Cube is excellent as the doughy, rumpled ex-somebody who finds new life in helping to save somebody else's.

Sister Aimee is a scrappy period piece that supplants the things a bigger budget might have afforded with good choices about things that were under the filmmakers’ control.

Exodus is an entertainment of the first order. I’m not so sure about the filmmaker’s decision to render the Metatron archangel as a 9-year-old boy, but what the hell? You get hit on the head with a boulder, who knows what you’ll see?

The Contractor seems torn between two types of films: the direct-to-video staple of a reluctant soldier bearing arms to protect his family, and a bleaker condemnation of private contracting (and the systems of power that necessitate its survival). It is the second film that blinks first, leaving Pine and Foster to carry the remaining scenes to their generic conclusion.

Wall to wall blood 'n' guts laced with surprisingly keen social satire, much of it targeting the fatuousness of media culture.

Paul Kirby's production design stands outs for its opulent re-creation of the golden glitz and ostentatious trappings of the Iraqi palace, but otherwise The Devil's Double belongs to filmdom's hoi polloi.

On the strength of this sequel – a dense yet deft return to the high standards Yates set with the Potter films – count this Muggle’s heart and mind all in.

Kiddos: I'm sighing, too, but only from relief it's all behind us now.

It’s bleak and brutal, and Waugh’s cold tone (a definite throwback to Shot Caller) leaves no one with clean hands. But as a testament to the costs of a noble sacrifice in the face of institutional inhumanity, it’s as vital as any of his earlier films.

Producer Joel Silver and Willis keep trying to remake Die Hard. This time they call in Top Gun director Scott. The result is mildly interesting, but there are so many weird and gratuitous scenes of insane violence that the effect is drained of impact.

Kunis and McKinnon don’t exactly set the screen on fire with their chemistry, and there are only the most perfunctory shadings to their characters.

There’s not a sympathetic character in the bunch.

The eye candy can't quite compensate for the murky mess of a plot.

It's not perfect - infrequently the comedy and drama rub up against each other too much - but it is the genuine article: a wholly unique family film that can moisten your eyes even while it quickens your pulse.

It's definitely not hard to understand what the little girls see in Bieber, and this film delivers the goods. This one's for the fans, not the movie buffs.

Gondry’s well-meaning but too soft, too structure-less picture.

Fallen's pretentious vision of a demonic force out to shatter the life of one lowly homicide detective is, ultimately, a pretty silly ride despite the film's obvious strengths and some genuinely eerie scenes.

David Lynch doesn't tell stories as much as he shows hallucinations. Wierd, wild, excessive, obsessive, idiosyncratic visions.

Teetering between folly and genius, this Will Ferrell comedy masquerading as a Mexican soap opera-cum-horse opera unfortunately levels off somewhere near the undistinguished center.

Hook has you marveling at the nuts-and-bolts work of producers and assistant directors, but never at the intrinsic imaginativeness of the story. It's as if Spielberg calculatedly set out to make a perennial classic -- certain folly if ever there were.

Not since Mario Bava's "Hercules in the Haunted World" has Greco-Roman movie-house mythmaking been so thoroughly well-conceived and executed.

Fans of the original films will dig Richards and Eisenmann's cameo appearances.

Just watching the trailer for Oliver Stone's new football epic a few weeks back left me with a grating headache; watching the whole sweaty film practically put me in the ICU.

“Freely inspired by a true story.” That’s the filmmakers’ cunningly phrased hand-wave acknowledging the gap between actual history and the moony-eyed imagined romance proffered here. Still, it’s a curious deployment of the creative license: You’d think the construction of one of man’s greatest monuments would supply sufficient drama on its own.

Though not nearly as perfect as Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt (to cite two of Forman's previous semibiographical efforts), Goya's Ghosts uses the lives of artists and historical figures to show us the best and the worst of our human impulses.

A relentlessly good-humored, life-affirming film.

There's a genuine, sparky chemistry between the three (and later, a fourth), and Robertson, particularly, is luminous in her role.

Either you like your movies to be, well, movie-like: imitations of life, with musical accompaniment and artificial lighting and tracking shots and looped dialogue; or you like them to be re-creations of life, sans the artifice. The King Is Alive clearly falls into the latter camp.

The character of Valentin is immediately recognizable to anyone who's gone to more than 20 films in their lives -- charming, cuddly, hellbent on making his world tolerable -- but to his credit both Noya and Agresti don't overplay their hand.

Too self-referential for its own good by half.

No one would mistake the Benzini Bros. Circus for the greatest show on earth – the Depression-era traveling troupe is a junker compared to the gold-standard Ringling Bros. – but still, a film has to try pretty hard to render lions and tigers and trapeze artists so uniformly underwhelming.

Elliptical, authentic, and with a strong palate of visual flair, Miss Lovely can be a confusing concoction at times, but it is never boring.

