The movie would be more bearable without the unyielding score by Clint Mansell, which somehow melds the worst of Minimalism, art rock, and New Age music. It's what you'd hear if your massage therapist wanted to induce a stroke.

There’s plenty of talent involved here, but the film fails to cohere on a basic level. Yes, it’s a legacyquel, says so right there in the title, but did it have to be so lazy? Especially in a world where Cobra Kai exists?

I know I’ve been rather harsh on an indie film that deserves points for its ambitions, so let me end on a brighter note. If Papierniak took that scene with Stanfield and started over with it, he might have a hell of a good rom-com. He needs to learn to separate the gold from the f*cking shit.

As Jay and Silent Bob, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith are the perfect comedy team for smart, dirty-minded 15-year-olds, which means just about all of us.

The action-thriller The Accountant is laughable, but when you’re not laughing at it, you’re laughing with it. It’s enjoyable enough.

After its intriguing start, the movie gets dumb and dumberer. “Third-act problems,” concluded many in the Sundance audience. But the first two acts have issues, too.

Trolls World Tour is ruthlessly simple, rushed, and obvious.

Evocative, gorgeous, occasionally maddening film.

Ender’s Game’s only lyrical presence is Breslin’s. The actress has a gentle soul. In the end, she’s the movie’s mascot, and its mournful spirit.

The Six Triple Eight is about people who received no public recognition for their achievements at the time, but in trying to give them their belated due onscreen, this clunky excuse for a war movie ends up being more about what they endured than about what they accomplished.

Transporting, well acted, and occasionally powerful. It’s also a rushed, maddening mess.

Holy Rollers fuses a somber, old-world palette with a jittery urban unease--a good mix of tones. It’s also wonderfully acted.

For a filmmaker who used to make these movies with a measure of anarchic glee, Ritchie appears to have bought into his own bullshit here.

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.

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a more troubled beast, the surly goth teen of the Kipling remake pack, with maybe a touch of pyromania and an alarming fondness for blood. Its edges are rougher, and its animation isn’t quite as jaw-dropping. But it’s also beautiful in its own phantasmagoric way.

The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.

Lovelace is a respectable job, but it never goes deep.

For all that it has been positioned as the comeback of the rom-com queen, Marry Me isn’t really a return to form for the genre. Instead, it aims to have things both ways, to have the glamour and the buoyant fantasy and to also be more textured in its treatment of its characters and their relationship.

There's no wonder or elation or even dopy sincerity here - just a high level of proficiency and, yes, a lot of expensive CGI.

Taken--in the hands of director Pierre Morel (District B13), with Neeson in nearly every shot--works like gangbusters. The Frenchies have made the filet mignon of meathead vigilante movies.

A well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything.

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.

This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.

Wolf Man is a blunt movie, but it also feels like only half a movie.

The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.

There’s only one good scene in True Story, though it’s the most flagrantly absurd.

This is the sort of action film where the bad guys often hold their fire for no discernible reason, and are terrible at dodging things, but if one suspends one’s disbelief long enough, they’re rewarded with a rollicking, highly competent popcorn movie.

Sometimes you just have to let yourself be a sucker for the obvious — whether it’s for a holiday movie, a ridiculous romance, or an awkwardly grafted-on but very timely theme.

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

The pieces are in place — detestable villain, likable cast — but Now You Don’t can’t muster up the energy or the wit to make us care one lick about what’s happening onscreen.

No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps.

Everything unfolds elegantly, understatedly. The movie is a Grisham in Le Carre clothing.

A.C.O.D. is reasonably pleasant and therapeutic and antiseptic and you just wish somebody would bring a chandelier down on somebody else at some point.

He (Perry) has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle for seven African-American actresses, cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the "Precious" ante.

For all its bloodshed, the movie’s not sharp enough to land a cutting blow — or even to break skin.

Hit and Run works less as a film and more as a likable, semi-documentary romp among friends. The illusion of the drama may be gone, but it's been replaced by something more authentic and adorable. And we might be okay with that.

Perhaps seeking not to sensationalize or to Hollywood-ize a story set in a drab, mundane world, Sollett shoots without any frills. That’s usually a good thing, but here it helps to suck the life out of the material — in part because Nyswaner’s screenplay seems to have settled for the most direct, speechifying way of dramatizing the issues at hand.

In the golden turd that is Eat Pray Love, everyone helps Julia Roberts find herself so she can then experience true love.

Devoured by its own mechanical ostentation, generates no emotional involvement, and has a smart-ass, infinitely less powerful ending than the original.

Reeves has confidently entered his self-parodic period. You’ll enjoy his wry post-Matrix murmurs and squinty stares.

Audiences may not have run out of enthusiasm for what the Jurassic Worlds are selling, or at least they haven’t yet, but the people tasked with making them sure are out of ideas.

The Hunt isn’t a total mishap, not with Gilpin being as good as she is and with Zobel’s gleeful aptitude for violence, but that’s what’s so exasperating about it. It has a habit of getting in its own way with trollish tendencies whenever it starts to build momentum.

The film starts to feel like it’s more invested in selling the idea of the series rather than a film in and of itself.

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

That, in chasing something vaguely progressive and YA-inspired with Snow White, Disney has turned out a film with some hilariously timely choices is a great joke, though I wouldn’t call it an intentional one.

Eurovision gives us an inspired and hilarious match between subject and stars, all driven by melodrama: The glorious, over-the-top theatricality of the song contest makes an ideal stage for Ferrell’s brand of high-highs and low-lows.

It starts off as a mess, yes, but eventually finds itself in a very poignant place. Even a lesser Terry Gilliam film is usually more engaging and invigorating than most of the other movies out there.

The script is frantically trying to build a whole world when a modest house would do.

