Stephanie Zacharek

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.

The animation itself is technically gorgeous, a class act all the way. But there's so little to be found in the faces of the characters, or even in the way their limbs move (much of it adopted, cleverly enough, from Tati's own physical style), that it's not clear what we're supposed to feel for them.

This Diane Arbus, as she's portrayed by a tremulous Nicole Kidman, radiates warmth and empathy that's nowhere to be seen in the work of the real Diane Arbus. Fur is intended to be a tribute to Arbus, but it's more a fancifully embroidered tapestry of wishful thinking.

There’s some comfort to be found in the predictability of its beats. But only at the end does it muster any real vitality. Any ribs it breaks along the way have healed seamlessly before you’ve even left the theater.

A Quiet Place Part II is effective, all right—Krasinski holds all the keys to turning us into nervous wrecks by the end. But just because you hold the keys doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use them all. And a horror movie that gives us space to breathe is also more likely to hit us where we live.

The novelty of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies wears thin in the last third: How is it that the threat of a zombie apocalypse is always more thrilling than the event itself? But Riley and James help carry the picture to the finish line.

The picture is entertaining and brutal (it's a movie about tough convicts fighting, after all), but it can't figure out what kind of movie it would like to be.

The French Dispatch is high Andersonia, an elaborate movie contraption with a million tiny parts moving in concert, and depending on your threshold, it might all just be too much.

Robin Williams, who's sometimes too overbearing in real-life live action, makes a great cartoon-character voice.

Don’t Worry Darling makes a better entertainment than it does a serious parable.

To be bewildered by Upstream Color is to be human; the story is obtuse by design, though the filmmaking is X-Acto precise. But it's a bloodless movie, and its ideas aren't as tricky or complex as Carruth's arch, mannered approach might suggest.

Even though Brody works hard -- and he's got those magnificent drooping eyes, which suggest both innocence and a seen-it-all-before weariness -- his scenes don't spark, and the movie drags around them.

A gentle, easygoing picture -- it's not exactly dramatically gripping, but somehow, its spirit carries it through.

A movie featuring Kevin Hart is going to be a Kevin Hart movie: at this point, his personality is too big to fold up; his jackrabbit energy dominates. That doesn’t leave much oxygen for Haddish, whose loopy, billowing spirit needs lots of airspace. And still, somehow, she’s the movie’s guiding presence.

Sergio’s intentions are pure, and the movie is pleasingly old-school in the way it merges political drama — and tragedy — with romance. Sometimes, though, the burden of playing a dedicated servant of the people appears to be too much for Moura: the performance feels stiff and stately, as if he’s considered every breath. Moura makes us see the gleaming role model, but it’s much harder to see the man underneath — and you can’t leave a legacy without first having had a heartbeat.

Wish I Was Here is at least stretching toward something, and even if its reach exceeds its grasp, Braff's earnest determination as a filmmaker and performer helps smooth out some of the awkward bumps.

Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights feels stiff and overworked in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit awkward. And yet the story is both compelling and easy to identify with.

The Fault in Our Stars doesn't quite capture the discreetly twisted humor, or the muted anger, of Green's book, and its problems can be attributed to a constellation of little annoyances rather than any one serious, North Star–size flaw.

Nickel Boys is a picture on the move, a work that’s traveling forward, the thing we always ask for yet often don’t know how to accept when it arrives.

Takes forever to get going and then goes nowhere.

Anthony—whose previous documentary, Rat Film, traced the history of Baltimore via the city’s relationship to its rodent residents—has fashioned a thoughtful, if sometimes frustrating, meditation on the acts of “seeing” and “interpreting,” particularly as they apply to law enforcement and the criminal-justice system.

By the end of Wonderland, I might have felt completely pistol-whipped if not for the gracefulness of some of the movie's actors.

Hancock is just intriguing enough that I kept wishing it were better. But Berg doesn't have the subtle touch that this material needs.

