The new film never lags and some of the sturdiest elements from the original — namely the catchy and descriptive tunes by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice — remain every bit as strong as they were in 1992.

In the often illustrious career oeuvre of Clint Eastwood, Trouble with the Curve is a minor entry, a cinematic footnote.

Surreal but disappointingly drab, it's still not the best Almodovar in years. Despite the usual Almodovar plot twists, kinky sex and themes of sexual identity reversal, gender bending and mad desire, the cult auteur has gone off the tracks and lost his compass.

The situations in Little Accidents cry out for more clarity than the script delivers, but the carefully observed performances are worth perusal, and the dark, industrialized joylessness of Rachel Morrison’s cinematography is a somber mirror to the sad dead-end life of Appalachia.

It's definitely worth seeing for Ms. Cattrall. This gal can really act.

A dull, pretentious trifle from director David Gordon Green with Al Pacino in another of his late-career mishaps that does nothing to elevate his fading film status. How I wish he would stick to the stage.

James Franco's role hardly exists. He's a doped-up cipher who attends museum openings and drives his car into a cement wall, looking as bored and out of place as he did hosting the Academy Awards.

It is a visually enthralling, high-gloss commercial for state power and repressive constructs. This is a product precisely tooled to be what the global marketplace demands of entertainment that is this expensive to make—a win for capitalism that will leave many filmgoers who found a powerful reflection of themselves in the original film feeling like they’ve lost something important and essential.

The realism is honorable, the acting is exemplary, and all do good work, but life among the unlucky and disenfranchised who exist without hope is not a subject that will put a glow in your heart or a smile on your face. Be forewarned: The depression is inescapable.

It’s mildly entertaining, sure, but as aspirational wish fulfillment it’s not particularly impactful.

The movie is not great, but the star is not bad. This, in some quarters, is high praise indeed.

Sweet but inconsequential, The Great Gilly Hopkins will satisfy family audiences and pre-teens with minimal demands for their money.

The terrific cast is well worth watching, but everything else about this wayward movie mistake leaves you feeling just awful.

I wish all the agony in The Big Year was leading up to something fascinating in the end, but the most inviting thing in the movie was the exit door.

Lincoln is also a colossal bore. It is so pedantic, slow-moving, sanitized and sentimental that I kept pinching myself to stay awake - which, like the film itself, didn't always work.

Odd Thomas has high-speed chases, explosions, narrow escapes and masses of special effects—none special enough, I’m afraid, to save it from mediocrity.

Empty, pointless and stupid, the barrage of gunfire called Welcome to the Punch is another unappealing entry in the overworked British gangster genre.

Which points us to the real issue with this film and so many like it. These super heroic and super histrionic spectacles are multiplying so rapidly that they are recycling their own tropes at such a rate that it is almost impossible to be surprised anymore.

As a film, though, Chlorine is as confusing as its title. Moviegoers be warned: With the skyrocketing cost of movie tickets (not to mention popcorn), this one is a bad investment.

This is a movie where the characters utter the word “weird” enough times to fill an Advent calendar; in truth, the only thing that’s actually weird about it is how middle-of-the-road and mild it is.

Ms. Carano still has a lot to learn about acting, but she’s certainly the one you want around in case of a home invasion.

The real issue undermining Durkin’s sophomore effort is central to the weaving of the film’s conceit. It looks like a horror movie, swims like a horror movie, and quacks like a horror movie, but it isn’t a horror movie. So then what the hell is it? Good question. After a long, slow build-up, The Nest winds up being as vacant as the Surrey country house of the title, and leaves the viewers feeling every bit as empty.

The script may be flawed and the narrative storytelling mechanical, but the period details are fascinating, the camerawork swaggers across a maze of squalid row houses and nightclub floors with visual velocity, and whenever either one Tom Hardy (or both) is onscreen, Legend is engrossing stuff indeed.

Michael Caine is such a consummate actor that it's a major cause of concern to see him in Harry Brown, another hateful vigilante flick the wags in England have already labeled Dirty Harry Brown for reasons that are immediately obvious.

From its gas-passing piranha (voiced by In the Heights’ Anthony Ramos) to its reliance on phrases like “butt rock” and “grumpy pants” that seem grown in a lab to make the 12-and-under set giggle, the movie plays its target audience like a fiddle.

