Tom Russo

It’s a diverting if slightly undercooked throwback that could offer more genuine intrigue, but that’s still worth it to see the cast gamely chuck out the window manners and vanity.

If there’s any way that Roach slips back into a creative pigeonhole, it’s by being overly keen on sticking his actors in prosthetic makeup. Richard Kind’s Rudy Giuliani, for one, elicits an unintended chuckle. And while Theron’s makeover is, again, uncanny, Kidman’s cleft chin is needlessly distracting. We’d buy her performance without it.

Middling cop thriller, whose attention-grabbing city-on-lockdown premise is undercut by thin plotting and forced performances from the supporting cast.

What’s most entertaining here, ultimately, is the performance that Stewart turns in as outspoken, play-it-loose Sabina, a completely unexpected, who-knew mash-up of sexy and offbeat.

Not surprisingly, Doctor Sleep splits the difference, dutifully attempting to honor both King’s writing and Kubrick’s film simultaneously. The movie actually manages to pull it off for a time, until in the last act revisited concepts start to play more like ill-advised retreads.

What we’re left with, then, is yet another “Terminator” far easier to appreciate for isolated bits of inspiration than for any stroke of genius it manages overall.

This franchise might be all about shedding light on lost details, but “Mistress of Evil” sometimes leaves us in the dark.

Pattinson and Dafoe dig into their roles, all right, with both actors crazily, mesmerizingly toggling from workaday to recriminating to maniacal and on and on. Together with Eggers they deliver a masterful study of souls trapped on a rock alone, but also trapped together, with all the twisty complexities involved.

The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.

It’s a deep-thinking character study that’s provocatively if imperfectly presented — at least until the story devolves right along with its subject’s state of mind.

Yes, as it turns out — not only is Abominable as amusing as the competition, it boasts a lyricism and sweetness uniquely, sublimely its own.

The biggest narrative justification for “Downton” getting feature treatment might be the sweeping quality to all the character developments and showcase moments being juggled here. The intricacy is managed without ever playing like Fellowes took a couple of routine postscript episodes and simply stitched them together.

The character-isolating bits furnish us with immolating heroines and dread-laden glimpses of Pennywise unmasked — you know, stuff to fill the quiet moments between arachnophobe nightmares and a predatory scene even more perverse than the saga-opening storm-drain vignette.

For all of its engaging performances, this thoughtful yarn from the filmmaking tandem of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz is limited by a quaintly straightforward story line. Every choice the characters opt for, every bit of self-discovery they make, is as scripted as a rasslin’ baddie’s folding-chair cheap shot.

Unless you’re familiar with the various particulars, you’ll likely find yourself experiencing the film in aptly wavelike fashion, cresting with optimism about the crew’s prospects before plunging into apprehension, again and again.

This time, the over-the-top craziness that Spencer slyly serves up fills more than just a pie plate.

You’ll just have to look to your own effects-jazzed inner child to find a kid who’s relatable here.

Compared to a second installment that expanded the established Keanuscape in ways the “Matrix” sequels only wish they had, “Wick 3” fumbles for compelling, organically incorporated territory to explore.

In the end, the movie leaves us stuck with unmoving drama and increasingly numbing carnage.

One quibble: For such a legendarily elusive spot, the snowmen’s Himalayan hideaway seems awfully well trodden these days. If you thought the similarity between, say, “Coco” and “The Book of Life” was a case of animators not looking resourcefully enough for inspiration, how about the trifecta of “Smallfoot,” “Missing Link,” and DreamWorks’s upcoming “Abominable”?

Shazam! is pretty entertaining. It’s a lark that aims to distinguish itself from too-familiar DC dourness a bit like “Guardians of the Galaxy” playfully tweaked Marvel’s formula.

Maras and his cast craft such a chilling, narratively grueling dramatization of the episode — chaos worsened by the lack of tactical response forces in Mumbai — it’s tough to view quietly-played everyman heroics as the story’s takeaway. These striving unfortunates are just too hopelessly, fatally overmatched for that. Audiences are likelier to leave horrified or, at best, numb.

