For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.

When French New Wave directors like Truffaut and Godard paid tribute to Hollywood pulp, they poeticized it and gave it an infusion of feeling. Tarantino’s tributes are, for the most part, far less complicated: He’s a fan, and Kill Bill is his mash note.

Believe it or not, there's a strange kind of lifelessness to the movie that makes you wish it were dumber -- that it was more obnoxious and louder and crazier.

Too often, it’s the MOVIE that isn’t there. What’s meant to be archetypal comes across as superficial.

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

There’s a lot of good stuff here, but the movie often seems more interested in ennobling rather than dramatizing.

Ultimately, Ali is a far more complex creature than this movie allows for.

Winningly goofy but blemished by behind-the-scenes tinkering, The Lost Kingdom is disappointing in the usual sequel way: It rearranges without deepening the elements people liked about its predecessor.

Alpha is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against.

Transcendence never quite succeeds at telling a story of scientific overreach. And it doesn’t really click as an action movie either. But as a human tragedy of man and monster, of beauty and beast, it has just enough genuine pathos that you wish it were better.

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.

Few films go as obviously and bewilderingly wrong as Chloe, but for the first hour it’s a potent little melodrama in which the smooth, super-controlled storytelling contains the theme of unruly obsession like a straitjacket.

The film wallows in a particular brand of Americana — denim and leather, cornfields and Harley-Davidsons, crumpled packs of cigarettes and boilermakers on the bar at a dive — without being comfortable laying claim to it.

It’s not the weighty emotions that drag Vol. 2 down. It’s the plot that chases its own tail and the cluttered visual palette.

It’s a transcendent performance, somehow both a miracle and the kiss of death. It is good enough to almost elevate the entire movie above its many awkward shortcomings. And yet it also crystallizes those shortcomings.

The story doesn’t feel dramatized. It feels pitched.

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.

While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements.

Mapplethorpe doesn’t linger long enough to have a present tense. It hits its marks and breezes on. It’s not inept — there are few bad scenes. It doesn’t risk enough to be bad.

Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.

A mixture of mild pleasures and deep disappointments.

As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.

Few recent movies better embody the vibe that in a spiritual vacuum all that matters is momentary sensation, a dry quickening of the pulse to counteract the emptiness of what we might still choose to call “existence.”

As many times as I tried to get onboard with its proposed brand of breezy fun, it kept kicking me off, if only because I found myself running up against the very foundation of its premise.

By its close, Voyeur spouts some lines about how we all like to watch, and we are left with three documents of the Voyeur’s Motel and no closer to knowing why we should care.

Somewhere in this mess, there might be a very good movie.

Cold Pursuit ultimately winds up being about how unsatisfying films like Cold Pursuit can be.

Like the film Challengers itself, Zendaya is a star who still operates on the surface of things.

Tusk is not a particularly good movie, but the vivid anxiety dream at its heart makes it one of the most personal films this writer-director has ever made.

Despite the obvious effort that went into the making of Maria, there’s so little life. For a movie built around a performance meant to be lauded for its bravery, there’s no sense of anything risked.

Anyway, "Children of Men" this ain't, though the inert directing of Len Wiseman (who helmed the first two films and has a producer credit here) has thankfully been replaced by Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein, who seem to have a lot more verve and even some visual whimsy.

The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright's direction is too slick to elicit much feeling.

Barely rates faint praise.

This film ultimately doesn’t reach its full potential in part because it can’t settle firmly enough on a vibe or viewpoint. It ping-pongs between buoyant caper, farce, and female empowerment drama without ever lingering long enough in a single zone to make an impact.

Disposable, sporadically amusing.

Mute is pretty meh but gets points for randomness.

The problem is the enervated pacing and ludicrous depiction — after much fancy skipping back and forth in time — of the murders themselves.

The inevitable showdown between these two paragons is something of a fizzle; there's too much over/under-acting going on.