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 clarity of its aspirations just makes the film’s downfall that much more pathetic, like a baseball player pointing to the home run he’s about to hit and then completely whiffing and landing on his ass.

All other films hoping to become the official cinematic standard-bearer of #TheResistance, take a seat. This is the most damning political narrative of 2017.

Director Barbet Schroeder is too elegant an artist for this material, which veers between routine cop-movie conventions and high-toned malarkey that seems a lot closer to Dungeons & Dragons than to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

Andrew Davis, the director of "The Fugitive," one of the best thrillers of recent years, has added pace and heat and explicit sexuality to the material without whipping up phony excitement.

Boundaries is earnest in way that partly makes up for the overbroad characters and stale setup.

A misguided attempt to mix together social realism, children’s adventure, and political thriller, Stephen Daldry’s Trash never sits still long enough to be any of those things.

None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.

The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks.

The tall, cool Kidman works hard to impersonate a woman possessed, but she's not the type of actress to fill in a role that hasn't been filled in on paper.

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.

Twisted and outrageous but ultimately artificial. Albert Brooks did this art-reality thing a lot better years ago in "Real Life," his takeoff on PBS's "An American Family," and was sidesplitting besides.

James Franco’s adaptation of the sick little Cormac McCarthy period novel Child of God is surprisingly pretty good.

Ken Hixon's script contrives a lot of mutual-healing set pieces and then sadly but shrewdly aborts them: That makes the drama more Chekhovian than "quite real."

The movie is, in all senses, a big downer.

Leterrier’s film is the kind that doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny: The more you know about it, the more befuddled you’ll be.

A brisk feminist melodrama that is, historically speaking, a load of wank. It has the feel of a game of “telephone,” in which information is progressively mangled.

An agreeable time-killer, but I'll bet a couple of clever kids could make a livelier movie with a Woody puppet and a Predator doll.

It's also breathtaking to watch a throwaway studio sequel break its corporate chains before your very eyes and become something thrilling and dangerous and alive.

Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.

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.

If the righteous retelling ever feels heavy-handed, it’s Poots’s command of her role and the cast’s electric chemistry that make this a reckoning fit for our fantasies.

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.

I wish the movie had more of a tragic undercurrent — the tone is wobbly.

Don’t Let Go is a slog. I wish it loosened up, better balanced the potential fear, joy, wonder, and delight spooling out of its premise to yield a more adventurous result. Instead, it carries itself with dread and stilted seriousness, alleviated only by noteworthy performances from Reid and Oyelowo.

Here are two action stars having fun; watching them work together as a team is a lot more entertaining than you might have expected. Try not to think too hard about it, and Escape Plan is stupid, stupid fun.

It’s a carefully crafted world of hyperfemininity intended to be as ominously smothering as it is pretty, and if the story that Paradise Hills, the directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, told were as sharp as its visuals, it’d have a guaranteed future as a cult classic. Instead, it’s a disappointingly half-baked riff on The Stepford Wives whose brand of feminism feels more 1970s than 2010s.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol throws around a lot of intriguing ideas in this film, and even though his ambitions are more expansive than his talent, he's managed to come up with something that credibly resembles the shape of things to come, Hollywood-style.

Marvelous atmosphere and individual scenes, but not quite a movie. [31 Dec 1979, p.12]

Is Death of a President plausible? As political prognostication, perhaps. As a TV documentary, no way in hell. What's missing is shapeliness, suspense, narrative cunning, visual flair--in short, art. Are we really to believe that a network of the future would broadcast such a barbiturate?

I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.

Steven Soderbergh is usually an inspired chameleon, perfectly suiting his style to his content. But The Good German is an ambitious miss...It's all very beautiful, high-minded, and remote.

When the film shifts to Shanghai and the club Casablanca, there's too much lustrous-hued loitering and too few martial­-arts set pieces.

Please Stand By is thoughtful in how it dramatizes the consequences of autism. The movie is a little stiff, though.

I found parts of The Sacrament more effective than anything else he’s done to date, as it’s probably the least genre of his movies. But don’t tell West that; I’m pretty sure he still thinks he’s made a horror flick.

It’s hard to think about who, exactly, is going to be moved to make changes to how they live their lives by Don’t Look Up, a climate-change allegory that acquired accidental COVID-19 relevance, but that doesn’t really end up being about much at all, beyond that humanity sucks.

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.

What Men Want is a wildly uneven stretch of a movie that’s more of a flail than a romp.

With a million times more computing power at its disposal than its 1982 predecessor, Tron: Legacy still looks like Disco Night at the jai alai fronton.

It makes the same misstep that Allen's comedies often do: It assumes that the lives of these people are only about sex and love, and so that's all we ever see of them. This one-and-a-half-dimensionality wears thin.

The lesson of this is that there’s no easy way to dramatize the story of Julian Assange and that trying to turn it into a conventional melodrama is not just politically irresponsible but dull-witted.

Part of the pleasure in watching The Best Offer is the elegant, unassumingly suspenseful way it unfolds. You never quite know where it’s all headed, in part because it never quite tells you what kind of movie it is. I called it a “romantic thriller,” but there’s a lot more movie here than that.

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.

As usual, it's Banks, who's turning great performances in lousy movies into some kind of brilliant career strategy.

It is a movie that's alive in its own way, and a welcome surprise in a genre sorely lacking in them of late.

The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.

With McG's migraine-inducing jerky-cam and monochromatic palette (livened only by splotches of rust), Terminator Salvation puts the numb in numskull.

If you’re immune to Malek, there’s no hope for you. The actor might not be as handsome as Mercury and might not do much actual singing (it’s all Freddie), but he’s nearly as magnetic, and he makes you believe that that voice is coming out of that body — an amazing feat.

This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn’t even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-’em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives.