This Bob Ross doc isn’t just messy, it one that paints a mixed portrait that’s hard to decipher.

As much as I’d love to see these characters in another film, I’d also love to have seen more of them in this one. Oh, and a quick general note to action directors everywhere: Silencers are great for stealth kills, but they really suck the fun out of a full-blown siege.

It’s a dazzling showcase of fantasy-based filmmaking in the 21st century that also manages a feeble attempt at injecting feminist politics into an antiquated narrative. Yet its eventual climax strains from the obviousness of these efforts.

A gritty romance that only translates some of the source material’s poetic bent to the big screen.

It almost doesn’t matter that the movie is too emotionally prescriptive to have any real power, or too high on imagination to leave any room for wonder; DuVernay evinces such faith in who she is and what she’s doing that “A Wrinkle in Time” remains true to itself even when everything on screen reads false.

The film’s eye-popping, blood-soaked vistas are a marvelous sight, as are a number of its era-specific details, and its handful of striking moments of queer samurai imagery. However, for the most part, Kitano’s tale of ambition and beheadings — many, many beheadings — loses nearly all momentum in its second half, before settling into a rote, repetitive rhythm.

While many of the film’s beats are familiar, director Gary Alazraki’s version of this classic family comedy often misses one essential ingredient: real humor.

At the end of the day, it’s the action equivalent of a secondhand musical – you’ll most likely come for the dance scenes, and they’re good enough to wade through the filler.

Despite some clumsy moments, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 handily revives the first movie's appeal.

Much like its message, Disenchanted reminds us that every moment has the potential for providing us with a happily ever after, but it’s the good and the bad that makes it ever more enchanting. Did we need a sequel to “Enchanted”? Not really, but it’s cute enough to cast a bit of an escapist spell this holiday season.

Gottsagen is sympathetic without being pitiable, sweet without being saintly, and funny without making himself the butt of every joke. While the writing is often perfunctory, Gottsagen has a way of making every story beat feel sincere.

Fans of “The Raid” franchise will feel right at home, even if Mayhem! never approaches the operatic scale that made the fight scenes in those movies feel larger than life.

While Deadwyler turns in a remarkable performance as Mamie, beautifully calibrating her love and anger in one riveting package, the rest of “Till” is prone to trope-ridden, predictable sequences that do little to advance her story or Emmett’s legacy.

It never crystallizes into a singular experience, and instead collapses in a rush of well-intentioned innovations.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

With its “Glee”-colored dance numbers and drag-lite drag scenes, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie just isn’t serving.

For a movie so intuitively captivating, so visually extravagant, it very nearly papers over all its emotional weaknesses.

On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.

As ghost stories go, this one's done just well enough to provide reminders of how it has been done better.

Suspended Time never really brings its two big ideas together: the everyday challenges of the pandemic, alongside existential worries about what’s behind us and what happens after we die, feel too separate to build into something bigger.

For a movie that’s meant to represent the birth of a brand-new cinematic universe (the DCU), James Gunn’s slight and slaphappy take on Superman doesn’t feel much like the start of anything.

Despite the film’s introductory text, most of Calle Malaga could happen in any city in the world. Without Maura’s performance, there’d be no specificity to speak of.

Despite its flaws, Umma is an impressive debut for Shim, the kind of outing that hints at plenty more under the hood or tucked inside a massive suitcase, just bursting with secrets.

Not only is “Rogue One” the rare modern blockbuster that could have afforded to risk something real, it’s the rare modern blockbuster that gave itself a genuine responsibility to do so. And yet, for all of its excitement and occasional splendor, there’s nothing the least bit rebellious about it. It could have been special, instead it’s just… forced.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is at its best — and its most unique, amusing, and fresh — when it’s tossing out those expectations and letting its freak flag fly. There doesn’t need to be carnage (or, hell, even Carnage), there just needs to be Venom, and more of it.

Eternity does what it can to leverage its heady concept into a heart-stirring tale of love and longing, but the world-building — or lack thereof — invariably gets in the way of the emotion that Freyne is hoping to generate from it.

The moral of this story is supposed to be shrugged off despite its overwhelming honesty, but Living downplays its drama to such an extent that it can feel as if Hermanus and Ishiguro lacked the nerve to attempt the same trick.

