True artists will risk sacrificing audience goodwill for truth and sentimentality for cold historical reality, but Herman doesn't want your respect; he just wants your tears.

As an experiment in mood, as a love song to Paris and to the French New Wave, as a fun, flirty little number, Charlie provides a giddy satisfaction.

It’s hard to say what makes Veronica Guerin feel so distant and uninspiring. Maybe, it’s just as conventional wisdom has always said: Journalism is a dull and tedious business to put on the screen.

Cobbling together so many different characters (nearly all of them familiar to regular viewers) has left the Kids' feature debut as something of a letdown. We've seen it all before, and better, on HBO and Comedy Central.

A startling beauty who radiates both intelligence and a teenager-like surliness, Mackey is Hot Milk’s main point of interest and its stable anchor. She makes a meal of the scraps meted out about Sofia’s backstory, her inner thoughts, and motivations – which is what makes the film’s final moments so rankling.

Maybe it’s just an expression of relief after a summer of superheroes and fantasy scenarios, but 2 Guns is a refreshing blast.

Mostly Legend just lurches.

With its wonderful veteran cast, its heart on its sleeve, and a love for the landscape that suffuses its technique, Don't Come Knocking is a peculiar but rewarding escape.

The movie moves episodically, leisurely, through roughly a decade, and that feels like a gift: to nestle in with these extraordinary, ordinary people and get to know them.

Uneven, ineffective mash-up of sex comedy and artillery-heavy action.

While this is hardly "Breaker Morant," it's nowhere near as mawkish or cloying as it could have been.

Enough already with the pointless gun battles that litter Safe like spent syringes in a shooting gallery. No matter how spastically you edit them, you'll never top John Woo's early work, or, for that matter, Sam Peckinpah's. Aim higher, even if it means fewer hits.

Refreshingly, this isn’t so much a found-footage movie – although it was backed by "Paranormal Activity" overseers Blumhouse Productions – as it is a completed faux documentary, complete with onscreen titles and a cripplingly hilarious end-credits sequence featuring Tyler being Tyler.

Boys adventure stories are a dime (store novel) a dozen, but girls adventure tales are rare things indeed.

Even though the film is a jumble that oftentimes leaves its top-notch cast unmoored and renders its science-fiction elements somewhat anemic in light of our current expectations from special effects, Megalopolis is truly one from the heart, an outpouring from one cinephile to his tribe.

Hero, here, though, might be the wrong word (and I suppose it always was for Bronson's roles). After all, the film's tag line claims that Mr. Majestyk touches the hero in all of us and indicates that this melon picker didn't want to kick ass, exactly, no matter how adept he is at it, but that he was rather forced into it.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is elevated comfort food. The flavors aren’t complex, but it’s nourishing nonetheless.

Aquaman also benefits from a cast that is unafraid to chew a little scenery. Momoa is an established entity at this point in his career; equal parts cartoon character and Eighties action lead, he carries the film through its muddiest moments through sheer charisma.

The reality is that most criminal enterprises operate under a shadow of confusion, of disorganization. That's the story of Arkansas, a hard-boiled noir where the end is written in the messy beginning.

It's stoner comedy of the most absurd kind, part fryboy mental drizzle, part wink-wink audience baiting, and wholly, utterly funny.

When the film leans too heavily into violence, it undercuts the comedy; when the comedy takes center stage, it makes for an awkward bedfellow with the hard-R violence that defines the fight sequences. It’s a tricky line to walk for a Christmas movie – even one as unconventional as this – and Violent Night is not above the occasional stumble.

It's not so much the individual storylines that grab you, but Curtis’ unrelenting optimism. In the end, it's nice to know that love, actually, does conquer all.

Wahlberg brings an intense, often internalized performance to a wickedly written role, and while he’s no James Caan, he’s certainly able to infuse this mesmerizing character study with enough rancid brio to make this self-flagellating hustler believably doomstruck.

After the fact, The Flash feels like the ultimate case in point as to why James Gunn and Peter Safran have been brought in to course-correct the trajectory of the DC enterprise. According to them, this has been retrofitted to be the first of a few transitory films as we exit the DCEU and move into a newly established DC Universe. Here’s hoping they pull it off, because I don’t know how many more of these I can take.

Though Cuaron slips a time or two during his stylistic highwire act, his refreshingly original movie, aided by Hawke's career-best acting in the lead role, is a joy to watch.

A mess, albeit one with occasional flashes of brilliance.

What Sayles gives us is a jumble of ideas and stunning performances that never coalesce into a satisfying movie.

The highlight of this satirical remake of ABC's mid-Seventies buddy-cop anomaly is named, unsurprisingly, Will Ferrell.