In the small-town-conspiring-on-a-big-lie genre, The Grand Seduction doesn’t get near the mastery of 1998’s "Waking Ned Devine," but the shots of the village in Newfoundland, where it was filmed, are beautiful, and the local accents are convincing.

Overall, it is the performers that give the story life and allow Arkansas to rise above some of its shallower instincts, which include a garish costume design that seems to posit the idea that people from the South dress like rodeo clowns. Hemsworth in particular brings a truth and measured heartbreak to his portrayal of someone who has been forced to glimpse how the world works and deeply wished he hadn’t.

Beautifully shot and reeking with style, Last Night is as slow as sorghum; nothing ever really happens.

Nothing to line up for or write home about, but it’s a pleasant time-passer, not a regrettable time-waster.

Burton’s riff on the elephant that could fly and the circus freaks who love him is about as subversive as a Pottery Barn Kids fall catalog. Which is not to say it isn’t beautiful, and sometimes mesmerizingly so.

In this case two mesmerizing performances by Clive Owen and his astounding co-star, a remarkably adroit child actor named Jaeden Lieberher, who is going places fast.

There are some forces, like Ford’s magnetic presence on screen and our affection for one of his most epoch-making characters, that remain undimmed by time.

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.

Watching Richard Gere’s charm and sweetness, as he turns into a metaphor for the nobodies of the world who hock their souls to be somebodies, is something very special indeed.

Marvel's latest movie feels just as sanitized and safe as its other products, even with its killer cast and talented director Destin Daniel Cretton.

A well-meaning, expertly acted film, it unfortunately drowns in its own sorrow.

The violence is intense, and at two hours and 12 minutes the movie is too long and the pace too leisurely to sustain it, but I wasn’t bored. When in doubt, bring on the Troglodytes.

Those looking to re-experience the tear-jerking emotional heft of Inside Out won’t find that here, although the climatic scenes are sweet. It’s less joy than it is moderate satisfaction.

No matter how you regard its limited commercial possibility for success, there is nothing funny about Tully. Having forewarned you, I must add that suffering through her never-ending agony is less daunting than it has to be when it is Theron who is doing it for you.

Certainly not a bad movie, but a disappointing one. It knocks itself out trying to break your heart, but it's too starched and blow-dried for its own good. Maybe if it had manipulated me less, it would have moved me more.

The Gorge is chaotic and fun, despite some narrative and design hiccups. It’s too bad it’s not heading for the big screen. This is the sort of thing you want to experience with a lively audience with the sound turned all the way up.

Despite reaching the conclusion of the first novel’s plot, Dune: Part Two deliberately leaves an assortment of dangling threads that will leave you either tantalized or frustrated.

Add up the ingredients and you get a mostly enjoyable dog-eared formula for escapist entertainment without critical perception.

Has brief moments of levity and charm, but mostly it's depressing.

As sports biopic, Gran Turismo is solid. As a video game adaptation, it feels like some of the key elements still haven’t downloaded.

It does have a dark, satisfyingly sinister feeling of gothic creepiness that I somewhat reluctantly admit appealed to my enjoyment of perversity as entertainment.

Mr. Gere is miscast as Eddie, too naturally regal in bearing to be the screw-up he’s supposed to be, and for a broken man, he still moves with the same confidence as his younger self did in "An Officer and a Gentleman."

Sure, it’s a silly R-rated raunchy comedy in which we get both testicle and poop jokes (classic). But it’s proudly open hearted and a funny, if absurd, champion of friendship.

This gruesome thriller set in a fogbound insane asylum is incomprehensible and fatally flawed, but having said all of that, I will also say this: It never seems anything less than the work of a skillful film buff. Mr. Scorsese may be a smart aleck, but he’s a professional smart aleck.

A family epic that is strangely ineffectual and disappointingly underwhelming.

Hack director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) is lucky to engage Cruise’s box-office appeal for a tale that otherwise would never have seen the light of day.

As the corpses pile up on every side of the law, it reminds me more of those nasty, sometimes laughable Charles Bronson genre vehicles from the 1980s, buried under 50 feet of snow. Call it "Death Wish" with icicles.

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.

Although it eventually loses staying power, Lynne Ramsay’s ferocious relationship drama Die, My Love quickly seeps beneath your skin, practically holding you hostage in its initial half.

With a different cast and director, this movie would be just another fuzzily lit made-for-TV movie. But because of the performances and the rather gorgeous cinematography, one is left wishing that it just could have been something more.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is as feverishly inventive in its visual presentation as it is slapdash and anemic in its storytelling.

While this may be yet another potentially disposable action movie, it’s still worth seeing on the big screen at full volume if you can. The action is big and the stars give it their all, even if the dialogue leaves something to be desired.

I found Contagion both flawed and fascinating, but it's not an entertainment.

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.

Has moments of heart-pounding suspense and brief glimmers of greatness, thanks to fine performances by Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams, but overall feels uneven, sprawling and strangely incomplete.