Sometimes, this peculiarly amusing film argues in its own special way, coming face-to-face with the weirdness that life throws your way can be the most important step towards learning how to live with it.

Most of the shorts here try to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to serious terror, but unsurprisingly struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact; meanwhile, the sole episode that keeps a straight face and taps into some of the real fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most genuinely upsetting short in years.

As much as Questlove probes his many interviewees with questions about the expectations and responsibility that comes with “Black genius,” his film doesn’t live up to the ambitious framework he puts forth.

The exorcism itself is the least entertaining thing about the movie, even though it eats up a sizable and unbroken chunk of the 68-minute running time.

In the end, Good Fortune left me skeptical and uneasy, wondering whether the people it depicts with such lightheartedness will only feel objectified instead.

Chopped up into chapters with dead-on titles like “Open Secret” and “Comeback,” Sorry/Not Sorry seems to suffer from biting off way more than a single, wide-spanning documentary could ever ably chew.

It’s an amenable enough ramble of a romantic comedy, and Witherspoon is as charming as ever in the genre in which she excels.

Ultimately, Robbins’ domineering character is so well-calculated that it appears Berlinger couldn’t peer beyond the curtain even if he tried. That fascinating dilemma makes the movie worth watching even though it presents an incomplete picture.

The bone-crunching action and relentlessly blood-letting feels out of place, and as those sequences start appearing with more frequency, the film loses much of its rangy charm.

The Killer’s Game finally gives Dave Bautista a great rom-com part to play, so it’s a shame that his rom-com leading lady isn’t given the same opportunity to fully pop.

If, for all of its godawful men, “Brimstone” has a hard time sewing its feminist fervor into anything more than a thin shawl over its bleak spectacle, this disturbingly watchable religious Western makes a solid case that hell is a place on Earth.

Who are these people? Why should we care about them? Not only does this inauspicious debut struggles to answer those basic questions, it never finds a believable way to ask them.

Is this impressive, boundary-pushing, experimental cinema or an endurance test with no internal logic where the chief pleasure is leaving the theater afterwards? Could it be both?

Fuglsig’s feature debut is ultimately less an action movie and more a procedural, one in which incremental gains and minimal casualties are as much as can be hoped for.

Amer’s fraught but noble intent has resulted in a fraught but noble film; a volatile, urgent debut that’s semi-effective kaleidoscopic approach is meant to reflect Hasna Aït Boulahcen’s fractured identity.

The big reveal at the end of the second act is absurd enough to pump some adrenaline into the third act, but the movie drags on too long afterwards.

There’s something much bigger afoot, something truly subversive and new, but The Retreat resists digging into that, instead leaning on its (admittedly, badass) leading ladies and their inspiring ability to kick butt. We love to see it, but we’d really love to see more.

It’s a movie that seems all too aware that life is hard, but desperately wants to simplify it. In doing that, it does a disservice to its own ideas.

The situation is dire, and while Centigrade eventually spins off into some well-worn tropes and predictable twists, the strength of its clever introduction keeps it pushing forward into a satisfying end.

Long-time fans of Joplin's music will likely not find much new material to relish in "Janis: Little Girl Blue," and if the film earns any new acolytes for the songstress, it will be the result of Joplin's own charisma, not of the presentation of the film built so shakily around her.

On its own, Paddington in Peru is a fun if forgettable matinee for the whole family to enjoy, but — like its hero and its villain alike — the movie belongs to a tradition that it implores us to cherish like an heirloom, and it would be a direct contradiction of its story to orphan it from the greater context of its creation.

There’s much to enjoy in the film’s first hour, which plays out a bit like an updated “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” It’s a chatty comedy populated by amiable leads and a constellation of wacky supporting stars, with an ill-fated would-be couple at its heart.

As much as Tuesday strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.

Wan seems to critique the third act failings of The Conjuring during the alarmingly superior first half.

It’s simultaneously too much and too little..., but it is a wacky bit of history that is entertaining in fits and starts. No, not all the pieces fit together, and it certainly doesn’t speed up as the game winds on (something it might have done well to emulate from the game itself), but it’s got players worth rooting for and a story that keeps leveling up. It won’t stick in your brain like the game (who doesn’t still see those little blocks floating ever-downward?), but what else possibly could?

