In the hands of director and Stevenson High School grad Gene Stupnitsky (“Good Boys”), who co-wrote the screenplay with John Phillips, this is a hit-and-miss romp with just enough wit and heart to carry the day over the utterly predictable plot and the occasional bit of physical comedy that misses the mark.

A creepy documentary with all the elements of a horror film about a demented serial killer, and an extra ingredient: This one is real.

I'd rather August Rush went the whole way than just be lukewarm about it. Yes, some older viewers will groan, but I think up to a certain age, kids will buy it, and in imagining their response, I enjoyed my own.

This is a sweet, bittersweet comedy, well-executed if perhaps a little heavy on anecdotage. You know who might have made it in the old days? I kept thinking of Woody Allen. You don't know what you want. Woody knows what you want.

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks make a lovable couple; she's pretty and goes one-for-one on the bleep language, and Rogen, how can I say this, is growing on me, the big lug.

A Quiet Place doesn’t have the pin-you-to-your-seat originality of “Get Out,” or the psychological depth and pure scare impact of “Lights Out” or the wall-to-wall intensity of “Don’t Breathe,” but it is one of the smarter and more involving horror films of the last few years.

It’s an invaluable look at a complicated and often misunderstood artist who is more than the usual talking points of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “ripped up a picture of the pope on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ ”

The Enforcer is the best of the Dirty Harry movies at striking a balance between the action and the humor. Sometimes in the previous films we felt uneasy laughing in between the bloodshed, but this time the movie's more thoughtfully constructed and paced.

Aladdin is good but not great, with the exception of the Robin Williams sequences, which have a life and energy all their own.

The Laughing Policeman is an awfully good police movie: taut, off-key, filled with laconic performances. It provides the special delight we get from gradually unraveling a complicated case.

Shoot this film in black and white and cast Barbara Stanwyck as Elena, and you'd have a 1940s classic.

First They Killed My Father occasionally strays into overly sentimental territory — and with a running time of 2 hours, 16 minutes, the storyline stalls a bit at times. Mostly, though, this is an accomplished and moving and solid drama from a director who seems on the verge of giving us a great movie sometime soon.

Although it is not a great movie, it contains some moments when the audience is likely to think, yes, being 16 was exactly like that.

One aspect of the film is befuddling. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is a popular blogger with conspiracy theories about the government's ties with drug companies. His concerns are ominous but unfocused. Does he think drug companies encourage viruses? The blogger subplot doesn't interact clearly with the main story lines and functions mostly as an alarming but vague distraction.

It doesn't have the inspired perfection of Stranger Than Paradise, in which every shot seemed inevitable. But it's a good movie, and the more you know about movies, the more you're likely to like it.

This understated documentary, though, has no agenda to shame any one family or agency.

When Alone in Berlin reaches the end of its journey, it’s the performances of Gleeson and Thompson that ensure we’ll never forget the bravery of Otto and Anna.

This is a rip-snorting adventure fantasy for families, especially the younger members who are not insistent on continuity. Director Michael Apted may be too good for this material, but he attacks with gusto.

The movie is essentially a filmed stage play, one of those idea-plays like Shaw liked to write, in which men and women ponder their differences and complexities.

A cast of mostly first-time actors shade the film with a touching realism. Bakri offers a masterful performance, portraying Omar as kind and easygoing while also tamping down those traits in an atmosphere of suspicion and betrayal.

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.

There’s nothing subtle or deeply original about “Fear,” though it does feature some impressive albeit low-budget special effects, first-rate production design and strong performances from the cast.

I now believe in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was one of many who somehow absorbed the notion that it was an imaginary illness. I am ashamed of myself.

It's an intimate performance portrait.

Not often have I been more certain of the direction a movie is heading, or more wrong. Littlerock, a sensitive indie feature by Mike Ott, plays fair. I was misled only by my own cynicism.

Shoot to Kill is fast-food moviemaking - quick, satisfying and transient.

Not a great movie, but it has moments that go off the meter and find visceral impact. The characters driving through the riot-torn streets of Los Angeles provide some of them, and the savage, self-hating irony of Russell's late dialogue provides the rest.

The Witnesses doesn't pay off with a great operatic pinnacle, but it's better that way. Better to show people we care about facing facts they care desperately about, without the consolation of plot mechanics.

With Bening giving an all-in, nomination-worthy performance and Foster providing invaluable supporting work, Nyad is an effectively inspirational biopic.

A rare item these days: An erotic film made well enough to keep us interested. It's about beautiful people, has a lot of nudity, and the sex is as explicit as possible this side of porno.

The film leads to no showy conclusion, no spectacular climax. It is about movement possible within the soul even in difficult times.

The uniquely talented director Josephine Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) and the screenwriter Sarah Gubbins (adapting a 2014 novel by Susan Scarf Merrell) have teamed up with a two-generational quartet of fine actors to create one of the most visually arresting and intellectually provocative films of the year.

