This three-hander has an honesty and a momentum that I found grudgingly rewarding.

While the presence of both Law and Depp is a little distracting — the film could also be called "The Proxy War of the Long in the Tooth Former Hotties" — the acting is generally strong. But here the film’s best assets are also criminally underused.

Enough is enough. One good thing: The jungle scenes were shot in Hawaii, so at least they all got a paid vacation.

I expected more from a movie about the most feared man in America for half a century. Whatever else you think about him, in retrospect, he had balls of brass - an essential quality replaced in J. Edgar by dull indifference.

For fans of the first film, it’s more of the same, and for any casual horror viewers who are up for a funhouse thrill this October, it’ll do the trick.

The actors are fine, but the material doesn’t give their talents much room to stretch.

Johnny Depp is dismally miscast as the alter ego of the rebellious author with the "screw you" attitude.

Elvis Presley never dies, but an unequivocally gripping, emotionally effective and quintessential movie about him still begs to be made. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is not the one.

Timely but sluggish and confusing.

This exercise in hysteria is so over the top that you don't know whether to scream or laugh. Despite an emotionally gripping performance by Natalie Portman, it's nothing more than a lavishly staged "Repulsion" in toe shoes.

Something is missing here, like a clear perspective.

The results are realistic and refined, but uneven and disappointing.

A harrowing but tedious chronicle of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ time in America in the 1950s.

Dreamland doesn’t quite work, but she (Robbie) deserves an A for effort.

It’s described as a smart, suspenseful psychological thriller, but there’s nothing smart about it, and as an alleged thriller, when the mysteries are explained in a twist finale, it could use a psychologist of its own. The only suspense is waiting to see if Diane Lane’s reputation will survive.

Swimming with Men doesn’t tackle the plight of middle-age in any relevant new way, but even though it’s not a great film, it’s not a waste of time. Oddly enough, it’s been playing on airplanes for months. Catch it now, on dry land, before they empty the pool.

James Franco again, more subdued and less hokey than usual, this time in something called Good People, the kind of routine thriller they used to show on Thursday and Friday nights before the big Saturday double features, back in the good old studio years when the marquees changed every two days.

Disappointingly tedious, On My Way is a contrived vehicle for Gallic icon Catherine Deneuve. At 70, she’s still the embodiment of placid ripeness we know and love, but the movie has little substance.

Cowboys & Aliens is one of the silliest movies ever made, but so many otherwise serious people have attached their names to it that, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid.

It’s a genuine stab at romantic comedy that stumbles more than it strides.

The actors are so good, though, that they make you want to see what they could do in a better movie than this tedious acting-class experiment.

I found the whole thing pokey and plodding, but there’s no denying the fact that even when sitting through Mr. Holmes seems numbing, Mr. McKellen is a force so powerful he’s his own reward.

Petunia augurs more titillation than it delivers and only works occasionally.

If you’re patience doesn’t wear out, the movie culminates in that clever shock ending that not only explains everything but gives what you’ve just seen a rewarding jolt.

Brief moments of light shine through the darkness, but mostly it’s a disappointing study of the confusing time we live in now. It’s a noble experiment that wears itself out fast, then drags out the running time until the idea of Covid-19 fades in the rearview mirror and we’re left facing even more problems than we started out with.

It’s meant to be a gritty slice of cornpone about revenge from a woman’s point of view, but the female protagonist who emerges is nothing but a cartoon.

Dreary, depressing and desultory, A Most Wanted Man is not my cup of Schokolade mit Schlagsahne.

The caterpillar crawl that passes for pacing succeeds in putting any number of viewers to sleep, including me.

Of course, you can’t really make a movie that combines elements of the metaphysical, zombie and haunted-house genres without a few splatter-movie clichés, but Mr. Geoghegan makes them creepier and more unpredictable than I thought possible.

King Cobra is a cut above most homoerotic masturbatory screen fantasies, but not by much.

The director’s vision is so dark — and Mr. Crowe’s grumbling, sour-stomach persona so much like a Tums commercial — that you don’t care much what happens to him or his ark, which looks like a big barge with a stove pipe in the middle.

Clumsy and contrived, the film never manages to connect the dots in a trio of stories set in three different cities, and I had to pinch myself to keep from falling asleep.

OK, it’s an action thriller with a maximum of preposterous set-ups, fraught with a minimum of actual thrills. Lamely directed by Baltasar Kormakur, every scene is built on cinder blocks of tension, but the riotous screenplay is so silly and one-dimensional you find yourself laughing in spite of yourself.

This one blends the scented candles of a daytime soap with the tamer aspects of a middling thriller. Some folks will bring Kleenex. Others will need NoDoz.

There are so many ideas rattling around in Backstabbing for Beginners that are never resolved, and so many duplicitous characters that are never satisfactorily explained, that the end result is a muddle of confusion and violence that could end the future of tourism in Baghdad forever.

It is still Gerard Butler who keeps it all afloat, negotiating rough waters with superior skill.