The ideas don’t cut that deep, but like its psychic protagonist, this movie knows exactly what its audience wants.

If Over the Moon launches into orbit on the strength of its specificity, much of the film is frustratingly generic for a fable so rooted in a particular sense of place, the unique traditions that come with it, and the way they help a certain little girl learn to appreciate the enduring light of her late mother’s love.

An overlong blend of kid-friendly “Game of Thrones” warfare and standard-issue metaphors of intolerance, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds plenty of ways to build on the original premise, but few that resonate any better than the last flamboyant ride.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

It's not a terrible film, and succeeds in giving us a play by play of an alleged dynamic between two individuals, but as a whole feels like a missed opportunity.

Watching Cho, perhaps on the same search as the filmmakers — for profundity, for catharsis — is always an entertaining experience, and a reminder of her curiosity as an actor more than the sum of her stand-up parts.

Rather than developing Roman’s conundrum, Roman J. Israel, Esq. settles for a prosaic character study laid out in painfully obvious terms, with a tacked-on twist in the third act just so that the story can find some way to end.

Smothered by its lighthearted approach, The Monuments Men attempts to make a grand statement about the valiance of dying for the sake of art, but fails to create it.

The film is entertaining enough for most viewers, although some audiences might balk at a perceived lack of comedy from comedic superstar Poehler. That’s not its aim, however, and the film is charming, even without big laughs.

While the movie barrels toward some tense face-offs between the townsfolk, and more than a few convulsing moments of possessed (maybe?) hysteria, Zalava never quite takes off as a terrifying genre piece, even if Amiri’s attempt to exorcise his own demons is admirable.

If you have your heart set on watching a new release about people who have a ghost today, “We Have a Ghost” will be a tolerable experience. But for everyone else, reading the film’s highly descriptive title is about as interesting as spending 127 minutes watching it.

Predominantly a failure of tone, Horns has plenty of admirable traits and yet dooms itself from the outset. It's an admirable conceit stuffed into far less subtle material.

There’s fun to be had here, at least so long as audiences know what they’re getting — and what they’re not.

A fitfully amusing erotic thriller in which nothing is what it seems, anything could happen, and everything is at least a little ridiculous.

Fans will praise this film as yet another brave sacrifice at the altar of artistic vulnerability — because that’s what “A Man Named Scott” wants you to believe. But the authorized film lacks the artistic vision of Cudi’s musical talents, despite its best efforts.

An electric lead performance and a growing sense of self make it worth your while to see that Izzy gets where she’s going.

The hit rate gets better as the film lumbers along and the scenarios grow more extreme, but it takes a certain degree of perseverance to roll with this thing until it pays off.

Choked by overwrought trappings and suffocated by an unforgiving narrative structure, Wim Wenders’ “Submergence” is only bolstered by a pair of sterling performances from stars Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy, both of whom somehow rise above the lackluster film they’re sunk into.

The numerous belly laughs are undermined by jarring flashes of darkness that never organically sync with the plot.

Fine enough, really, but if the first film was the kind of thing that never goes out of style, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will last a season. That’s all.

For a film ostensibly about sex, Mark, Mary & Some Other People doesn’t seem to be much about actual desire; its compulsions are rooted in the pressures, expectations, and general idiocy of youth. That, at least, feels real.

More shark action would be welcome in this film about sharks. As a basic disaster flick? Thrash works, and offers up less than 90 minutes of admirably silly and occasionally chilling action, even if it could stand to take a bigger bite out of the story.

At best, it’s a suitable companion piece to the novel; at worst, it’s a lackluster feature bolstered only briefly by flashes of real human emotion.

The Painted Bird spirals between fairy tale and history lesson as if it were trying to fly with a clipped wing. Several passages create a stomach-churning sense of inertia, but only during the very last shot does the whole thing manage to get high enough off the ground to offer a valuable perspective.

This is a film that admires — even awes at — Billie Jean King, but it doesn’t share her commitment to the game. If anything, it has more in common with Riggs than it should, moving with the sluggishness of a player who underestimates their opponent.