Pearce may be the other big star in Traitor, and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here.

The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.

This is a respectful movie, even a genuflecting one; there’s never a moment when Chazelle fails to let you know he’s doing important, valuable work. But that’s the problem: The movie feels too fussed-over for such a low-key hero.

Brings honor to its predecessor, but it’s somehow lacking in joy.

Almost all of the movie's romantic lunacy is too calculated and sly; the picture never quite sweeps us away.

Schumer, writing and performing a character close to the one she’s been presenting to the public, may never be this funny again, but funny she is.

As shot by the gifted cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Nocturnal Animals is beautiful—or at least arresting—every minute, and it sure isn’t boring. But it’s unclear exactly what Ford is trying to say, though it’s clear he’s trying hard to say something. And that’s the most frustrating thing about this picture.

Undone by simply trying too hard.

It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites.

Winter's Tale, however imperfect, is that rare beast on the movie landscape: an unapologetic romance (for the first two-thirds, anyway), with attractive stars and special effects designed to give audiences something other than the experience of watching worlds get blown up.

Lowery stumbles, working too hard to squeeze a response from us.

As a story of courage and personal growth, The Guardian is perfunctory, a saga of character building that could (and may, advertently or otherwise) serve as a Coast Guard recruitment vehicle. But it's far more interesting as a tale of two faces: Kutcher and Costner have a kind of visual chemistry that's just as elusive as the other kind. And the connection and contrast between them remind us that Hollywood isn't as forgiving of older male actors as we like to think.

Unwieldy, long-winded, self-indulgently nutso and, in places, very, very boring. It also caps off its two-and-a-half-hour run time with an extended finale – partially orchestrated to David Bowie's "Cat People" theme song, no less – that I could watch again and again with pleasure

It's hard to say whether Sound of My Voice is a wholly bogus and pretentious indie enterprise or a weirdly compelling bit of low-budget storytelling.

Most wonderful of all is Josh Brolin as the young Agent K. It's so easy to believe that Brolin could turn into Jones, given a couple of decades.

As with the previous two Knives Out installments, the conclusion is almost beside the point. It’s the getting there that matters, and the twisty road of Wake Up Dead Man is dotted with offhanded jokes and one-liners that are occasionally extremely witty.

If director Tim Johnson -- adapting Adam Rex's book The True Meaning of Smekday -- can't do much with the story's confused, if well-intentioned, agenda, at least he's got some charming, vivid characters to work with.

The surprise of Anatomy of Hell is that Siffredi's character is ultimately more vulnerable than the woman

Inside this failed picture there’s a sicker, darker, more truthful one crying to get out. But for a while, Passengers is really going for something. The movie it might have been is lost in space, alone, never to be seen by mere mortals. All we can see from Earth are its few brightly burning scraps, but at least it’s something.

Trap isn’t the worst Shyamalan movie; no one would say it’s the best. It's suspended somewhere in the murky middle, but at the very least it has an amiable goofiness.

It’s worth seeing A Different Man for the two performances at its heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.

With a promising cast like that, not to mention the glittery party setting, Ocean’s 8 should be great fun. Instead, it’s a kind of noncommittal semi-fun.

Last Night in Soho soars at the beginning, only to crash in the end. It’s a broken promise.

The Birth of a Nation isn’t a great movie – it’s hardly even a good one. But it’s bluntly effective, less a monumental piece of filmmaking than an open door. Parker stars as Turner, and his performance is grounded and thoughtful – he may be a better actor than he is a director.

Just doesn't give us enough to hold onto, perhaps partly because it's executed with so much restraint and subtlety. It's often a tense, uncomfortable little movie.

Ben Affleck is smart about setting the scene -- he's even better at it than Clint Eastwood was in another Lehane adaptation, "Mystic River." But he's less adept at defining individual personalities, at making us care about the characters who deserve our sympathy -- or, maybe more important, the ones who don't.

