The movie is physically beautiful, but the ideas are kitsch -- it’s a New Age love story, the latest version of the doomed romances of 50 years ago.

The (elderly) Burt Reynolds vehicle The Last Movie Star strikes a note of banality in its first sequence from which it rarely deviates.

Ultimately, to borrow a phrase from writer Michele Wallace, Ma is too wistfully hegemonic to truly work.

Reminiscence is the damnedest thing — a movie filled with promising concepts it doesn’t get around to exploring, because it’s dedicated to a romantic mystery that’s never very romantic or mysterious

It's hard to get past the primitiveness of Allen’s fantasies.

Predictable, not so much from his (Zhang Yimou) previous movies as from the work of the many sentimentalists who have already plowed this well-tilled turf.

A frustrating blend of the sharply funny and the ploddingly generic. Although he does them well enough, we don’t really need Ron Shelton to give us the same old skidding-U-turn cop-thriller theatrics. He’s a much more distinctive talent than this crass spree allows for.

Spiderwick. There’s nothing wrong with it that passion and personality couldn’t fix.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.

The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.

An unusually powerful mess, a broad satire of suburban self-indulgence with little in the way of a consistent style, and with a character who's serious business: a convicted child molester.

The film is repetitive, top-heavy: Wright blows his wad too early. But a different lead might have kept you laughing and engaged.

Aside from the ingenious creation of Moretti and his occasionally unpredictable behavior, the film fails at creating interesting characters, deploying suspense, and even delivering some cheap thrills.

For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.

The film may have its roots in reminiscence, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the heart: Zeffirelli's, as usual, is swathed in tinsel. Still, the villas on display are gorgeous, and watching those dowager martinets intimidate the Fascisti is fine sport.

Life After Beth is a reasonably fun, medium-gory horror comedy that’s better before the innards hit the fan.

It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.

She’s Funny That Way often displays an old-school generosity and polish, and at least one breakout performance — but just as often, its moments of inspiration are tempered by miscasting and shrill attempts at humor.

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.

The middling romantic comedy Smart People, which centers on a hyperintellectual dysfunctional family, is of interest chiefly for the first post-Juno role of Ellen Page.

The most charitable way to view it is as a Dadaist experiment, in which two tonally disparate movies were hacked down and their remaining strands woven together to bizarre effect.

The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity.

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

It's fascinating trying to separate the thirties material from the mostly maladroit additions.

If you can stay awake, you'll see a performance by ­Keaton that is radiant in its simplicity, all ditheriness shaken off. She's still ­peaking - ­someone give her a great role.

With the transformation of Al Franken from comedian to activist, Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus stumbled onto a good subject, but in the documentary Al Franken: God Spoke, they stumble around in it.

The primary pleasure of James Marsh’s understated heist film is the opportunity to watch these icons go from mild-mannered pensioners to snarling, backstabbing hoods. That’s one of its shortcomings, too: We want more, and the picture never quite gives it to us.

Ella McCay is gas-leak cinema at its finest, which is to say that there is a naïve purity to its unhinged qualities that is almost charming.

Except for a screamingly funny climax in which he attempts to kidnap Pamela Anderson (who reportedly wasn't in on the joke), I found the Borat feature (directed by Larry Charles, who does similar duties on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") depressing; and the paroxysms of the audience reinforced the feeling that I was watching a bearbaiting or pigsticking.

As Jesse Owens, [James] mixes confidence, bewilderment, and subdued rage into a powerful whole. It’s not a big, show-offy performance. Quite the contrary: He’s surprisingly quiet, watchful. Everything seems to be submerged, but still present.

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.

Pacific Rim made me marvel at the technology of movies, but never the magic of them.

The ultimate effect of this film, directed by actor Diego Luna, is curiously cold — it never transcends the hagiographic nature of its material, despite a talented cast and a compelling subject.

The unfairness of it all would be worth getting more worked up about if Adore were a better movie. It’s not. But it’s a fascinating one nevertheless — a case study in thwarted cinematic ambition and a cautionary tale of stylistic timidity.

If Cheap Thrills ultimately does carry us along, it’s due largely to Healy’s performance and presence. He’s a figure halfway between schlemiel and criminal, and the film effectively works that full range.

Even the film’s most charming character work is undone by the stale jokes that populate its script.

The dissonance between that meditative quality and a premise as goofy as Happy Gilmore’s is jarring, though it’s hard to blame Sandler for taking the time to look back, no matter the context.

Its comedy is successfully awkward and discomfiting until it’s evident Borgli isn’t interested in exploring people so much as using their mistakes as gristle to create an endless sprawl of socially awkward scenarios with all the grace and interpersonal cognizance of an edgelord. It is only through the sheer force of the actors involved that the movie is engaging and entertaining.

There’s a ravishing aliveness to the spacious imagery; at least the clichés have room to roam free.

Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.

It muddles what might have been a fascinating alternate — i.e., downbeat — take on one of Israel’s most-acclaimed military operations.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

As a director, he’s always been more about conjuring a mood than telling a story, about immersion rather than suspense. Filled with large, empty rooms, great blank stretches of barren landscape, and forlorn glimpses of the lonely vastness of space, The Midnight Sky is a movie you’re supposed to lose yourself in, at least a little bit. And on a small screen — even on a really big small screen — that’s practically impossible.

Master Gardener plays less like a thematic finale and more like the director is trying to exorcise himself of his perpetual idée fixe.

To be fair, some of it is good, very good. Jersey Boys has an easy, likable gait. It’s Eastwood’s most fluid film: He gets the swing of the music without fancy editing.

The film plays more like it was made by an AI versed in the existing movies but not quite up to spitting out something coherent itself.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

The movie Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul belongs to Regina Hall. By the end, she has seized it with both hands thanks to a performance that, especially in the film’s second half, is explosive, multi-layered and, unfortunately, much more purposeful than the film itself.

Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.

Pleasant, if inane – helped along by a likable cast that’s clearly having fun.

It’s not brash enough to measure up to the very-near-future dystopia of "The Purge" franchise; it’s also not studied enough as a character ensemble to work as a dialogue-driven bottle movie. The Oath lands in an unpleasant middle ground that is too close to reality to feel like escapism, and too antic to feel equipped at anything like incisiveness.

Mostly uninspired and insipid, but it rallies, and builds up enough comic steam by the end that you might find yourself amused.

Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."

It’s not a bad film, exactly, but it’s a jumbled, uncertain one, and it never quite makes a compelling case for itself.

More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies.

A wee Boy Scout would have done far better in the wilds. It’s tough to think "Waiting for Godot" when what you’re watching is closer to "Dumb & Dumber."

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.

The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.

About Time is like a sermon that starts with a few good jokes and ends with tremulous exhortations to live, live.

It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances [Cumberbatch] has given. Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character.

The film ultimately overloads us with so much amazing nonsense that we sort of give up and give in.

It’s neither a rigorous history lesson nor a particularly interesting work of drama and character, and it ends up doing the exact same things — pitting women against each other, fixating on fertility and virginity — it claims to find so oppressive for its heroine.

Directed by Bryan Singer in a break from his gayish superhero movies, it's a low-key procedural with a dollop of suspense--although perhaps not enough to make up for the foregone conclusion.

Ultimately, The Ice Road veers uneasily between immersive tension and a variety of you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me howlers on the level of both plot and dialogue.

If "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" are the seminal killer-as-voyeur movies, Vacancy is the nasty little runt offspring with no other purpose in life but to gnaw on you.

It starts off with a flourish and winds up limp, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat that turns out to be dead.

The action has become incoherent, largely past the point of enjoyability.

