I’m going to tread lightly so as not to spoil too many of the twists and turns, but I will say it’s not often you experience a film that at times plays like a rom-com from the 1990s spliced with something from the John Carpenter playbook.

It’s ugly but not scary. It’s creepy but not chilling. It’s one of the least successful adaptations of a Stephen King story since …The last Pet Sematary.

This movie is one of the most relentlessly nonstop action pictures ever made, with a virtuoso series of climactic sequences that must last an hour and never stop for a second. It's a roller-coaster ride, a visual extravaganza, a technical triumph, and a whole lot of fun.

Appealing performances and a not always predictable storyline help elevate Pulling Strings above the run-of-the-mill rom-com.

Here's a movie that teeters on the edge of being really pretty good and loses its way.

Going All the Way is a deeper, cleverer film than it first seems.

A smaller picture like this, shot out of the mainstream, has a better chance of being quirky and original. And quirky it is, even if not successful.

Likely to entertain kids, who seem to like jokes about anatomical plumbing. For adults, there is the exuberance of the animation and the energy of the whole movie, which is just plain clever.

The kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous.

Kurosawa was a great artist and so even his lesser work is interesting -- just as we would love to find one last lost play, however minor, by his hero Shakespeare.

It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

The main story keeps stalling out in favor of these drive-by interludes that take center stage for a few minutes and then fade into the background, usually never to be heard from again.

With Surrounded, Mandler solidifies his standing as a talented and versatile filmmaker, with Letitia Wright and Jamie Bell burning up the screen as two wounded and fiercely independent adversaries who both realize they’re in this thing together, and the outcome is most likely going to be a bloody mess.

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.

The Thing is basically just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in The Thing. But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary.

In less skilled hands, this could have come across as cynical and manipulative material, but Pollono is such a skilled wordsmith and the cast is so universally excellent, Small Engine Repair becomes a viewing experience you won’t easily shake off, not today and not for a long time.

Tom has enlisted our identification and sympathy, but he seems hopelessly isolated within his own bubble of despair. How much that happens is in his mind?

A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive.

Even though we’re trafficking in mostly melancholy territory about lost souls trying to regain their footing, it says something about the tender artistry of the filmmaking, and the beautiful work by the actors, that I’m actually keen to spend more time with these characters and see this story unfold from different perspectives.

This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in - a movie about dreams.

Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.

I will say that the attempt to reinterpret the memorable closing shot of "Blood Simple" is so gauche and graceless that I involuntarily moaned in disgust. I docked the film another half-star just for that.

Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.

If the story is immensely satisfying in a traditional way, the style has its own delights.

Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

This is a story that has been told time and again in the movies, and sometimes the performances overcome the condescension of the formula.

The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

The movie gets credit for not making the high life seem colorful or funny. It is not. It is boring, because when the drugs are there they simply clear the pain and allow the mind to focus on getting more drugs.

Body of Lies is a James Bond plot inserted into today's headlines. The film wants to be persuasive in its expertise about modern spycraft, terrorism, the CIA and Middle East politics. But its hero is a lone ranger who operates in three countries, single-handedly creates a fictitious terrorist organization, and survives explosions, gunfights, and brutal torture.

Writer-director Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Hostiles) is an enormously gifted storyteller who infuses nearly every moment of this movie with a sense of despair and hopelessness, as some genuinely goodhearted but in most cases deeply damaged souls struggle mightily to battle a mythical, flesh-eating creature from the deep woods while also dealing with real-world trauma that’s equally frightening.

The remake bounces all over the place with a convoluted storyline, a number of superfluous characters and two main villains who are sorely lacking — one because he’s a bland nothing, the other because he's so far over the top it’s like he’s in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Space Jam is a happy marriage of good ideas--three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare.

Adult Beginners has a casual, comfortable, low-budget authenticity, though it loses some of its edge near the end with some overly predictable and familiar resolutions.

By the end of Scent of a Woman, we have arrived at the usual conclusion of the coming-of-age movie, and the usual conclusion of the prep school movie. But rarely have we been taken there with so much intelligence and skill.

The modern sequences lack realism or credibility. The ancient sequences play like the equivalent of a devout Bible story. The result is a slow-moving and pointless exercise by Bertolucci, whose “The Last Emperor” was a much superior telling of a similar story about a child who is chosen for great things.

Maintains a certain level of intrigue, and occasionally bursts into life.

Always nice to enjoy a little comfort-food movie in which almost nothing surprising or particularly fresh happens, but we’re happy to spend time with the characters and we wish them the best as the credits roll.

