Stephanie Zacharek

May be overly sentimental at times, but at least it's about something.

Licorice Pizza feels pleased with how casual and effortless it is, which is the exact opposite of being casual and effortless.

But for sheer, go-for-broke nuttiness, The Greatest Showman stands alone in the landscape of this holiday season’s crop of movies, and I urge you to give it a chance.

To paraphrase a line from another Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby is too much like a fragment of an underdone potato. The chef tended it very, very carefully, and still, it didn't turn out quite right.

Del Toro loves his creatures. Maybe he loves them too much: He always wants us to get a good look at them, and that's one of the things that saps the spookiness from this Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

As an ode to fatherhood, Jersey Girl is sweet without being particularly deep; but Smith is really onto something when he nudges against the ways in which the geographic landscape of a life merges with the genetic one.

Greengrass, a meticulous, thoughtful filmmaker (he also directed the second and third films in the series, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum), clearly believes in what he’s doing. But his earnestness is at odds with the movie’s desperate, frenetic desire to keep us engaged every minute.

Cars is an elaborate concoction all right. But it feels soldered together from a scrap heap of tired ideas.

Actually, The Intouchables isn't bad - its merely shameless, but at least it's overtly so.

It's too bad that the glamour wears off about halfway through Entrapment, when it stops being a movie about art heists and starts being one about stealing (ho-hum) money.

The picture—directed by David Yates, who also gave us the last four Harry Potter films, terrific ones—feels both sprawling and crowded, as if it were trying to pack too much mythology into one cramped crawlspace.

This well-cast adaptation somehow feels obvious and overblown.

The 33, directed by Patricia Riggen, makes a valiant effort to tell this harrowing story onscreen, and there are moments when every shifting plate clicks right into place. In the end, though, the picture stumbles, and it may not completely be the fault of the filmmakers.

Minions: The Rise of Gru is hardly the best of the Despicable Me movies or spinoffs...But the ridiculousness quotient of The Rise of Gru—directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val—is still high enough to spark at least mild rejuvenation. And whether you have one eye or two, six hairs sprouting from your pate or none at all, you could probably use a little of that right now.

If you focus on the acting alone, it’s fun to watch these two circle each other–but the movie around them doesn’t bring us any closer to the heart of this aggrieved city.

In strict filmmaking terms, Bohemian Rhapsody is a bit of a mess. Some of its scenes connect awkwardly, and it hits every beat of disaster and triumph squarely, like a gong. Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with “bad” movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings.

Witherspoon's sophisticated-pixie brilliance practically makes the movie, and her easy, confident, curvaceous carriage doesn't hurt, either -- she's the thinking guy's cupcake, maybe because her mind is just as supple as her curves.

If you can get past its toothpick of a premise, Run Fatboy Run is a perfectly enjoyable light comedy. It's also just good enough that I wanted it be better.

Although Chappaquiddick doesn’t address Kennedy’s subsequent legislative record, it’s the silver-lining storm cloud that hangs over the movie.

Completely harmless and inoffensive, and at the very least, Shyamalan appears to be having a little fun here.

It has a pleasing, noodly elasticity about it -- the picture knows what its limits are and proceeds to boogie unself-consciously far outside them.

Malkovich is usually such a numbingly self-serious actor. But he cuts loose here in a way that's outlandishly brilliant: It's his best performance in years.

With the ambitious home-invasion horror chiller Us, Peele goes even deeper into the conflicted territory of class and race and privilege; he also ponders the traits that make us most human. But this time, he’s got so many ideas he can barely corral them, let alone connect them. He overthinks himself into a corner, and we’re stuck there with him.

The picture is broken down into narrative chunks that ultimately don't tell much of a story – what you get instead is a series of mini-climaxes held together by banter between characters.

This is Lunson's debut picture and she's smart enough to keep the whole affair very simple.

Everest is visually splendid, though it loses a few points for its murkiness in rendering its main characters as distinct individuals.

Despite its problems, the picture still satisfies -- more than a lot of allegedly worthy "A list" movies do. In a movie world where heavyweight often means top-heavy, Against the Ropes shows some pretty fleet footwork.

What Happens Later, directed by Meg Ryan, works so hard at trying to give us something fresh and novel that I couldn’t help wishing it were better: the cloud of dissatisfaction I felt after watching it kept trying to reshape its molecules into a better movie, albeit one that could live only in my head.

Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp.

There's a pleasantly malevolent ridiculousness hovering around How to Lose a Guy. But the movie would have been so much better if it had jumped into its mean-spiritedness with gusto and passion, instead of just splashing around in it halfheartedly.

Starts out, and ends up, as a thriller trying valiantly to show us layers of moral depth. But in between that beginning and ending, Paxton's vision (as well as that of Brent Hanley, who wrote the script) becomes wavy and indistinct, a blurry muddle of sensationalistic, prurient grisliness masquerading as a meditation on the nature of evil.

There’s something safe and cozy about Mad About the Boy that made me long for the unruliness of the first film.