The fact that Cronenberg directed almost works against Maps to the Stars: We expect greatness from him, not just proficiency, and he doesn't exactly have a gift for comedy, not even the black kind. But the movie still has the darkly glittering Cronenberg touch, even if it's just a light brushing.

Horizon—while being at least somewhat culturally sensitive, handsome to look at, and reasonably engaging—still comes off as curiously undistinguished. It’s so tasteful, so careful, so eager not to upset or offend, that it reflects little sense of risk.

Hickenlooper too often approaches his subject with the filmmaking equivalent of a wry chuckle.

If you boil the psychology of Collateral down to its essence, what you get, mostly, is Vincent badgering Max for not having enough chutzpah -- in essence, for not being enough of a tough guy.

Chemical Hearts never pretends that getting through teenagerhood is easy or fun. But if Grace and Henry can survive the perils of first love, there’s got to be hope for the rest of us. Reliving all that anxiety makes adulthood in the modern age look better — at least a little.

Snyder’s new zombie entree The Army of the Dead is too scattershot, perhaps too derivative and definitely too long. But it’s definitely a movie, as well as a perfectly acceptable turn-your-brain-off entertainment.

As lukewarm as We Have a Pope may be as a piece of filmmaking, Moretti doesn't tread particularly gently into sacred territory. The picture could be more irreverent, but at least it dares to suggest that popes are people too.

We know relatively little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction—paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been.

Cooper may have gone overboard in delineating the hardships of blue-collar life in Out of the Furnace. But he has a gift for getting actors to put some muscle into their work, and enough finesse to make sure the sweat doesn't show.

It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. But none of those things make it subversive. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it—or pretend-eaten it—too.

Triangle of Sadness definitely looks like money. But it feels like a luxury item, a picture whose payoff isn’t as grand as you might have hoped. Östlund’s gifts are dazzling. If only he knew when to stop giving.

The Weitzes haven't come up with a masterpiece in Down to Earth, but they have put their stamp on a perfectly pleasant 90-minute diversion

Getting a movie's setup right is one thing. But following through on an intriguing premise is the hard part, and that's where Matthew Chapman's The Ledge, a thriller that wrangles with intricate ideas about faith and religious extremism, goes splat.

Not half as clever as its setup leads you to think it might be: It's all buildup and no payoff, the kind of romantic thriller in which if just one sensible character called the police at the moment as any normal human being would -- well, then, you wouldn't have a movie.

The Martian is only partly a story about a man in peril; it's mostly a story about men (and a few women) taking control of the uncontrollable. It's confident, swaggering sci-fi, not the despairing kind. That may be why, as elaborate and expensive-looking as The Martian is, it's almost totally lacking in poetry.

Big Gold Brick may be a bit too enamored with its own quirkiness, but everything Garcia does, no matter how outlandish, feels perfectly natural.

For all the ways in which Plan B is sometimes thunderously obvious, there’s still a lot going on beneath the surface.

The picture is a bit arty and decorous; it could do with fewer swimmy camera moves. But Young vests it with a fascinating, flinty grace.

Although Little bears some similarities to the 1988 kid fantasy "Big," it’s a thoroughly modern comedy, one that lives comfortably with the idea that women can hold power and authority–though because they’re human, they can misuse it, too.

Breezy, silly, possibly quickly forgettable—but if you need to lose yourself for an hour or two, it could be just the thing.

Once you start reckoning with Anomalisa’s obsession with self-absorption, the novelty of this one-man pity party begins to wear off. A little puppet pain goes a long way.

Wakanda Forever is set in a world that many people desperately want to revisit—in the first film, Wakanda and its citizens were so vivid it’s no wonder they took a hold on us. But Wakanda Forever feels a lot like Marvel business as usual, marred by the usual muddily rendered action sequences and ungainly plot mechanics.