There are images of astonishing beauty in Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi, sequences when we marvel at the sights of the Earth, and yet when the film is over there is the feeling that we are still waiting for it to begin.

This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.

There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history and even the backstage intrigue of the auction business.

Jennifer Garner is indeed a charmer, but she's the victim of a charmless treatment in 13 Going on 30.

Bernie Mac gives a funny and kind of touching performance as a man who attains greatness once and then has to do it again.

Clive Owen can be a likable actor, but the character is working against him...And please, please, give us a break from the scenes where the ghost of the departed turns up and starts talking as if she's not dead.

It's not enough to like such films because they're "so bad they're good." You need to specialize, and like the films because they're so good about being so bad they're good. Modus Operandi, a film by Frankie Latina that has won praise on the midnight movie festival circuit, is such a film.

In Sacrifice, about a father who loses his son to the power of the state, it is difficult to miss the parallels with Chen's own life.

Fey is such a likable and funny screen presence, but she’s no lightweight when it comes to playing subtle, honest drama.

Setting entirely aside the accuracy of the film, the IRA still has him marked for death, and indeed there was an attempt on his life in Canada 10 years after he fled. He’s still out there somewhere.

Geraldine Viswanathan, fresh off her scene-stealing turn as the intrepid high school newspaper reporter in “Bad Education,” gives a knockout performance.

This is an unapologetically over-the-top, blood-soaked, orgy of stylized violence filled with familiar action-movie characters going through familiar action-movie paces, with a whole lot of CGI, a bounty of epic set-pieces and a borderline exhausting number of kills.

Set in England, the dystopic “Brazil” and “28 Days Later” both ended with pastoral idylls for adult couples. How I Live Now offers adolescents a lovely vision of holistic healing in the same countryside.

The movie is in the naughty-but-nice British tradition in which characters walk on the wild side but never seem to do anything else there.

If someone could give you a pill that allowed you to live for 500 years, would you take it? Not me.

This is a good idea for a movie. Unfortunately, in Brainstorm it remains basically an idea. The characters take such a secondary importance to the gadget that we never feel much for them.

Whatever else it may be, Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels” is a joyous, fanatic, slightly weird experiment in the uses of the color videotape process. If there is more that can be done with videotape, I do not want to be there when they do it.

Bad Words is the kind of pitch-black dark comedy that makes you wince even as you give up on stifling the chuckles.

Linda is a truly good woman, and Rachael Harris' performance illuminates Natural Selection.

Even though Uncle Drew is outlandish and predictable and downright corny, I loved the positive energy of this film, I got a kick out of the winning performances from a cast of All-Star comic actors and All-Star, well, All-Stars — and I laughed out loud at a steady diet of inside-basketball jokes.

Although the movie centers on well-made action scenes and contains a couple of tidy surprises, its strength comes from the portrait of this soldier on the edge.

In his press notes, Winterbottom adds: “We didn’t make the moral too obvious, or too heavy-handed.” And they don’t. But the bottom line is unmistakable.

The past traps the present, fate smothers spontaneity, and all of the dialog sounds like Dialog - not what people would say, but what characters would say. The film is depressing for some of the right reasons, and all of the wrong ones.

The film chronicles their criminal career in a low-key, meandering way; we're hanging out with them more than we're being told a story.

Close never steps wrong, never breaks reality. My heart went out to Albert Nobbs, the depth of whose fears are unimaginable. But it is Janet McTeer who brings the film such happiness and life as it has, because the tragedy of Albert Nobbs is that there can be no happiness in her life. The conditions she has chosen make it impossible.

Because the stories are so skillfully threaded together, the movie doesn't feel like an exercise: Each of the stories stands on its own.

Most movie characters are like Greek gods and comic book heroes: We learn their roles and powers at the beginning of the story, and they never change. Here are complex, troubled, flawed people, brave enough to breathe deeply and take one more risk with their lives.

Minghella does a fine job of capturing the essence of the 21st century talent competition show and all its corny, addictive allure.

While Southpaw will surprise almost no one who has seen a fair amount of boxing movies, Fuqua’s direction and the excellent performances keep the action humming.

Instant Family has heart and good intentions. It’s a shame the journey is such a bumpy ride as it takes us all over the map.

While Extraction 2 doesn’t match the original action thriller from 2020 as it embraces so many clichés I lost count, it’s still a rousing international adventure with some incredible battles that will leave you feeling exhausted FOR the actors (and their stunt doubles). This is the kind of movie that leaves it all out there on the field.

