Steven Rea

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Maybe the best reason to see Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is to catch a glimpse of the real Finca Vigia, the property, with its house and pool, gardens, and tree-lined drive, where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote - and famously drank - from 1939 until 1960. Pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls were banged out here; so, too, The Old Man and the Sea.

The feeblest kind of costume drama, where the costumes have more impact than the drama and where the period details serve only as distraction, reminding audiences that things looked different back then and not much else.

Director Robert Schwentke and his writing team do their best to move things along. Actually, who knows if it's their best? Maybe they're suffering from Divergent fatigue along with the rest of us.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

It's overstating things to say the stars of Fantastic Four are Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, because I can't remember the last time four actors appeared less invested in a movie for which they've teamed up.

The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

Let sleeping bros lie.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

In fact, no one in The Gunman looks happy. And what happened to chivalry? If a fierce squad of goons is coming after you and your ex, whom you still love, and there's only one Kevlar vest to throw on, don't you offer it to her? Apparently not.

Run All Night isn't dull. The pace is breakneck, and necks get broken. But the violence is relentless, ugly, unredeemed by any real humanity.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

The movie pulls off the worst kind of con: the one that disappoints.

In the future, in the past, at all points along the space-time continuum, the Theory of the Teenage Male Mind throws everything out of whack.

There's real hypocrisy here. If a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey is supposed to offer a voyeuristic experience - and not a ridiculous experience - have some integrity about your nudity. Despite what the filmmakers may want to believe, there isn't a lot else going on here. Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, not so much.

As for Kunis, she gets to wear some out-of-this-world couture, and gets to make her entrance at a marriage ceremony on a floating dais, kind of like Katy Perry at the Super Bowl.

A moody cyber-noir with not much on its mind but looking good, Blackhat is a must-see if you like your dialogue (romantic, dramatic, subtitled Cantonese) peppered with techspeak.

Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

As for Bale, he seems to have lost his compass. His accent strays, his famous intensity wasted on clunky dialogue.

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.

Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly. Instead, it's just terrible.