It leads exactly where we think it will on a sometimes funny, ultimately predictable, journey.

The end result is as dour and unilluminating as British weather.

There's no question that Black women are underrepresented in movies. There's also no question that when they get a chance to perform, they deserve a better movie than For Colored Girls.

Spare Parts is the kind of feel-good underdog movie that almost can't help getting waylaid by cliches.

Just slam the pedal to the floor, blast on past the weaknesses in the plot, and enjoy the ride.

Good intentions can only take you so far. So it is with Freeheld, a well-meaning movie whose sterling intentions, timely and provocative subject and terrific cast are muted to near oblivion by uninspired storytelling and direction.

The general dippiness isn't helped by the dialogue: "Every word in Italian is like a truffle!" Gilbert exclaims as she learns the language. Equally annoying is the gauzy lighting, which gives Roberts a sweetly angelic glow most of the time.

It's a style of storytelling that leaves the audience guessing, but it also gives the actors room to breathe, to inhabit their characters without having to explain them away in terms of biography or pop psychology.

Sneider, who keeps the tone starkly unsentimental, manages to stay fairly neutral with the couple. Both characters are wildly flawed, and you can feel your sympathies shift during their knock-down, drag-out fights.

What elevates this sequel are stakes.

Despite the best efforts of Plaza and the rest of the cast, Life After Beth never winds up being as scary or as funny as it ought to be.

There are some poignant moments in the movie's latter half, as well as a couple of genuine laughs. If it never achieves the heft it wants, it at least manages a sitcommy kind of charm, like an extended episode of "The Golden Girls." Perhaps more importantly, it gives Rowlands a lead role, which is never a bad thing.

I appreciated the effort Delpy, directing her sixth feature, puts forth in trying to spice up the genre. But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed it.

Going in Style will probably be a lot more enjoyable if you’ve never seen the original. It’s not that the remake is terrible. It’s cheerful and undemanding, and an appealing cast makes the time go by painlessly enough. But the 1979 film is poignant and layered.

The Zero Theorem feels like Gilliam's keen intellect chasing its own tail.

Racer and the Jailbird, the inelegantly translated title of “Le Fidele,” is a first-rate caper movie. It’s also a pretty good romance. And a boring, suffocating melodrama.

The Guilt Trip surprises by avoiding the obvious. It zigs when you expect it to zag. It's perceptive and thoughtful as it swerves around potholes that easily could have broken an axle.

That American Ultra works as well as it does is a testament to its two lead performances.

There is never any doubt where this is going, and the film takes far too long to get there.

The trouble with a movie like Jungle Cruise is the comparison it invites. And in this case, the ride is better.

I like movies like “Rosario” — creepy little horror films with enough scares to keep you on edge and enough of a story to keep you invested.

Just when you're ready to throw in the towel, Plummer does something that keeps you going; maybe it's the quietly affecting way Jack turns up the twinkly charm as age and illness are starting to take things away. Then there's Farmiga's ability to mine a laugh out of angst and yet remain human, and MacDougall's sly, sleepy charm.

There’s a lot to be admired here, and After the Wedding certainly gives you a lot to think about. It just doesn’t quite make you feel all the feels.

For all its issues, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is a good excuse to get out of the house with the family and take the kids to see something fun. And that’s what this movie is: fun. Even if I was bored and unmoved, the target audience will have a great time.

It's all very relatable. The film allows audiences to see that we are all human beings trying to make sense of the world and live our lives.

As with nearly everything else in The Campaign, a little goes a long way, until it finally just goes on too long, period.

My Policeman weaves a compelling tale of star-crossed love through different perspectives and timelines.

Put this title on your Netflix queue in the first place. Just give your own Mr. Right a break and don't waste your date-night dollars on the big screen.

There are a couple of good performances and a few funny bits, but mostly the film just bounces back and forth until coming to a flat, trite close.

It’s not just that the jokes aren’t funny, or that they’re given to genius comic actors like Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to deliver — which has to be some kind of pop-culture crime — the bigger issue is that there's not a single instance of recognizable human behavior in the entire film.

A flawed script prevents Welcome to the Rileys from being the effective meditation on grief and healing it wants to be.

Disney movie about U.S. cavalrymen who are short on horses so they start riding camels. But how many movies feature Slim Pickens, Denver Pyle and Jack Elam? A cornucopia of coots. [18 Aug 2006, p.1]

There are scenes here and there that are worthy, but many that aren't. Lipsky tries to use dialogue to cover up weaknesses in other areas - such as why these people behave the way they do. Some of the movie is inviting, some of it off-putting.