What comes across is that she is, after all, a very good editor.

The Last of the Mohicans is not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be -- more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit -- but it is probably more entertaining as a result.

The result is not a movie that is very good, exactly, but it's entertaining and funny.

There is a lot of truth in this portrait of a marriage running out of the will to survive.

This a movie with such a light, stylish touch, it makes no claims to profundity and is a sweetly hopeful experience.

Although the narration is addressed to his wife, we learn little about her, his family or his personal life; he is used primarily as a guide through the milestones of the Congo's brief two-month experiment with democracy.

When those little mice bust a gut trying to drag that key up hundreds of stairs in order to free Cinderella, I don't care how many Kubrick pictures you've seen, it's still exciting.

This is a Western that places the sidekick front and center, and in doing so gives reliable everyman supporting character actor Bill Pullman a rare chance to carry the film, and what a fine job he does with the added responsibilities.

The laughs come at a rapid-fire pace, but the comedy sometimes veers into hokey, over-the-top set pieces.

The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina.

It's hard enough for a director to work with actors, but if you're working with your own family in your own house and depicting passive aggression, selfishness and discontent and you produce a film this good, you can direct just about anybody in just about anything.

By far the best of the mid-1970s wave of disaster films.

Despite a couple of large, genie-blue stumbles along the way, Guy Ritchie’s live-action version of Disney’s Aladdin is on balance a colorful and lively adventure suitable for all ages and a touching romance featuring two attractive leads — and has enough creative musical energy to introduce this story to A. Whole. New. World.

This is the face of dysfunction. Apparently alcohol and drugs are not involved, except perhaps with some of the missing men. The drug here is despair. They seem to treat it with cigarettes.

This movie plays better than perhaps it should. Directed as a debut by Daniel Barber, it places story and character above manufactured "thrills" and works better.

I despised the character of Alan James so sincerely that I had to haul back at one point to remind myself that, hey, I've met Rip Torn and he's a nice guy and he's only acting.

Doesn't reach for reality; it's a deliberate attempt to look and feel like a 1940s social problems picture, right down to the texture of the color photography.

When the material in Uncle Frank wades into soapy, melodramatic waters, the performances are pure and powerful.

Based on the novel of the same name by Olen Steinhauer and directed with style and skill by the Danish filmmaker Janus Metz, All the Old Knives feels like a small-scale version of a John Le Carré adaptation, with the obligatory Spy Movie Score as perfect accompaniment to the tension-building sequences in the restaurant and the cloak-and-dagger stuff in Vienna.

This film is a symphony of recognizable notes.

In a summer where the special effects in movies have grown steadily more repetitive and dreary, "LCTR:TCOL" uses imagination and exciting locations to give the movie the same kind of pulp adventure feeling we get from the Indiana Jones movies.

Working from a clever if occasionally convoluted screenplay by David Golden, director Michael M. Scott has fashioned a classic cautionary tale about two seemingly good and smart people who make some dumb decisions when greed and opportunity come knocking.

Watching the movie is an entertaining exercise in forensic viewing, and the insidious thing is, even if it is a con, who is the conner and who is the connee?

There are some nice, amusing scenes, especially when one of the dozen (Donald Sutherland) pretends to be a general and inspects some troops. In fact, right up to the last scene the movie is amusing, well paced, intelligent.

A jolly movie and I smiled pretty much all the way through, but it doesn't shift into high with a solid thunk the way "Bridget Jones' Diary" did.

After a while, it seems to run out of places to go, but for most of its running time, it’s a wickedly clever divertissement.

Eight different characters, all played by Murphy, all convincing, each with its own personality. This is not just a stunt. It is some kind of brilliance.

As much parable and fantasy as it is realistic.

This one holds its flavor better than most.

What I saw was a successful attempt by the outsiders to dramatize how success and status in the world often depend on props you can buy, or steal, almost anywhere - assuming you have the style to know how to use them.

It’s the beautiful and breathtaking animation that gives The Tale of the Princess Kaguya a luster that is both simple and sophisticated. Once again the visionary Takahata and Studio Ghibli prove that great animation is not just for kids, but can be universal in its reach.

Sandler works so hard at this, and so shamelessly, that he battered down my resistance. Like a Jerry Lewis out of control, he will do, and does, anything to get a laugh. No thinking adult should get within a mile of this film. I must not have been thinking. For my sins, I laughed.

It’s a variation on the teletransportation paradox as filtered through a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, with some B-movie creatures thrown in for good measure.

De Niro infuses Costello with a kind of avuncular charm, while Genovese has the fiery temper and paranoid fury to match Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull.” It’s a privilege to witness one of the best actors of all time, still at the top of his game.

Here is a film that, for all of its plot, depends on characters in service of their emotional turmoil. It feels good to see Coppola back in form.

It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc. Example: Airplane Captain (Peter Graves): Surely you can't be serious. Doctor (Leslie Nielsen): I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. This sort of humor went out with Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and knock-knock jokes. That's why it's so funny.

