Despite being half–“Let’s put on a show” movie and half–romantic comedy, two genres dedicated to delight, Magic Mike’s Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.

Novelist-turned-director Leigh's dryly efficient style is perched between the matter-of-fact and the impossibly arty.

Echo Valley feels in need of an additional twist, or one fewer — to either commit to being foremost a drama about addiction or to go harder into the suspense, rather than ending up an awkward hybrid of the two.

Their doomy romance is supposed to be fated, but it just seems sloggy, certainly not the stuff of myth. A good comedy could be made from this same premise.

It may be that Merchant Ivory need the armature of the past in order to create a sense of the present. Le Divorce is mustier than any of their movies set back in time.

Those bookending sequences, the start and the finish, are the only ones The History of Sound fully inhabits, while in all the others it plays coy, holding back for no particular reason than that it offers the illusion of sophistication.

Moderately entertaining, immoderately splattery spaghetti Western.

With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.

Hopelessly amateurish, the troupe is saved by a remarkably pretty young blonde called Douce with a sweet soprano to match her angel face. The gifted, unknown actress-singer who plays her, Nora Arnezeder, also saves the movie, which would otherwise blur into a mass of droopy, mustached, big-honkered Gallic character actors.

The lax, lame A Walk in the Woods is a road movie without a road, a journey of self-discovery without discovery, and a tale of friendship without any chemistry.

As Brown becomes more flagrantly self-destructive and at the same time more deluded, you realize you're watching "Bad Lieutenant" made by a tediously finger-wagging Jew instead of a tediously desecrating Catholic.

The sequel, Planes: Fire and Rescue, is still a DisneyToon production, but it does aim higher, with a visual zip that was lacking from the first. It is, in almost all respects, a better movie. It’s still not particularly good, though.

Too much is skimmed over rather than dug into deeply.

The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear - the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.

The doubt about what is real and what isn’t has permeated so much of the film that when things take a turn for the serious in the final act, we the audience can’t even quite believe what we’re seeing, until the credits roll and you shrug to yourself, “Huh, I guess it was for real.” That’s a weirdly muted note to end such an otherwise over-the-top — conceptually and physically — comedy.

The film would be better if it were gentler. It's broadly written and played, the actors too busy telegraphing their characters' emotions to let us contemplate their faces in peace.

One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane. Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle.

The movie substitutes milky, washed-out color and funereal music for insight. The murders are purposely un-fluid: When you see Mohammad or Malvo take a shot, you don’t see the impact of the bullet. When you see the victim struck, you don’t see the shooter.

It will resonate with anyone who has ever buried a loved one and struggled to reconcile the myriad emotions--grief, anger, helplessness. Which is to say, everyone. And yet out of this premise comes glop. Departures needed a little more work in the morgue--like cutting to the bone.

Fuqua deliberately downplays the fantastical in King Arthur, but the gritty faux realism wears itself out quickly. You've seen one lancing, you've seen them all.

It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.

Unfortunately, Child’s Play is undone by a lack of tension even its best performances can’t conjure, and a familiar story that only skips lightly along the surface of gnarly ideas.

Sinister 2 is far from perfect, but it has a nobility that’s rare in much modern horror cinema.

Johnny Depp makes a valiant stab at the part, but even with his hair thinned and lightened and his face hardened, Depp remains Depp: I never forgot I was watching a big star doing an impersonation. It’s as if the spirit of a psychopath like Bulger resists the camera. Or maybe the movie isn’t imaginative enough to penetrate his shell.

Chemistry is nothing to sniff at, but P.S. I Still Love You does come awfully close to arguing itself out of its central romance.

It's good enough that you forget how much better Brian De Palma could do it. The rest is a slow road to nowhere, less clunky than "The Interpreter" but bogged down by its own cynicism.

Works only in spurts.

Showing the allure and gradual corruption of power through the eyes of a third party — sort of a mixture of "The Great Gatsby" and "Scarface" — is a solid conceit. But Andrea Di Stefano’s underbaked film doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

American Ultra is undemanding late-summer studio fare — ultraforgettable. But I’ll remember the faces of Eisenberg and Stewart, who are easy to ridicule but, whatever the pundits say, very much movie stars.

The artifice of the aesthetic premise overwhelms any of the film’s other intentions.

