Steve Pond

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A rough but vital film.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Like the run-down carnival in which it is set, Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss is a little clunky, kind of messy and oddly entertaining.

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

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

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.