Sheila O'Malley

Humorous and poignant. There are a couple of scenes that fall flat, losing the manic push of the rest of the story, but the mood is so screwball that the film hurtles past its own mistakes. It's good fun.

There's a little Magic Mike XXL in the mix of How to Please a Woman, with its merry band of eager-to-please strippers, although How to Please a Woman also hearkens back to The Full Monty in its surprisingly profound look at pleasure.

Because the "witchcraft" part is treated mostly as a fun thing to do at slumber parties, there are very few frightening sequences (as compared to the often-unnerving original). The result is a confused movie.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez is the latest to tackle the rich implications of Bluebeard in his film Elizabeth Harvest, bringing a modern horror-sci-fi sensibility to the story. The horror is already implicit. Gutierrez makes it explicit.

The film gets increasingly hallucinatory as it progresses, and there's a vivid sense of growing danger.

The look of buried terror and resentment in Hawke's eyes tells the deeper story. Still, Adopt a Highway wanders ("Ella" is just the first chapter) and the redemption narrative isn't so much heavy-handed as it is super-imposed.

My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?

Where Maya Dardel really works is when it sticks to being a character study.

The YouTube Effect is a chronicle of extremely recent history and doesn't cover much new ground. If you follow YouTube, big tech, or any controversies surrounding social media, you will be familiar with everything here.

Winkler, and featuring three very strong central performances and eye-catching poetic visuals, Jungleland is more of a mood-piece than anything else, and on that level it works beautifully. The mood is strange, sad, and hypnotic.

The heist movie has a long pedigree, and while Finding Steve McQueen is no "Le Cercle Rouge" or "Rififi" (or even "Reservoir Dogs"), Johnson keeps the tone light, vivacious, almost slapstick at times. This is a smart choice.

The final exchange between Paisley and McGuinness, when they shake hands, is the best, but by then it's far too late.

An actor has to just have it and Omar Sy has it. One needs only to watch his performance in Samba to see Sy's old-school natural star power in its purest form.

EPiC is so vivid it makes Elvis seem not like an entertainer from the past, but a figure who lives in the perpetual Right Now.

Man of Tai Chi is hugely entertaining.

Refusing to explain Ted Bundy is the strongest possible choice Berlinger could have made because it destabilizes reality. The film itself gaslights us, and this is where Berlinger and Zac Efron — an inspired choice—are powerful co-creators.

It's a courageous film that's willing to sit in those moments instead of underlining them or hurrying past them, hoping we get the shorthand. Love is Strange is a patient film. The emotions it unleashes are enormous.

Co-directors Sam and Andy Zuchero also wrote the script, and while there are a lot of vibrant ideas at play, there are about ten ideas too many. The film ponders existential questions but keeps them at a remove.

It doesn't know what it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell.

Players, written by Whit Anderson and directed by Trish Sie, struggles with the inherent artificiality of its setup. The tropes are so front and center that real life barely has any room to breathe.

Sorvino is great in the small role of Clark's tear-stained, checked-out mother.

This Beautiful Fantastic is not meant to be realistic. It's supposed to be a fairy tale. That's fine, but it's a very low-stakes fairy tale, wrapped in a strained garden metaphor.

As Danica, the head witch, draped in a bright-red gown with matching lipstick, Rebecca Romjin gives a very perverse and funny performance, all icy intimidation and glamorous power.

The film plods at points, trudging along, and there are a few misguided narrative "devices" tacked on, but still, Trial by Fire bristles with anger.

The characters never take shape, not even as caricatures. There are elements of parody, but Operation Fortune is not broad enough to be a spoof. It's weirdly empty.

"Stanleyville" is part Stanford Prison Experiment and part MTV's "The Real World." It's part Milgram experiment and part "Squid Game."

Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen plays like a tall tale, a yarn heard at the corner pub, filled with exaggerations and embellishments, where the storyteller expects you to pay his bar tab at the end. And maybe you won't mind doing so.

The cast is terrific, and there are a couple of sequences that made me laugh out loud, but the movie as a whole is baffling.

A mostly satisfying entry in the art heist genre.

Fatima is told simply but emotionally, prioritizing the sensorial reality of the children's world and the people inhabiting it. This devotion to the "real" makes the holy vision palpable and plausible.

