Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

This cranked-up drama wants it both ways.

Beneath all of its hard-R partying, rebellious debauchery, and profanity, it taps into something very real and insidious in the zeitgeist. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year—and one of the most necessary.

A shiny-bright jukebox musical with a heart of gold and a plot of pure polyester, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again works hard to be the feel-giddy movie experience of the summer. And it mostly succeeds in its own glittery, aggressively winsome way.

Throw in a nagging divorce settlement, an unplanned murder, and Billy Crudup - hilarious! - as a raging security man, and Jill Sprecher's film enjoyably fuses cleverness and sheer desperation.

Lonely Hearts never locates the key to the killers' bloody bond.

By the end, the pieties of Nell fall into place all too neatly.

You never forget you're watching a derivative, machine-tooled entertainment; the fun is in how the machine keeps spinning off course.

The supporting cast includes Nick Nolte, Christine Lahti, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Hailee Steinfeld, making the movie’s greatest accomplishment the fact that it was able to squander so many interesting actors.

Yet as Everything moves from nation to nation, the cohesion and potency of its message dissipates.

I will say that it's been a while since a romantic comedy mustered this much charm by looking this much like life.

The story belongs to its young cast, and Lords' ramshackle comedy sweetly captures the rank anxiety, random humiliations, and undiluted hope of being young.

The film says that the U.S. immigrant situation is untenable, but then it forces US to ask: What should be done?

A sobering look at the bureaucratic trials and life-and-death decisions rookie doctors face on their daily rounds.

British director Sean Ellis has a knack for staging the film’s early plotting-the-scheme scenes in dimly lit, monochrome interiors, but the storytelling is disappointingly square.

The film’s nihilism serves as a metaphor for the merciless death pit of Mexico’s drug war, but not much else.

And although director Paul Anderson treats the story with appropriate deadpan respect, there are enough sparks of humor (particularly generated by Linden Ashby as a shallow martial-arts actor who worries that he's a fake, with good reason) to amuse the adults accompanying the 10-year-old boys in the audience.

Glosses over the kids' lives off the court.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

One of the happiest movies around.

The Rundown is actually a lot of fun, mostly because The Rock, simply by standing there and being The Rock, cancels out Scott entirely.

Petersen gives us monumental images of waves and rain and wind, but the editing is so choppy that the images don't build and crest.

Beowulf is a solemnly gorgeous, at times borderline stolid piece of Tolkien-with-a-joystick mythology.

What sets it a notch or two above rote familiarity is its cast, featuring a charismatic, white trash-with-a-heart-of-gold turn from a mulletted Matthew McConaughey and a naturalistically low-key performance from newcomer Richie Merritt.

Like the garden at its heart, The Secret Garden has always found its beauty in its quietude, a small story of hearts broken and healed through nature, attentive care, and true connection. But this adaptation doesn’t understand that, instead drowning the film in showy set pieces and magical realism rather than understanding the inherent magic in all things.

The newcomer kids are delightfully...kidlike. Cosmic bonus: "The Office's" Rainn Wilson plays a New Agey science teacher.

Jordan lets slip virtually every rudiment of drama. He never deigns to develop his characters, he coats the movie in a wet blanket of whimsy, and he lets pop songs do his work for him more lavishly than Cameron Crowe did in "Elizabethtown."

Franco gives one of his most subtle performances yet as a recovering-alcoholic father, and the three young newcomers’ performances are honest and affecting, capturing what it feels like to be adrift and on the verge of adolescence.

Spider-Man 3 has terrific moments, but after the danger and majesty and romantic brio of "Spider-Man 2," those adrenalized rooftop ballets feel, more than ever, like sequences.

It's eye candy that detonates.

It's moving, admirable, and occasionally exhilarating. What it's missing is the one thing that could always be counted on with Jolie as a star: the spark of danger.

Very ''Waking Ned Devine.'' There's shrewd wit to Pouliot's gentle, no-bull farce.

The Shallows could have been a really fun B-movie. And in a lot of ways, it is. There’s no denying that it has some great jump-scares and scratches a certain summer itch we all get this time of year. Too bad it’s a bit too watered down.

Rigid, airless, and browbeatingly repetitive, Das Experiment is an overly didactic piece of thesis hectoring; it's like ''Lord of the Flies'' set in a Skinner box.

Unlike so many recent horror movies, The Clovehitch Killer is patient with its thrills, almost excruciatingly so.

About two people on a stage, talking their way into and out of alienation.

Enough to anesthetize the living.

Most of the movie feels like Farrell's performance: deeply sincere, and more showy than convincing.

The Best Man Holiday is an eggnog that's sticky-sweet and heavy at the same time.

Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.

Mackenzie falls a little too in love with his battle scenes; by the fourth clash of blood and swords it all starts to feel like déjà vu, with different horses. At nearly two and a half hours, there’s clearly room to trim.... But he also films it beautifully in the natural light of candles, torches, and overcast skies, and there’s a solidness to the old-fashioned conventions of his storytelling.

Rachid Bouchareb's intensely dramatized, passionately partisan story of militancy in the struggle for Algerian independence from France after World War II makes effective use of "Godfather" storytelling theatrics.

It’s 85 minutes of grim abyss-gazing with no hope of salvation. If Silverman’s going to bare her soul this nakedly, she deserves a better film to do it in.

It’s Nyong’o who makes Monsters worth spending 90 breezy, bloody minutes on; wielding her tiny guitar like she did a fateful pair of scissors earlier this year in Jordan Peele’s "Us," she’s both a warrior queen and a fallible, believable human woman — and never not a movie star in every scene.

Tower Heist is the cinematic version of a Trump property: overblinged, eye-catching, and essentially tacky.

If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress.

The Holocaust scenes are wrenching, the past-meets-present dialectics less so.

Like everything else in Jackson's Tolkienland, the buildup to the climactic melee stretches on too long. But when it comes, it's a doozy.

Told in a tricky flashback mode that's vivid even with a few too many temporal kinks, Don't Move is the sort of thing that Claude Chabrol was once praised for making with more pretension and a lot less less juice.

By the time Army of Darkness turns into a retread of "Jason and the Argonauts," featuring an army of fighting skeletons, the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle.

Even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love.

A realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary.

What's missing from this by-the-numbers drama is a sense of abandon.

In Happenstance, fortune doesn't just smile -- it schemes and tricks and zigzags, forming an urban road map of fate's detours.

The First Wives Club has all the conviction a comedy of female vengeance needs. But as soon as the dumb plot takes over, the wit leaks out of the movie like helium from a balloon.

Even at the movie's silliest and most unsteady moments, she's (Wasikowska) the ballast: a Judy bruised but unbowed — and finally, fully ready to punch back.

It’s hard not to admire a movie featuring a spaceship with D-cups and a title that has the nerve to one-up Star Wars — but if Lucas’ film is PlayStation 2, this one is hopscotch.

Charming enough on its own not to feel like just reheated leftovers.

Rory O'Shea Was Here gazes at the physically afflicted and just about begs for our sympathy long after we've grown restless and eager to feel something else.

If you want a great monster movie that's actually also about people — how they think and talk and feel when they're more than just screaming kaiju chum in the water — try 2017's Colossal, currently streaming on Hulu. If not, maybe Godzilla vs. Kong's brawling lizard-brain shock and awe is exactly the void you came for.

Miller's theme is innocence, the loss of it, and the reclamation of equanimity in the face of that loss, and the music she makes is haunting.

No Hard Feelings is a welcome addition to a dwindling genre — and a reminder that Lawrence is one Hollywood's best (and funniest) leads.

Doctor Sleep is a mess. It’s way too long, clashing somber sobriety with loony cheap thrills. The Shining homages turn shameless and cheap. The jumpscares are more funny than scary.

Engages in the cinematic equivalent of not inhaling.

The man has the right to retire, but what will he do with all the words in his head?

But the great revelation in this version is the terrific, beautifully controlled work of Alexander -- Seinfeld's most gifted actor, whose recent movie roles have not allowed him to show his range.

DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.

Back in his day, Mr. Peabody was a dog whose over-civility had bite. Now he's a genius you want to cuddle with.

In our summertime-movie world of aliens and superheroes who look all too familiar, Dodge and Penny look all the rarer in their precious humanity.

