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.

Bullet Train feels like someone crossbred Kill Bill with a Final Destination movie. And at times, David Leitch’s film is almost as glorious as that description makes it sound — elaborate and ridiculous but dedicated to making the elaborate and the ridiculous feel … well, not plausible, exactly, but certainly compelling and fun.

Y2K is audacious in concept but pretty slapdash in execution.

I think the movie works best if you know the original and have a taste for goofy revisionism.

Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.

It can’t quite match the power of Östlund’s film, or its bemused, clinical (dare I say Scandinavian?) sensibility, but it has an awkward, American charm all its own.

The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.

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.

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.

It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.

As a result, we get relatively little insight into the other characters as they react to Riddick. Without an unknown force to spark our own imaginations, the result is mostly dead air.