It’s a film about language in ways that are promising but more often exasperating.

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 The illusion of the drama may be gone, but it's been replaced by something more authentic and adorable.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.

Moverman is attempting something hugely ambitious with Time Out of Mind: a socially conscious, existential-displacement art movie. I think it would have worked better with a little less rigor and a little more intimacy.

The movie itself isn’t dull. It’s moderately stylish, moderately suspenseful, fun in patches. It hits its marks. But the setup lacks urgency.

Not quite a history lesson and not quite a rom-com and certainly not an epic, the movie is a mild but pleasant mishmash of genres held together by the sheer charisma of Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, two actors who seem unexpectedly well suited to each other’s energies.

Feig keeps throwing so much stuff at you — gross-out gags, chases, brutal violence, not to mention actors working their heads off — that he finally wears down your resistance. In the end, I admired him for keeping this ramshackle construction together, casting performers I adore, and proving that Melissa McCarthy can, indeed, hold a gun. A mixed victory. A definitively mixed review.

The destination is often familiar and not always particularly interesting, but the ride itself isn’t always so bad, especially when you’ve got Bill Murray along for company.

Rough Night, which is like an episode of Broad City that got a blowout and smoked a pound of primo studio notes, tries to have it both ways. It wants to be a character-based lost-weekend romp, but keeps forcing itself toward increasingly ridiculous and self-consciously naughty set pieces.

I have to tip my cap to such a bold attempt to induce in the audience his heroine’s inner flux and fragmentation. The double-entendre title tells you to expect a trip, and you get one.

Two Girls and a Guy isn’t a satisfying movie, but Downey is alarmingly brilliant in it -- a man locked in torment who can’t find the way out.

The First Purge is pretty good if you’re not averse to caricatures, predictable twists, and lots of familiar B-movie tropes.

Alex Strangelove is a little stylistically unambitious, nor is it terribly compelling as a romance — who Alex ends up with is ultimately beside the point.

One of the more enjoyably terrible movies of the year.

This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.

The film plays out mostly like an occasionally above-average episode of the show.

The decomposition of the soul is the goal of a Stasi incarceration, the promised end for an enemy of the state, and there is something about the movie’s pacing--the silences, the drone of the narration ("The name of your enemy is hope?…?")--that wears you down.

It turns out that Mean Girls: The Musical: The Movie is pretty good, and likely to succeed at its primary purpose, which is to remind you that the original Mean Girls is fun.

Carrey is the film’s most prized weapon, letting us wallow in the ridiculousness of this whole enterprise without ever holding himself above it. Quite the contrary, he overcommits in the best possible way.

No genre really makes more sense for this moment than horror — except, maybe, for black comedy, and Aster’s bracingly nasty but centerless new film offers plenty of both.

There are too many musical performances in this movie, even for a country fan such as myself, to keep the city slickers engaged. This bespeaks great faith in the charisma of the stars, who merit it. They also, however, deserved a better script.

Wright’s movie, aside from its mess of an ending, is a propulsive and generally fun affair that sends Powell careering around the Eastern Seaboard like the Tom Cruise successor he’s so determined to become, even if he’s not entirely plausible as a guy who’s volcanic with anger.

Evocative, gorgeous, occasionally maddening film.

Ultimately, what comes through most forcefully in The Hundred-Foot Journey is the longing of the immigrant, the overwhelming push-pull between the need to belong and the need to assert one’s own identity.

I like the movie, though. It forced me to rethink the way sexual desire saturates everything, along with extreme vulnerability of children.

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.

Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done. If the narrative is finally unsatisfying, it’s because the last vital chapter — the way in which Zamperini was able to have a life after years of unspeakable cruelty and the dashing of his Olympic hopes — is signaled in a couple of title cards before the closing credits. Unbroken proves that Zamperini could take it and make it — but make what of it?

The stylistic choices Guadagnino makes throughout Queer are invariably more engaging than the central story itself, no matter what the filmmaker tries unsuccessfully to will it into.

There is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.