I found Howl a fascinating and imaginative evocation of mid-20th-century liberation, a mere and merciful 90 minutes long.

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.

Historians are already calling Anonymous preposterous humbug, but I found it a complex cornucopia of ideas and panache. You go away sated.

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.

You feel the late genius through the way Day carries her body, so lissome yet creaking with the weight of both her talent and addiction. The Rise Up singer not only matches our imagination’s version of Holiday, but somehow beats it: she seems so present yet ethereally sozzled in a manner that suggests she may be operating on another plane.

It’s a late-life coming-of-age story, and it’s not great. But she gives it all she’s got, and she’s never been sunnier or funnier.

Despite the work of a first-rate cast, it doesn’t feel real to me.

The film, written by Jason Fuchs and based on a novel Elly Conway (who fans have, perhaps incorrectly, suspected is a pen name for Taylor Swift), boasts strong performances and creatively memorable sequences, but sometimes loses itself in a roller coaster of plot twists that many will see coming.

Maybe this is just a whimsical trip with quirky characters and little depth. Maybe we’re never supposed to really understand or care about anyone’s motivation or background. There are great moments and a great idea here. Without that connective substance, though, the car gets stuck in neutral.

It’s filled with powerful ideas about the many ways that violence—of the body, of the state and of the soul—manifests in men, and the generational ripple effects therein, even if it doesn’t cohere enough to be consistently engaging.

It oscillates between moving and manufactured, but the movie’s honest portrayal of life on a tribal reservation and a powerful performance by Lily Gladstone keep things grounded.

Heart of Stone is happy to take its cues from predecessors in the spy genre—which isn’t a problem in and of itself. The formula does still work, but the sum of the movie’s parts doesn’t quite add up the same.

The Grandmaster offers welcome relief from a moviegoing summer spent in sensory overload.

The film ends up getting stuck in a no man’s land between fiction and documentary, never quite coming together as a complete narrative.

In its best moments, The King’s Man feels like you and your friends have just dumped out your great grandfather’s dusty crate of tin soldiers to create a game that has no rules whatsoever beyond doing something ridiculous. But the movie’s politics? Ugh. They are the cinematic equivalent of your British uncle complaining about cabbies with foreign accents or claiming that Brexit didn’t go nearly far enough.

The film works because of Mr. Harrelson's magnetism.

Is Wonder Woman 1984 entertaining? Sure, it’s fun, hits all the right superhero marks, and visually, the 1980-something world is a technicolor throwback to behold. But if our heroine is supposed to represent the good and hope for all humanity, one has to wonder who specifically this humanity is reserved for.

The film itself plays like an extended riff on the famous scene where the Frankenstein monster befriends a little girl.

But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”

This is a movie about action, not acting, and although, under the circumstances, the cast does yeoman work in roles that can only be called generic, in the long haul they can’t save the script and direction from being sometimes boring and always predictable.

A Teacher is more in the vein of Michael Haneke’s brooding 2001 film, "The Piano Teacher."

Amidst this dull rendering of a genuinely great true story, García Bernal shines. The actor is nothing if not charismatic, and his lasting screen presence brings much to Cassandro—both the film and the Lucha Libre wrestler.

Despite its protagonist, voiced by British actor Stephen Fry, the film feels oddly disjointed, as if there’s not enough story to sustain 90 minutes of beautifully-made stop-motion and hand-drawn animation.

It’s not quite enough to completely undercut what had been an engrossing and well crafted chamber play of a movie, but it does leave you with the profound sense that all of these characters, the angels and the devils, deserve better.

Mr. Arestrup gives a full-bodied performance as the film’s most intriguing character, who blurs the line between senile irascibility and out and out malice.

Instead, we just sort of soak in the despondency, like lukewarm water in a half-filled hot tub. While sometimes touching, the results of this noble experiment lack dynamism. Eventually whatever is fresh about the approach is undercut by a familiar will-the-man-child-finally-grow-up trope that has made some of Apatow’s lesser films feel insular and self-indulgent.

With its stunning John Ford-like vistas of a corpse laden Sahara and a vast Mediterranean Sea empty of aid vessels to help an immigrant ship overburdened with desperate and sick North Africans, Garrone has—on the surface—made a lush and monumentally disturbing feature-length commercial for staying home.

This dumpling and rocket-fueled contraption continues to employ the same seemingly unstoppable one-two punch: a steady drubbing of painterly and balletic cartoon violence and the unbounded—and increasingly turned out—enthusiasm of the series’ resident Zeus of Skadoosh, star Jack Black.

The film itself is mostly fine, with breathtaking visuals broken up by a less captivating story that often drags its feet (despite several great performances). But its place within Western traditions—both real and imagined—is strange, unsavory, and fascinating.

Mr. Green has managed to turn a story about two road workers doing roadwork into something compelling. Sometimes that is a credit to his quirky script, but mostly it happens when he lets the dramatic scenery speak for itself.