It’s the mark of many a standout sports movie that you don’t necessarily have to be a fan to enjoy the story. The real-life pro wrestling portrait Fighting With My Family is a hugely entertaining case in point.

For all of Alita’s she-Pinocchio charm — and her Cameronian estrogen-charged badass-itude — she can’t quite carry the audience all the way across that pesky uncanny valley.

An unexpected portrait of the legendary comedy duo on a mostly forgotten stage tour at the twilight of their careers.

Aquaman’s first glimpse of Atlantis is meant to convey wonder, but mostly there’s a sense of digitally over-busy déjà vu, as we’re reminded of more inventively designed fantasyscapes in “Thor,” “Avatar” and so on.

After a point, we’re left wondering whether we’re watching a character study or caricature. Either way, the portrait gradually morphs from intriguing to tedious.

At its best moments, Creed II manages a feat nearly as striking as anything that Michael B. Jordan’s Rocky Balboa protégé pulls off in the boxing ring: It doesn’t play all that much like a sequel.

The imaginative, touching, and dizzyingly animated Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sequel with a rich, broad vision that addresses all of these issues faster than you can say Fix-It Felix.

The particulars are often fascinating, but all the solemnity does work against a more rousing finish. The Netflix-distributed feature might equal “Braveheart” (1995) in its gritty authenticity, but that standard-setter’s memorably transportive quality was ultimately a far battle cry from this.

The result is a reworking that feels both unnecessary and uninspired, even if it’s too genial and visually captivating to be flat-out off-putting.

What starts as a modest, agreeable riff on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale — and, more relevantly, Tchaikovsky’s ballet — eventually veers into stultifying action, rote twists, and other badly forced contemporary tweaks.

It’s as if Hill took his familiar sly humor and sneaked it into a segment from Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.”

He (Barinholtz) works hard to creatively lampoon a nation divided, and his first-timer’s ambition and thematic investment are admirable. Disappointingly, though, he lacks storytelling chops, aiming for wildly provocative satire but instead churning out a technically spotty screed.

Go figure that the year’s most outrageously harrowing action movie turns out to be an arthouse doc from National Geographic.

Everyone from Channing Tatum to Danny DeVito to Hollywood transplant LeBron James is here voicing the movie’s winsomely rendered snow creatures, but it’s the creative story more than the routine-if-likable characters that makes this one so engaging.

Tricky territory to navigate, but it ultimately lends some genuine poignancy to the story’s familiar accidental-family themes. If there’s someplace Roth makes a mark, it’s here.

Kendrick’s interplay with Lively crackles, whether they’re going for laughs or something darker. Both are big selling points — as is their director, even if it’s not as advertised.

Notoriously remembered as a mastermind of the Final Solution, Eichmann was also infamous for the just-following-orders dispassion he maintained all the way through his trial, a banality that Kingsley channels expertly.

Some of this smutty irreverence is undeniably hilarious, goosed along by Melissa McCarthy’s game presence as Phil’s estranged LAPD partner and human foil. (In other felt-free casting, Maya Rudolph is equally entertaining as Phil’s trusty secretary, even if Elizabeth Banks and Joel McHale go to waste.)

Berg and Wahlberg deliver a relentlessly paced, addictively slick paramilitary thriller actively catering to fans of gonzo brutality and turbocharged machismo.

The stylishly crafted film mostly succeeds in its engaging (and tagline-ready) ambition to chronicle “how mankind discovered man’s best friend,” even if its naturalistic strengths are swapped out for an exaggeratedly epic tone in the later going.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

It’s surprising to see how straight McGregor plays it for director Marc Forster (the J.M. Barrie portrait “Finding Neverland”), allowing the CG-animated Pooh and friends to endearingly steal the show.

Save for a couple of crisp standalone segments incorporated as tone-setters, Washington’s first-ever sequel is a narratively and visually muddled disappointment, one that regularly confuses numbing brutality with vicariously thrilling righteous vengeance.

It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s superficial, it’s full of likable stars and scientific mumbo-jumbo, and, above all, it taps into the human urge to see big things become little and little things get big. It’s as close to lizard-brain entertainment as superhero blockbusters get, and as the mercury pushes toward 100, I’ll take it.

