It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.

It’s as scary as a pumpkin pie left in the oven too long. Instead of horror, it’s pretty funny.

Unsparing in its depiction of violence and carnage, the movie meets an even greater challenge showing the myriad of ways people from every class, culture and creed found the courage and strength to unite and join forces in order to survive.

In this overly familiar and ultimately meandering exercise in tedium, Mr. Burns also plays the lead.

Filmed in England, Hungary and Croatia, Lee is a vivid and unforgettable tribute to one of the bold women who devoted her life to the penetration of male dominance to change the way we see the world. Don’t even think about missing it.

It all combines to make for quite the adventure, enjoyably uncanny if overly broad.

It’s not a flashy movie, and the vintage aesthetic sometimes feels unnecessarily dour, but it makes for good storytelling that embraces both our past and present concerns at once. And sometimes it’s the unassuming movies that manage to sneak up on you.

It’s a perfectly unexceptional but slickly made, sincerely acted, often entertaining, sometimes manipulative and always watchable blend of action on the diamond and bravery behind the scenes that will please baseball fanatics more than movie historians. It’s a good enough biopic to make you wish it were a better motion picture.

In a bravura performance that is the primary don't-miss reason for its existence, he (Carlyle) gives California Solo all he's got; even in scenes that just exist to pass the time, his presence informs the essence of the man he plays and the humanity of the film itself.

Dual can occasionally feel like a one-joke film that never bothers to be funny, or where the comedy comes off as so arch that it lands as something else entirely.

When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as "the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino."

As an epic of awesome achievement, it never bores.

Rønning unfurls the journey with tension and then triumph, even if some of the storytelling leans towards the formulaic.

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.

Carell delivers a performance both tender and tough.

Directed by Burton and written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the fantastical comedy is a hilariously strange and charismatic voyage through Hollywood’s best creative minds and most skilled special effects magicians.

Nimble, off the beaten track and very entertaining, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a lava lamp.

There’s no way to avoid the resemblances of this film to one of Keaton’s biggest past successes, Mr. Mom, but it’s consistently more intelligent and original.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s basically another tough genre workout that is all too familiar, with enough tension and violence to keep an audience alert if not riveted.

A feel-good fairy tale that collapses under the weight of its own silliness, Red, White and Royal Blue is a gay rom-com that dazzles visually but defies all attempts at anything resembling plausibility.

A single idea stretched out for nearly two hours, it’s an odd but strangely compelling film, but so ponderously paced that it doesn’t always convince.

Wonderful, honest and low-key performances inform and enhance The Yellow Handkerchief, an otherwise unexceptional little drama.

Nothing much revelatory here, but what makes the movie a keeper is the energy of director Ben Younger (Boiler Room) and the charisma of Miles Teller, the sensational young actor from "Whiplash," who invests the role of a prizefighter with the same intensity he brought to the role of an obsessively driven drummer in that film.

All of it combines into not only a profoundly romantic experience, but also an exploration of a number of different kinds of love and connection.

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

Most of Ted eludes description, analysis and explanation. You just have to hold onto your own certifiable sense of humor and let Mr. MacFarlane take you where he wants to go. Then get out of the way and enjoy it.

Too bleak and wrenching to recommend unconditionally. You need a strong constitution to watch it soberly, but it is a gripping experience that left me weak in the knees.

Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe's range and charm.

Wakefield is a terrific movie, with a devastatingly bravura performance by Bryan Cranston that seizes and grips attention from first scene to last.

The target audience — people who waste their lives playing video games — might be amused by a movie about devices designed for the sole purpose of destroying everything in sight, but the serious audience the film industry wants to lure back to brick-and-mortar cinemas won’t find much substance here.

It's a Clint Eastwood role that only proves you can't send a boy to do a man's job.

It’s mildly entertaining with a likeable cast. And when it ends, it’s a relationship you’ll move on from quickly.

There’s always room for another first-rate action thriller, and Plane breathlessly packs its punches in spades.

It’s one of the most important and revelatory films of the year.

If you can suspend your disbelief that a cute 22 year-old had the power to succeed with civil rights where Martin Luther King and President Kennedy failed, The Help actually has a lot to offer.

Daddio is a dreary two-hander with the look, feel and sound of one hand clapping.

Eight for Silver howls the arrival of a new and exciting take on the old werewolf story, with an inventive mythology and a memorable xenomorph-inspired scene that will nest in your nightmares. Sadly, the good parts of the film are trapped within the monstrous body of an overly long and average feature film.