Her Smell is an uneven movie, occasionally dipping into clichés. But Moss’s performance works as a distillation of one of Love’s signature lines, from the song “Doll Parts”: Becky knows what it costs to be the girl with the most cake.

Just as the dessert topping you scoop out of a tub may contain only trace amounts of actual cream, the ninth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise, F9: The Fast Saga, isn’t so much a movie as an entertainment product. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long you know what you’re getting, and there are even some pluses.

As visually arresting as Kill Bill often is, there's a stultifying blankness about it. Despite Tarantino's obvious enthusiasms, he comes off jaded and cynical: He's seen plenty of movies, and this is his proof.

Preachy infotainment that wants to offer thrills, too -- an uneasy hybrid.

Somewhat entertaining, in its own little mud-brown way.

No director yet has found the best use for Hudson, the role that will tap those terrifying and thrilling reserves that are just lying in wait. But Softley comes closer than anybody has.

Mother! is ambitious and dorky, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting redone as swirl-art. It’s entertaining to watch, because it’s not easy to see where it’s going—though you might feel a little underwhelmed when you discover where it ends up. The main reason to keep watching is Lawrence, receptive and radiant.

Whatever his strengths may be, Nolan lacks the human touch. His movies are numbingly sexless, and by that I don’t mean they need sex scenes or nudity -- those things are rarely really about sex anyway. But in all of Nolan’s films, human connection is such a noble idea that it’s beyond the grasp of flesh-and-blood people.

Just because a movie is based on a true story doesn’t mean you have to fully buy it: The Greatest Beer Run Ever isn’t terrible, and it’s hardly great. But the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s almost as dreamily clueless as its hapless hero is.

If there was ever a testament to the resilience of actors, in the face of a flawed script and wonky direction, The Family Stone is it.

It’s a moderately effective horror movie with a much better, creepier and more nuanced one nestled invisibly alongside, the unborn twin ghost of a movie that might have been.

"Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.

Although The Reluctant Fundamentalist raises some complicated questions, in the end, it doesn’t challenge that much.

If The Animal -- co-written by Schneider and Tom Brady -- never quite gets fired up, at least it chugs along efficiently on its mildly inspired ridiculousness.

Even though Papushado and Keshales raise some ticklish questions, it's hard to know exactly what they're going for, beyond some mischievous, grisly thrills. At least they're skillful at delivering those.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance only partially rekindles the spark of the earlier movie, or that of its rambunctious sequel, Magic Mike XXL.

Star Wars lore is woefully lacking in sex appeal — even Han Solo is more of a guy’s guy — but Glover has an unruly, charismatic elegance. He belongs in a better movie, but at least he perks this one up.

The movie itself seems to be locked in a kind of adolescence; it never quite blossoms into maturity, into a fully rounded whole.

Day Shift delivers everything it promises, which isn’t all that much. But Foxx goes above and beyond the call of duty, seemingly without even trying. Before you know it, his shift, and ours, is over, and the time has passed painlessly enough.

The film ends with a syrupy coda that betrays its earlier subtlety. But Ronan and Howle are the keepers of its true spirit.

Where’s the line between a sensitive work of imagination and an invasion of real-life grief in the service of arty filmmaking? There’s a lot of clever technique in Jackie, like its canny, razor-precise editing. But there’s also something arch and distant about the picture.

Only half a mess -- and even with all its flaws, it's an enjoyable diversion that shows both respect and affection for the formidable legacy of the "X-Men" comics.

Nine out of ten gags in this crude pub crawl of a comedy are indefensible. Maybe ten out of ten. Tragically, perhaps, I laughed anyway: It’s so hard to know what to laugh at anymore, and what it’s OK to laugh at.

The Bone Temple is part satisfying triumph, part missed opportunity, and its pluses and minuses bump against one another in jangly discord.

Overall, the movie is so ambitious—so intent on reminding us, every minute, that it really is a work of Big Ideas—that it ends up subverting its own charms. The Pixar masterminds often seem to think complicated is better, or at least just deeper. But to paraphrase Thelonious Monk, they’ve been making the wrong mistakes.

