This is low-grade satire. The shocks to the system in Buffalo Soldiers are nothing more than cheap thrills.

This isn’t to say that the humans in The Commuter act anything like real people; the train is the most realistic performer here, but you could do a lot worse.

This series is in its fortieth year; it might be nice to see Bond battle a readily identifiable, real-world villain for a change. There's certainly no shortage.

Alpha is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against.

Showing the allure and gradual corruption of power through the eyes of a third party — sort of a mixture of "The Great Gatsby" and "Scarface" — is a solid conceit. But Andrea Di Stefano’s underbaked film doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

Adrift is enough of a boilerplate piece of survival drama that you know to expect those beats more or less coming on schedule, but Woodley makes it more emotionally satisfying than it would be otherwise.

The doubt about what is real and what isn’t has permeated so much of the film that when things take a turn for the serious in the final act, we the audience can’t even quite believe what we’re seeing, until the credits roll and you shrug to yourself, “Huh, I guess it was for real.” That’s a weirdly muted note to end such an otherwise over-the-top — conceptually and physically — comedy.

I found its thundering journey through several decades of recent Russian and world history revealing and (perhaps more importantly) enormously entertaining. And by utilizing Law’s charisma to approximate Putin’s anti-charisma, it gives us a villain who is chilling and believable. I can’t wait to see it again.

For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.

Despite its exuberant perversities, Waters’s take on erotomania is almost quaint.

Million Dollar Arm is cute, cloying, simplistic, borderline offensive … and thoroughly effective.

If you're in the mood for a liberal message movie in which the only surprise is no surprise, American Violet is the ticket.

As he delivered his climactic sermon in the Israeli desert, I murmured, "Amen, brother." Religulous is a religious experience.

Even those of us willing to accept that there are many different shades at work here will likely feel the foundation of the film fall out from under us by its conclusion.

The Sonic movies have built their success on mixing light doses of Gen-X nostalgia with shiny, sparkly, speedy CGI action, and this new entry has that in spades. But for all their swiftness, the fights and chases in these pictures tend to have a predetermined quality; it can sometimes feel like watching someone else play a video game. That’s why giving the characters some shading helps.

Genius does a pretty good job of capturing the peculiar drama of the relationship between editors and writers, in this case some of the most revered in American letters.

Ibiza doesn’t have the strength of wit and character to suffice as a hangout vacation movie, and it has zero idea how to be a romantic comedy, either. It’s not a movie, it’s Netflix.

There is little doubt throughout that it’s a work of artistry, grace, and, yes, outrage.

As Jesse Owens, [James] mixes confidence, bewilderment, and subdued rage into a powerful whole. It’s not a big, show-offy performance. Quite the contrary: He’s surprisingly quiet, watchful. Everything seems to be submerged, but still present.

Salles hasn't reinvented On the Road, but rather turned it into a rambling, beautiful, and occasionally even heartbreaking museum piece.

The movie goes in circles, constantly expounding on the same things. It has lots of insight, but little momentum. Then again, maybe that’s the idea.

This kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a particularly good movie — I’m not even sure it is a movie — but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it.

It's the worm set pieces that rule, as our hero must carry out a dare to eat ten worms ten ways between sunup and sundown.

The result isn’t an all-the-feels, drown-us-in-tears kind of experience, but something rooted in wisdom and clarity. It’s the rare movie that can sacrifice the clean lines of fantasy and melodrama for the messiness of ordinary life — that neither burnishes nor condemns the up-down turmoil of the teenage soul, but rather lets it be.

The action has become incoherent, largely past the point of enjoyability.

The key to a good B-mystery is that all the actors should be a little stilted. You should never know the difference between an actor acting badly and an actor doing a masterful acting job of someone acting badly. In Non-Stop, there is much excellent bad acting.

Directed by Bryan Singer in a break from his gayish superhero movies, it's a low-key procedural with a dollop of suspense--although perhaps not enough to make up for the foregone conclusion.