Kill Your Darlings wants to be a young man’s movie, but it’s all “cinema du papa,” as the French New Wave used to call it. The philosophical disconnect is downright cosmic.

In their move from 11-minute episodes on TV to 94 minutes, Tim and Eric have lost none of their hilarity or irreverence. But this time around, they somehow manage to be tedious, too.

If more can't be found in Bond than this, I wouldn't object, in principle, to that tuxedo's being hung up in the closet for good.

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.

Hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained.

If the narrative film only exists to give us the unsettling sliminess of Efron as Bundy, it won’t be a total waste. But it’s not much of a movie, either.

Their amalgamations can be feats of genius, like their stoner-gumshoe farrago "The Big Lebowski." Or they can pretty much lie there, like much of their new, star-packed comedy, Hail, Caesar!, which is nothing but movie fodder.

The movie, based on the terrific book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, is only so-so, but it moves at a fair clip and fills in a lot of details about the early successes of the Afghanistan war.

It's not a particularly complex (or pleasant) film, but along the way you get a glimpse of the kinds of neighborhoods that give birth to anti-Western fanatics.

I know I'm going to bring down the room by saying I think it's just okay. Well, Jennifer Hudson is more than okay.

This is the first big-studio action picture with some of the disgusted, bloody nihilism of the post-Vietnam era.

By the time the film works up to its finale, what secrets it wants to reveal to us have become fairly obvious. But they still carry a dark charge; Diablo’s ultimate grisliness is impressive in its own way. And it might have worked, had the film not asked entirely too much of its young lead.

The movie tries to turn boringness into a virtue. Every time Rob Reiner builds a little suspense, he goes off into a civics lesson, but he has nothing interesting to say.

Without a character, he’s (Pitt) back to that soft, appraising, Robert Redford Jr. stare, his mouth half open as if he’s about to speak but plainly with nothing on his mind apart from, “This is what a movie star looks like without any lines.” The ghouls are having deeper thoughts.

The cast in House is exceedingly fancy, but they never seem to connect; Blanchett and Black are about as awkward a pairing as they sound on paper, engaged in two irreconcilable ways of going about their performances.

The highest-gloss revenge porn imaginable. It’s hard to believe that so much visual elegance has been brought to bear on material so ugly, and yet the disjunction is intentional, and the film is all of a piece.

Worth seeing, even if you're as ambivalent about it as I am. Its strength is in the way the drama creeps up on you.

If you're in the mood for a liberal message movie in which the only surprise is no surprise, American Violet is the ticket.

Unfortunately, instead of coming across as a warm throwback, Nappily Ever After is a romantic comedy saddled with a reductive understanding of black womanhood without enough cast chemistry or beauty to distract us.

What's odd about Lady in the Water is that for all Shyamalan's histrionics, he's overcontrolled.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the 15th feature from Guy Ritchie, and while it’s not very good, it’s also hard to dislike something that has the genial tone of a day-drunk romp.

So-so quasi-thriller.

The problem is that he — unlike most modern sci-fi directors, who throw so much CGI at you that they make miracles cheap — seems peculiarly stingy when it’s time to deliver.

The movie’s satirical backbone softens and dissolves, and watching it go wrong might make you realize it wasn’t that good to begin with — that Bell had been getting by on energy and the audience’s goodwill.

Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.

Lucas is a brilliant technician but a poor philosopher, and his lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires. (You don’t make anything this big, for this long, without aiming for the planet Masterpiece.)

If Profile has value, it’s not as a tale of terrorist recruitment or of amorous delusion, but of how power works in the extremely online world.

Serenity isn’t just meant to surprise you — which it will — but to give you an emotional wallop — which it may or may not. It didn’t work for me: I was too hung up on the fanciness (and, in truth, ridiculousness) of the final half-hour to feel everything Knight wanted me to feel.

Identity Thief is funny enough, but it needed to be darker, raunchier, and crazier to live up to the promise of its casting.

Using Dickie Pilager as a stand-in for George W. Bush seems too coy a tactic for these scabrous times. For better or worse, we want the real--or at least, the "real"-deal.

In some ways, it encapsulates the director’s best and worst instincts. It might be his most personal film, a genuine effort to understand the connection between two of his key obsessions, spiritual faith and human impulse. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that the film wants to outrage us into a response, but its supposed transgressions often feel tired and pro forma.

