I've saved the best for last: The love interest played by that throaty redheaded (here blonde) darling Emma Stone, whose blue eyes radiate so much intelligence that any actor on whom she trains them in adoration becomes an instant movie star.

Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.

Tukel takes a big risk in Catfight: using farcical means to weave together personal and political tragedies, so that each dimension feeds the other. The rough edges and occasional clunks are a small price to pay.

The filmmakers spend so much time milking gags they should have called it Bridget Jones's Dairy.

Mamet is so in love with the con that he's conned himself.

I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis, who's done a lot of briskly unsentimental TV work with young people--"Malcolm in the Middle," most notably--knows how to avoid mawk, keeps the squawk to a minimum, and gets wonderful performances out of at least two of the sisterhood, "Gilmore Girls'" Alexis Bledel as the modest Lena, and America Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") as the stubborn Carmen.

It’s Moss who takes the film to a higher, scarier level. After years of playing Peggy Olson on "Mad Men", she knows how to smile and nod and say one thing while obviously meaning the exact opposite, and when at last she unleashes the truth, it’s with demonic intensity. She turns subtext into horror-poetry.

Harriet only highlights how this genre can fail despite the so-called important nature of the picture and a talented black director at the helm.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

The movie might pass muster for kids weaned on the Harry Potter films — I shudder to think of the movies that pleased me when I was 7 or 8 — and uncritical critics. But you’d have to be desperate for another Potter fix to think this is magical entertainment. It’s thoroughly No-Maj.

Elio . . . plays like something that was imperfectly assembled from its component parts, as though its creative team couldn’t figure out a way to align its visions of candy-colored intergalactic diplomacy with its emotional themes of empathy and learning to think about what’s going on inside those around us.

The film is a dead-on skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania that now afflicts so many members of the techno oligarchy, who unfortunately also control the levers of the world. I found it incredibly unpleasant to watch, in a way that made me think about comedy’s limitations as a critique of power when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version.

In the world of bloated movie-star vehicles, it's not unusual to see an ego trip of these dimensions. What’s rare is when one hits its marks so smoothly.

We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.

It’s a performance that suggests the most interesting stretch of Affleck’s career as an actor is still to come.

Like its protagonist, Puzzle finds itself as it goes along, and Agnes becomes a truly interesting person to root for.

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.

She has the perfect nervy, nerdy, needy alter ego in Anna Kendrick.

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.

Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable.

The movie gives off a stranger vibe. Beavan is both a hero and a figure of fun, a man whose ideals are in constant collision with the habits of modern life.

Maybe, in another time and place, and with different actors and a better director, it might have worked. But this thing collapses right from the get-go.

The splatter comes more easily to this new movie than a grasp of overall tone does.

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.

Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?

The first two thirds and change of I Am Legend is terrific mindless fun: crackerjack action with gnashing vampires barely glimpsed (and scarier for that) and how’d-they-do-that New York locations that retroactively justify the traffic jams.