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.

It’s not the first film to try to disguise its titillation at violence, in particular against women, with blunt, larger themes. But when those themes are about the structures that enable that violence, the whole enterprise just feels repellent.

Apart from scenes with Leslie Mann as a mother who propagates the wisdom of The Secret (she’d be too heavy-handed for a Disney Channel sitcom), The Bling Ring is enjoyable. And it’s always easy on the eyes.

For all its stridency, Dinosaur 13 isn’t looking to mobilize us or get us to think hard about these issues. It just wants to tell its wild, one-of-a-kind tale in the most engaging way possible, and it does that exceptionally well.

It’s a dry, arm’s-length movie that seeps into your blood as it seeps into Jones’s.

Lawrence and Henry have a warm, natural chemistry, and that rapport really seems to guide where the movie ends up, instead of the other way around.

This is yet another of Soderbergh’s “exercises in style,” which means he has one big idea and sticks to it. He makes the space shallow and ugly (faces are bathed in orange) and adds groovy sixties titles and Marvin Hamlisch music.

It doesn’t always seem to know what it wants to be. But it’s still full of marvels.

Cyrano is a delicate dream of a movie, the kind of film that feels like you might have merely imagined it — light on the surface but long on subconscious impact.

It’s a case of diminishing returns: gorgeous, occasionally evocative, but, in the end, mostly dull.

A labor of love that sometimes wears its love too laboriously, but a surfeit of rapture isn’t the worst thing in a movie.

The film builds to an anarchic set piece, in which a school full of rambunctious children defend the world from evil while the adults literally disappear off the face of the earth. It’s the closest thing Cornish comes to a real-life prescription for what ails us, and it goes down pretty well.

It's a film you won't stop thinking about, arguing over, debating, after the lights come up.

What Hooper can’t manage is to put us inside his characters’ heads — where we should be in a story that makes every surface suspect.

It won’t fix the studio comedy, but it’s a welcome, watchable outlier for now.

The movie is a broad ethnic comedy, but there’s nothing broad about the wicked-smart way it’s executed.

Every generation has to discover the same clichés that were drummed into previous generations, and kids could do worse than to learn them from this film.

Cory Yuen's So Close is a kind of Hong Kong martial-arts variation on the Charlie's Angels movies, only better.

The tit-for-tat scenario ought to be wildly entertaining, but the magic is crude, the characters flyweight, and the story protracted and unpleasant.

It's surprising that The Greatest Movie Ever Sold plays so entertainingly, given that Spurlock's quest is essentially beside the point.

It’s hard not to gather up these move complicated moments and wish for more of them — to think about how much better it would have been if she had gotten to play Garland as a flesh-and-blood person and not as the saint of suffering for showbiz.

The weirder its treatment of the treat becomes, the better the movie is, cutting through the script’s more potentially sentimental tendencies. It never reaches the singularly compelling strangeness of the source material, but it lands somewhere close enough to be mostly satisfying.

The most engrossing part of Truth is the gradual, grueling retreat from the story, first by its participants and then by the network that broadcast it.

A spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal."

It’s a light musing on adulthood and monogamy and sisterhood, washed in Pavlovian period nostalgia. The revelations are gentle, but worthwhile.

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.

The easygoing tone of The Gospel of Eureka — sometimes contemplative, sometimes cheerful — distinguishes it from many other documentaries about timely social issues.

It Happened on Fifth Avenue earns its warmth honestly, tethering a tale of fresh starts and changed hearts to the real difficulties faced by those reaching for the American dream in a postwar era that was supposed to bring prosperity for all.

A sense of unease, of incompleteness, is, I think, the appropriate response to this movie. Instead of trying to fill in the blanks, Curran and Gross leave things open and ambiguous. Just like life.

The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.

The movie is gorgeous, mesmerizing, poetic; the lyricism actually heightened by harsh jets of gore.

Margot at the Wedding doesn’t develop; it just skips from one squirmy scene to the next.

