Ty Burr

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Directed and co-written by the Samoan filmmaker Miki Magasiva, the movie features a unique central character, a powerhouse star performance and some truly uplifting choral singing. Those are the good parts. The less good part is a script that pummels audiences with melodrama, manipulation and sentimental clichés until we all cry uncle.

The Unholy Trinity is a reminder that they don’t make ’em like they used to — and maybe that’s a good thing. A pokey, low-budget Western enlivened by a couple of aging stars happily hamming it up, it’s the kind of B movie they used to program before the feature and after the cartoon in the old days.

Straw has all the feels it wants and little of the art it needs. But there’s nothing to suggest Tyler Perry would have it any other way.

Henry Johnson is unusual for Mamet in that it focuses on the prey. It’s also as close as a movie can get to a filmed play without including your dinner and a ride home.

Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

It speaks to a cultural sisterhood that knows exactly what Paola Cortellesi is talking about. But some things get lost in translation, and this lovingly crafted work of neorealist cosplay is one of them.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

There’s just enough bite there to give the stars something to work with, and Diaz especially responds with the joy of the well-rested.

The Piano Lesson offers a spirited if uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

In any event, Pugh uses her expressive eyes and ardent, intelligent sensibilities to paint a touching if underdeveloped portrait of an artist desperate to leave her mark before being rushed too soon from the show.

Is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too.

You Gotta Believe is an entry in the “heartwarming true story” genre, Little League subdivision, and it isn’t bad so much as resolutely average.

The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better — for Kravitz’s filmmaking future and for us — if we just forgot the whole thing.

It’s a critic’s failure to gauge the movie he wishes had been against the movie that is, but in this case the movie that is is disappointingly bloodless, cold rather than chilling, with a payoff that isn’t shocking so much as an admission that we’ve spent 90 minutes we’ll never get back.

The problem with making homages to junky genre movies is that sometimes you just end up with a junky genre movie.

Maybe there’s an epic novel in his head, but what [Costner's] given us with “Chapter 1” is a table of contents instead.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash.

Because there’s little internal logic in IF, you may find yourself constantly asking why the characters are doing what they do, or how the whole imaginary-friend thing works within the context of the movie.

Boy Kills World, a cheeky and extremely bloody action extravaganza, keeps an audience so off-balance for so long that you may throw in the towel well before the final bad guy falls.

Well, there are worse ideas for movies and certainly worse casts, and Michael Lembeck’s genial, predictable comedy rolls along on well-worn tracks elevated by the class and commitment of actors who’ve earned our affection over decades of work.

Hardcore fans and gamers will thrill to the contractually required scene where a fighter has his still-beating heart ripped out of his chest. But that’s the only time Mortal Kombat shows a pulse.

It’s a shame: Odenkirk begins the movie with a rep as a smart and slippery performer, but by the end of Nobody, he could be anybody.

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.