As Karla turns into Super Mom, brushing off multiple car accidents and more than one attempt on her life, Kidnap provides some easy applause-getting moments but grows increasingly over-the-top.

The cinematography has a washed-out, dull tone. The special effects are mediocre. With a few exceptions, the dialogue is stilted and filled with expository passages so obviously intended to explain things to us, I half-expected characters to turn to the camera and say, “Here’s what you need to know so you can understand what’s happening.”

Without question, Broadway producer Amanda Lipitz’s brilliant feature film directorial debut is deeply moving and inspirational, but unlike most documentaries it also makes for very entertaining viewing.

Score is a straightforward film told in relatively broad strokes.

Landline is a very funny film about people dealing with very serious situations.

This is an astonishingly uninvolving and at times almost laughably melodramatic effort, marred by overwrought voice-over narration from Theron, a relentless barrage of scenes depicting horrific human suffering and a love story featuring one-dimensional characters we don’t particularly care about.

Punch kick stab shoot. Borrow from “Bourne” and Bond. Rinse and repeat. This is the recipe for the quite ridiculous, ultra-violent and deliriously entertaining Atomic Blonde.

An intimate, often heartbreaking chronicle.

Arriving in theaters almost exactly 50 years since the Detroit riots of late July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is a searing, pulse-pounding, shocking and deeply effective dramatic interpretation of events in and around the Algiers Motel.

The blood-soaked potboiler First Kill is Generous Pour through and through, from Bruce Willis playing a cop for the umpteenth time in his career to the old switcheroo we can see coming a mile away to the pounding and overwrought score to some genuinely effective detours and subplots.

The characters in Girls Trip aren’t always three-dimensional and their actions aren’t always completely believable — but even in their worst moments, their humanity shines through and they are consistently likable.

Sure, the pricey special effects are impressive to behold (though, as usually the case, the 3D is nothing to text home about). And yes, at times “Valerian” creates a strange and beautiful universe. Which ultimately means nothing, because the plot is paper-thin.

Nolan has crafted a tight, gripping, deeply involving and unforgettable film that ranks about the best war movies of the decade.

Baldwin and Moore generate genuine heat and chemistry together, even in some ridiculous moments.

True, The Little Hours is essentially a one-joke comedy — but most of the jokes under the umbrellas of that one joke are pretty damn, I mean darn, funny.

Roughly 60 percent of A Ghost Story is disturbingly beautiful and spiritually challenging and stuck to me like a memory magnet. About 40 percent of A Ghost Story is maddeningly still and achingly self-conscious and just a little too pleased with itself.

Serkis is brilliant and memorable and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking as Caesar. The supporting players excel, with each getting a moment or two in the sun.

Hickok is not without its corny, borderline-cheesy moments of fun — but it eventually loses steam due to the increasingly cliché-riddled story developments, not to mention the awkwardly edited shootouts that sometimes make it seem as if the combatants filmed their scenes on separate days.

The best thing about Spider-Man: Homecoming is Spidey is still more of a kid than a man. Even with his budding superpowers, he still has the impatience, the awkwardness, the passion, the uncertainty and sometimes the dangerous ambition of a teenager still trying to figure out this world.

This is a disappointing, misguided movie that has all of the parts in place to be a much better one.

The high-tech stuff is absorbing. Harrison Ford once again demonstrates what a solid, convincing actor he is, and there's good supporting work from Archer, Thora Birch as the Ryans' precocious daughter, and the irreplaceable James Fox as a British cabinet minister. But at the end, when a character is leaping into a burning speedboat in choppy seas, I wondered if this was exactly what Tom Clancy had in mind.

Despite the pairing of the eminently likable and talented Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler as the leads, and about a dozen recognizable (and usually funny) supporting players, The House is a fetid, cheap-looking, depressing and occasionally even mean-spirited disaster.

It would be easy to tear the plot to shreds and catch Kramer in the act of copping out. But why? On its own terms, this film is a joy to see, an evening of superb entertainment.

It is funny and smart and wise and silly, it is romantic and sweet and just cynical enough, and it is without a doubt one of the best romantic comedies I have seen in a long time.

All great farces need a certain insane focus, an intensity that declares how important they are to themselves. This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny. And yet, when the cowboys sit around their campfire singing a sad lament and then their horses join in, you see where the movie could have gone.

The 'Burbs tries to position itself somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Twilight Zone, but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story.

The 1971 version of The Beguiled was blunt and overheated and a little bit nuts. The 2017 edition is more sophisticated and nuanced — but it’s still a little bit nuts.

Blame It On Rio has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

It all works. All of it. The music, the performances, the twists and turns in the plot, the sheer energy and life force of the movie.

The greatly gifted and consistently eccentric writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s Okja is an uneven but never complacent mix of fantastic fairy tale; social satire; heavy-handed commentary on corporate greed and our consumer-crazed culture, and bizarro action film.

The talented writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour raises the crazy stakes with a well-made, sometimes darkly funny and at times bizarrely entertaining film that eventually falls apart due to directorial self-indulgence, excessive grotesquery, a bloated running time, too many half-baked messages—and let’s not forget the distractingly campy appearances by Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey.

Maudie is one of the most beautiful and life-affirming and uplifting movies of the year, capable of moving us to tears of appreciation for getting to know the title subject.

While the plot is a bit shaky in parts, the overall effect of creating needed tension and some outright, out-of-your-seat jumps of fright is quite effective.

All Eyez On Me is enthralling, exhilarating and at times maddening.

At times it’s funny as hell. At other times it’s pretty much a disaster. But it never commits the crime of being tedious.

It’s a portrait of communities and families striving to do right by their kids, but where schools and lack of job programs fail to meet communities’ most desperate needs.

Beatriz at Dinner is entertaining enough as farce — but over the course of a feature-length film, the characters actually become more one-dimensional and less believable.

Thanks in large part to Elliott (and Offerman and Prepon and Ritter, among others), The Hero survives some bumpy, well-worn clichés.

Rough Night doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s also “Painfully Unfunny Night,” “Contrived Night,” “Unsurprising Plot Twist Night” and also, “How Do These Dimwits Ever Make It Through Any Night”?

Cars 3 is a lovely, clever and entertaining generational tale with tons of heart, a simple and effective storyline, wonderful candy-colored visuals and winning voice work from the talented cast of returning regulars and welcome newcomers.

In this haunting, darkly funny and elegiac mood piece, Cranston once again displays a nearly unparalleled ability to make us like and care about men who are selfish and impetuous and reckless — yet still seem to have a core of decency buried deep within.

That’s when It Comes at Night is most effective — when we’re trying to figure out these characters and what exactly is creating those weird noises and jolting thumps beyond the locked doors.

The Mummy is so wall-to-wall awful, so cheesy, so ridiculous, so convoluted, so uninvolving and so, so stupid.

Kate Mara delivers one of the best performances of her career in the title role.

On the stage, it could be a powerful and moving work. As a movie, it’s a sometimes effective but more often tedious history lesson.

Writer-director Martin does a stellar job of balancing sketch-comedy style laughs with genuinely touching moments.

Director Patty Jenkins’ origin story is packed with heart and empathy, and we have Gadot’s endearing performance to thank for that — but it’s also a byproduct of the timeline.

It’s deliberately over the top, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some observers say Pitt made huge miscalculations in his acting choices with the result being the worst performance of his career — but I found it to be a brazenly effective piece of work, well-suited to the material.

The twist on top of the twist was so amateurish, so hacky, so insulting to the viewer, I’m already thinking about apologizing to you guys for just the one-star demerit.

By its nature, “Adios” lacks the thrill of discovery of Wenders’ doc. But like the 1999 film, it pulls at the heartstrings and never lets up.

When you make films from junk TV, more often than not you’re going to wind up with a junk movie.

"Dead Men” works well enough as a stand-alone, swashbuckling comedic spectacle, thanks to the terrific performances, some ingenious practical effects, impressive CGI and a steady diet of PG-13 dialogue peppered with not particularly sophisticated but (I have to admit) fairly funny sexual innuendo.

Virtually every single element in Everything, Everything rings false and manipulative — and that’s BEFORE we get to a Big Reveal so contrived, so insanely implausible, so monstrously tone-deaf, we can see the entire movie plunging off a cliff, landing with a sickening thud in the Land of the Worst Movies of the Year.

You might think a documentary about the obituary writers at the New York Times would be a depressing, sobering, scholarly work — but it’s anything but.

The presentation is gorgeous. The actual meal is nothing but empty calories.

At its core, “Covenant” is a glorified monster movie, with some great “gotcha!” scare moments and, yes, a number of scenes in which a number of supposedly super-smart characters do some really stupid things that get them killed dead-dead-dead.

Liev Schreiber is outstanding as the hulking, rough-edged, amiable and charismatic Wepner.

This is a monster movie disguised as a war movie.

The Lovers gets a tad too theatrical in the last act, and the deeply cynical resolution might not sit well with everyone. (I thought it was just about perfect.)

The tantalizing enticement of Goldie Hawn pairing with Amy Schumer for a mother-daughter, road-trip buddy comedy has some moments, but never fulfills its promise. As their onscreen adventures and antics grow zanier and broader, the laughs actually grow softer and more sporadic.

In its finest moments, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is swift and clever and exhilarating. At its low points, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword plays like a cheesy B-movie, with ridiculous monsters and unintentionally laugh-inducing moments.