False Positive fails to cohere. Glazer and Lee’s script scatters its thematic attention in the last third, which ruptures the movie’s attempt to build dread, and director Lee creates a thin, under-realized world.

They make you wish Haggis would put away the Great Themes, the belabored dialogue, the forced narrative dynamics, and just figure out a way to scale down his scope and tell smaller stories. Maybe it’s not all as connected as he thinks.

Amid all the important facts, I longed for something unnecessary from the filmmaker, some expressive flourish whose sole purpose isn’t just to convey information. Again I find myself typing the words, “It’s an unquestionably worthy story, I just wish it was told with more inventiveness.”

The chief — though hardly the only — problem with Victoria & Abdul is that too much political correctness proves to be as bad for drama as too little.

In order for the film’s stylistic conceit to work, the protagonists need to pop more. We need to want them to break free of their grief and find ways out of the darkness.

Things speed up too quickly, meaning just when the movie’s rhythms should become loopier and the action more eccentric, The Cloverfield Paradox becomes one more formulaic ticking-clock series of chases and shootings with a moral dilemma for pathos and then uplift.

Another charmless Hollywood thriller.

It doesn’t entirely earn its twists, in part because it botches both the whodunit elements and the psychology of its characters.

The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.

The philosophic notions in I Love Huckabees are ultimately not much more than window dressing for some fancy slapstick.

There’s a lot jam-packed into this movie, but it’s in such a rush to get through it all and to not bore us that it … well, it bores us. We’re lost, and we’re clearly not supposed to be.

There’s something strangely uninvolving about White Boy Rick, despite all its claims to be a sensational true story.

Neither terrible nor excellent; Hayek, who also co-produced, may have obsessed for years about this project, but the result is a fairly standard this-happened-and-that-happened biopic.

Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.

Roach is too stiff a director to give Ferrell room to romp. Bits like the one in which he's challenged to recite "The Lord's Prayer" needed extra zigs and zags instead of variations on the same joke. A looser director like Adam McKay (Step Brothers) might have created a happier climate for improv.

Just because Cole Porter's biography was botched and airbrushed in "Night and Day," starring Cary Grant, doesn't mean De-Lovely, which is up-front about Porter's homosexuality, is a whole lot better.

Too eager to please to be truly dislikable, and Roberts and Cusack have a fine rapport.

Juicy, revved-up, semi-satisfying biopic.

Cinematically speaking, this is all low-hanging fruit. Maybe such unimaginative choices wouldn’t stand out so much if Huppert were herself not such an inventive and riveting performer. She is, and Mama Weed doesn’t really deserve her.

The film never quite reconciles the banality of this love triangle with its far more interesting depiction of the rest of these characters’ lives.

Has an authentic rotgut flavor, but here's the question for the future: Will Gallo learn to criticize his own ideas or continue to pride himself on screwing up?

The film becomes an aria of agony--but with a rousingly yucko finish!

It’s a gorgeous-looking, sensitively edited film to be sure, but never finds a dramatic foothold, no matter how many manic arguments and drug overdoses it throws our way.

There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.

Somewhere inside The Last Exorcism Part II is a very good thriller — a genuinely unnerving movie about possession — struggling to get out. But then the sound drops out, the music shrieks, a figure jumps out, and we’re back to the same old, same old.

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

Roth's deep-dish introspection would be difficult for any movie to achieve, but with the right cast and more passion, we might have been pulled right into Coleman's psychic prison. The Human Stain isn't a movie of ideas, and it's too inert to be a probing character study. No stain is left behind, just a wan watermark.

What we're getting in this movie isn't necessarily better; it's just more.

Early in The Rachel Divide, a commentator describes Dolezal as a Rorschach blot, and the movie is one, too. Some people think it’s a hatchet job, others that it gives its subject’s commitment to social justice too much credence. I found it pretty much down the middle.

In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, it’s a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Willis’s anguished mug. There’s an uncomfortable Great White Father (and Mother) aspect to this movie.