The Tender Bar is generally a sweet, affectionate film, it deflates whenever J.R. isn’t in Manhasset—because that means there’s no Ben Affleck.

August: Osage County, however, bitterly funny in some places and numbingly earnest in others, is just too much Streep. But all is not lost. Some of her fellow actors are resourceful enough to reconstruct themselves after being obliterated.

Thunder Force drags until roughly its last third, and then something remarkable happens: its gonzo spirit kicks in. From that point on, Thunder Force feels crazily, joltingly alive, as if it were realizing, a little too late, that it ought to have been a different movie altogether.

Free Guy is a little like Ready Player One jumbled with The Truman Show, with some Sleeping Beauty and The Velveteen Rabbit mixed in. It is, admittedly, a lot of movie, probably too much. But Reynolds makes the most of Guy’s elation at finally busting out.

Condon's tone is gentle and lifeless and at times baffling: The picture is a weird cross between clinical and whimsical.

The picture still meanders and drags, and sometimes Iñárritu’s lofty ideas come off like a hot-air balloon that deflates and gets stuck in the trees. You wish he could just move on with things already. And yet there are some magnificent visions in Bardo.

The chief problem with Thank You for Smoking, isn't that it's over the top; it's that it fits so neatly UNDER the top.

Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft.

The story's aims are noble, but it works too hard at scoring its points to succeed as either entertainment or lacerating social commentary. The picture needed to bite harder and deeper.

It's to Stiller's credit that he can sustain the joke for the length of the movie, but just barely. Ten more minutes of Zoolander would have been 10 minutes too many.

If you're looking for thrills, you should know that you have to wade through a good seven-eighths of the movie before Sade does anything remotely disreputable, and even then it's a rather mechanical bit of business that would have been more effective (and more disturbing) if it had been handled with a bit of humor.

Marginally romantic and only the tiniest bit thrilling.

While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.

For a surprisingly solid stretch, Ambulance is great fun.

All of these women, and Day-Lewis too, sing and dance vigorously and enthusiastically throughout Nine, and the results are spotty, though you can't accuse anyone of not trying.

I have to hand it to Hardwicke: I was a lot less bored by The Nativity Story than I feared I'd be.

After that kick-ass opening, the picture devolves into an action-action-plot-action-plot-action monotone.

Prince Caspian is elaborate filmmaking, all right. It's the magic of the human touch that's missing.

Frank Coraci's '80s-nostalgia comedy is predictable and unevenly paced, and it lunges too often for the easy joke.

The mere presence of Elba’s Luther, with his haunted gaze, his voice as plush as the finest antique Persian carpet, is enough to keep The Fallen Sun from sinking.

It’s sometimes boring and pretentious and often a little silly, almost to the point—almost—of parody. But even with all its flaws tallied and noted like battlefield casualties, there’s still something mildly compelling about it.

There’s visual thinking everywhere you look in Blackhat, which is great until you realize that it’s bled into a kind of overthinking — the movie is too much of a good thing, an exercise that flattens any potential exhilaration or excitement into the sensation of grading a term paper.

Gibney, a prolific and skilled documentarian, marshals and organizes a raft of information as deftly as anyone could wish. But his conclusions are murkier than they might be.

A sweet-tempered, mildly entertaining picture.

It’s perfectly entertaining as you’re watching, but when it’s over, you might not feel any smarter—or humbler—than you did going in.

The movie’s ending is little more than a fizzle. But wow, what a dog. The extraordinary animal actor Jumpy, a border collie mix with fabulous speckled legs and alert triangles for ears, listens attentively to every word from his master’s mouth, comprehending nothing yet understanding everything.

The picture might be entertaining if it didn't take itself so seriously.

This is the kind of work a great actor does when he's not preoccupied with giving a great performance. Its very casualness is its big selling point.