Pokémon obsessives will want to check it out, but the movie is mostly an uninspired slog, not committed enough to work as a demented genre picture, and not funny enough to work as a goofy, lighthearted comedy. You chuckle, you go “aww” a couple of times, and that’s it.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may give us the franchise’s first Asian American superhero, but what may be the most Asian American thing about it is the way it’s caught between the legacy of its forebears and a still-developing sense of self, its protagonist yanked away from that journey and enlisted as the face of the latest representational win, without ever seeming entirely decided on what he’s representing.

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.

At its best, it's a lively on-the-road chronicle of how to put an act together from scratch.

The last hour is like a night at the comedy club after the headliners have left and the room has the smell of stale beer and flop sweat.

The finished product is in a different league than the whompingly terrible Men in Black II - it hits its marks. But it's not inventive enough to overcome the overarching inertia, the palpable absence of passion.

People are calling Fifty Shades Darker the worst movie ever made, but it’s really not that terrible. It does, however, misrepresent itself, which is true of most mainstream American films about sex. The movie’s real subject is wealth.

The bigger problem is that stupidity just isn’t a very interesting subject.

The movie plays like a strenuous imitation of Steven Spielberg instead of the real deal.

Some good gross-out inventiveness, but too heartfelt by half. Do we really need the Farrellys to champion inner beauty?

The non-ending turns the whole movie into an elaborate tease, too creepy to dismiss, too shallow to justify its "ambiguities."

For all that Nyad is happy to show its subject’s personality flaws, it has trouble finding her humanity,

The actors are good, but their lovemaking has no raw edges, no messiness. Deschanel lights them like sculptures — art objects — while Richter saws away to serenade their transcendent oneness. It’s Middlebrow Realism, comrades.

The story is hell to follow--the flashbacks aren’t in chronological order--and the nonacting variable.

The passing of the torch from Raimi to Alvarez is not a momentous occasion. In the end, who really cares? Five years from now, will you want to watch this bloody $14 million extravaganza or Raimi’s shoestring original, which was Amateur Hour elevated to pop art?

Working in a mini-genre whose bones would appear to have been picked clean by the likes of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, Glosserman and Stieve find a few pints of fresh blood.

There’s a disconcerting shrewdness underneath its patina of tastefulness — it’s too calculating to achieve the transcendent almost-romance it strives for but never inhabits.

Hateship Loveship is in no way a comedy, but Wiig's enormous presence threatens to make it so. She can't disappear into the void, so the drama onscreen becomes hard to take seriously.

Sets out to demonstrate that life is about more than having sex. Inadvertently -- I think -- it ends up showing us just the opposite. As if we didn't already know.

Nothing about the film is especially coherent, including its simultaneous status as a piece of art, a gesture of religious conviction, and a shameless act of commerce. It feels like notes from an artist who’s not sure if he wants to express himself as a worshiper or an object of worship — but who’s prepared to give it a try anyhow, on the biggest screen possible.

Seems tailor-made for an intelligent thriller in the Graham Greene mode, but in Jewison's hands, the dragnet that closes in on Brossard is lackadaisical, and the larger political overtones--especially concerning the complicity of the Catholic church in aiding Nazis--are spelled out over and over.

While the imagery in this retelling is impeccable, the story is strangely lifeless.

Despite much fervent talk of the beauty of the mountains and the closeness of God, Alive peters out. [25 Jan 1993, p.55]

The amiably bland family comedy The War With Grandpa genuinely surprises with how un-special it is. It’s the kind of film that seems to vanish from the mind even as you’re watching it.

All in all, one walks away from Rustin enchanted with Domingo’s performance, while feeling that a character as larger than life and momentous as Bayard Rustin surely deserves a film less dutiful and more inspired.

Based on the popular video games, this is a movie with breathtakingly visceral racing scenes, and they are matched by a breathtakingly, breathtakingly terrible script.

Caught Stealing is an intermittently fun experience that would be a better time if Aronofsky either loosened up a little more or, conversely, maintained a tighter grip on the wheel.

The King of Staten Island shrinks Davidson down a little too much, to the point where his pathos and humor doesn’t blend with but actively gets obscured by his immaturity.

It's the only Almodóvar movie in which feeling, emotional or sexual, doesn't suffuse the imagery and hold the ramshackle melodrama together.

