff.

22 Jump Street hits far more often than it misses, and even when it misses by a mile, the effort is so delightfully zany that it’s hard not to give Lord and Miller an “A” for effort.

Seth MacFarlane has delivered a flaccid all-star farce that’s handsomely dressed up with nowhere to go for most of its padded two-hour running time.

Amel’s script is agonizingly airless and contrived