Character quirks know no limits in the indie dramedy Boundaries, a multi-generational road-trip movie that gives both Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer richly drawn roles to play.

Hawke delivers a strong melancholy variation on his familiar emotional cool as Reverend Toller.

What’s most unexpectedly gratifying is how much energy veteran standup director Jeff Tomsic and his splashy cast pour into ensuring that this is legit entertainment, packed with gonzo wit and even some sentiment.

The drama palpably, potently conveys the group’s misgivings, their jangling nerves, the foolhardy resignation pushing them on despite themselves.

As he did with his "Everest" cast, Kormákur draws a strong, pathos-rich performance from Woodley, filled with moments of her character confronting her own mortality and looking back on safe choices not made. It’s solid drama, but also very slow going.

Veteran London theater director Dominic Cooke (the BBC’s “The Hollow Crown”) and acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan adapt the fractured-narrative feature from McEwan’s book, enhancing the elegant prose with additional bits of rich characterization and handsomely shot scenery.

Thoroughly vanilla comedy, a movie jammed with well-meaning girl power messages but surprisingly little edge.

Keener’s performance keeps the film grounded even as blunt scenes of the opposing camp’s machinations flirt with soap opera villainy.

The pervasive, absorbing bitterness and hurt falter only when the story eases off its characters’ cynical insistence that people don’t change. Sudeikis knows how to play jarringly nasty — see “Colossal,” for one — but choked-up can be a reach here.

The engaging dynamic between our hero and his gargantuan, computer-generated pal is the movie’s best surprise, with silly and straight bits both working mostly as intended for director Brad Peyton (Johnson’s “Journey 2” and “San Andreas”).

As nifty as any of it is a witty, touching story thread about Adlon’s trepidatious geek wrestling with her sexual orientation even as she wrestles with peer pressure to hop into bed. And guess what? She and the movie make the smart call.

Tucci can be so focused on Giacometti’s artistic process that he gives short shrift to the art itself.

Still, not to put too fine — or juvenile — a point on it, a bigger problem is that there’s nothing but ’bot-on-’bot mayhem until the climax, when familiar ugly heads are reared over Tokyo.

The film is quite the showcase for Zoey Deutch (“Before I Fall”), giving her loose-scripted freedom to play brazen, breezy, even soulfully vulnerable. Still, her selectively promiscuous hellion is so off-putting so much of the time — as are most of those around her, and their lurid plots and predicaments — it’s hard to see the point of it all.

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.

A story steeped in emotional remoteness manages to command our attention in Thoroughbreds, first-time filmmaker Cory Finley’s darkly satirical portrait of the young and disconnected in old-money Connecticut.

A hard-R espionage thriller heavy on themes of sexual degradation and graphic, sometimes sadistic violence.

The film can be naggingly vague and patchily written where precision seems called for, but the familiar procession keenly digging into the wistful material does hold interest.

For all the energy that Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, and their castmates pour into their gimmicky comedy, there’s too often a feeling that they’re straining to pump up flat material.

If the freneticism gets repetitious, the target audience won’t mind, at least not judging by a preview crowd’s delirious reaction to a recurring electrified-doorknob gag.

Where we hoped for a narrative rebound, we get instead another pedestrian, overlong post-apocalyptic entry that fails to capitalize on some decent character dynamics.

Danish photojournalist-turned-director Nicolai Fuglsig channels his experience into a credibly stark snapshot of war, one that helps audiences further grasp why the region has been so hellishly problematic for American troops.

Neeson’s financially strapped character might vent even more convincingly if he didn’t somehow still have a BMW parked back at the depot, but we’re on board with him all the same.

The numbers just aren’t as dynamic as we might have hoped for from director Trish Sie, whose credits include alt-rock act OK Go’s “treadmill video” and other addictively innovative shorts.

The group’s thematically, comedically broad inversion of the source material is consistently entertaining, and squeezes in some nicely played character growth to boot.