There's a lot of interesting things here and yet Flannery feels incomplete, and — worse — a little bit scared to go in for a much deeper dive.

It's a disappointment when so much goes unexplored, when the film bows to the demands of a cliched plot driving the story forward.

It's all a bit overheated, and while there is certainly nothing wrong with melodrama, the problem arises when the script (also by Tornatore) keeps insisting on explaining its own symbolism and subtext, to make sure we get how deep the thing is.

Set in 1967 Ireland, The Miracle Club stars three powerhouse Oscar-winning and/or nominated actresses (none of whom are Irish) and features period clothing and cars, sweeping cinematography, location-shooting, and a heartwarming message, where each character gets a satisfying arc. Cliches work for a reason.

Bohemian Rhapsody is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign.

A successful franchise depends on the hero at its center. Is the hero's personality interesting enough to warrant more? Time will tell, but Falcon Rising is off to a good start.

Last Looks works best in its twisted often-incoherent plot, where no character is generic. Everyone has a secret. No one is on the level. Surfaces lie.

A lot of thrillers are exciting but empty. “In Cold Light” is thrilling but very full in unexpected and complicated ways.

The story is simple — too simple, in fact — and some of its more intriguing elements could use further developing, but the presence of Huppert makes Souvenir well worth a look.

The adaptation (by Josh Boone and Jill Killington) lacks any inference, mystery, or discovery: it is all text. Any complexity that there may be is all on the surface. Problems are easily solved, since there's nothing left unsaid, or if something is left unsaid that Ruthie says it for us in the voiceover. This makes for predictable viewing.

The Greatest Showman, directed with verve and panache by Michael Gracey, is an unabashed piece of pure entertainment, punctuated by 11 memorable songs composed by Oscar- and Tony-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

Jeanne du Barry cares more about the love affair between two non-distinct people wearing exquisite clothes in stunning rooms than the reality that would sweep away those rooms, those clothes, and those people in just a few years' time.

Southern wields the tropes in a stylistically over-determined way–jump-scares and all–which cheapens the delicate and poetic narrative.

Carnage Park is an extremely empty experience.

The film captures a little bit of the flame of the original, particularly when it allows itself to be funny. It works really well as a comedy, almost of "manners," although manners aren't really in sight.

As an origin story, Tolkien, has its moments of clarity and emotion. Some of it is oversimplified, even misguided. But the film cares about its subject, and cares about finding ways to portray "things that are good and days that are good to spend."

Good scripts make you forget they are scripts. The script for Prisoner's Daughter is quite talky and never takes wing. You can almost see the words on the page, despite the strong efforts of Beckinsale and Cox.

Semper Fi is best when it sticks with the journeys of the individual characters, each with their own backstory and struggles. These men have always known each other. But something goes wrong along the way, and Semper Fi suddenly decides it wants to be another kind of movie. The transition doesn't work.

There are some very funny bits here, but unfortunately the concept takes too long getting off the ground, leaving the first three-quarters of the movie floating in limbo, waiting for it to all make sense.

It's charming. It's funny. The case they investigate has a legitimate twist to it, there's a lot of French intrigue, there's much that is totally implausible, but the film lives or dies on the dynamic of the two main guys. It lives.

Unfortunately, The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

Music can bypass your defenses. Music can imagine a better world, but it can also mourn the world or a love you've lost. Sometimes music does both at the same time. The Indigo Girls are like that. "Glitter & Doom" understands this dynamic, but the architecture of the film is so rickety there's nothing to hold onto. Just sit back and ride the waves of the music.

The script tries to do way too much, but the film also moved me quite deeply a couple of times, mostly in the scenes between father and son.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, The Giver, in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

The movie doesn't quite hold together at times, and some of the darker elements (like what it feels like to be shamed and shunned at every moment of your life) are soft-pedaled. But it has a strange charm nonetheless.

Beckerman intersperses the footage with static, loud and jagged, and the couple of "effects" included are quick and dirty. If you're going to go the found-footage route, you might as well try to find a new way to approach the material. Beckerman has.

