Steve Pond

The Wizard of the Kremlin is a loud, bold film that is held together by the quiet performance at its center.

The movie seems to be trying to be quirky, but it’s never quirky enough, and it’s hard to feel much for the characters or feel that there’s much in the way of healing going on. But it’s breezy enough to be mildly diverting and gently nostalgic.

Sirât is bold in its depiction of a decaying world in which some people can still find release. But its insistent brutality feels less bold than exhausting, and the question asked by one of the characters – “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” – has an easy answer: Hell, yeah.

There are things to admire in the visual design and in the way a small group of accomplished actors submit to this quiet horror show, but cold, begrudging admiration is about all the admittedly stylish film is designed to elicit.

The Second Act is little more than an amusing trifle, as meta as that trifle may be.

It looks amazing, of course, but it might well be the least involving movie he’s ever made, with an amazing cast providing little but momentary distraction.

Impressive in its single-mindedness, this is nonetheless a movie that dares you to try and like it – and most likely, few will take Sauvaire up on that dare.

The juxtaposition of jubilance and misery is the film’s modus operandi, however jarring it may seem.

It feels as if there’s a better movie in here somewhere, lost beneath the wild-eyed freneticism and the unsatisfying exposition.

Director Jono McLeod’s filmmaking itself is inventive and odd, and that’s almost enough – emphasis on the word almost – to make up for the fact that the story itself is something of a letdown.

The movie sometimes feels as aimless as moments in the lives of the characters it depicts, but that helps give it the intimacy of a story told from the inside, not the outside.

A dense and bloody spy thriller with enough twists, turns, double agents, defectors and buried secrets to confuse even viewers who know the geopolitical players without a scorecard. For those of us who are struggling to figure out who’s who and where their sympathies lie on the fly, it can get downright impenetrable.

For a film that tries to be a bravura piece of genre-hopping cinema, “Encounter” too often feels confused rather than assured.

The melodrama can be effective at times, and there’s an admirable urgency with which it tackles significant issues in U.S. immigration policy.

It’s a drama rather than a comedy, so call it a rom-dram – and if that phrase seems slightly dismissive, it’s appropriate for a movie that plays up the sentimentality and never escapes the feeling that it’s a light look at a heavy subject.

The Owners is tense, uneasy and brutal, escalating from the creepy to the ludicrous over the course of 92 deliberately unpleasant minutes.

Grounding a genre movie in the history of slavery and the resurgence of white nationalism is a dark and dramatic gamble that pulls “Antebellum” out of the horror genre and into social commentary, or at least makes it an intriguing mix of the two. It’s just too bad that the execution isn’t surehanded enough to live up to the ambition.

A brutal action flick that’s running on ugly from start to finish, the film from director Derrick Borte flirts with having something to say about stressful, angry times and toxic masculinity, but settles for letting Russell Crowe glower, seethe and leave a whole lotta destruction in his gruesome wake.

If you want a comedy that works hard to be touching, you might find that here – but honestly, you’d expect a movie about pickles (and a movie starring Rogen) to have more of a bite than this.

This is a movie that shows the Curies’ work changing the world, but then has Marie say, “I can feel our work … changing the world.”

It makes a solid case for itself as filmed entertainment, while also suggesting strongly that it really ought to be seen in person in a theater.

Stewart’s whole career is based on the idea that political commentary and humor go together. Yes, they do – but as Irresistible shows, they do it better when they’re in the moment.

In the Ferrell canon, “Eurovision Song Contest” is a workmanlike, “Blades of Glory”-level effort, never as funny as you want it to be no matter how hard it tries or how silly its actors look.

Sure, it’s creepy as hell and very stylish to boot, but You Should Have Left essentially plays like a scaled-down Blumhouse riff on “The Shining,” only with slightly shorter hallways and considerably less ambition.

While an energetic kids’ fantasy with cool creatures fighting each other is probably a reasonable win for Disney’s new premium service in these days before most theaters reopen, it’s hard to watch it as an adult and not wish for something that produced a little more magic of its own.

For all its wide-eyed embrace of murder and mayhem, the film feels rote as it goes about its bloody business.

The High Note is a character study, it’s a romance, it’s a dismissive look at the music business and a celebration of the power of music, it’s a movie that refuses to go down the path it’s been telegraphing and a movie that pulls out all the stops to get where you figured it would all along.

Nanjiani and Rae are funny and likable people who try very hard to bring some life to this enterprise, but the action is too preposterous for the laughs to make much headway. They’re fun to watch, in a way, but you really wish they had something better to do.

A thriller that wants to be more than that and stretches the bounds of plausibility to get there, Inheritance may have you squirming in your seat and shaking your head in equal measure.

If there’s something you remember, or liked, about any iteration of “Scooby-Doo,” you’ll probably find it, or a joke about it, in Scoob! It gets to be a little tiring, but maybe it helps all this frantic silliness go down just a little easier, too.

While Have a Good Trip tries really, really hard to not fall into the usual traps that make putting hallucinatory experiences on screen look silly, it can’t help itself.

The approach is dramatic and artful, to a degree, but also so studied and stylized that you yearn for some kind of release – and after about an hour, it becomes wearying unless you’re fully submerged in this world.

While the film sometimes seems to be stretching to find problems in every corner of the environmental movement (apparently, no company that claims to be green can also plug into the power grid), it does a brutally effective job of suggesting that a dream of endless renewable energy may be unattainable.

As good as Hargrave is at staging and shooting action, you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns in a film built around fistfights and automatic weaponry.

Flynn’s ferocious commitment to the role is something to admire, even if we’re not completely convinced.

Endings, Beginnings takes a young woman who tries to be in the corner but must find a way to train a spotlight on herself — and if you have to lean in to appreciate her journey, Doremus and Woodley make it rewarding if you do.

The film is at its best in exploring the gaps between dream and reality.

The Main Event is an easy enough ride for kids who are stuck at home and like to see people bash each other. Will parents want to stick it out, too? That’s a tougher question for a movie about magic that doesn’t really have too much magic of its own.

It’s kind of a mess, a crazy balancing act that flails as often as it connects.

If you can’t completely trust the details of the story you’re seeing, the question becomes whether the footage itself is spectacular enough to justify the qualms you may be feeling. And on that count, Elephant delivers.

The Goldfinch, the novel, was a testament to the power of The Goldfinch, the painting – but The Goldfinch, the movie, can’t be more than a footnote to the mysteries and the grace of the works that inspired it.

A rough but vital film.

Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy is a lukewarm examination of what might have been a hot topic — and that means it risks being overshadowed by the real-life soap opera playing out around it.

The beats are too predictable — and even though the film tells a story we may not have known until now, the storytelling is too familiar.