A cheerfully twisted horror/comedy/sci-fi mash-up with a surprisingly sweet heart lurking beneath all the bloody-rinse-and-repeat hijinks, which aren’t all that bloody anyway.

Writer-director John Ridley and star Regina King get right to it in the Netflix original film “Shirley,” a no-frills, straightforward and inspirational biopic of the iconic and pioneering Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress and the first Black candidate for a major party nomination for president.

[An] informing if not inflaming documentary.

Above all, it contains characters I care for, played by actors I admire.

This is a messy, confusing, uninvolving mishmash of old-school practical effects and CGI battles that feels … off nearly every misstep of the way. It’s like watching a master musician play a piano he somehow doesn’t realize is out of tune.

Christine is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I enjoyed it anyway. The movies have a love affair with cars, and at some dumb elemental level we enjoy seeing chases and crashes. In fact, under the right circumstances there is nothing quite so exhilarating as seeing a car crushed, and one of the best scenes in Christine is the one where the car forces itself into an alley that's too narrow for it.

This isn't a strict remake of Sam Raimi's hugely influential 1981 horror classic, but it does include the basic framework and some visual nods to the original. On its own, it's an irredeemable, sadistic torture chamber reveling in the bloody, cringe-inducing deaths of some of the stupidest people ever to spend a rainy night in a remote cabin in the woods.

Thor: Love and Thunder is one of the goofiest and least consequential sagas in MCU history — an allegedly wild and wacky but ultimately disappointing and disjointed chapter in the ongoing story of the God of Thunder, who seems to get more clueless with each passing movie.

Madagascar is funny, especially at the beginning, and good-looking in a retro cartoon way, but in a world where the stakes have been raised by "Finding Nemo," "Shrek" and "The Incredibles," it's a throwback to a more conventional kind of animated entertainment. It'll be fun for the smaller kids, but there's not much crossover appeal for their parents.

This is no piece of pretentious fluff. It’s a grim and nasty but wickedly entertaining bit of business, seasoned with sharp little plot turns before an admittedly ludicrous but dramatically satisfying twist-on-top-of-a-twist ending.

Chalk is not the kind of movie many people will appreciate at first viewing. You have to understand who Nilsson and his actors are, and give some thought to the style, to appreciate it.

A brilliant and absurd film of "Titus Andronicus" that goes over the top, doubles back and goes over the top again.

Between the Caan and Dillon characters there are atmosphere, desperation and romance, and, at the end, something approaching true pathos.

A carnival geek show elevated in the direction of art. It never quite gets there, but it tries with every fiber of its craft to redeem its pulp origins, and we must give it credit for the courage of its depravity.

I think the screenplay, written by director Isabel Coixet, is shameless in its weepy sentiment. But there is truth here, too, and a convincing portrait of working-class lives.

The movie sees World War II and the following years through the eyes of those who went away and those who stayed at home, and it tells one small true story that represents the incalculable effect of the war.

The problem with Code 46 is that the movie, filled with ideas and imagination, is murky in its rules and intentions. I cannot say I understand the hows and whys of this future world, nor do I much care, since it's mostly a clever backdrop to a love affair that would easily teleport to many other genres.

The story line sounds plain and simple, but the movie is enlightened by Bernie's impassioned narration and by a gallery of small comic details.

Beyond the visuals, what makes The Maze Runner so compelling is its attention-grabbing storyline.

A polished, high-ozone sequel, not as good as the original but building once again on a quirky performance by Robert Downey Jr.

Our Friend occasionally goes overboard on the sentiment. But thanks in large part to Segel’s huggable-bear persona, Affleck’s typically steady work and Dakota Johnson turning in perhaps the most impressive performance of her career, the laughs and the tears feel quite real.

Good but not great Brooks... but smart, funny -- and edgy.

Cars 2 is fun. Whether that's because John Lasseter is in touch with his inner child or mine, I cannot say.

This is a fairly bad movie, and yet at the same time maybe about as good as it could be. There may not be an 8-year-old alive who would not love it.

Like Free Willy, The Secret Garden, Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Man in the Moon, this is a "family movie" that doesn't condescend. It takes its 12-year-old hero as seriously as he takes baseball, and nothing is "dumbed down" for the PG audience.

Cold Pursuit moves forward with the assured and deliberate force of Nels’ massive snowplow. And with Neeson/Nels at the wheel, Cold Pursuit is one fantastically hot mess of a movie.

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

This is a monster movie disguised as a war movie.

This is the kind of film that isn't as much fun to see as it is to hear about.

When you wind a plot up as tightly as this one, it runs along nicely for awhile, but then the last half-hour has to be spent simply resolving everything.