It was a stroke of genius, at least a miniature one, to cast Black in this role – he's made to play the affable teddy bear who could snap at any moment.

The Lake House is an example of the way bad movies can sometimes be more interesting than merely mediocre, workmanlike ones, and of the way they sometimes compel us even against our better judgment.

It just doesn't have the buoyancy, or the resonance, that this kind of semifactual flight of fancy needs.

There’s almost too much going on in Honk for Jesus. The film jumps from one thematic thread to another without exploring any of them thoroughly, and even so, some sequences go on longer than they should.

The sad thing about All the Real Girls is that Green seems more in love with his perceived unconventionality than he does with his characters. If that's not a town without pity, I don't know what is.

The picture never quite finds its footing.

The highest purpose of movies is to give us more than what we think we want, and even though Three Thousand Years of Longing offers plenty of rapturous imagery, the arrow it shoots from its mighty bow just doesn’t pierce as it should.

The best and most moving part of Miracle may be the closing credits, in which we see pictures of the actors accompanied by the names of the real-life characters they played and a strip of type that tells us where they are now.

The Batman is a moderately well-made film, with some appealing performances, most notably from its star, Robert Pattinson, and from its cryptically glamorous Catwoman, Zoë Kravitz. And it looks like a movie, which used to be something you didn’t even have to say: The Batman may be dark, literally—its doomy, underlit ambience comes courtesy of cinematographer Greig Fraser—but at least it’s pleasurably cinematic, a picture that creeps to the edges of the big screen with an operatic flourish.

The movie doesn't for a moment pretend to be subtle, and it has a sprawling, unfocused quality. But it's got some juice, and it's even faithful, in some surprising ways, to the essence of the original.

Hayward is the very best thing about Cats, a movie that, like cats themselves, is otherwise filled with contradictions. Cats is terrible, but it’s also kind of great. And, to cat-burgle a phrase from Eliot himself, there’s nothing at all to be done about that.

Franco's performance, particularly as he portrays the post-"conversion" Michael, is hard to read: the character drifts through the later scenes as if he'd been body-snatched. And, in some ways, he was.

As an amusement designed to take the world’s mind off its problems for a few hours, Wonder Woman 1984 is perfectly suitable. But it’s also OK to wish for less noise and more wonder, especially in a world that’s filled with the former and sorely in need of the latter.

Jennifer Westfeldt's sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve.

Watching Last Holiday, I kept waiting for the moment I could decree the movie truly terrible, the instant I could comfortably put my pen and notebook away and give it up for lost. But that moment never came, partly because I never fail to take pleasure in Latifah, and partly because I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that the movie I was watching was something of a ghost from another time.

A well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.

The pleasures of Ballerina are both blunt and fleeting; you’re not going to remember the plot—or any of the performances, perhaps save one—five minutes after the end credits role. But the picture’s cartoonish brutality is cathartic.

One of those movies where the small pleasures stack up high enough to dwarf the disappointments.

An absurd little trifle, but it does have a kind of buoyant, punky energy.

By the time Lion has really begun, it already seems half over. That’s not to say the picture isn’t satisfying in a straight-to-the-gut way.

In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls.

There’s nothing overtly dislikable about the film, and there are a handful of scenes that are beautifully written, acted, and directed. But Jay Kelly feels more sentimental than truly thoughtful, particularly in the motif that resounds like a clanging bell in Jay’s brain: Why didn’t I spend more time with my kids?

Feels weirdly impersonal; very little love, or even true thought, shows up on the screen.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.

In the end, the action sequences are just overblown and dollar-squandering, with no particular payoff in the entertainment department. The supporting actors - particularly Jones, Tucci and Luke - are the thing to watch here; they do all they can to keep the movie's gears running smoothly.

It's an intelligently made (and beautifully edited) picture that at the very least has a spark of life to it -- more than you can say for plenty of movies that flow through the Hollywood pipeline without a hitch.

There’s plenty of spectacle in Coming 2 America, and a few laughs. But its chief value may lie in reminding us how good its 1988 predecessor really is.

While Snakes on a Plane barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event.

The best sequences are those incorporating vintage footage from the 1970s-era Chez Panisse, where Tower, as a young, rakish beauty — quite clearly gay, but also pansexual in the dashing way people were allowed to be in those days — was the crown prince of the kitchen.

It doesn't matter if the movie around Firth is a good one or a lousy one: Either way, I wouldn't be able to explain how an actor could come up with a performance as subtle, in both its heartbreak and its magnificence, as this one is.

There are some modest pleasures to be mined from Peter Bogdanovich's romantic caper She's Funny That Way, which at least strives for buoyancy.

Unfortunately, Silver's movie doesn't cut deep enough: It glosses over some thorny questions and hammers too fixedly on others.

It's imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity – it doesn't feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars – but it doesn't inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either.

This well-intentioned movie is a somewhat flawed one: its pace is a little slack, and sometimes it feels too predictably prepackaged. But Jones and Hammer keep the picture moving even through its shakier phases.

Am I alone in thinking that computer animation is the work of the antichrist?