Feels like three-quarters of a movie. It leaves you wanting some elusive soupçon of comedy or drama or romance that it just doesn’t deliver. Yet even within those parameters, there’s something appealingly human about it: It has the warmth of a tiny beach fire on a cool night, casting a soft glow that makes you want to creep closer; there’s wistfulness, at least, in its low-key quietude.

It's not quite as crazy as it needs to be: There's something listless about Life After Beth — it starts out as a reflection on the potentially morbid nature of grief and then doesn't seem to know where to go.

Ends up being nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing.

The movie’s hero, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), is low-key and likable, though it’s his best pal, Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Newt, who gets the most dramatic moments. He’s charming to watch, but by this point, it’s futile to wish for a cure-all.

Alien: Covenant is reasonably entertaining. But it slips off course after that opening section, and the problem is caused by the very creatures we presumably came to see.

If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.

How much you enjoy Damsels will depend on your tolerance for Stillman's particular brand of duct-taped Sperry Topsider whimsy. It's a comedy! It's a musical! It's a trip down memory lane to revisit the blissful confusion of our - or someone's - college years!

At the movie's end, nuance is all we have left; beyond the admirable efforts of some of the actors, the picture leaves behind nothing so human as a fingerprint.

Begins as a perfectly reasonable thriller and ends up rather an inane one.

Beyond its easy-on-the-psyche message, the picture is reasonably pretty to look at.

A pleasingly disreputable trifle.

Pleasurable.

So much of Vortex is stirring, compelling, upsetting. But a greater share is merely numbing in its depressive showiness.

If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence.

A handsome-looking thing, with fairly grand period costumes and reasonably lavish sets. So much for production values: In every other way the picture is stiff and unyielding, hampered by a clumsy plot and diorama performances. The whole thing has the feel of a second-rate living-history exhibit.

May be far from perfect, but those small, odd Hartley touches help you warm to it.

As it ticks by, laboriously, it leaves you feeling that you should be enjoying it more than you are.

A feebly pleasant surprise: It's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been, but it's also too eagerly well-meaning and indistinct to really stick. It's a piece of mildly entertaining, inoffensive fluff.

It's a good-natured if flimsy comedy that, at the very least, suggests that Murphy hasn't completely lost whatever made him funny in the first place.

The Host gets bogged down in its “who’s kissing whom now?” dynamics, and it becomes all too easy to snicker at it.

Well-meaning but remote picture.

The Mother would be more effective if she could wink at the audacity of the material instead of just playing it all straight. But then, Lopez can get away with things that other mere mortals can’t, and if you approach it in the right spirit, The Mother could be ridiculously good fun.

As Pine’s Webber navigates that seemingly helpless little boat, squinting into the driving snow and more than once nearly falling victim to the ocean’s mighty maw, he’s the movie’s finest special effect — not because he’s mindlessly brave, but because he lets us see how scared he is.

Sabotages itself by trying too hard. The worst of it is that Maybe Baby feels very much like an Englishman's attempt to make a Nora Ephron movie, all warm and squishy in a decidedly American way.

Crass, stupid and crudely made. It's also, in places, weirdly brilliant, a picture that plays to the largest possible audience with mechanical efficiency but also, here and there, betrays glimmers of self-deprecating cleverness, as if it were striving, perhaps even unconsciously, to transcend its own dumbness.

In the end, it feels too much like a school assignment. Washington approaches the material with canonical reverence, but that isn’t the same as shaking it up and bringing it to life on-screen.

When you’ve been charged with reviving one of the most obsessively beloved franchises in modern movies, is it better to defy expectations or to meet them? With Star Wars: The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams splits the difference, and the movie suffers—in the end, it’s perfectly adequate, hitting every beat. But why settle for adequacy?

Hail, Caesar! doesn’t completely hang together. But Johansson in a mermaid’s tail? Really, why else make movies—or go to them?