Now You See Me is a movie about magic, but its most astonishing trick is how little mileage it gets out of a stellar cast.

The audience should be given game controllers upon entering the theater. It wouldn't mean the film would make any more sense, but at least you'd feel like you had some say in the matter.

Exactly what it sounds like: a cowboy movie and an alien movie thrown together, a genre mash-up that's more fun than good, but pretty good nonetheless.

You'd expect the sequel to be an improvement based on production values alone, and you would be right, but not by much.

It’s exceptionally well made, daring and experimental, with a powerful performance from Ana de Armas at its center. At its everything, really — she dominates the film, as well she should. But the film is also too long, too self-indulgent, just too much. It is a marathon of misery.

The story is the problem here, devolving into a ridiculous situation that produces far more groans than chills or thrills.

The tone is so uneven, the shifts so jarring, that they overtake the movie’s modest pleasures.

The plot is ingeniously engineered, but the narrative is like a low-res image. It gets the idea across, but without the kind of details that make it memorable.

It’s not fair to either of these actors to want to see Rocky and the Terminator over and over again. But it is fair to want to see them in something better than this.

It’s one part history lesson and one part ode to the rapidly fading quality of refinement. But mostly, it’s a chance to indulge in juicy celebrity stories, catnip for those who love that kind of thing.

Go for Caan and Farmiga, and stay to be surprised by Reeves.

Unfortunately Jean-Marc Vallée’s film doesn’t measure up to Gyllenhaal’s performance.

This is a stunningly accurate portrayal of our current climate. And it’s not pretty.

What raises it a notch above the typical slick Hollywood romances are its stars, Ludivine Sagnier and Nicolas Bedos.

The director is known for visually quirky choices and offbeat interviews and asides. These techniques can be a mixed bag; sometimes they help lighten up a deadly serious segment, other times they seems silly. But it’s distinctive, and “This Is Us” could have used more of it.

You don't have to be endowed with an otherworldly gift to know that What Men Want will do little to please the men or women watching it.

TRON: Legacy may well satisfy the fanboys who have waited almost three decades for its appearance. Enjoy. Who knows, maybe one day if you wait long enough they'll make a "Super Mario Bros." sequel, too.

While this version, listed as a "prequel," has a few gross-out moments, it lacks any sense of warmth. Which might be an odd criticism of a horror movie set in Antarctica, but there you have it.

Instead of delving into the moral questions WikiLeaks asks by its very existence, Condon gives those a passing nod in a couple of weak subplots.

Den of Thieves isn't a masterpiece by any means, but it's fun, exciting and hard-boiled, and the actors are doing solid work.

American Reunion depends more on the audience's feelings for recognizable characters than telling an original story, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

One of those message movies that never uses subtlety when a sledgehammer is handy.

Gosling and Evans are movie stars, no doubt about it. How far that charisma can take a film is a question “The Gray Man” asks and answers: pretty far, but not far enough.

It's a soapy, predictable ride where everyone learns about the importance of family. And though it's just a Christmas tree away from being a holiday special, the stellar cast wrings just enough genuine emotion out of a stale premise to make it mostly sweet.

The story simply doesn't stand up, with its combination of well-worn plot elements and confusing red herrings -- or maybe they're just details that don't add up.

There are plot twists galore, but they unfold in ham-fisted fashion, as if the screenwriter (newbie Brian Tucker) didn't know how to layer the mystery. Instead, the movie simply drops these secrets out of nowhere, in clunky fashion.

The plot is lacking in emotional weight, even though the adversities are right there on paper.

Director McG proves perfectly adept at blowing things up in interesting ways, but there's not so much acting here as there is yelling at different volumes.

If it doesn’t have the family drama of “Walk the Line” or the psychodrama of “The Doors,” Bohemian Rhapsody does deliver what any music biopic must: convincing characters and some kick-butt simulated concert experiences.

It's all well done and cute and forgettable.

It’s befuddling that such a barrier-breaking filmmaker would make a biopic about a woman who shares similar daring qualities that’s so … ordinary. To make boring the revelries of 19th century literati is no mean feat, but it is Mary Shelley's chief accomplishment.

Trouble is, it all adds up to . . . not much.

Director David Leitch’s film, based on the novel by Kôtarô Isaka, is a hyper-stylized, hyper-violent action film that rarely comes up for air. It’s also a big ol’ mess. Although everyone involved seems to be having a good time.

The star wattage is blinding, but the film fizzles out.

It all adds up to a decent movie — one that, for those in the know, stands in the shadow of a better one.

Owen and Binoche both are quite good, rising above the material for the most part. But even they can't save the film from itself, or from an ending that's downright bizarre.