The Croods: A New Age ultimately spins that off into a wacky adventure that somehow involves aforementioned punch monkeys (cute, but very punchy indeed), a revelation that the “Croods” franchise might intersect with the world of “Mad Max,” and a generous dash of female empowerment (plus awesome fake heavy-metal music to go with it). It’s a little silly, very colorful, and entertaining enough to deliver some good-hearted ideas that aren’t beholden to any period in time. Worth nearly a decade of push-pull to get here? Probably not, but on its own merits it’s a charming throwback — not necessarily a “new age,” but the remnants of a classic one.

Never as hackneyed as it is heartfelt, Instant Family takes the stuff of real life and turns it into a touching reminder of what love can do for the people who need it.

Despite some major narrative missteps, the film’s bold twist on the mob drama still has a refreshing quality. Maybe The Kitchen would have fared better as a series, with more time for its potential material to simmer.

While certainly the most dazzling Superman movie to hit the big screen, the 143-minute Man of Steel is also the longest, and it only justifies that heft because it leaves room to keep the effects coming.

Unlike so many comedies, Sausage Party only gets funnier as it goes along — there are dozens of duffed jokes along the way...but the script mines its demented premise for its full potential, and the plot crescendos to an ending so good that you’re likely to forgive many of the dull moments that came before it.

The film’s predictable plotting is delivered via a nearly lethal combination of obvious twists and a series of face-offs that would be compelling, if not for the exposition-heavy conversations that take place in between the physical brutality.

The expectations of the genre provide a framework for Work It that both delights (so many dancing montages! all of them fun!) and confounds (a chemistry-less romance). When it dares to break those boxes, however, things get miles more interesting.

There’s enough go-for-broke and whiplash-inducing shifts in tone on display to suggest this filmmaking duo has a future, even when their characters don’t seem to have a past.

The problem is that, while Johnson crafted a good script that balances multiple tones, his directing isn’t as confident in that tightrope.

There’s a deeper, more serious film at the heart of I Want You Back, but a bent toward offering up off-kilter comedic set pieces instead keeps it from hitting any harder truths.

As knowing and perceptive as Howell’s script can be, it fails to galvanize its most sensitive ideas into compelling drama, and Meyer doesn’t recognize where a spark might be necessary.

Handsomely made but tediously plotted, Kirby is more than deserving of this kind of meaty, she’s-in-every-frame role, but Night Always Comes sunsets long before we get there.

Despite the focus on such a fertile period, it suffers from a meandering narrative and a jarring pace, particularly as it pushes on into his later years without bothering to age star Nicholas Hoult in the slightest.

R#J certainly looks new, but flashy graphics can’t detract from the problems that lurk inside its structure and its script

Evans and Grace are exceedingly appealing together, and their charming chemistry keeps the film afloat even when it doesn’t seem to know which direction to move in.

A stylish but ultimately stiff collection of old tropes about writers and their audience, fiction vs. reality, and the Other that becomes you.

Despite its title, this Rebecca is decidedly modeled after the second Mrs. de Winter instead of the first. Soapy where Hitchcock’s interpretation was stiff, the film is beautiful and hurried and eager to be liked by everyone in a way that will only lead to trouble. It dutifully respects Manderley’s past, while at the same time revitalizing that drafty mausoleum with an Instagram-ready sheen.

The film presents a contemplative elegy for a hotel whose history is (still) being eroded, but by focusing on the literal walls (and how they, of course, can’t actually talk) only further removes the voices of the very people who live (and dream) inside of them

There’s almost nothing about “Emilia Pérez” that’s conventional — until the movie unravels into a third-act bit involving a hijacking, guns, and a live human body in a trunk. Which is just a reminder of where Audiard’s head really rests all along.

Like any Mamet endeavor, the real star is the language. Major plot events happen almost entirely offscreen, with its ensemble of characters using them as jumping off points to soliloquize about everything from the value of therapy to Snow White’s vagina. Everyone has preconceived opinions about his writing style, but Mamet puts it to use, with more substance than recent misfires.

It might seem a bit showy and cheesy in its final moments, but that kind of over-the-top shock is missing from most of the rest of the film. It’s a thriller missing the thrills, and we’ll take them where we can get them.