Apocalypse never rises from the sum of its parts, becoming another bloated summer spectacle that rides the rail between fan service and coherent story. You can probably guess which side it eventually crashes on.

The script by Mike White (who may have been locked in the writer’s room by Illumination Studios after working on the superior Migration) and series co-creator Ken Daurio feels like a stack of B-plots stapled together rather than a full story.

If Roger Ebert was right and cinema is a machine that generates empathy, then for all its uneven steps, No Man’s Land may worm its way into the hearts of Americans who see Mexico as a supporting character (or worse) in our grand narrative. For the rest of us, it’s a film whose reach exceeds its grasp.

The East is an unrelenting condemnation of the Netherlands’ misguided attempt to return its colonial outreach to a time long gone while hitting most (if not all) of the “doomed war” niche genre movie tropes without ever actually teetering into cliche. That’s an ever-tricky move that Taihuttu aces.

Ultimately, however, this film is a collection of vignettes in search of a narrative center. Although it’s enjoyable, the film never coheres into a whole. Instead, it resembles a pile of ill-fitting jigsaw-puzzle pieces rather than a fully formed picture.

I couldn't help feeling that The International was stuck in second gear, like it couldn't decide whether to be fun or meaningful and so settled for being neither.

In the world of Mel Brooks, everything is fair game and anything is good for a laugh. God bless Mel Brooks.

Weaving, who excels at this kind of character-driven action-horror, plays perfectly with our empathy, wordlessly guiding us through this damned land.

Infinitely more entertaining than anything the WWE has done recently, this sophomore outing from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Hess is full of cheesy goodness, but it's Velveeta.

In Triple 9 and so many other films today, the twists and turns of the contemporary thriller have become a Gordian knot that audiences are not invited to untangle. You may rightfully ask: Where’s the fun in that?

As YA adaptations go, this isn’t quite "The Notebook," but its core demographic of teen girls will likely be more than satisfied.

The storyline lacks credibility.

Great voice work, stunning visuals, and a witty, full script make this entertaining for all ages.

It's delightfully frightful fun, a fine addition to the venerable and febrile tradition of Australian comedy-horror.

The fight scenes are splendidly choreographed...but they're shot in that grating, thoroughly American flashcut style that leaves you wondering just who the hell is hitting who.

After it has ended, you may want to view it all over again, just to see if you can beat the odds and pick up on what you missed the first time around.

The bland script and direction are spruced up by a likable cast.

It’s a frequently riveting gambit, and the actors give it their all. However, the mood and the stylized camerawork make the proceedings too arch to completely succeed.

We've just been to this party before and we know how it ends, again and again and again.

My cynical half hated it, despite the presence of Lane, who is so magnetic that she could prance around the countryside in the absence of plot and still be compelling somehow.

The Nines is the feature-film-directing debut from screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish), but it feels much more like some Bizarro World collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Kaufman, and not in a good way, either.

A thoroughly preposterous movie that's as outrageously entertaining as it is relentlessly chaotic.

Director Espinosa stages the endless action with a tremendous flair that recalls John Woo's grittier moments, and cinematographer Oliver Wood, who shot Woo's finest Hollywood moment, "Face/Off," gives the whole violent show a downright brackish look that borders on the sublime.

The all-around excellent cast swings with aplomb from silly to sweet.

The film constantly plays against expectations. Reitman’s skilled direction of the superb cast allows the ridiculous to become poetic, the artificial to unfold naturally, the absurd to achieve a deep romantic resonance.

The Hunger is typically Tony Scott -- more style than substance, and perhaps simply an excuse to get Denueve and Susan Sarandon, Miriam's post-Bowie love, in bed together.

If Slingshot leaned into that character study, rather than roughly gaffer-taping it to a deep space thriller, maybe it wouldn’t stall out on the launch pad so badly.

Every once in a while, a movie is more than a movie, but it’s surprising when that becomes the case with a punk-ass comedy, one that’s more puerile than pointed yet not without some good laughs.

While retaining the core story of a bionic man tormented by the memory of his former human life, the film doesn’t play with the concept or give it new dimension. The whole enterprise raises the question: Why do filmmakers insist on remaking movies for no good reason?

While not exactly rote, the script undeniably feels a little derivative in places.

Saint Laurent gets across how isolating celebrity can be, how exhausting it is to keep a toehold on top of a mountain that keeps shifting underfoot. But the film is allergic to insight: It’s as numbed-out as its hero addict.

Certainly lead adult actor Arnezeder has panache to spare, as does Bousinna, but the muddled storyline defeats them time and time again, no matter how perfectly angry/hopeful their lines are.

Beautiful Creatures is a fascinating amalgam that demonstrates that a movie can be smart and dumb at the same time.

It’s fun, gore-drenched, and even touching at times. All that’s missing from the toothy chaos and broad comedy on display here is Dame Judi Dench and the kickass title that could have been: "The Best Necrotic Mandible Hotel."