The Snow White comedy Mirror, Mirror turns out to be not that terrible - or maybe it's that the terrible first half hour wears you down so much that the rest seems relatively pleasant.

All this is diverting but also borderline dull.

I'm not sure any other actress today could have pulled this off without seeming cheap or manipulative. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the movie itself, which often traffics in the manipulative.

So relentlessly giddy and hyperactive that it doesn’t really need a movie review--it needs a prescription.

The action is bludgeoning. When Max gets pummeled by fists and lethal objects, we get pummeled by light and noise and rock-'em-sock-'em editing. No shrimp, though. As a narrative, "District 9" wasn't particularly original, either — in the end it was a standard conversion melodrama. But everything is better with shrimp.

The whole movie is like an NRA wet dream, with Robert Duvall as a crusty gun-range owner who pitches in to shoot bad guys. Jack Reacher already feels as if it belongs to another era.

More often McNamara comes across as Exhibit A in Morris's latest metaphysical creepshow.

Disney’s new Haunted Mansion is a hot mess, but it’s a sporadically entertaining one.

That more or less is The Upside in a nutshell. It’s a film that contains complicated, sad, interesting ideas rarely expressed on screen — even Kidman’s scold character unfolds into a more intriguing person, full of contradictions — but whose package is fundamentally unsuited to showcase those ideas, like a sweater with the holes in all the wrong places.

If only Crowe brought the same subtlety to his direction that he brings to his performance.

At its core is a scenario in which someone’s given the chance to confront their younger self and call out their worst choices — one that feels like it has more to do with therapy than with all the unconvincing action in which it’s unfortunately packaged.

There’s a bitter irony to the fact that, whether due to access issues or an inability to wrangle what he wanted from his material, in retreading the Manson details, Morris has made something that feels a lot closer to that omnipresent slop than to the work that inspired it.

Some of that fun is infectious. For a while. Maybe 45 minutes. But when actors look as if they’re having a better time than you are, the buzz wears off fast. You turn into a wallflower at an especially obnoxious party.

Let’s Be Cops has its moments, but it in no way distinguishes itself.

Instant Family is a surprisingly foul-mouthed, filled-to-bursting roller coaster of a comedy-melodrama that tosses you in eight different directions before leaving you a teary, conflicted mess. And when it works, it’s genuinely funny and moving. But when it doesn’t, hoo boy, it’s atrocious.

If I’ve made Robert the Bruce sound laughable, I’ve misrepresented it. It’s not bad at all. Though he is unusually uncharismatic, Macfadyen (who co-wrote the script) is an excellent actor, and Richard Gray directs ably. But that word — “ably.” I never used it before. It’s the bottom of the neutral zone, before you dip into negative territory.

If the staging were as witty as the plotting, Quantum of Solace might have been a corker like "Casino Royale." But when the action starts, art-house-refugee director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) mashes together close-ups in the manner of "The Dark Knight," and every big set piece is borderline incoherent.

It’s just another example of art-house hokey-pokey. Amazingly, this film won both the Palme d’Or and Best Director Award at Cannes, beating out, among others, "Mystic River."

Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.

I can't think of another movie that starts so brilliantly and ends so miserably as this one.

It’s easier to think about Frozen II as a product than as a film because a (sometimes stunning-looking) product is all that it feels like.

I was never bored by Normal, but I’d also be lying if I said I was ever excited by it. Maybe it’ll help you forget your troubles for an hour or two, but there’s also a good chance you’ll forget the movie itself in even less time.

Watching this Pelham--a money job from its conception--you can believe that there's no other motivation on Earth.

Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

As a result, the mystery itself eventually becomes tiresome and shrug-worthy, even as the film breathlessly racks up the revelations. In the end, this twisty thriller just winds up twisting in the wind.

It replicates the template and the atmosphere of the original, but it lacks invention and emotional investment.

When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.

Creative Control is the most elegant vision imaginable of a world in the process of losing its moorings.

The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone.

The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.

Although it's shot in lovely, dusty shades of brown with splashes of Coca-Cola red, John Hillcoat's Lawless is dead weight: listlessly classical and then bludgeoning.