The standard plot may inspire feelings of déjà vu, but the gags and performances in Goldbuster will win over audiences that like slapstick and silliness.

This capably acted, if unevenly paced film often lacks focus and depth.

Granted, it’s all pretty stimulating. But when the jolts subside, there’s not much for viewers to cling to, to steady themselves.

Probably no one movie could capture the scope of citizens forcing regime change in a dictatorial country, but the South Korean feature 1987: When the Day Comes valiantly tries in its own thriller-ish way.

Bening has done a remarkable job of capturing Grahame's look and her breathy way of talking, insuring that her performance is real and using it to explore still-relevant issues of aging, glamour and relationships.

An increasingly disturbing film, it offers no relief for its central character, or for its audiences for that matter. Akin was inspired to tell the story by real-life political events in Germany, and his skills as a filmmaker are such that escape from this unsettling film is not in the cards.

What holds you throughout isn't just the picture's astounding craftsmanship but also its unsettling, exploratory vibe — the sense it conveys that you've seen something like it before, even as you assuredly haven't.

At 140 minutes, this movie qualifies as something of an endurance test.... But as endurance tests go, Molly's Game is also an incorrigible, unapologetic blast — a dazzling rise-and-fall biopic that races forward, backward and sideways, propelled by long, windy gusts of grade-A Sorkinese.

Though its theme of the corrosive influence of unimaginable wealth is not exactly news, "All the Money" benefits, in much the same way that Scott's similar (and underappreciated) "American Gangster" did, from the director's expertise at bringing pace and interest to stories he cares enough about to sink his teeth into.

This Russian drama is at once poetic and painfully realistic as it explores a century of conflict and its broader impact.

Along With the Gods strains to whimsically entertain, but routinely fails its smaller human-sized moments due to convoluted plot twists.

The twists and turns of the story keep you on your toes until the very end, never giving anything away. The verbal blows drop as fast as the bodies, and if British aristocrats fighting over money, beautifully, is your thing, Crooked House will more than satisfy, it will thrill.

With a dirge-like pace that provides ample opportunity to figure it all out well ahead of the protagonists, you keep wishing somebody would buy a vowel to hurry things along.

If Happy End is something of a bad-seed nightmare, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor. (It's been a while since a Haneke movie left me cackling in horror rather than reeling in it.)

It's hard not to appreciate the visual and thematic scope of "Downsizing's" reach. But it's harder not to see the chasm between its strange, misshapen story and the grand, towering vision to which it aspires.

The Post is the rare Hollywood movie made not to fulfill marketing imperatives but because the filmmakers felt the subject matter had real and immediate relevance to the crisis both society and print journalism find themselves in right now.

Once feared dead but found instead only sleeping, the western has sprung back to strong and compelling life with the intense, involving Hostiles being the latest case in point.

The trailer for Pitch Perfect 3 makes it look and sound like a comedy, which puts me in the unfortunate position of announcing that it is nothing of the kind. It's a tragedy in four-part harmony.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Bright is that it squeezes nudity, profanity and blood into the kind of dopey adventure that should be aimed more at adolescents — right down to its simplistic lessons about tolerance.

The Greatest Showman, for all its celebratory razzle-dazzle, in the end feels curiously lacking in conviction. Its pleasures, namely those Pasek-Paul songs, could be removed and repurposed for another story entirely, with no discernible loss in enjoyment or meaning...Its failures are rooted in something deeper: a dispiriting lack of faith in the audience’s intelligence, and a dawning awareness of its own aesthetic hypocrisy. You’ve rarely seen a more straight-laced musical about the joys of letting your freak flag fly.

Whatever affection the filmmaker might have for her characters, she does her actors no favors, leaving newcomers as well as seasoned talents flailing.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a one-joke movie, relying on the subversion of physical stereotypes, but thanks to impeccable casting and fun performances, that joke is very well-executed.

Spent exhausts the audience’s goodwill within the first few minutes of this bizarre project, and requires the utmost patience to endure.

There isn’t a lot of insight or depth regarding the bestselling author’s life and experience beyond his career achievements.

Though overlong, and pitched a little too heavily toward cable-TV sensationalism...Killing for Love is still a gripping murder mystery about the fated coupling of a pair of calculating romantics too smart for their own good, and the limits of the American justice system

If our understanding of the losses these characters have suffered feels incomplete, it’s hard to come away entirely unaffected as these men and women look back at their young adulthood and the whirlwind of historical change against which it played out.

This is a satisfying indie western, a dark and brooding film made with both a modern touch and real love for the genre.

“A Portrait” may not make Frisell’s biography fascinating, but it does give the proper due to a guitarist whose music flows like water into any handy vessel.