White Noise is certainly uneven — wildly so, probably by design — but it’s also never boring, always eager to throw something new at the viewer, and it’s eager to entertain. I never imagined I’d laugh so hard while watching a movie adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

The sympathy Roofman extends toward the break room of its big-box stores and the low-ceilinged place of worship where Leigh sings in the choir every Sunday is more moving than its treatment of its protagonist, offering an appreciation that these places could be anywhere and at the same time are highly specific.

What it is, really, is a showbiz satire about media ownership and our nostalgia fixation, though it muddles its message before the tone gets too scathing. It is, after all, still a Disney movie, even if it takes a perverse pleasure in playing around with Disney’s vast catalogue of characters.

Kick-Ass is a compendium of all sleazy things, and it sings like a siren to our inner Tarantinos.

This is a wan, shapeless, and amazingly conventional piece of work .

A smart little teen picture that, for a change, actually features recognizable teens.

She sometimes falls into the same trap that Lenny Bruce fell into, playing the taboo-breaking emancipator, but for the most part she's blessedly bawdy.

The film starts out as a freewheeling farce and turns into a pitch-black burlesque with surprising depths of feeling.

It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.

Ultraman: Rising’s canniest trick is the way it sustains narrative momentum while staying true to the realities of new parenthood.

The pleasant surprise of Dumb Money is that it’s such an effective entertainment, even if it oversells the revolutionary impact of what it’s depicting.

The resulting film is amiable, pretty, and charming in all the right ways — even if it ultimately settles for a fairly typical tale of a late bloomer finding his way.

As in his pithy, tuneful songs-many written from different perspectives, in different styles-Merritt is committed to stylizing his misery instead of boring you with it.

It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.

When Skinamarink sets out to actively scare . . . it’s very good at it. But the idea of the movie is more beguiling than the overall experience of watching it.

She lip-syncs convincingly to Piaf's songs. Even when she overacts like mad, she makes you think she’s Piaf overacting like mad--the little sparrow with the foghorn pipes.

Much of the bloat is still there, but The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in the Hobbit trilogy, is a real improvement – filled with inventive action set pieces and dramatic face-offs that we (finally, at long last, hallelujah!) care about.

The not-so-good news is that Mid90s never quite manages to make an impact, in part because it gives us so little to hang onto with the characters onscreen.

I've saved the best for last: The love interest played by that throaty redheaded (here blonde) darling Emma Stone, whose blue eyes radiate so much intelligence that any actor on whom she trains them in adoration becomes an instant movie star.

Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.

Tukel takes a big risk in Catfight: using farcical means to weave together personal and political tragedies, so that each dimension feeds the other. The rough edges and occasional clunks are a small price to pay.

The filmmakers spend so much time milking gags they should have called it Bridget Jones's Dairy.

Mamet is so in love with the con that he's conned himself.

I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis, who's done a lot of briskly unsentimental TV work with young people--"Malcolm in the Middle," most notably--knows how to avoid mawk, keeps the squawk to a minimum, and gets wonderful performances out of at least two of the sisterhood, "Gilmore Girls'" Alexis Bledel as the modest Lena, and America Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") as the stubborn Carmen.

It’s Moss who takes the film to a higher, scarier level. After years of playing Peggy Olson on "Mad Men", she knows how to smile and nod and say one thing while obviously meaning the exact opposite, and when at last she unleashes the truth, it’s with demonic intensity. She turns subtext into horror-poetry.

Harriet only highlights how this genre can fail despite the so-called important nature of the picture and a talented black director at the helm.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

The movie might pass muster for kids weaned on the Harry Potter films — I shudder to think of the movies that pleased me when I was 7 or 8 — and uncritical critics. But you’d have to be desperate for another Potter fix to think this is magical entertainment. It’s thoroughly No-Maj.

Elio . . . plays like something that was imperfectly assembled from its component parts, as though its creative team couldn’t figure out a way to align its visions of candy-colored intergalactic diplomacy with its emotional themes of empathy and learning to think about what’s going on inside those around us.

The film is a dead-on skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania that now afflicts so many members of the techno oligarchy, who unfortunately also control the levers of the world. I found it incredibly unpleasant to watch, in a way that made me think about comedy’s limitations as a critique of power when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version.

In the world of bloated movie-star vehicles, it's not unusual to see an ego trip of these dimensions. What’s rare is when one hits its marks so smoothly.