A debut feature by American writer-actor Brady Corbet, the film is sketchy, confused and too self-consciously aimed at arthouse audiences to thrive commercially, but it has a chilling impact.

As he has shown in other directorial efforts—most especially 2007’s Gone Baby Gone—Affleck has a real knack for both building narrative momentum and attenuating a film’s emotions until they ascend into a satisfying catharsis.

There is no way I would call this a good movie. But! I was indeed entertained the whole way through, and there were enough genuinely interesting scenes to almost make up for the incredibly clunky moments provided by a very wooden screenplay.

The trajectory consists of one damn thing after another, with the able Mr. Walker giving it all he’s got without getting out of the vehicle to catch his breath.

They came in fleeting glances, befuddled smiles and odd-timed pauses that the iconic pair share with each other before the movie shuffles them from one frenzied and inconsequential story beat to the next. In such stolen moments, you sense the depth of a friendship so profoundly felt and so deeply comforting that you think to yourself, I would follow these guys anywhere.

As a thriller, The Imposter is gripping. As a documentary, it provokes confusion and annoyance.

Dream Scenario might have worked better as a character study, which is clearly what Cage wants it to be.

At an obvious crossroads in his life, Woody Allen has been thinking about guilt, morality, consciousness and the limitations of the intellect. I wish he had done it in a more entertaining and satisfying film than Irrational Man.

It is a doom-invoking, cathartic and strangely satisfying head-trip that’s also a bit ridiculous.

While Dauberman is still figuring out how to effectively build suspense (Daniela’s various forays into the Artifact Room seem to take as long as visits to the DMV), he does a good job of varying the types of scares he uses to shock his audience. He also leavens the tension with just the right amount of humor and does well with his recreation of the ’70s.

The series’ trademark blend of character comedy and absurdist sight gags is in full display, served up with just the proper amount of postmodern self-awareness that adds to the fun rather than detracts from it.

Not a bad film, just a dull and inconsequential one. here today and gone tomorrow.

Though it’s a neat throwback that features a few memorable performances, MaXXXine imitates its period setting a little too well, prioritizing style and adding little substance to the series.

The great screenwriter Steven Zaillian's elaborate, convoluted script, so muddled that even after it's over you still don't know what it's all about, is a drawback - but the movie is a master class in sinister style, tense and deeply uncomfortable.

Too queer for some, not nearly queer enough for others, Uncle Frank is fated to become the green bean casserole of this holiday’s film streaming options: designed to appeal to everyone, but destined to remain uneaten.

American Pastoral tries to be loyal in its adaptation, but the material is film-resistant and flat as cardboard.

Even though it does so through a dull and talky haze of cigar smoke, it is always Gary Oldman’s phenomenal performance that keeps the film airborne.

A film can exist for aesthetic value alone, but only if it doesn’t try to expand itself to unreached depths. In the end, Parthenope seems to assert is that beauty is unappreciated until it vanishes—a lesson we all learn too late—but like its lead character, the film remains too shallow to fully understand.

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.

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

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.

What it lacks in textual depth, it makes up for with the genuine sympathy it evinces for characters that most films would dismiss as stupid, depraved and undeserving of our empathy and concern. Like Freud, Scheinert seems to understand that even people who commit unspeakable acts deserve our understanding.

Kaluuya, who grew up on a council estate in Camden, clearly has a personal stake in The Kitchen. The actor has previously written short films, but this marks a solid debut feature for him that is stronger for its adept comment on the British class system.

Grousing aside, this is a disarmingly sweet movie, enjoyable to the hilt, with music that really stomps.

Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Kindergarten Cop," but better.

In the end, Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a mixed bag: a ripe visual adventure of limitless imagination hamstrung by an undercooked plot propelled by lackluster heroes.

Proving again that her Best Actress Academy Award for playing Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" was no fluke, the marvellously sensual Marion Cotillard, with her wounded doe eyes and look of permanent unfulfilled longing, delivers another kidney punch as a double amputee in love with an illegal bare-knuckle fighter in the French shocker Rust and Bone.

The honesty of the actors and their commitment to each other bails the movie out. They manage to find truth in a highly manipulative situation, and that’s something even the least stardust-sprinkled among us can appreciate.

Not a great movie, but satisfying enough to hold attention and win your affection - a rare blue-plate combo on today's overcrowded menu of movie chaos that sticks to your ribs and stays there.

If it all seems a bit familiar, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also funny and pleasingly transporting, thanks to a game and attractive supporting cast and a transfixing setting that seems cut out of the pages of Conde Nast Traveler.

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.

It's a slow, repetitive, meandering, mostly overacted little picture - perfectly agreeable but nothing special, and directed with a steamroller by David O. Russell. Go figure.

This futuristic tale of teenage violence is so not my kind of movie that I approached it grudgingly, so imagine my surprise when I ended up being totally exhilarated and enjoying it immensely.