There are disjointed elements here—a modern-leaning script, driftless performances and an overwrought score from Jeff Russo, its clanking piano more suited to an out-and-out Gothic thriller—that Macneill is ultimately unable to wrestle into a cohesive, compelling whole. The result is a dull retread of a story that deserved better.

Ross’ debut is scattershot, and lacking in the consistent purpose that articulates a filmmaker’s intent.

It's the camerawork by director of photography Brett Lowell and cinematographer Corey Rich (along with many other contributors) that impresses the most here. Close-ups show just how precise and physically challenging the climbers' moves are.

The acting is not the problem. It rarely is. And, within parameters, the movie is not dull. Just don’t expect to feel much short of guilt in response to your own apathy.

The film—Weitz’s first since 2015’s indie Grandma—feels a little cheap and shortchanged.

In story and in visual style, The Predator feels less like a Shane Black movie than a generic, middling Hollywood blockbuster helmed by a workmanlike studio hack who occasionally asked Shane Black for advice.

Director-producers Quinn Costello, Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer, along with narrator Wendell Pierce (of TV’s “Treme”) keep the tone light, but the underlying message is both timely and worth remembering: You can mess with Mother Nature, but she will mess back.

Kendrick’s interplay with Lively’s big, alluringly langurous temptress is deliciously diverting, but the script could have used some judicious editing; a surfeit of credibility-straining, overly antic plot developments crowd the last third of the film, which until then had an intriguingly languid pace.

The songs, written by Gaga, Cooper, Lukas Nelson, Jason Aldean and Mark Ronson, are all terrific and will make a helluva soundtrack album, and Lady Gaga’s performances are electrifying. Combine that with the genuine-feeling romance between the co-stars and the heartbreak of its dissolution, and you have one soaring and searing piece of movie entertainment.

Despite its structural hiccups, Demange’s film still manages to highlight the humanity of a family and community that fights to survive their no-win circumstances and aspire to pass on something hopeful to their descendants.

This doc is far more about being gay than being a gay dancer, with not enough extended performance footage to give you an idea of their real capabilities. This lack also softens the impetus of the movie’s inevitable contest climax, which takes place at the Gay Games in Cleveland, with one of the featured couples winning big.

Although hardly conceived or executed on the scale of his work, Proust kept popping into my mind as I watched this disarming film, with its meditative accretion of the fascinating little details that comprise a life.

Despite all of the mediocrity, there are a handful of sweet moments in the film.

Devoid of any corniness, sentimentality or condescension, Pick of the Litter is a must for dog lovers, but it will also serve all those needing reminders of how kind, decent and giving humans can be and the role dogs play in our lives.

An awesome and inspiring doc from the team behind Meru.

The approach, while admittedly daring, leaves the game viewer, although certainly dazzled by much of the footage, rather wanting more than Bartsch verbalizing the arc of her life and ambitions, yes, but in a distorted layered and overlapping soundtrack that, intentionally, is not always decipherable.

Languid, associative, at times dragging, at other moments deeply affecting, thanks to a song and a trick of the light, Ethan Hawke’s Blaze is difficult to define.

While the film’s vision of Nelly Arcan may ultimately remain just slightly out of focus (a notion that’s duly literalized in its final shots), Mylène Mackay’s powerhouse turn seems certain to resonate.

Briskly paced, the film makes for a visually exuberant experience as it cuts quickly among photos and video clips of Kusama’s flashy artwork, commentary from critics, gallery owners and fellow artists (delivered both on-camera and as audio over images of Kusama’s work) and footage of the maverick artist herself.

Nyoni’s title articulates her uncompromising, feminist stance, and her characterizations of Mr. Banda and the male villagers explain how patriarchy plays out in Zambia, but it is in her sublime direction—lengthy close-ups, clever tableaux and skillful scoring—that the writer-director accomplishes a social critique so cinematic as to defy description.

Amy Scott’s affectionate and smart documentary sheds light on an artist obsessed with addressing the injustice and intolerance in this country, but who himself could be the most problematic of men.