The imagery is romantically period, with textured scenes staged in handsomely lit smoke-filled rooms, its newsreels and baseball stadiums suffused with charming Americana. But you can’t root for set design or feel empathy for colored filters. You need human beings for that, and The Catcher Was a Spy keeps its heart under lock and key.

Little won't offer a lot of surprises as it hums along to the inevitable conclusion, but it is funny.

It's not a total wash. Shaye's performance is reliably good and the sequences set in The Further (the netherworld of the "Insidious" films) have a kicky charge.

Riddick aims much lower than the stars and still doesn't quite hit its target. But when you consider a summer overstuffed with disappointing prestige pics that cost the GDP of several island nations to produce, Riddick's more modest (and less expensive) stumbling doesn't seem so bad in comparison.

Without a buttress of cleverness, Cooties is mere freewheeling idiocy.

Unfortunately, the name is the only thing emboldened about this starchy biopic, a dry, talky affair that even Liam Neeson in full glower can’t bring to life.

In the end, How to Make a Killing is fine, fun, a nice diversion starring, if no longer the flavor of the month, then a good actor elevating the material around him.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at what we see in “One Track Heart,” but harder to dismiss the happiness and peace on display here.

Lola Versus isn't a bad movie. It's just not a particularly noteworthy one. It's too self-consciously ... everything.

Director and co-writer Terry George (“Hotel Rwanda”) tries his best to give the film an epic sweep, but he substitutes quantity of plot threads for quality of story.

There are some funny parts, of course, because the cast is so talented. But it’s too much work for too little payoff — sound and fury signifying nothing. Nothing but Minion fart jokes.

Director Ruben Fleischer, who directed Eisenberg in the worlds-better "Zombieland," never finds that kind of successful groove here, instead bouncing from one set piece to another, with vastly inconsistent results.

Once the twist becomes apparent, the film stops being scary and you stop caring about Sarah, despite Olsen's graceful performance. It's a shame. If the film stayed on track, it might have been come close to being a classic. As it is now, it's a huge missed opportunity.

The action is entertaining enough, and it's kind of fun to follow the intricate plotting and planning of the jobs.

Despite the silly-sounding premise, it's a wistful, bittersweet meditation on aging and death.

That it chooses to waste a capable cast of mature actors by trotting out tired sex jokes as the enfeebled old men plot the world's most needlessly convoluted bank heist solves the mystery of why it took the film two years to limp its way to American cinemas.

McConaughey has become one of the more interesting actors around, someone whose next role is always worth checking out. But in Gold, the balance is off somehow — he’s acting up a storm, but a muddled story and hard-to-figure character ultimately betray him.

There is an engrossing, important story at the heart of 7 Days in Entebbe. Unfortunately, it only shows up intermittently.

While the film’s last 30 seconds are refreshing, they hardly redeem the previous 90 minutes of utter predictability.

There's just nothing magical about the story, nothing that lifts it above its status as an agreeable song-and-dance movie, a laugh here, a laugh there, pleasant but overly busy, for seemingly no real reason other than to throw a few more set pieces at the wall to see what sticks.

Live by Night is a mess. It’s got some interesting elements that Affleck, who wrote the script based on a Dennis Lehane novel, surprisingly can’t pull together. And, it must be said, his performance in the lead role isn’t up to snuff.

The elements of a good story are here, and the talent to tell it is more than willing. The movie just never quite gets there.

Surprisingly, the movie doesn’t bear much of the stylistic stamp we’ve come to expect of Lee, who’s in his generic journeyman mode here. But aside from a satisfyingly clever new direction in the denouement, what distinguishes the remake from the original is its cartoonishness.

Inkheart is entertaining enough, if not always easy to follow. And if it does nothing else, at least it may inspire kids to read, if for no other reason than to help make sense of it all.

[Jennifer Aniston's] performance in Cake is rightly being praised as a dramatic breakthrough (no one doubts her comedic chops). She's really good. It's just too bad the movie does her no favors.

It’s when bullets fly that Bay is at his best. He stages the battles well, and builds tension effectively and at times inventively.

Sure, these roles aren't exactly a stretch, with Duvall being crotchety and Downey being sharp-witted. But that familiarity is part of the appeal. They're good at this. Really good. After all, as has been noted, they're not movie stars for nothing.

Despite a solid storyline that adds to the series with a lively team of characters, there are parts of the film that could've been better.

The movie, like Jackie, loosens up a bit, and her relationship with Ian adds a nice bit of warmth. Hunt directs the film, and at times its tonal shifts are a bit jarring.