A shapely, stylish, white-knuckle horror-thriller that hits its marks with blood and thunder. It stinks to heaven, too, but it isn't lame. The streets of Rome haven't run this red since the Inquisition.

That first half of Admission is a lot for an actress to overcome. It’s not just very bad, it’s very fast, as if someone had overwound the metronome. Fairly naturalistic lines are delivered at the pace of screwball zingers — which stubbornly refuse to zing.

Into the Storm is at once one of the dumbest films you'll see this year and one of the scariest.

The revulsion that Steven Spielberg maintained to the end of "Saving Private Ryan" is nowhere in sight — Ayer betrays his own values with a climax that’s like a hack gamer’s recreation of Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch." The final encounter between Ellison and a German soldier is meant to offer humanist balance, but in context it’s ludicrous. You can’t believe Ayer thought he could get away with it.

As the cowboy-hatted wild man who cooks up speed in his motel-room lab, Rourke, who looks at home in his tattoos, is mesmerizingly grungy. He strikes a rare note of authenticity in this otherwise phony fandango.

Levin’s dialogue is relentless. Every line and retort is a punch line, and every punch line more or less amounts to Lindsey and Frank telling each other how much they stink.

The heist itself, shot mostly underwater, is actually lots of fun.

The contemporary nostalgia for romantic comedies is understandable (even if I do not personally share it), as is the nostalgia for Jennifer Lopez, movie star. Unfortunately, Second Act is a strange, scattered attempt to cash in on that longing, and it doesn’t seem to know what its own deal is aside from a rushed vision board collage of Things Women Are Probably Worried About.

This Aladdin’s sole innovation is a feminist Jasmine who refuses to be controlled, but the song is so saccharine and the vistas are so synthetic that it doesn’t feel as if she’s being liberated. It feels as if yet another man is trying to engineer her responses. Aladdin might as well have put a VR headset on her.

For all the Saturday-matinee heroics, the movie is dreary and monotonous, the vision junky in more ways than one.

It's a shame, though, that so many of The Possession's later scenes, particularly the exorcism stuff at the end, is mostly a grab bag of tired old scares. You might have convinced yourself, for a while at least, that this one was going to rise above the crowd.

The movie’s not all bad. There’s palpable chemistry between Duhamel and Hough. The former particularly seems well-suited to this sort of thing: He has just the right amount of grizzled charm to be one of those wounded hunks Sparks likes so much.

Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.

The trouble is, lazy, opportunistic writing can be distracting in its own way, and there’s way too much of it in Ted 2 to fully ignore.

Maudlin.

This is a film designed to be watched while performing a menial task — folding the laundry or washing dishes. Even during a pandemic, or perhaps especially so, we have more pressing things to do with our time than drain it away watching mediocre Netflix comedies.

Yet another remake no one needs is The Omen.

The only saving grace is that Caine and Duvall don’t overdo the southern-coot stuff.

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

It was probably hopeless from the start: The Warhol cosmos is too weird and complicated to lend itself to a conventional Hollywood biopic, and this one is conventional down to Warhol's first glimpse of his future "superstar" bouncing up and down vivaciously in tacky slow motion.

All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Spirit's narration comes to us courtesy of Matt Damon, who, having played a horse's ass in some of his earlier movies, perhaps thought it wise to inhabit the entire nag this time around.

Drab and stone-faced to a fault, The Mandalorian and Grogu struggles to capture the inventive vitality of the better Star Wars movies with action scenes that feel frustratingly pro forma and lifeless performances that seem determined to lull us to sleep.

This director is too calculating to hold our trust for long, and skepticism will kill transcendence every time.

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.

While Sohn has said Elemental was inspired by his parents, his upbringing in multicultural New York City, and his own mixed marriage, the lack of deeper consideration his film gives to its ideas leads to some ugly reductiveness.

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."

It’s all strenuously camp.