The picture coasts along quite nicely on the strength of its contemplative sensuality, its macaron colors, and the exquisite beauty of its three chief actresses, Léa Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen and Diane Kruger. Oh, and there's nudity in it too, not to mention lesbian undertones – or are they overtones?

It's so almost moving -- a meticulously crafted mechanical bird -- that it nearly feels like the real thing.

Avatar: The Way of Water is both more extravagant and dorkier than Avatar, which was pretty dorky to begin with.

You might not call this picture a major achievement—it’s both elegant and rather silly—but you can’t fault it for lack of vision.

Kutcher finds compassion without going for anything so cheap as an explanation for Jobs's bad behavior; it's a wily, understated performance.

The world isn’t pretty, and Lanthimos is sounding the alarm. If only he would tell us something we don’t already know.

It’s a relief just to watch the actors act once in a while, and thankfully, Snyder is astute enough to punch some breathing holes in this steel-clad colossus.

By the end of Trembling Before G_d, you desperately wish that at least some of DuBowski's subjects would see the light.

An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.

Mick Jagger acts his age, finally, in an entertaining but ultimately disappointing fable.

Braff, and Garden State, give it the old college try, and at least some, if not all, of the sparks catch. Even if the movie doesn't quite take off, it doesn't leave you feeling stranded, either.

Might have been an oversized Hollywood dazzler. Phoenix keeps it firmly and modestly on a human scale.

I was with the movie every step of the way, right until the final credits began rolling – at which point I realized that the whole thing made no sense whatsoever, and that none of my nagging questions about what the hell was going on would ever be answered. There's a distinction to be made between being a dupe and being had.

Now that Woody Allen is no longer making acceptable Woody Allen movies, it's surprising we're not seeing more comedies like Prime, a slight but well-meaning picture that strives for the same kind of pleasurably neurotic sophistication that Allen, at his best, used to give us.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that 12 Strong–based on Doug Stanton’s 2009 book Horse Soldiers, about U.S. Special Forces troops who traveled to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 to confront Taliban forces–should add up to more than it does.

A not-very-good movie about a fascinating and underexplored subject: the unknowability of a marriage.

This is a dignified piece of filmmaking, and one that uses brutality to great effect.

It has to be more of the same, but better, and the movie doesn’t quite succeed. You can’t really make a bigger, better Ant-Man — that just means defying the diminutive, carefree scale that made the earlier movie work in the first place.

Defiance comes off as plodding and workmanlike -- and even in the midst of Zwick's too-careful machinations, it's a movie that's unsure of what it wants to be.

The vainglorious pas de deux between Philip and Zimmerman is entertaining for a while, though the novelty gradually wears off.

Director Andy Muschietti’s It, adapted from King’s disquieting 1986 epic of the same name, doesn’t cut very deep and isn’t very scary. At its best, it’s a sometimes-entertaining evocation of the way kids think and talk within their little cliques, and of the way they protect one another with fierce loyalty.

Lee can't tell a story to save his life, but he's something of a visual magician, laying out glittering piles of goodies that you instinctively want to follow.

It's when Stone engages in shameless editorializing -- when he lets his freak-flag point of view fly, rather than tempering it -- that W. is most entertaining and most vital. The rest of the time it feels too much like awards bait: stiff, arch and knowing.

Maybe it's only half of what it could be, but at least it's a healthy half. And in this era of mainstream cookie-cutter moviemaking, that's a feat in itself.

Roughly speaking, the characters in Kit Kittredge may be stereotypes, but they're stereotypes with soul. And they live in a very real place.

This isn't an art house crowd pleaser along the lines of the 2006 "Paris, je t'aime," a freewheeling mixed bag of shorts made by the likes of Olivier Assayas, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. Tokyo! demands more patience, patience that it sometimes doesn't deserve.

There's just not enough of Forster, who has a small role as Ford's work colleague and confidant. ..Sometimes star quality shines out from the corners of a movie, and not from the center.