What he (Fukunaga) doesn't deliver, however, is a fresh take on an often-told love story.

It’s a throwback slow-burn thriller and an over-the-top scenery-chewing buffet — sometimes in the same scene. The back-and-forth tone prevents it from being the serious examination of human behavior (and misbehavior) it believes itself to be. It makes the experience of watching more strange than immersive.

It’s clever. It’s also occasionally a chore to watch, true to the boredom you’d expect to feel listening to computer programmers hash out chess logistics.

What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in Lee’s performance. He is effectively stern as the king. More importantly, he makes Ha-seon funny and movingly genuine.

The film feels overlong and a bit repetitious, but it’s obviously a complex subject that deserves a thought-out treatment.

Strongman is a documentary Diane Arbus might have made: These are the wretched of the Earth, and our peeking into their lives feels intrusive.

In Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, director R.J. Cutler’s film about the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, he allows the audience to come in its own time to what seems obvious by the end: For all of her talent, which is considerable, and her brilliance as a recording artist, Eilish is a teenager trying to figure out her place in the world.

Miles Ahead is by no means a perfect film, but it is an interesting one. In this case, driven by Cheadle’s performance, that’s more than enough.

How to Be Single has enough laughs and heartfelt moments to appeal to all generations.

Swank and Rockwell, both typically great in almost everything they do, act as if their lives depended on it - their lives, not their characters'.

Busy, busy. That's The Adventures of Tintin boiled down to its essence.

A funny, if slight, documentary.

There was something about the first film, about seeing not just the horror but also the joy of growing up through the kids’ eyes. That’s lost by necessity here, but It Chapter Two certainly misses it. And so do I.

It’s a good movie. It’s also a flawed one. And in this case more than most, it’s hard to separate those two things.

Every now and then you run across a film in which a really talented cast takes a crack at a well-worn genre entry. For the most part, that’s what Permission is, though writer and director Brian Crano tosses in a couple of wrinkles.

X-Men: First Class isn't anywhere close to being a genre classic like "Spider-Man 2" or "The Dark Knight," but it is good enough to rejuvenate a franchise stuck on idle.

Randall Park, the actor (“Fresh Off the Boat”) making his feature-directing debut with a script Adrian Tomine adapted from his graphic novel, displays a confidence here that is infectious.

How you feel about Knight and Day will depend largely on your feelings about Cruise. If you can't divorce his performance from his off-screen antics, well, that's a problem, here and elsewhere. If you're willing to watch what's on-screen and leave it at that, there's fun to be had.

The authenticity that Collette brings to a woman desperate for some kind of change and the willingness to seek it is inspiring. She’s the real winner here.

It's all very stylized and flashy and modern, self-consciously hip in a way that's clearly been designed to speak to generations for whom Elvis Presley may not be the King of Rock 'n' Roll so much as the guy on the soundtrack to "Lilo & Stitch."

What saves Meadowland from being an exercise in masochism is the acting. Wilson and Wilde have a light touch that makes them perfect for the comedies they often make. Here, Morano leads them to much darker places, and they plunge right in.

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.

Alvarez puts us in the interesting position of rooting for the bad guy, and continually changing our ideas of who that is, a genuinely intriguing idea. Don’t Breathe doesn’t always live up to that potential, but for much of the movie it comes close.

Reeves was born to this kind of role — quiet, moody, looks nice in black. He’s just as good as he was in the first film, because he’s exactly the same. In many ways, so is the film. That’s fine this time around, because John Wick: Chapter 2 is just as crazily entertaining.

It’s a horror movie that is actually scary; it’s got a good idea that feels both relevant and contemporary; and it’s really gross. (That’s a plus — it is a horror movie, after all. Sometimes they skimp.) I just wish I understood its logic a little better.

Broderick and Röhrig's chemistry is so unusual that it works well in this strong feature film directing debut for Shawn Snyder. And that goes for the whole movie. It's so odd that viewers need to see it.

The film, directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (“Little Miss Sunshine”), might have come off as too breezy were it not for the leads: Emma Stone as King and Steve Carell as Riggs.

A cunning civics lesson about religious pluralism that will have civic-minded citizens throwing up the devil horns even if they’re not quite ready to proclaim mocking allegiance to Satan.