It cannot, unfortunately, boast a taut pace and narrative to match the mood of unease that fills the air like dust in this depressed desert outpost.

Peppermint is a bloody crowd-pleaser, but it’s fundamentally forgettable, the kind of movie whose details begin to disappear the moment the credits roll.

The Nun resorts to makeup effects to put a frightening face on its supposedly scary sisters.

A giant leap even for the youngest-ever Best Director victor, Damien Chazelle’s technically astonishing First Man is a poetic non-blockbuster of claustrophobic intimacy.

Older Than Ireland isn't relentlessly upbeat. It's filled with stories of loss, disappointment, tough lessons learned and compromises made, and it's hard not to suspect that the genetic hand you're dealt counts for a lot.

The bottom line is that Reprisal is an extremely silly movie doing its damnedest to look tough and gritty and clever, none of which it is. In fact, it’s both tediously formulaic and weirdly puzzling.

The Little Stranger invites debate and analysis long after viewing. Heady horror films with psychological tics and twists are few and far between, and this is the best one since The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s stylishly sinister 1961 edition of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

It’s clearly meant to be a light romp –a party movie to be enjoyed in group settings—and it is.

Unfortunately, Bryan's case quickly turns into a dense, confusing slog through a bewildering array of newspaper headlines, TV news clips, splashy graphics and talking heads.

Slim movies like this live or die based on their personal charm, and the sour Destination Wedding soon wheezes its way into the ICU.

Given the magnitude and complexity of the topic, an entertaining film is almost irrelevant, at moments trivializing. This particular story cries out to be viewed through a new, fresh lens. Otherwise, why are we hearing it? Why now?

The Bookshop is an exquisitely understated tragicomedy.

Writer-director Colin Minihan’s thriller is tightly plotted and delivers a couple of terrific shocks, shocks that are firmly rooted in character

Charlie Hunnam as Parisian safecracker Henri “Papillon” Charrière and Rami Malek as his pal-in-hell, counterfeiter Louis Dega, were sorely in need of richer characters written (or directed?) with more complexity, coloring, backstory, tics, or whatever might humanize them more.

I Am Vengeance showcases Bennett playing tough and taciturn, but he nevertheless comes off a bit stiff. He has potential, but Bennett is going to need to try a little harder to have a career on par with his Eliminators co-star Adkins.

The whistleblowers of the NYPD 12 definitely deserve a comprehensive chronicle of their struggle for justice, as their struggle affects so many. Crime + Punishment speaks well on their behalf, but not emphatically enough to close the case.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good reminder of why Rockwell’s admirers have happily stuck with him for decades.

the film, set in 2009, misses its comic target by a mile, resulting in a dumbfounding collision of unsympathetic characters always choosing the most moronic thing to do in any given situation.

If you expect the humor to be any smarter or more original than “Hey, look, this puppet has pubes!,” you’re going to walk out disappointed.

Dramatically constructed and studded with sharp, thoughtful points of view,The Oslo Diaries nevertheless falls down on one point. The movie doesn’t get as much sunlight into the PLO viewpoint on the process, focusing almost exclusively on Israeli domestic politics.

At any moment, We the Animals might look and sound gorgeous—yet the film unfolds with a naturalistic pace that plods like a too-lazy summer day. This gorgeous view demands ample, ample patience.

Funny little Nazis require rather more finesse than The Littlest Reich possesses.

There are few elements of suspense or intrigue in this drama, as it’s largely an inward journey into Duras’ agonized, shaky state of mind over the unknown whereabouts of her Resistance-member husband, Robert Anselme.

Endearing and funny but with a melancholy edge, Juliet, Naked is more than just a rom-com—it’s a movie for and about adults, in all their messy complexity.

New paint can't hide the worn-out frame behind Mile 22, a gung-ho workout that pairs Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg for the fourth time. Cribbing from themselves as well as tons of other action films, they manage to throw enough firepower on the screen to placate genre fans.

A Whale of a Tale only skims the surface of the many matters it raises, be it cultural imperialism, tradition, animal rights and socioeconomic necessities. Still, its objective approach, and subtle plea for middle-ground compromise, makes it a worthwhile addendum to Psihoyos’ celebrated predecessor.

The Wife is an astute character study thanks in large part to Jane Anderson’s winning screenplay.

The movie...is a visual feast, one of the rare 3D films which was clearly designed with that extra dimension in mind.

With its star-studded cast of experts, from Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk to automated warfare experts like Peter Singer, and a brief that is nothing short of the survival of humanity, Do You Trust This Computer? is a more sprawling and diffuse piece of work. It has a larger frame of reference than Paine’s battery-car docs but never hammers it into shape.

There’s a “Let it be” sense to McAlpine’s soft exhortations, which struck me as a little ironic, since her Cielo might have garnered more of the appreciation it deserves if she herself had quieted and simply let it, the sky, be, in all the reverent glory she with the silent poetry of her camera was already showing us.

Chu is definitely not an actor’s director, being far more concerned with splashy spectacle than intimate human emotions, and often you can feel scenes go slightly dead, with his performers likely called upon to improv their lines and motivation as best they can.

The simplicity and wonder of Sól’s quest for identity is muddled by pretense, and by circumstances and subplots that are tangential to her.

The film isn’t a genre changer, but it’s elegant and admirably remorseless—and when it breaks bad, it breaks very bad indeed.

In the end, Skate Kitchen is a frustrating film that’s supposed to elicit a heady sense of freedom, girl power and a rush of sisterhood. It doesn’t. Instead, one is left feeling vaguely hollow.

Bo’s secret weapon in The Island is Shu Qi, an effortlessly magnetic star who enlivens even the dullest material. Kept in the background for a lot of the story, she still brings a welcome human touch to a plot that keeps threatening to turn into a lecture.

Credit director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and Cole for an impressive achievement that takes viewers on an intense journey.

Is it a particularly great movie? No. Does it have some pretty major structural problems? Yes. Does Jason Statham fight a giant, prehistoric shark in it? Yes. Verdict: See The Meg. The Meg will cleanse your soul.

No spoiler here that all unfolds with twists and complications but lands in a colorful kibble bowl of happy endings. Surprise does lie in the fact that such familiar material can deliver some unexpected pleasures.

The seams definitely show in the film’s effort to contain all the comment, comedy, horror, romance and drama, but Lee handily orchestrates the layout of the period and players.

In the end, the fine acting cannot salvage the uninspired material that fancies itself cutting-edge yet is paradoxically dated. Madeline’s Madeline might have been innovative in the mid-’60s, but its novelty has long expired.

McQueen, the exhilarating, heartbreaking documentary by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, presents an almost excruciatingly intimate portrait of this genius.

Cocote’s narrative structure exhibits a tidy symmetry, strongly suggesting that what ultimately transpires has a certain inevitability to it, that cycles of retribution and vendetta all too easily devolve into vicious circles.

The Darkest Minds isn’t atrocious so much as it’s just plain dull, which is a worse kind of bad to be.

There is magic in this film's ode to growing old and being with the people who knew us young.

It’s a flashy film, but also rather derivative. In the end, Hot Summer Nights is a study in the power of talented actors to elevate material.

Schwentke’s delectable drama is ultimately a keen indictment of the stereotypical German affinity for efficiency and the sense of community born of bonding together in the hurting of others.

It’s a raunchy, rollicking story of movie legends off the set and between the sheets.

It’s a movie made with an insider’s knowledge (directors Ben and Orson Cummings are both proud graduates of the school) and affection (Shaquille O’Neal is one of the producers, as is art-world titan Larry Gagosian). And yet, while it has heartwarming moments, it’s not a predictable, eager-to-please entertainment.

Marking her feature debut, Frizzell’s direction is competent, but her screenplay, which is semi-autobiographical, is a series of vignettes that narrowly add up to a narrative.

Searching is so smart about how we interact with computers that it's surprising how lame it is about moviemaking basics like characters and plot.

The unrelenting gloom and oppressive atmosphere verge on the exploitative.

Gavagai is a curiosity and nonetheless remarkable in its own way. Slow (very slow) paced, it’s a meditative, haunting and lyrical film that explores the many layers of love and grief.

Dyrholm fully immerses herself in the iconic legend that was Nico, at the same time investing her with so much desperately pulsing life—a true artist portraying another—that it uplifts what could have been a very dreary slog of a movie.

It’s a deliriously silly, often preposterous movie...but director Susanna Fogel keeps things moving too quickly to leave much time for complaints.

Puzzle proudly wears its unfussy metaphors on its sleeve, while sidestepping trite clichés of stories about self-discovery. Its premise might sound dull, but this charming crowd-pleaser is thankfully anything but—so much that Puzzle might even restore your faith in remakes.

Sharply argued, indignantly one-sided and stylistically monotonous The Bleeding Edge sometimes seems closer to angry PSA than documentary. But that may not be a distinction that matters.

What makes it play is Archambault, who gives a strikingly unpleasant performance as Gerald.

Ultimately, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is fun enough, if unmemorable. If you’re not already invested in the property, you probably won’t find enough in it to make it worth your time.

Larger Than Life presents a vividly comprehensive picture of Aucoin’s work...and the intoxicating era in which he thrived, when models were gorgeous and sensual women. But Bartok leaves out certain key incidents that would have lent greater depth and interest.

Casal and Diggs have both lived these roles for years, so it’s not surprising that they never deliver a false moment.

Technically splendid but emotionally distant, The Third Murder will seem more like a detour than a destination for his fans.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a minor miracle of a musical, something you never thought you would ever see.

Fallout is the boldest of a series that has set a very high (sometimes literally so) standard for breathtaking set-pieces. By my count, the new film has at least seven of them—a generous gift to summer audiences from daredevil star Cruise, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood.

It’s strange that The Equalizer 2 is such a sluggish ride. Fuqua and Washington have developed a body of work over the years that is, if nothing else, reliably kinetic. But with Wenk’s pedestrian writing, there just isn’t much for Washington to work with here.

The story of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which opened the spigots of campaign cash, has been told before. But Reed weaves it into a larger narrative in which it is simply one of the steps in the unraveling of modern campaign-finance laws.

Cassel, one of France's singular talents, delivers an absorbing performance, committing to his role on both mental and physical levels.

This is an astonishing filmmaking debut from Burnham, a renowned comedian as well as a musician—you might secretly wonder how a young male not only captured the point of view of an eighth-grade girl so exactly, but also expressed it with such emotional precision. Whatever the secret formula to his experiential accuracy and unexpectedly inventive directorial eye is, the outcome is a deeply serious coming-of-age film that is only light and charming on the surface.

Path of Blood is more an immediate experience, and as such succeeds in unexpected ways. The human normality of what it shows is nearly more sickening than the carnage itself.

Ostensibly a drama filmed with European realism, What Will People Say has the air and the unsettling effect of a horror film.

The fun of Uncle Drew is to be had in the energy of its athletic cast, all of whom appear to be having a grand old time playing around.

Unfriended: Dark Web doesn’t deserve your faves or your retweets. Instead, it’s a regrettably stupid horror sequel that was better left in the drafts folder.

Aside from a witty montage near the start of the movie and sparks of his cheeky, goodhearted subversiveness later on, most of Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is bludgeoningly broad and obvious.

Milford Graves: Full Mantis is a wide-ranging look at an intriguing artist, a documentary brimming over with his thoughts about culture as well as his music.

Director Matthew Ross does the near-impossible in Siberia: He turns a Keanu Reeves vehicle about sex, diamonds and the Russian mob into a dreary, endless slog.

a plodding film with ill-placed, klutzy exposition and credibility-defying and/or colorless characters that are spokespersons for various predictable viewpoints.

Despite committed performances across the board, I left the film craving a deeper, more conventionally attentive character study.

The Rock retains his uncanny ability to elevate his material. Through sheer will he makes it seem possible that he could shimmy up a fraying rope outside a burning building's glass wall while carrying his own leg.