Abigail has an undeniable case of M3GAN envy, and its blood-spattered ballerina is simply no match for horror cinema’s new iconic android.

You watch the movie like you read a book, which leads to eventual tedium. You can’t put a bookmark in a movie, come back later, and pick up where you left off.

A film that is part infidelity drama and part slasher film while never fully committing to either idea.

There are questions and uncertainties that linger once the movie ends. But like difficult, repressed memories, there is no easy resolution to be found.

Perkins’ take on the short story The Monkey certainly shows that he’s a filmmaker with a unique eye for horror (and comedy), though his attempts at grounding the story are less assured.

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

The movie achieves the kind of rhythm of an opera, alternating between arias of animated poetry and the recitative of normal speech.

For all Mr. Schlesinger's misapplied conventionality, these characters remain too abstract in the film, and the violent climax feels bombastic and preposterous rather than meaningful. [21 Jun 2004, p.27]

A 2½-hour art film that is something of a well-intentioned mess.

Filled with nuance, intricate emotion and a refreshing absence of melodramatics, Conviction is a moving exploration of light and love shining through the darkness of despair. Its impact cannot easily be shaken.

It’s both a pretty good post-Kevin Williamson slasher movie and a pretty good post-Nora Ephron studio romcom. The finished recipe isn’t much more than the sum of its ingredients, but when one of those ingredients is in such short supply, the result is some welcome — if blood-splattered — comfort food.

Fortunately, despite its stranger-than-fiction premise, this thriller does have a handful of interesting ideas outside of the realm of true crime. Unfortunately, it also all but abandons those ideas in its messy third act, making for a mixed bag of a movie.

It’s one damned thing after another in Suncoast, a leaden, melodramatic soap opera with forced comedic elements inserted to drag out the playing time.

Directed with polish and restraint by Ritesh Batra, this is a gripping film that seizes your focus and never lets go. If this one fails to move you, then you don’t really care much about the power of movies.

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.

The high-thrills onscreen version, which adheres relatively closely to reality, is taut, exciting and will send viewers to frantically search Wikipedia for the rest of the story.

Dan Savage adapted Ausiello’s 2017 book with David Marshall Grant, and the resulting screenplay is cute, weepy and unfortunately lacking in chemistry.

Except for the admirable testosterone on display that represents hours in the gym instead of the acting class, the rest of Magic Mike XXL is seriously stupid.

An all-star cast of #MeToo celebrants are now determined to prove how empowered women can make the same smart, entertaining heist movies as men.

Movies like Sleeping Beauty are as sensual as cottage cheese, not to mention passé.

Jennifer Hudson is so spectacular in Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic, that she makes you overlook, ignore and eventually forgive the film’s multitudinous flaws.

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.

This is one terrific movie about one terrific horse. It enthralls on so many levels-emotional, cinematic, historic.

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

Brilliantly directed by Jason Reitman, from an intelligent, carefully researched and fast moving screenplay by Reitman, Jay Carson and Matt Bai (based on Bai’s marvelous book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid), this enthralling film is a mirror to the shifting relationship between the media and politics, and the events that changed the last 30 years in American history.

Incompetently directed by Scott Coffey and weakly written by Andrew Cochran, a rotten egg called Adult World is anything but.

Violet’s editing and texture effectively convey what the character is feeling, and while its noncommittal camera choices occasionally prevent the viewer from feeling it alongside her, Munn’s performance, and the film’s eventual narrative trajectory, are incisive enough to get around its visual shortcomings.

Scathing and funny and cynical about contemporary society and the hypocritical way we live now, Carnage may not be the dream movie I expected, but it has a dream cast of pure, unimpeachable ensemble perfection.

For the first time, Scream seems at risk of becoming just another horror perennial, one that fans go see because there’s a new installment, not because it has anything new to say.

Flawed but different, well-crafted and consistently powerful, At Any Price is the best film about impoverished farmers in the economic agricultural crisis since Jean Renoir’s "The Southerner."

While the movie may not, in the end, be so effective in tapping into our current class anxieties, that hardly seems to matter. Like a trip to Elysium, it’s a wild ride.

Øvredal also coaxes mostly strong performances from his young cast. This is especially true of Zoe Colletti (Showtime’s City on a Hill) as protagonist Stella.