Both the songs (once again written by two-time Oscar-winners Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) and the relationships between the characters — strong points of the original film — register with less energy and originality this time around.

Our Brand Is Crisis adds up to a toothless exercise in missed opportunities that is half cautionary tale, half political satire and oddly insignificant as both.

To its credit, the latest and seemingly last Guardians installment— which at times can feel like a Spotify playlist in search of a movie— mostly manages to drown out the corporate exhaustion of its parent company with copious and often inspired needle drops, even more hit-or-miss one-liners, and a visual playfulness that recalls actual comic books.

The film's weakest link is Rufus Sewell's rumpled gumshoe, inarticulate and mumbling to the point of madness.

Despite good intentions, the movie never lives up to the breathless excitement the real-life story promises.

This works in her favor, since everything around her is trashy and forgettable. J-Lo is the only reason to see it. As a pop flick of no consequence, it’s inviting but forgettable an hour later — but the praise Lopez has received is well deserved. She’s developed nicely as an actress. Call it learning on the job.

The love affair part of the film is so wholesomely family-oriented that it’s about as sexy as an algebra book. There isn’t even one single kiss. Fortunately, the action sequences are nothing bland or dull, adding up to a whale of entertainment.

By presenting this crucial cultural phenomenon in a staid documentary form and in the reverent tone of a hushed docent, The League has the unintentional impact of making Black baseball seem like ancient rather than living history.

In the title role of the sometimes clever but mostly contrived Carrie Pilby, she (Bel Powley) taxes the boundaries of both.

A good idea gone bad plagues this movie adaptation of D.M.W. Greer’s controversial 1992 play Burning Blue.

The cinematography is beautiful (filming in the Virgin Islands, you’d have to be a moron to make a movie that looks ugly) and the four-member cast is easy to take. Not the worst way to spend 90 minutes on a hot day.

Though there are glimmers of greatness tucked away in this film, its full potential goes unrealized and this fantastical, pharmaceutical flick ends up surprisingly unmemorable.

Jovovich binds the episodic action sequences, her face a mask of noble pain and isolation. She outruns zombies, orchestrates catapults of flaming gasoline, literally slays a dragon with a Hummer – and all without a single unnecessary quip or wasted kiss.

Written and directed with muscle and grit by Kitty Green, The Royal Hotel is loaded with grim ambiance, and there is even some suspense, mainly while the viewer waits to see if anything will ever happen.

He (Gordon-Levitt) can act, and there’s a possibility he can also direct, but there’s no evidence in Don Jon that he can do both at the same time.

It’s not much of a story, so understandably, it’s not much of a movie, either. But for shock effects, the aliens that descend upon the Gardners are admirably grotesque and some of the special effects are admittedly hair-raising.

Opus isn’t as superficial as the world it’s commenting on, but it’s not cleverer, either.

What saves the movie from tedium is a cast that is easy to watch, from understated veterans such as Belushi.

Burning Palms is too sick to attract the masses, but he's onto something subversively valid, and the film is never boring.

The actors work hard to convey terror-especially Mr. Christensen, who proved he could act when he played disgraced journalist Stephen Glass in the marvelous, underrated "Shattered Glass"-but the panic that overtakes the characters never quite grips the audience.

The lugubrious pop songs by Gregg Alexander are execrable. Ms. Knightley isn’t remotely believable as a bike-riding pop singer. The saving grace is Mark Ruffalo, the only actor on the premises who shows any grit or passion for his character or for the music business.

The dreary, chug-along Australian film The Daughter offers a good but sadly wasted cast, obscured in the eye-rubbing mist of a foggy Down Under countryside and struggling to rise above the sludge of a basic soap opera with literary pretensions.

Too relentlessly depressing to recommend to the everyday audience. It seems to be on automatic pilot. Horrible, sad things keep happening, but it just goes on.

Ultimately, though, Dirty Weekend is a vague, languid affair.

There are moments of beauty and simplicity, but not nearly enough to sustain a feature. There’s meaning to be wrung out of extended shots of trees, lumberjacking, and deer skulls, sure, but the movie’s ambivalence gets old quick.

Overexposed and barely awake in the most dramatic scenes, Ewan McGregor is the star, but it’s not one of his most energetic performances.

The actors are fine, but the roles they are forced to play are so deadly they might as well have stayed home reading screenplays for better films.

Despite its visual appeal, its concentrated star performance by Emma Mackey and the dedicated obsession of Australian actress Frances O’Connor, making her debut as a writer-director, it gets almost everything wrong and seems more like a work of fiction than a believable biopic.

Ultimately, everyone in the movie is wasted, including Catherine Zeta-Jones, who provides great eye candy but has nothing important to say or do. Most of the roles are so ambiguous you end up scratching your head in the final reel, and some of the loose ends are so irrelevant they seem to have ended up on the cutting-room floor. With Russell Crowe, it really helps if you can read lips.

October Gale features picturesque scenery, crisply photographed by Jeremy Benning, and composed in shots that could pass for glossy tourist postcards. The two stars are pretty to look at, but Canada is hard to upstage.