The good news is that while the movie is susceptible to some pandering, it also takes the story’s charming core elements and gives them a contemporary luster.

Consistently intriguing as all the lit-process tidbits are, the film struggles to mesh footnotes and somber notes.

Returning director Sean Anders strings together mayhem-filled moments that just aren’t the howlers that they’re clearly scripted to be, never mind the fatherly foursome’s chemistry, or the tobacco-stained guffaws Gibson keeps busting out to sell these bits.

Thor’s bloodsport detour diverts an inordinate amount of the filmmakers’ attention, and ours, from the whole end-of-days buildup. Hopkins gets short shrift, as does Idris Elba’s returning interdimensional gatekeeper, Heimdall.

What’s most compelling is the near-documentary quality of Teller, Koale, and Bennett’s characters playing against a VA backdrop of prosthetic limbs and catheter bags, of desensitized clerks and overwhelmed therapists.

The film concerns itself more with beauty shots of the region’s rugged, intimidating vastness than with “Backdraft”-rivaling imagery of combustion as art.

If the movie can’t maintain its interest in Chan, why should we? This narrative splice job simply doesn’t hold together. Call it a taut mess or a hot mess, take your pick.

The film feels as if it’s drawing its characterizations far more from the appeal of its stars than from any prose.

With its inventively nutso action, youthful vibe, and subversive topicality, the “Kingsman” franchise feels more relevant than even Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Screen espionage doesn’t come any hipper these days.

A sharper script would have been the real ultimate weapon.

Trouble is, the movie’s dopiness isn’t in fact something you can get past. “American Assasinine” is frequently more like it.

Home “again”? It seems that first-timer Meyers-Shyer isn’t setting so much as a piggy toe beyond familiar territory, and this listless rom-com shows it.

Ultimately, cast and crew conjure up horror that’s more efficient than terrifying.

As an orphan who dreams of joining the Paris Opera Ballet in the animated feature Leap!, Elle Fanning really hears it about the artistry and precision required to become a prima ballerina. The makers of this cheery but subpar confection probably should have been taking notes in addition to scripting them.

There aren’t sufficient words to describe the remarkable visual environment; suffice it to say that the production designers are the stars here as much as the cast. More so, really.

Sincerity turns out to be the default tone for Brigsby Bear, making this indie’s odd concept of an accidental man-child wrapped up in a Teddy Ruxpin fantasy world feel odder still in the execution.

Hirschbiegel and Friedel win credibility points for painting Elser as noble without painting him as a saint.

The laughs here are more about the colorfully zany action than the ho-hum material the cast gets.

Not that the movie’s various shortcomings are all on Moore. British genre director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (“Storage 24”) gives her nothing but trite drama to work with in setting up the story, and an overload of distracting, reductive prattle once she hits the water.

Stay patient through those Seinfeldian stretches in which Martin isn’t so much acting as performing, and you’ll be treated to the bonus of some surprising emotional depth and poignancy.

In short, the film owns its immaturity. And the argument it appealingly offers in defense is that it’s healthy, even vital, to be able to laugh at scatological silliness, adults included.

The result is a scattershot comedy that only intermittently nails either tone, finally just bogging down in flatly choreographed mayhem in the late going.

For all her “Clueless” comedy cred, Silverstone just might be at her best conveying a mother’s special knack for witheringly guilting her boys.

The film’s casting in general is a strength, however deep the resonance of what the actors are playing. Schreiber’s ex-girlfriend, Naomi Watts, is a brassy, savvy presence as Wepner’s bartender soulmate.

Watching Taylor-Johnson’s character engage the enemy this way is intriguing, but also a bit removed from the realism the film is after. Can you say catch-22?

The movie also plays as an extended reminder of why we love Goldie. It’s enormous fun seeing Hawn up to her old tricks — at 71! — even if they’re tweaked to help sell someone else’s brand of comedy.

Monkeys end up supplying the movie’s real drama. While parentally overlooked mischief-maker Tao Tao gets up to the requisite, well, monkey business, he’s also witness to a stunning snatch-and-fly attack by an opportunistic goshawk. It might not be nature on demand, but it’s some scene.