The human ensemble is here to provide exposition and cringy comic relief, annunciating the finer points of a plot that doesn’t really require explanation. This is a wrestling event, and they’re the commentary team.

Movie plots thrive on the idea of alternative realities or timeline swaps, but it can also become a gimmick if not executed well. That’s the crisis faced by The Greatest Hits, a sweet, well-intentioned romantic comedy with a good concept that’s presented with faltering effect.

Why tell the Sleeping Beauty story anew? With this half-hearted film, Mr. Stromberg, the visual effects wizard behind such big-budget blockbusters as "Oz the Great and Powerful," "Alice in Wonderland" and "Avatar," can’t provide an answer.

For the Mario fan in your household, young or old, it’s likely exactly what they want it to be. However, if you’ve somehow managed to go through life without having any attachment to the character, there is absolutely no reason for you to watch it.

Pixar’s Elemental is a movie about failing infrastructure, though that may make it sound more interesting than it actually is.

The movie needs more of that charisma and fewer cigarette butts to make Golda a woman as memorable on the screen as she was in real life.

As a director, Mr. Crowe’s camera meanders all over the place; as an actor, he mumbles and growls his way through the carnage like it was nothing more important than a re-make of Gladiator, filmed on old sets from Gene Autry westerns.

Remakes are odious, even when they’re nothing more than harmless television takeoffs on successful feature films, but The Roses is an especially egregious waste of time and talent because it takes itself so seriously.

A sensitive career-changing performance by luminous Penélope Cruz dominates the Spanish film Ma Ma, but there’s no escaping the fact that the rest of it is not much more than a dreary, tear-stained soap opera.

So much of Eastwood’s career over the last two decades has proven that his age and experience has incredible cinematic value when he holds himself to the high standards he set for himself years ago. When he doesn’t, which is sadly the case with Cry Macho, the uninspired results leave you with wistful memories of what once was.

Movies about dying with dignity are always a box-office challenge, but this one doesn’t even qualify as a sad reflection on life’s bittersweet third act. It’s a soggy lump.

Danny Collins is nothing to write home about, but it kept me entertained without too much guilt, and I didn’t wince. By today’s American movie standards, that’s becoming very high praise indeed.

Ms. Farmiga is the only one who seems to be having any fun, as an aging flower child stuck in an earlier decade and addicted to healing vortex workshops and primal screams. Mellow, but very much a work in progress, Goats has a bland but overcrowded menu that could benefit from a little feta.

At least Gong is ravishing, which occasionally takes your mind off the gibberish that is going full tilt around her.

Lazy, eccentric, chain-smoking and accident-prone, Mr. Murray gives ’em what they clamor for. His eventual redemption as a saint in disguise is predictable. The direction is negligent and the jokes are mild. It’s an O.K. little picture that doesn’t really go anywhere, but it has a resonance that is easy on the heart.

I wish I could have enjoyed Widows half as much as the critics who are salivating over it with rapturous praise, but Steve McQueen, Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave, directs movies with a jackhammer. Turning his methodic violence with a camera from the brutality of slavery to a commercially driven feminist heist movie, he does not enhance the old Hollywood genre. He pulverizes it.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, whose debut film Seventeen showed great promise, this maudlin soap opera is a disappointment, despite a strong performance by the extraordinarily gifted veteran actor Brian Cox. He makes every moment he’s on the screen throb with understated honesty, but Prisoner’s Daughter doesn’t boast much of anything else worth remembering.

Like any good cautionary tale, Puncture tells a suspenseful story responsibly, creating food for thought and leaving the audience both enlightened and entertained.

Despite its good intentions, this earnest little film seems embalmed.

Rancid, preposterous and hysterically over the top in ideas and execution, “once upon a time” perfectly describes writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is indeed another hopped-up fairy tale like every other Tarantino epic.

Armstrong is played by Ben Foster with an astonishing lack of animation or personality, and his literary prosecutor is played by the usually colorful, award-winning Chris O’Dowd with a dreariness that is stripped bare of his usual dynamism.

Music video director Director X, making his feature debut, presents it all in a compelling and often intoxicating manner. There is something narcotic and languid about his pacing and camera work that feels purposeful and stylistic when the script is focused but comes off as stumbling and haphazard when the story looses momentum, which is often.

The best thing about Last Flag Flying is that Ethan Hawke is not in it. Otherwise, it’s business as usual, and the business is excruciating to get through.

A dreary bummer.