Griffiths is one of the most intensely interesting actresses at work today.

Both a distraction and a revelation.

Even when writer-director Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s acclaimed novel takes some insanely big dramatic swings and doesn’t always connect, Bale is immersed in his performance — equally powerful when he’s quietly revealing a painful moment from his past or exploding with the earth-shattering rage.

Romero finds still new and entertaining ways for unspeakably disgusting things to happen to the zombies and their victims.

What I liked the most about the second "Dozen," was another performance, the one by Alyson Stoner as their daughter Sarah. As a girl poised on the first scary steps of adolescence, she finds the kind of vulnerability and shy hope that Reese Witherspoon projected in "The Man in the Moon."

The parts work even if the whole leaves me uncertain. Many movies are certain about their whole, but are made of careless parts. Forced to choose, I would take the parts.

Perhaps too laden with messages for its own good, but it has many moments of musical beauty, and it's interesting to watch Janet McTeer.

Die Another Day is still utterly absurd from one end to the other, of course, but in a slightly more understated way. And so it goes, Bond after Bond, as the most durable series in movie history heads for the half-century.

If the film has a flaw, and I'm afraid it does, it's the Sondre Lerche songs on the soundtrack. They are too foregrounded and literal, either commenting on the action or expounding on associated topics. In such a laid-back movie, they're in our face.

This is a film brimming with essential truth about the events at hand, and it delivers an impactful but also entertainingly resonant message. It’s also a crackling good, emotionally satisfying, old-fashioned thriller, with readily identifiable heroes and hiss-worthy villains.

Although at times overly talky, The Holdovers on balance is a charming and smart comedy/drama that is set in 1970 and actually looks like it was made in 1970, from the scratchy opening titles through the grainy-looking visuals, which were achieved through a combination of old school lenses and digital post-production magic. Hal Ashby (“Harold and Maude,” “The Last Detail”) would have been proud.

Director Philipp Kadelbach crafts a war drama cued to the ethics of the characters.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman” is a whip-smart, consistently funny and good-natured film with some terrific voice performances and one of the most hilarious appearances ever by an animated version of a living human being.

Strongman is a tantalizing example of the kind of documentary I find engrossing: A film about an unusual person that invites us into the mystery of a human life.

Every frame of the film is bursting with sensory overload information, from the shaky, hand-held camera angles to the constant scrolling of viewer messages to the occasional use of split screens.

The movie treads a dangerous line. There are times when its ferocity threatens to break through the boundaries of comedy - to become so unremitting we find we cannot laugh.

What IS remarkable, and kind of awesome, is that these confabs were beamed directly into the living rooms of some 40 million Americans via a rather unlikely platform: “The Mike Douglas Show,” a pleasant and mainstream daytime program aimed primarily at what we used to call housewives.

Despite everything I have said, I found Memphis Belle entertaining, almost in spite of my objections. That's because it exploits so fully the universal human tendency to identify with a group of people who are up in an airplane and may not be able to get down again.

Along with charming animated visuals, spot-on voice talent and nicely paced direction, Ferdinand incorporates themes that are very relevant and much-needed for our time.

When the Looney Tunes trademark came on the screen at the kiddie matinee of long ago, the kiddies would cheer in unison because they knew they were going to have unmitigated fun. The Emperor's New Groove evokes the same kind of spirit.

This is an atmospheric, intense film, well acted, and when it's working it has a real urgency.

What I liked about Two-Lane Blacktop was the sense of life that occasionally sneaked through, particularly in the character of G.T.O. (Warren Oates).

While elegantly mounted and well acted, the movie is not the equal of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time. It is also not the equal of the recent film "Atonement," which in an oblique way touches on similar issues.

We veer close to the edge of Precious, Indie-Hipster Cliche so often in Infinitely Polar Bear, but thanks to a gifted filmmaker and two brilliant lead performances, the voice-over narration and the home-movie footage and the flights of fancy aren’t as off-putting as they might have been in lesser hands.

The center of the film is the simple, almost elementary insight that fantasies can be hazardous: You've got to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

The movie is funny without being hilarious, touching but not tearful, and articulate in the way that Burns is articulate, by nibbling earnestly around an idea as if afraid that the core has seeds.

The versatile and talented director David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “The Old Man & the Gun,” “The Green Knight”) and the requisite army of technical wizards have delivered one of the most visually stunning trips to Neverland ever recorded on film, featuring a cast of gifted young actors and reliable veterans who seem born to the roles.

I liked this movie a lot - not just for Bacon and Renfro, but also for the work of the wonderfully-named Calista Flockhart, as the girl who dates Karchy.

Basically the movie is a bubble-headed series of teenage crises and crushes, alternating with historically accurate choreography of such forgotten dances as the Madison and the Roach.

A visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement, but it retreats to formula just when it's getting interesting.