It's an opulent, if instantly disposable, kinetic joyride.

The defense concedes that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex hits its marks with the subtlety of a legal brief. But that’s not fatal.

The best reason to see the movie is Larson, who showed how terrific she could be in "Short Term 12" and "Room" as women whose ways of fighting back were frustratingly earthbound.

After the Hunt might be confused, and it might even be unsatisfying — but it also refuses to coddle anyone, and that feels like some sort of victory.

Here's what's depressing: that, given the millions spent on defense by multinational conglomerates, our last best hope isn't the courts but the fickle attentions of glossy magazines and the noblesse oblige of celebrities.

It’s the rare actor who can make playing a character this messy look so effortless.

Apart from having no particular reason to exist onscreen, especially at these prices, it's not half bad.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

The movie does a good job of capturing how ostracism and liberation are sides of the same spinning coin.

The Transformers franchise has made bloated, histrionic pandemonium such a thing that the modest Bumblebee, for all its derivativeness, feels like a breath of fresh air.

Kendrick and Lively have an undeniable chemistry that allows you to buy that these two characters really do like one another, despite the circumstances. But that only matters when those circumstances mean something, and by the end of Another Simple Favor, they don’t — nothing matters at all.

Some of the supporting actors register, especially Michael Mando as the unpretentious but quick-witted chief engineer. But the only surprise is Skarsgård. He has played wife-beaters, vampires, rapists, and mute would-be detectives, but who’d have thought he’d make a credible nerd?

If Wreck-It Ralph was a film about jobs and self-image, the addition of commerce into that equation in its sequel makes everything exponentially more manic and unstable. And after nearly two hours of our eyeballs being flooded with savvy, incessant product placement of eBay, Amazon, Pinterest, and of course the entire Walt Disney Company portfolio, we’re all wrecked.

It's tricky, it's surprising, and it's largely faithful to the original mini-series, but in context it's a nonevent. It's like a time bomb that's never dismantled but never explodes. The movie is good enough that the ending leaves you … not angry, exactly. Unfulfilled.

This is not the kind of material for a stately biopic or a political drama. This is nasty, strange business — perfect for Ferrara, whose work often hovers between art and exploitation, between angst and sleaze.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a particularly good movie — I’m not even sure it is a movie — but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it.

Has an appealing rawness.

Sure, it’s the Jamie Foxx breakout role. But the movie around it is so systematically “inspirational” that it comes perilously close to sabotaging the breakout.

Hercules has no right to be as entertaining as it is.

The descent into a tepid thriller of sexual jealousy slowly negates the abstract, almost metaphorical quality of this film — and it ultimately undoes the spell cast by that mesmerizing first half.

Something is missing, though. The themes are all there, but the movie doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier and rev you up.

We love charismatic murders and compelling monsters, but it’s always a little more comfortable to love them when they appear to be acting for good. The best thing about Don’t Breathe 2 is the way it constantly undermines that comfort, as though demanding we question the desire to assign hero and villain roles at all.

Franklin directs smoothly, but except for Freeman, the theatrics are pretty pro forma.

It’s puffed up in obvious ways but disarmingly puckish in others. As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful--yet his gung-ho spirit wins him Brownie points.

It’s a cracker­jack piece of filmmaking, a declaration that he’s (Eastwood) not yet ready to be classified as an Old Master, that he can out-Bigelow Kathryn Bigelow. Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In more ways than one, the Iraq occupation is seen through the sight of a high-powered rifle. The movie is scandalously blinkered.

Given the movie’s bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.

Despite the ticking clock of Finch’s rapidly progressing illness, the movie doesn’t build up much urgency or excitement. The script is pretty thin, almost all premise and little incident. But director Miguel Sapochnik has the eye to make this world compellingly hostile and bleak, and that counts for something.

Suggests a cross between "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve." The suggestion, alas, doesn't go very far, but Bening's performance approaches the pantheon.