The Blackening gets halfway there, and has the benefit of some gifted performers and some very good ideas. It just never really figures out how to be a movie.

I've never understood why filmmakers construct romances in which the leads hardly spend any time together.

The real-life story behind When the Game Stands Tall sounds amazing. But for all its exciting sports scenes, the movie version falls flat as drama.

Good enough to make you wish it were better.

Magazine Dreams certainly isn’t inept, and Bynum, who wrote as well as directed it, summons a devastatingly spare atmosphere that’s broken up with some arrestingly dreamlike compositions when Killian arrives at a show or competition. But it consists of the same idea, underlined over and over.

Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas work with professional skill in a ludicrous vehicle.

The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.

Netflix’s previous attempt at an extravagantly priced star-driven action movie, Red Notice, felt like it was written by an AI and performed in front of green screens without ever requiring its stars to be in the same room. The Gray Man at least feels like a middling studio movie that wasn’t worth catching in theaters but that would comfortably fill an afternoon if you stumbled on it airing on cable.

A mostly disposable, occasionally quite funny bromance distinguished at times by its earnestness.

Spurlock's movie is an attack on our eating habits, but it's also a prime example of an all-American sport--making a spectacle of oneself for fun and profit. Spurlock, you'll be surprised to learn, is developing a TV spinoff, with himself as host.

This is romanticism of a rather low order.

The movie improves on Koppelman’s ungainly novel but is generally dreary and light on insight. Director Adam Salky steers clear of the usual addiction-movie clichés, but he doesn’t have anything to replace them with, so it’s as if all the connective tissue is gone.

This is so often the problem with this genre — scary setups, followed by dopey resolutions — that you sort of want to give the movie a pass. But given its distinguished forebears, Insidious: Chapter 3 doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

Watching the movie is at once electrifying and maddening.

These are Doritos movies, indeed: a lot of crunching, a lot of empty calories.

Watching Goodrich isn’t like playing tourist in an upscale world — it’s more like stepping into the head of someone whose sense of normal is wildly different from your own.

The film is a hodgepodge, and it closes with a whimper. But along the way some lucid voices slip through.

Loach has gotten hold of a marvelous subject -- the invisibility of the working poor in the environs of the rich -- that keeps you watching despite all the banner-waving.

The result is a piece that’s more personal, but also not as rigorous and objective.

I’d see a whole film about the adventures of Hader’s desperate-for-transcendence roadie. Unlike Popstar, it might actually go somewhere.

If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.

A movie about such a pivotal figure who fought, and still fights, so hard for gender equality should spark some intense emotion, especially if you’re a woman. Weirdly, The Glorias never does that.

There are moments when the movie pops and the filmmaker seems in sync with his cast, his cast seems in sync with one another, and the intended sparks fly. But they’re fleeting.

As a bare-minimum action flick, The Marksman is mostly serviceable.

Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.

Pontypool doesn't jell--its pretensions way exceed its reach--yet it's madly suggestive, and it rekindled my affection for the genre.

It also comes as little surprise that she (Fonda) knocks the part out of the park, even if the film around her leaves something to be desired.

The Intern degenerates into a series of monologues about ambition and relationships and having it all. As the speeches pile up, our goodwill dissipates, and so does the film’s magic.

Queen & Slim does a disservice to both the themes of love and anger by never giving the latter the depth it deserves, leaving the film a beautiful object to behold but a hollow narrative to consider.

As a tribute for the awesome destructive power of the teenage libido, the house-party-gone-apocalyptic flick Project X is pretty compelling...Think "Girls Gone Wild" meets "Black Hawk Down." Unfortunately, it also appears to want to tell a story, with characters and things, and on that level it pretty much completely falls apart.

The Science of Sleep transports you, but it strands you, too. Apart from the time-machine bit and two or three other daft exchanges, Gondry’s scenes tend to circle around the same drain: the hero’s insufferable narcissism.

Anyone who has ever ended a relationship and taken long walks in the rain will relate, at least until the characters open their mouths.

The flatness that is meant to shock early on quickly becomes boring, and the movie never sparks, slogging on in its nearly unbroken monotone all the way to its climactic moment.

For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.

Delivery Man feels more unformed, as if nobody’s bothered to give it that extra coat of slick Hollywood paint to cover up the patchwork beneath.

The novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.