As a commentary on Reynolds' career trajectory, The Last Movie Star is hit-or-miss. What is undeniable, though, is the space Rifkin has created where Reynolds can do what Reynolds does best, and if you're a fan (as I am) there's much here to treasure.

Austin Found features a great ensemble cast, but never manages to explore unique territory.

Lily James brings a refreshing straightforwardness to the role in the second half, as the character takes the reins of the situation, but has a difficult time convincing us in the first half that she is susceptible, cowed, in thrall.

At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination.

The film is cliched and phony, the coincidences beggar belief, and the human relationships come from a very tired playbook.

I admire the intentions behind Cherry. I even admire the Russos' desire to "do one for themselves" after directing so many films in a corporate-driven context. But Cherry warrants a simpler down-and-dirty approach.

There are some good ideas in the film, albeit a bit obvious ("why can't we all look past our differences and get along?"), and albeit done much better in other films (primarily "The Visitor").

A gentle low-key comedy.

The film is a disappointingly empty experience.

At times, Blood, feels like a slightly-filled-out television police procedural with better cinematography, but the performances have an almost Shakespearean grandeur.

Yes. It is good. It is sincere, funny, thoughtful and spiritual, often poignant, and with a deep strain of existential worry running underneath the whole thing.

There are a couple of hallucinatory sequences that don't quite work, and the score by Paul Mills comes swooping in, insistent upon being inspirational in a way that feels like unnecessary underlining.

The film is best when it doesn't take itself too seriously. Unfortunately, for the most part it takes itself very seriously.

An awkward and mostly unpleasant hybrid of social critique and horror-comedy, detailing how this psycho kid decides to take the gloves off and become internet famous.

Written and directed by Aharon Keshales, whose debut (2010's Rabies) was an attention-getting nail-biter, South of Heaven—with a couple of exceptions—is inert and unimaginative.

The moments of sentiment, when they come, feel fully earned, and they come out of characterization.

These are tantalizing glimpses, hinting at the deeper psychological abysses at play here, but they are left unexplored.

Thankfully, the entertaining chemistry between the two young leads in Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Andrew Jacobs and Jorge Diaz), almost saves it.

A pretty uneven film, lurching from comedy to violence to sentiment, but it's best when it sticks in the realm of flat-out farce.

It's not the movie's fault, per se, although Almost Love has problems other than being jarringly out of date with How We Live Now.

While much of it is quite funny, the film ends up feeling like a good comedy sketch stretched out unnecessarily to a feature-length.

The main problem is: It's not actually clear what is appealing and/or interesting about any of these people.

The script is often very witty, peppered with sharp observations and two very entertaining performances, but there are underlying problems the movie cannot overcome.

The setup (script by Glen Lakin) is full of wacko screwball potential, some of which is mined, some of which misses the boat.

Some of it is so predictable you could set your watch by it, but there is a welcome (and surprising) layer of complexity running through the film that makes it a little bit more than your standard fare. The likable and funny ensemble helps too.

Merv is heartwarming, in the abstract, but the heat generated is strictly lukewarm.

A movie like Make Your Move rests on the success of its various dance sequences, not its plot. And the dancing here is exciting, innovative, and specific.

The Film Critic takes a light and knowing tone, spoofing the sacred cows of the critic world, and cramming every scene with visual film clichés that act like a "Where's Waldo?" of cinema.

The Bieber fans aren't going anywhere. And Justin Bieber's Believe is best when it shows us why.

It features one good performance from Dennis, who struggles to show us a real woman doing her best to live up to her expectations for herself and accept love into her life again. But Dennis can't save the whole thing. It's too big of a mess.

Aardvark doesn't know how to do what it wants to do. It's not that the tone is uneven or uncertain, it's that the film doesn't have a tone at all. Because a specific tone isn't established, earnest moments come off as insincere, deep moments seem like they're supposed to be a joke. It's not clear if all of this is by design or an accident from a first-time director.

The film never says the words "pro-life" or "pro-choice." It genuinely seems to be about how the system has broken down entirely, and how sometimes it is up to privately funded charities to provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

Son of God's earnest-ness is not necessarily a strike against it; it was made by earnest people who want to spread the word. But it's a tough draught to swallow if you're not in the mood for a sermon.