Unfortunately, it’s a fairly unimaginative, largely unconvincing, often dull and always predictable example of the genre with few thrills and no surprises, and the only thing it raises is a surfeit of puzzling questions about why the wonderful actress Rebecca Hall can’t find a script to show off her abundant skills in a vehicle someone might remember.

Based on her one-dimensional book Elvis and Me, the movie is a superficial chronicle of minutiae in the life of a naive girl, blinded by phony illusions of glamour, longing for affection from a child-man who never grew up, and trapped behind closed doors of toxic fame from Hollywood to Graceland. In the darkness beyond the klieg lights, it wasn’t much of a life—and it’s not much of a movie, either.

Two lost souls on the highway of life — that’s what a well-acted but benign little trifle called Arthur Newman is about.

The film is awkward, the situations tenuous and underdeveloped, the pacing torturous as a slow drip from a leaking faucet, and the narrative just plods along, with the body count rising for no clear reason.

You can’t fault the actors, who play the sadism for tough, two-fisted realism, but Crown Vic (a title that makes no sense; there’s nobody named Vic in it) is still a cheap copy of Training Day and a crash course in lock-jawed cynicism 101. Not to mention the worst P.R. the city of Los Angeles has had since the Rodney King scandal.

Mr. Spall, winner of the Cannes and New York Film Critics Circle best-actor awards, does his best to bring an unpleasant character to life — grunting and snorting like a boar ready to charge, spitting on his canvases and dragging around with a constant wince like a fat baby with colic. With all due respect, he’s too repulsive to watch for 150 minutes.

It’s been years since either Meg Ryan or David Duchovny appeared in a feature film, but now that they’re back, co-starring in a two-hander called What Happens Later, it’s fairly obvious that neither has forgotten anything about charm or how to keep a mediocre movie alive. They’re still appealing. This film is not.

Some characters are introduced and never fully explored. Others disappear without a trace, leaving the impression that key elements have been left on the cutting room floor. For Timothée Chalamet, one hopes for better luck next time.

Live By Night boils over with ambience and charged with details, from Roaring 20s flapper costumes to shootouts in period cars, but too many aborted narratives in Affleck’s lifeless screenplay intertwine, fanning the confusion, while other subplots are abandoned altogether.

A benign slice of life about suburban angst on Long Island. It's not much, but thanks to the noble efforts of a very good cast, I've seen worse.

Anesthesia is a pile of incomprehensible existential gibberish by the vastly untalented actor-writer-director Tim Blake Nelson about the meaning of life in an age of technology, told in the tiresome style of multiple characters who intersect at odd angles in a follow-the-dots plot centered on a single tragic action.

The result is respectable, but dull and tedious. Only half a loaf is not a three-course meal.

Implausible dialogue, contrived activist themes and an overstuffed, hard-to-follow trajectory (even for a parable) muddy the waters of a swamp that needs draining.

Despite an avalanche of misguided raves, Renée Zellweger as the greatest entertainer of the 20th century in a film called simply Judy is nothing more than another gimmick. You won’t get the real deal here, no matter which gushing hysteric you read.

What will happen to the man-boy when he's all man and can no longer slouch about in baggy pants and hoodie sweatshirts with perpetually flushed cheeks?

Genial, jovial, and always reassuringly natural, Dennis Quaid has range and depth and is not afraid to explore challenging roles of every description. In the wacko thriller The Intruder, he decided it’s time for a trip to the dark side. Yes, fans, this time he’s the villain. Playing against type, he’s good at that, too.

The battle here is between the sincerity of the filmmakers’ intentions and the cynicism driving the film’s creation.

Ultimately, Blonde mirrors our surface-level conception of Monroe herself: beautiful but vapid. Its flaws lie mostly within the storytelling rather than the filmmaking, and it’s not a boring watch by any means.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the latest installment, has more dinosaurs, more screams, and more general chaos, but doesn’t make a single move to explore a fresh idea or add a new slant on a tired old formula. As brainless summer-escapism movies go, this one can’t go fast enough.

The sum of the parts in martial arts on view here do not add up to a fascinating, consistently intelligent whole. You can write the plot on the head of an ice pick.

Content to make movies for himself (Malick) that nobody else wants to see as long as he can find someone to foot the bill, he's also an iconoclast searching for significance. So am I, but not 138 minutes worth. Anyone seeking symmetry in this cinematic taffy pull risks emerging from it with a pretzel for a brain.