Gorgeously photographed by Linus Sandgren, it’s both beautifully directed and cleverly written by British Oscar-winner Emerald Fennell, who follows her highly regarded Promising Young Woman with a film of even more staggering impact.

Expensive, derivative and boring as mattress ticking masquerading as designer fabric.

Artistic creativity and long-term plotting can co-exist side-by-side, but striking the right balance between them is a Herculean task....Regardless, even if Harley Quinn is no longer with the Clown Prince of Crime, she’s still poised to laugh all the way to the bank with Birds of Prey.

A horror anthology consisting of five episodes by different directors with more imagination than skill, Nightmare Cinema will make you scratch your head more than your goosebumps. Each story is designed and determined to scare the living daylights out of you, but I promise you more yawns than screams.

The nostalgia is so thick in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s furiously busy paean to the nascent days of SNL, so unrelenting and potent, that eventually it unmoors from the film and begins swallowing its characters whole, like the titular alien in Steve McQueen’s The Blob.

A mesmerizing, engrossing and beautifully made cinematic experience, rare as a pink unicorn, that enchants for more than two hours and makes you wish for at least one hour more.

Good Neighbors is a hotbed of twisted ideas with a straightforward yet novel approach to the Gothic horror in the hearts of mistakenly everyday people. Stressful and disconcerting but highly recommended, it gave me nightmares.

Watching The Lost City is the cinematic equivalent of slogging your way through monkey poop.

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.

The result is half docudrama, half suspense thriller with the constant threat of seeming artificial and fictional. Amazingly, the actors are so engaging and believable, and the facts are so riveting, that the movie, despite its flaws, held me spellbound.

Every good magician knows that the real trick is making the audience care. For all of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s mind-bending universe jumping, that particular magic never manages to arrive in the theater.

Billed as a comedy, it’s never funny. Taken as a rural western drama about sibling rivalry, it does not take place in the West and the drama never involves. The game cast is chock full of talent, but nothing percolates.

Mr. Rudd imbues Ned with an easy, charming sweetness and unpatronizing wisdom that make him seem simply guileless, not stupid. Indeed, the greatest flaw of Our Idiot Brother is in making Ned too saintly - despite the title, it's clearly the sisters who are the morons.

The May-December romance is an overworked genre, but steady hands guide this one with intelligence to a sad but satisfactory conclusion.

Bryan Cranston brings the complex personality of Trumbo to life with substance and humor.

You go away from Mary Queen of Scots sated but exhausted. The problem, as I see it, is that in spite of director Josie Rourke’s solemnity, her passion for translating history into modern terms doesn’t always jell.

Beautiful, bold and blazing with sex and suspense, Allied is a gorgeously photographed, intensely romantic, action-packed film by the great director Robert Zemeckis with two titanic star performances by Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard that delivers something for everyone.

A stupid waste of time and talent, but it might be just what his (Damon) fans are waiting for.

It’s fun, not in a way a computer or a boardroom might interpret fun—pixels taking the shape of something familiar, regurgitated across the screen—but rather, in an unabashed way, where it winks at the audience without apologizing for its gimmick, without being insincere or self-deprecating, and without sacrificing what makes popcorn horror movies such a reliable collective ritual.

In the end, Pixar has made essentially a gritty prison movie for kids disguised as a large sci-fi spectacle.

Like that dash across the freeway, the dirty jokes, bad language and bursts of violence end up being something that we have to grit our teeth to endure to get a glimpse of the inner lives of these boys, which are far richer than we typically see from a Hollywood comedy.

Motherless Brooklyn is so messy, confusing and pointless that you don’t know what’s going on half the time, and couldn’t care less.

The Whale has moments that touch the heart and passages that engage the mind, but the insufferable parallels it constantly draws between Charlie’s obesity and Moby Dick, Charlie’s favorite book, may have worked better in the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter than they do in his screen adaptation, where they merely ring false and drag the pace to a crawl.

If your own expectations are not too high, you crave period-costume drama and you’re one of those unfortunate people who refuses to watch anything in glorious black-and-white, this Great Expectations is worth the time and effort.

While Crawl never quite achieves the classic status of Jaws, it’s so convincing that you forget about the mechanics and become petrified by the gore.

The film is as disappointing as his fate, but it’s worth watching for the rugged, nerve-wracking performance by Colin Firth.

With little action, no suspense and an ending that fails in every way, Matt Damon is the only thing memorable about Stillwater.