Alien3 is a grimly seductive end-of-the-world thriller, with pop-tragic overtones that build in resonance as the movie goes on.

Colin Firth smolders as the PTSD-riddled veteran (played in flashbacks by War Horse‘s Jeremy Irvine), and Nicole Kidman cries dutifully as his wife — but they’re both derailed by the movie’s tidy emotional resolutions.

As a fairy-tale confection, a kind of West Side Story in Jamestown, Pocahontas is pleasant to look at, and it will probably satisfy very small kiddies, but it's the first of the new-era Disney cartoons that feels less than animated.

He rarely allowed himself to be interviewed, but Henri Cartier-Bresson, here nearing 100, comes off as a marvelous, spritely, and companionable figure.

Déjà Vu is watchable trash, meticulously edited in Scott's skip-stutter style, but there's something ultimately unsatisfying about a thriller that more or less makes up its rules as it goes along.

By the time the climactic act of violence finally arrives, there’s barely enough patience left in the viewer to feel any real sense of catharsis or liberation. Just exhaustion.

Cocaine Cowboys, which at times seems like it could have been edited by someone on coke, comes at you as a vast bloody river of underworld information.

The Mask, a rattletrap Jekyll-and-Hyde farce, surrounds Carrey with a nothing plot and a cast of ciphers. Still, his scenes as the Mask are rowdy and enjoyable.

Heartbreaker is like a caper comedy meets "The Bodyguard" - it's winsome and accomplished fluff.

What feels freshest, maybe, is the mere fact of two leads of color taking on all the tropes of the genre and making it feel as modern as they do.

The film captures how the constant turnover of students keeps educators poised between loss and rebirth, fuddy-duddyism and eternal kiddishness. That balance is there, most pleasurably, in Dreyfuss’ performance. The wonders of makeup and hairpieces have taken 20 years off his age, and his acting feels 20 years younger, too. He has an edgy vigor here that recalls his ebullient star turns of the late ’70s.

A suitably inspiring biopic despite its narrative unevenness and occasional reliance on schmaltz, seeks to show audiences the origin story of a cultural icon.

Unfortunately, Run All Night gets a little slack with its third act and runs out of steam by the time the final showdown arrives.

The story is too patterned and too contrived.

Ice Age: The Meltdown blithely looks on the bright side of life, amassing a screen full of vultures to sing and dance ''Food Glorious Food'' and daring us not to get happy.

Somewhere in this broody ''Twilight Zone''-ish story about magical thinking (and the lure, to filmmakers, of garish casino culture) is a provocative and maybe even shocking thought on the Holocaust as a crapshoot.

As a character, Austin Powers hasn't worn out his welcome, exactly, but he has outlived his novelty.

It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.

This strong, assured Band of Brothers-style drama from director Jang Hun makes universal points about bonding, misery, loyalty, and the senselessness of war through a portfolio of soldiers.

The script contains some genuinely uproarious laughs and is sharper than it needs to be, even if some of the jokes feel as old as Bridget’s condoms.

As a surreal slice of history served up nearly half a century later, it feels oddly satisfying: A reminder not just of simpler times, but of all the other wild untold stories we may never know, just because no camera was there to capture them.

She may be follically blond, but as an actor of distinction who's all of 25, Reese Witherspoon reveals interesting dark roots even as she plays golden girls.

As horror comedies go, this one sadly winds up somewhere between Scary Movie 4 and 5.

Fee steers Cars 3 like the sleek piece of movie machinery it is—a standard ride with a half-full tank, a gorgeous paint job, and not much at all under the hood.

In ''Ordinary People,'' at least one character -- Mary Tyler Moore's -- had to fall so that the others could survive. In Moonlight Mile, no one gets shut out of the hug cycle.

Ultimately though, it’s all secondary to Saunders and Lumley’s riotous chemistry together.

Savages is Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky, amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social, topical, or political relevance.

Bow Wow plays the skate-dance hero in a way that's never too cool to hide what an avid achiever the kid is, and he and his buddies converse in a fiendishly alert middle-class trash talk that keeps Roll Bounce jumping.

The acting is largely irreproachable, but the direction is leaden, and the movie just can’t overcome its clunky framing device and nagging air of inauthenticity.