Battleship is dopey, preposterous and unintentionally hilarious in all the wrong places, but as directed by Peter Berg, it is also energetic, fast-moving and bracing.

Landing in multiplexes more than a year late after some business reshuffling and rewrites (not a good idea for your bad guys to be Ukrainian gangsters at this moment in history), Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a slick and empty-headed spy thriller that is almost instantly forgettable.

A lurid, tasteless crime procedural about a plague of serial slaughters by a pair of particularly demented maniacs roaming across Europe torturing and mutilating young newlyweds and leaving their victims nude and positioned to resemble famous works of art. It’s more gruesome than I dare to describe.

The juxtaposition of tone, theme and content in the narratives fails beyond the basic ideas. This leaves the capable Gyllenhaal to do little more than scream and rant hysterically.

The movie, which hovers between ridiculous crass comedy and oddly touching moments of sweetness, is completely inane. But that silliness may also be what makes it somewhat endearing and, certainly, entertaining.

You watch along as it unravels with the tempo of a funeral dirge, and before you check your watch, you realize you’re already bored to death.

Plotless and illogical.

More bitter, bleak lives of American mill workers without a compass and no place to go if they had one are showcased in the pessimistic drama Out of the Furnace. It’s getting to be a dismal film director’s obsession bordering on cliché.

Let it be said that Ms. Streep is galvanizing, even as the film slogs through too much information and not nearly enough illumination.

Despite a lot of silliness, primarily thanks to Nivola’s absurdist performance as the Rhino, Kraven the Hunter is entertaining—far more so than expected based on Morbius and Madame Web. If only it wasn’t so convoluted or dragged down by extraneous characters. If only the CGI was better.

In a footnote to history that is still too close for comfort, he’s the real meaning of paradise lost.

Gun Hill Road is worth seeing for the acting. The great character actress Miriam Colon makes a brief but memorable appearance as the strong matriarch of the household, and Ms. Santana, a true transgendered teen who has never acted before, is especially wrenching.

By my rough calculation, the real Jack Ryan should be approximately 103. Preposterous but moderately engaging, Jack Ryan has outlived his welcome, and there’s no end in sight.

From his debut feature in 2001, the brilliant and sobering domestic drama In the Bedroom, with Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, his work has been sporadic but his films have been astonishing, heartbreaking and unforgettable. Not this one.

To Rome with Love has moments of isolated charm, but it's only moderately entertaining, it isn't very funny, and it's entirely too long.

The good twin/bad twin conceit in 2014 doesn’t have a shred of the original surprise, and Zoe Kazan doesn’t have the chops to carry it off anyway.

Don’t be misled by the title Leaves of Grass. Do not expect literacy, either. This stoner comedy has nothing whatsoever to do with Walt Whitman or poetry of any kind.

Another of those fact-based semi-documentary style films about the need for government transparency that is responsible, sobering, worthwhile and, in my opinion, as boring as the recent halftime show in the 2021 Super Bowl.

The scant narrative and unwritten characters result in a lack of empathy that doesn’t serve the thematic ideas.

To be honest, I can rarely recall any film, on any subject, that made less sense.

The film has beautiful cinematography and occasional peaks of high drama, but lacks the kind of significant tempo necessary to sustain enough interest for nearly two hours to keep a viewer focused.

Talky, labored and lost in mediocrity, Maybe I Do is another sad example of what happens to seasoned pros when they hang around long enough to end up in material that is regrettably beneath them.

If he weren’t voiced by a mellow and serene Kevin Costner, Enzo would sound like Martin Short’s old Ed Grimley character, only with Formula One replacing Pat Sajak and Wheel of Fortune as his object of obsession.

There are some lovely and moving things here, but over the long haul it’s more like watching an hour and a half of someone’s weekend trip to Knott’s Berry Farm.

A creepy descent into madness called Dark Was the Night is better than most.

The Goldfinch arrives as one of the year’s deadliest disappointments.

The results are variable, exasperating, challenging, often both disappointing and exhilarating. These elements surface throughout Happy Christmas, often simultaneously. Mr. Swanberg is not a total amateur, but he is called “a doodler” for obvious reasons, all of them on red alert here.

Trading in her red locks for kohl-lined eyes like a raccoon and the vampire look of Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, [Chastain] is the spookiest thing in Mama. Everything else is cable television.