We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.

It’s a performance that suggests the most interesting stretch of Affleck’s career as an actor is still to come.

Like its protagonist, Puzzle finds itself as it goes along, and Agnes becomes a truly interesting person to root for.

I Care a Lot wants to race along like a caper movie; it wants to sting like a satire. But it often winds up fighting itself, paralyzed by its own toxin.

She has the perfect nervy, nerdy, needy alter ego in Anna Kendrick.

Mary Poppins Returns is a work of painstaking re-creation, and it’s full of nice touches. But it’s a bit of a dud.

Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable.

The movie gives off a stranger vibe. Beavan is both a hero and a figure of fun, a man whose ideals are in constant collision with the habits of modern life.

Maybe, in another time and place, and with different actors and a better director, it might have worked. But this thing collapses right from the get-go.

The splatter comes more easily to this new movie than a grasp of overall tone does.

Streep and Jones make themselves small: She's chirpy; he's crusty. Incessant pop standards on the soundtrack supply the emotion the director can't. All that's missing are commercials for estrogen cream and erectile-dysfunction meds.

Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?

The first two thirds and change of I Am Legend is terrific mindless fun: crackerjack action with gnashing vampires barely glimpsed (and scarier for that) and how’d-they-do-that New York locations that retroactively justify the traffic jams.

What unites everything is Jarmusch’s playful, hang-dog absurdism.

While The Rivals of Amziah King is as overstuffed as a comfy sofa, if it’s about one thing in particular, it’s about the work that goes into holding together a community.

The movie didn’t rekindle the thrill of seeing, say, The Empire Strikes Back, but Rogue One will loom pretty large in the Star Wars galaxy — if only because there’s so little competition.

Whatever its occasional stumbles, Last Night in Soho is a mostly intoxicating affair.

In Married Life, Ira Sachs aims a bit lower than Green but obliterates his target: The funny, the scary, the campy, the sad--they’re all splendidly of a piece.

Even if it’s the weakest of the Paddington movies, it succeeds. The innate sweetness of the series carries it past figurative and literal rapids and into shenanigans involving bear carvings, a bear temple in the mountains, and a secret bear community.

"Perverse” is a good overall description for Stars at Noon, a hypnotic but relentlessly disconcerting movie and never more so than in the way that Denis frames Qualley like an influencer on a sponsored trip

Crudely ­powerful. You can object to the thuggish direction and the script that’s a series of signposts, but not the central idea, which is genuinely illuminating.

I wish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had developed more of a life of its own instead of being essentially a flat visualization of the book.

Closer is marred by some drippy music courtesy of Damien Rice and a small-surprise ending that feels like gimmicky irony. But the film's core idea is compelling.

The decomposition of the soul is the goal of a Stasi incarceration, the promised end for an enemy of the state, and there is something about the movie’s pacing--the silences, the drone of the narration ("The name of your enemy is hope?…?")--that wears you down.

As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries--and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.

The prolific Patrice Leconte takes a break from mythic, life-and-death scenarios with My Best Friend, a sitcom that threatens to take a rockier emotional path before swerving back into the comfy zone. It’s better when it’s threatening, but Leconte knows his audience.

The most successful quality of the film is how close it keeps in spirit and haphazard style to the first two installments, and how it feels proudly unstuck in time.

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.

If you’re the type of viewer who thought "Wolf of Wall Street’s" failing was that it looked too cool, American Made is for you. It’s the grubbiest, greasiest vision of bad boys gettin’ away with it in recent memory.

A glancing, disjointed little movie that captures as well as any film I've seen the mind-expanding mojo of rock and roll at the dawn of the counterculture - particularly rhythm-and-blues-oriented rock, particularly the Rolling Stones, the group that synthesized R&B and made it commercial.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t visually drab, only conceptually. As a critic who often complains about biopics diverging too radically from the facts, I’m chagrined to find myself wishing the filmmakers had taken more liberties with Turner’s brief memoir.

Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome.

It’s in the uncertainties and dissonances of Last Flag Flying that Linklater’s humanism really expresses itself. Three men of vastly different values and temperaments come alive in the shared understanding that their losses were for nothing. And that shared understanding is something.