All this magical switcheroo plot nonsense is just a formality anyway: everyone who comes to Irish Wish—friend, foe or neutral observer—will have come for Lohan.

With Champions, director Bobby Farrelly returns us to the late 1990s, a time when there were fewer sorely needed guidelines, but also fewer gatekeepers just waiting to catch well-meaning people who happen to trip up.

Still, at its best Keeping Up with the Joneses riffs on something very real: the existential loneliness of living in a place that’s just too perfect. Everyone needs new friends now and then – even ones who make you eat snake.

Haigh, perhaps driven by some misguided sense of narrative purity, refuses to loosen the screws, and it’s almost too much to bear. If you make it through Lean on Pete, you’ll feel weariness in your bones afterward. The ache may not be worth it.

Theron is a superb and versatile actor, and she’s good here — it’s not that she always needs to play nice characters. But as Megyn Kelly, she’s like a Hitchcock blonde with all the allure drained from her.

There's nothing in Earth that's as moving as the sight of the mother penguin "grieving" for her chick in "March of the Penguins." You can applaud Earth for not jerking tears. On the other hand, an occasional tear isn't such a bad thing.

The story becomes unpleasantly bitter and asks us to buy certain behaviors that don’t make much sense, and that we’re not quite sure a character would be capable of. Yet even after the movie makes that sharp zigzag, its one constant is Damon, who’s turning out to be one of those great, casual American actors we didn’t know we had anymore.

[Cutler] approaches all these teenage hyperfeelings with respect and sensitivity. It doesn’t hurt that he has Moretz in his corner.

Johnny English Reborn never quite ignites, even though it starts out promisingly enough.

LaBeouf shambles through the movie with an endearingly lost quality -- his savoir faire is of the hangdog kind, but it pretty much works. And Monaghan, with that upturned nose and those mischievous eyes, always looks like a woman in search of trouble.

There's a wry sweetness to this picture.

Works if you just give yourself over to its exuberant silliness.

It's too good a story not to have been made into a movie. Yet Calendar Girls, directed by Nigel Cole ("Saving Grace"), is filled with lots of extras it doesn't need, when the bare-naked bones of the story would have been plenty.

Whatever its flaws may be — and there are many — John Ridley's Jimi: All Is By My Side is compelling for one specific reason: It's more attuned to the women in Hendrix's life than it is to Hendrix himself.

There's no doubt that Being Flynn is an attempt at something painful and genuine – the movie itself yearns to make a connection, even if it can't quite locate the most effective channels.

Isn't a great work of horror, but it's admirable simply because it serves the genre so serviceably. It's nicely constructed, and it doesn't have one of those ridiculous extended endings.

Unfortunately, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a meta-comedy of ostensibly epic proportions, is not nearly grand enough to embrace those multitudes.

I was so charmed by the opening scenes of 13 Going on 30, and so entertained by the middle portion of it, that I had high hopes for its ending -- hopes that were cruelly dashed. Like a petulant 13-year-old, I'm still pouting over my disappointment.

Even though it has some amusing moments, Swimming Pool crawls entirely too slowly toward -- well, toward nothing much.

Really, as "Hangover"-style dumb entertainments go, it’s certainly good enough. Which isn’t to say it’s anything close to what what women want.

Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley manage to sparkle, but this overstuffed sequel is no treasure.

Perhaps only a marginally effective movie about 9/11, because, I suspect, there can be no such thing as an effective movie about 9/11 -- at least not right now.

Never lets us forget that it's a nonmainstream story about a nonmainstream subject, when ideally, it should simply be a story about a person. The picture too often feels like a lesson in tolerance.

If this wigged-out modern Western doesn’t quite work, it’s at the very least a cry of vexation over what our country, messy at the best of times, has become, thanks to a virus that found its way not just into our lungs, but into our very lifeblood. Dr. Aster has listened in on America’s heartbeat; the diagnosis is that we’re basically a mess.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post may not hit as hard as it should. But it at least suggests that the only real losers in life are those who presume to read God’s mind.

Promising in its first third, only to end up shambling too aimlessly in the last. But as flawed as this picture is, there's one sequence in it that has already burrowed deep in my memory, and of everything in the movie, it's the one element that convinces me that Tykwer has it in him to one day make a truly great picture.

Capone is an odd little film, at times weirdly engaging but often so bizarrely muddled that you might identify a little too closely with its perpetually unglued protagonist. But Hardy is always worth watching.

Why can't heroines just be heroines anymore, instead of micromanaged personalities who may as well have the words "Role Model" tattooed across their foreheads?

You know you’re really only here for the monsters, squaring off and staring one another down, first at sea and later in the streets of Hong Kong. Director Adam Wingard (Blair Witch, The Guest) makes the most of these moments, fleeting as they are: The Hong Kong fight scenes are particularly gratifying, a melee of orchestrated swiping and tail-swishing that jolt the movie out of its doldrums.

Its occasional entertainment value aside, the picture is also blithe to the point of being flimsy.

Tricked up with so many points that there's barely any flow to it.