Almost nothing about Illicit rings true — but thanks to the likable, earnest and attractive cast, and the semi-salacious, soap-opera vibe to the proceedings, my attention never wandered, and I’ll admit I was mildly curious about how everything would play out.

Risk is filled with dramatic scenes straight out of a spy thriller.

As you might expect from this cast, all four leads are simply outstanding.

Like many a sequel to a slam-bang, much-liked mega-hit, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 isn’t quite as much fun, not quite as clever, not quite as fresh as the original — but it still packs a bright and shiny and sweet punch.

I don’t think you and I need to connect on InstaSkypeChatFaceSnapTweeterBook for you to understand I’m saying we’ve seen this movie before. It’s just usually not this smug or condescending or muddled or inconsistent.

In a film about a magician, the most impressive trick in Sleight is how director and co-writer J.D. Dillard is able to spin such a memorable and unique tale on a micro-budget.

Either you’re in the mood for a series of gruesomely creative kills and lots of dark humor — or you’re not.

Gere’s work in “Norman” is to be treasured. It’s one of the best performances in any movie this year.

Yes, The Promise veers into corny territory, and yes, it’s derivative of better war romances — but it’s a solid and sobering reminder of the atrocities of war, bolstered by strong performances from Isaac and Bale, two of the best actors of their generation.

This is the type of adventure that transports you to a world so exotic and lush and mysterious and dangerous, it feels as if we’re on a different planet.

Before it was even over, I was already forgetting about it.

The great and usually fantastically innovative Werner Herzog has turned Bell’s story into a conventional, cliché-riddled, overly talky and plodding biopic where very little happens for long stretches of time, and we have to endure deadly-dull voice-over narration while looking at admittedly gorgeous scenery and, well, camels.

The problem this time around is the plot is particularly idiotic, the supposedly snappy quips are lame and come at some weirdly inappropriate moments — and it’s all delivered in an extremely bloated package.

From its weird little prologue to a nearly perfect ending, Colossal is a trip in multiple meanings of that word.

This is a film that moves quietly along but speaks volumes.

While this charming movie will be targeted to senior audiences, I hope younger generations check it out — as the humor and underlying messages are truly universal.

Win It All is just the latest stellar collaboration between Swanberg and Johnson.... This is their most conventional film in terms of story arc, but it still has a nifty, indie-without-trying-to-be-hipster feel.

Gifted isn’t the best or most sophisticated or most original film of the year so far — but it just might be my favorite.

So many scenes in Wilson play as if they’re dropped in from a different genre.

You need to be strapped in and focused for director and co-writer Charlie McDowell’s ambitious, unnerving, slightly loopy and beautifully ambivalent gem, which only tackles the question: How would people react if there was absolute proof of an afterlife?

Just about every scene in Ghost in the Shell is a visual wonder to behold — and you’ll have ample to time to soak in all that background eye candy, because the plot machinations and the action in the foreground are largely of the ho-hum retread variety.

This delightful, silly animated romp makes for a really fun time in the theater.

If you appreciate dark, original and chilling gothic horror stories with a supernatural twist, if you like low-low-budget indies that somehow manage to look and feel like big-time major motion pictures, you gotta check out Dig Two Graves.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s stylish and at times fantastically gory Life features an A-list, international and diverse cast, a few grotesque surprises and one very cool and labyrinthine spaceship — but eventually crashes and burns due to multiple failures.

While I clearly cannot recommend this film, I have to admit there were a couple of amusing moments.

So many great actors, cast adrift by a script that feels incomplete and a brilliant director delivering one of his lesser works.

T2 Trainspotting has one foot firmly planted in nostalgia and the other rooted in the present, and thanks in great part to Boyle’s unique, world-class talent, everything old feels new again, and everything new has the blazing look of an original and blazing piece of art.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

While the plot often travels familiar paths and even the impressive camerawork is evocative of other films, Mean Dreams has a few story tricks up its sleeve — and it has Bill Paxton, playing one of the most odious characters he ever played, and doing it with absolute mastery.

It’s a brilliant character study, a devilishly confounding murder mystery, a legitimately haunting psychological thriller, a hell of a ghost story — and one of the most memorable viewing experiences I’ve had in the last few years.

Bill Condon’s take on Beauty and the Beast is almost overwhelmingly lavish, beautifully staged and performed with exquisite timing and grace by the outstanding cast.

A couple of action sequences are well staged. That’s about it for the plus side.

For all the visceral depictions of hatred and violence and human destruction, it feels as if the director is chasing his own tail and forgetting about making it all mean something.

Shirley MacLaine is still a big-screen force. With a quick dismissive glance or a sharp-edged delivery of a one-liner, she creates a handful of genuine and genuinely funny moments.

Regardless of language, this film speaks volumes about the human condition. About childhood. About loss. About family. About unconditional love.

It’s wildly entertaining and it has a sense of humor about itself.