The movie is not particularly well directed by Justin Kelly (a protégé of Gus Van Sant), and his screenplay (co-written with the real Savannah) has the toxic naturalism of a drag revue. Dern is never less than fascinating, even in Gothic raspberry wigs, and does everything possible to bring a sense of human urgency to an unconventional dual role, but the film deserts her midway.

The net effect of all this techno-philosophic yackety-yak is the not altogether pleasant feeling that you are simultaneously watching a movie while being trapped in an elevator with someone desperate to explain what it’s all about and why you should like it.

Shot by Barry Ackroyd, the same cinematographer who filmed "The Hurt Locker," and using the same camera techniques, this movie looks like outtakes from a much better film.

If Spider-Man Far from Home is a triumph, as many will argue and its box office will undoubtedly confirm, it is a triumph of capitalism, not art. It is the film’s fervent hope that we, as consumers, are starting to lose our ability to tell the difference.

It opens our eyes to a subculture about which most of us know very little, but it is so unsteady in its focus that interest wanes.

Dog may be man’s best friend, but Dog, a snooze about a boring 1500-mile road trip shared by a dog and a man—both war-ravaged, brain-damaged soldiers—should have stayed in the kennel.

With terrific Appalachian ambience and moments of carefully constructed action, Devil’s Peak is not a terrible movie, but in the bigger picture, it’s not a particularly memorable one, either. It just lies there on the table, like day-old grits.

The screenplay, from Hailey DeDominicis, lacks the vibrancy you expect from a light-hearted holiday movie. Sure, there are a few genuine emotional moments and Lohan aptly gives Avery as much dimension as possible, but there’s only so much she and Chenoweth can do to liven things up.

The Innkeepers, a desultory indie-prod poorly written and lamely directed by Ti West, and filmed on the cheap at the actual location, is a poor-man's rip-off of Stanley Kubrick's hotel spookfest, "The Shining," promising paranormal horrors to all who dare to enter. Where is Jack Nicholson when we need him?

The D Train is so confusing it’s hard to track what anyone had in mind.

Liam Neeson is the dullest denizen of this particularly unctuous Hollywood After Dark. As Marlowe, he uncovers the usual blackmail, grand larceny, homicide and other crimes corrupting the klieg light rays of Southern California, without much energy or wit.

It is not a sequel, just another retread of tired material in a franchise that is more than ready for the big comic book bonfire. And why the title? There is nothing amazing about it.

Despite a plot trajectory that changes so often they seem to be making it up as they go along, everyone on and off the screen seems to be doing it by the numbers.

There are good things in it, but Ms. Hunt is smart, observant and bright enough to make films that resonate with more freshness than this. Maybe next time.

There are heart-tugging moments in The Glass Castle, but Walls’s bestselling memoir needed to be roughed up and aired out. For it to match up to the book, the movie needed the glass to be smashed, not every shard treasured.

We end up spending way too much time running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fear.

Like just about everything else these days that passes itself off as a movie, Bleeding Love moves too slow for its own good and hobbles its way to an inconclusive and unsatisfactory ending.

Rambling, well-shot but inconsequential curio.

Scorsese’s movie did something crucial that this one doesn’t: it told the truth as it knew it. Honesty, or at least some version of it, would have been a very good place for War Dogs to start.

Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.

Katherine is searching for inspiration during her time in Morocco and, meanwhile, Dern should search for a better project.

A far too anemic and restrained take on a story that demands at least some kind of dour sensuousness if not straight-up bodice ripping.

No one was expecting Midnight Run level repartee from Hobbs and Shaw, but is it too much to ask for a bit more than the who-has-a-bigger-penis stuff we get here?

A dismal hack job pretending to be a take on modern relationships.

The insurmountable problem is that Imogene is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic character, and Kristen Wiig is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic actress. Nobody in this movie is really appealing enough to be much fun. The state of New Jersey should sue.

It just goes to show, no matter how burnished your backdrop or splendiferous your setting, if your script is crap, you're stuck with a total dud.

Shaving too fast with an old razor blade, I’ve had more scares than anything in Heretic from my bathroom mirror.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League may feature altered scenes from its chopped-up counterpart, but it’s unlikely to play any differently to general audiences — apart from feeling like more of a slog. Its mere existence guarantees that someone, somewhere will be satisfied, but the film’s improvements are hardly enough to fix what was, now quite apparently, a flawed endeavor from the start.

Despite its title, Onward is a regressive film, sometimes painfully so.

The Mark Wahlberg–starrer reveals just how stuck Hollywood sci-fi is in 1999, when The Matrix cemented ideas of digital consciousness in the Western mainstream (with a bent of pan-Asian spirituality).

It’s occasionally diverting, sure, but so is killing time while you wait for your flight to board.

The movie exists between prestige and genre (or two genres, really, as it morphs in its final third from an escaped fugitive picture to a war movie), yet it can’t quite grasp either the elevated emotion of prestige or the snap of the genre.