Its pacing is too deliberate, and it doesn’t have a light heart. That’s revealed in the handling of some characters named the Brownies, represented by a couple of men who are about 9 inches tall and fight all the time. Maybe Lucas thought these guys would work like R2-D2 and C-3PO did in “Star Wars.” But they have no depth, no personalities, no dimension; they’re simply an irritant at the edge of the frame.

Here is an unsuccessful movie with some surprisingly successful scenes. It has moments when it is electrifying and passages where it slows to a walk.

The film is well acted all around and the excellent art direction brings the ’60s to colorful life. But Bandele struggles to balance an epic story of civil war and death against the equally epic story of sisters whose lives are forever changed by circumstances they can’t control.

As the body count piles up and the action gets bigger and bigger, even the great John Luther comes perilously close to being overwhelmed by the spectacle in an increasingly ludicrous storyline that favors admittedly stunning and often gruesome visuals in favor of anything approaching plausibility.

There’s no denying the talents of director Domee Shi (Oscar winner for the 2018 animated short “Bao”) and the infectious, energetic performances of the voice cast, particularly Rosalie Chiang as Meilin. The problems are mostly with the script, which often requires Meilin to be almost irritatingly obnoxious.

Surrogates is entertaining and ingenious, but it settles too soon for formula.

Recycles the 1977 comedy right down to repeating the same mistakes.

The movie is too flighty and uncentered, and it allows actual violence to break the spell when false alarms would have sufficed.

That looking-glass quality is missing, alas, from Back to the Future Part III, which makes a few bows in the direction of time-travel complexities, and then settles down to be a routine Western comedy.

Intervista is not a very organized movie, and long stretches seem pointless and uninspired. It would not be of much interest, I imagine, to anyone who was not familiar with Fellini's earlier films.

The Best of Me was a better film than I expected. Much of that is due to the performances delivered by Marsden, Monaghan, Liana Liberato and especially young Australian actor Luke Bracey as the younger version of Marsden’s character.

It's the ending, really, that spoils The Cowboys. Otherwise, it's a good-to-fine Western, with a nice, sly performance by Roscoe Lee Browne as the trail cook, and the usual solid Wayne performance.

For the first half of this movie, I was able to suspend judgment. Interesting things were happening, the performances were good and it is always absorbing to see how other people live. Most of the second half of the movie, alas, is taken up with routine cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Lespert’s film, made with Berge’s blessing, does not sugarcoat the demons that plagued Saint Laurent.

The dialogue in places leans toward the banal, but a couple of plot twists help hold interest.

In Bird on a Wire, director John Badham doesn't pay the dues before he brings in the exotic locations. We don't believe the characters, and so the elaborate chases and escapes and stunts and special effects are all affectations.

There is nothing really wrong with In Secret, yet in the end one feels dissatisfied. It’s as if you’ve just sat through a dry academic lecture dissecting the novel.

The film would have benefitted by being less encompassing and focusing on a more limited number of emblematic characters -- Meinhof and Herold, for starters.

There is an underlying likability to Austin Powers that sort of carries us through the movie.

Stylistically, this saga of survival never aims for urban neo-realism. Yet, as sentimental humanism, it shows laudable taste in dodging the usual indulgent touches and turns when lost kids find their way.

The Great Gatsby is a superficially beautiful hunk of a movie with nothing much in common with the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.

Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite is directed and acted with a certain nice style, but it puts us through so many convolutions of the plot that finally we just don't care.

While the spectacularly gifted and enormously likable cast has the firepower and charisma to match the testosterone-fueled ensembles of those earlier films, Ocean’s 8 is more of a smooth glide than an exhilarating adventure.

The awkwardly titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a mixed bag that plays like a cross between a “Mission: Impossible” movie and “Get Shorty,” and there are some moments of hilariously dark humor and a few nifty fight sequences. But the plot is so convoluted it feels as if chunks of different scripts were all fed into some kind of A.I. blender, with the result being an inconsequential serving of empty cinematic calories.

Cuts back and forth between a tragic story involving the Holocaust and an essentially trivial, feel-good story about a modern-day reporter. It's an awkward fit and diminishes the impact of the earlier story.

A lot of Trollhunter - but not enough - is funny. I imagine the best way to see the movie would be the way it was presented at Sundance, at a "secret" midnight screening at which the capacity audience allegedly has no idea what it is about to see.

I know the novel, and as dark as this film is, I believe it hesitates to follow Greene into his dark abyss. It is about helplessness and evil, but isn't merciless enough.

Mirror Mirror is a sumptuous fantasy for the eyes and a pinball game for the mind, as story elements collide and roll around bumping into each other.