The barrage of information in Rebels is at times wearying; indeed many of the speakers look somewhat battle-weary, but there's clearly still a holy fire burning deep within their now-hooded eyes.

No doubt this effort will find its fans, as it should, but there's a lot of lost potential.

For the most part, though, Nothing Bad manages to hold a tight grip, evocative as it is of Lars von Trier’s similarly unflinching "Dogville" and equally bound to start some conversations among those willing to stomach it.

Playing a 70-year-old seeking renewed purpose as an intern at an Internet start-up, Robert De Niro is gentle as a kitten. Is it disrespectful to want to greet this icon of American cinema with a snuggle and a tumbler of warm milk?

This remake of the 1972 Peckinpah gem lacks the Ali McGraw/Steve McQueen heart and soul of the original, opting instead for the vacuous and thoroughly forgettable anti-chemistry of Baldwin and Basinger.

When Dangerous Beauty grows up, it wants to be a Merchant/Ivory film. Too bad puberty is still such a long way off.

Lively’s performance grows more engaging as her facade finally begins to crack, and Huisman serves as a sufficiently handsome foil throughout, but if anyone rises to the occasion, it’s Harrison Ford as a former flame reunited with Adaline through a perverse twist of fate.

The film retroactively makes Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis look like a masterpiece for actually trying to be bedazzling and insane, because Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody is so stale it might as well have been shoved directly onto a streaming platform to wither away forgotten – unlike Houston’s discography, which will be remembered for decades to come.

There are significant stretches of talky tedium, more than a few “huh” moments for neophytes – especially whenever anyone starts nattering on about Dust with a capital D – and the ending plays abruptly, but there’s plenty here to hang a franchise on.

Burns has done such a thorough job of perfectly re-creating the moment that even the non-events (family dinners, procrastinated college-enrollment applications, the banal yet life-or-death routines of being a teen on the cusp) are lovingly rendered.

What A Walk in the Woods doesn’t have, however, is plot, character development, narrative conflict, and resolution – in other words, a destination.

Those who just want to watch dinosaurs eat people in creative ways? They’re destined to get their money’s worth.

Subtitled “A Street Romance,” writer-director Singleton's sophomore effort touches the heart more when it's on the street than when it's making romance.

Awesome.

Has an unerring eye for the banal intricacies of 1950s pre-planned suburban neighborhoods, à la Levittown.

Woo's mainstreaming his vision here, and though Windtalkers has its moments of precious, awful clarity, it can't hold a candle to the man's earlier blood-soaked balletics.

The soundtrack is a boisterous blast from the past, and there's a quiet pleasure to watching Zoe and Daly let their composure loose like scrambled eggs, but there's little else to hold dear here.

He's like the bizarro version of Wes Anderson’s same meticulous attention to detail, but while you can tell Anderson wants to entertain you with a story, Refn is clearly more interested in mood and highly stylized provocation. With The Neon Demon, he more or less succeeds.

What could have been a worthy tribute becomes a by-the-numbers melodrama.

This is definitely one My Hero Academia adventure that should go back to the classroom.

Contraband is a tidy little thriller that makes up in execution what it lacks in originality.

It’s important to note that Breathe was produced by the Cavendishes’ son Jonathan, who co-owns a production company with Serkis. I suppose not everyone sees their parents for the flawed humans that they are, but in this case, things would be a lot more interesting if they did.

Although Gilliam's bright color palette and weird camera angles lift the film, it has an overall sense of darkness, as if shot among people who have yet to see the Age of Enlightenment.

Despite featuring emotionally static characters who undergo no personal development and having the structure of basic robbery-and-chase setup, Bullet Head is the kind of action film that throws mindlessness to the dogs.

Cesar Chavez, though respectful and illuminating, never rises to the inspirational level of its titular subject.

The appearance of Richard Gere as a new guest whom everybody assumes is a plant from the multinational hotel chain that Muriel and Sonny have been wooing is straight out of the “Hotel Inspectors” episode of Fawlty Towers. Where’s John Cleese when you really need him?

A compelling small-scale drama, and Lapica is a talent to watch.

There are warm, genuine moments that endear these attractive characters and their experiences to us despite all the falderal. Feast of Love may be enough for some to keep the pangs at bay ’til the real thing comes along.

In practice, and played as farce, the characters are one-dimensional cutouts kept at a dogged remove. Their miseries are a bore – maybe to Allen, too, who abruptly ends the film, after so much inaction, when it finally catches some dramatic traction.

High Heels becomes mired in its own best intentions - primary colors and all.

In its best moments, the film's duo of Galifianakis and Downey Jr. remind us of a bickering Laurel & Hardy digging themselves out of another fine mess. And we're happy to be along for the ride.

I like the declarative clarity, the strength of conviction in the title. I wish the movie itself bore the same certainty, or sturdiness.