There's a little Magic Mike XXL in the mix of How to Please a Woman, with its merry band of eager-to-please strippers, although How to Please a Woman also hearkens back to The Full Monty in its surprisingly profound look at pleasure.

If the movies have already made growing up seem like hell, director Alex Winter’s dispiritedly cynical but rousingly comical “Adulthood” reminds us that there’s always a tenth circle to that inferno.

The Cuban pulls together music, romance, loss, and memory into an emotional tale that spans cultures and generations. One thing connects them all: Cuban music.

Oblivion is a special effects extravaganza with a lot of blatant symbolism and very little meaning. It starts slow, turns dull and then becomes tedious — which makes it a marginal improvement over the earlier film. It features shiny surfaces, clicky machinery and no recognizable human behavior. It's equally ambitious and gormless.

As he impresses by nailing each facet of the Western genre on the page and behind the screen, White's strongest suit is his consistent straying from any cynical territory. He doesn't try to aim for the same traits that made "Black Dynamite" a hit, nor does he try to be as outrageous as other Western parodies.

Director George Clooney understands the strength of this classic underdog story, and he knows how to tell it, with gorgeous visuals and heartfelt performances.

The ways in which the pigeons work wonders as a flock — to the point of becoming playfully weaponized in the name of good — is consistently inspired.

Some of the voice work elevates what could have been a total disaster, and the legendary Alan Menken drops a couple of entertaining compositions, but it's a largely forgettable venture that families will watch during Thanksgiving break before the Netflix algorithm buries it forever.

From the looks of it, Huppert had a grand time playing the title character in Greta, a film that could have been released in the era of MTV veejays and VCRs.

What resonates most potently are the scenes of the 1972 trial.

Because the "witchcraft" part is treated mostly as a fun thing to do at slumber parties, there are very few frightening sequences (as compared to the often-unnerving original). The result is a confused movie.

There are opportunities wasted here to dig into family roles and class commentary, but that’s often overcome by how much fun Furhman and Stiles seem to be having in the film's second half.

All of these interesting performers can't save a dull script. To work, Draft Day needs the kind of witty dialogue and snappy energy that Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin brought to “Moneyball” but the screenwriters mistake constant activity for actual screenwriting.

Camp X-Ray has cinematic and moral intelligence.

In a strange way, War Machine kicks off when it proverbially jumps the shark, introducing something so ridiculous as a big killer robot to jolt the movie awake from its ho-hum military recruiting motions. It’s not a movie built to withstand big questions, but for a high-octane action thriller, it’s a lot more fun when it goes off the rails.

Won’t add much to the debased discourse of this miserable season.

The ultra-violent take on “Home Alone” with a precocious teen girl who dispatches bad guys like a killer in a slasher movie? That’s where Becky falls apart.

In Profile, the images mix real documentary footage with fictional social media and news organization posts. And meaning is elemental—a simplistic rush meant to induce viewer panic. While also being incredibly on-the-nose.

Not all the pieces of Boogie fit neatly together, but it’s a film about a family that doesn’t fit inside the box of a standard inspirational immigrant story.

While the suspense that had carried the film for the first two-thirds of its brisk running time dips as it nears its conclusion, Cocaine Bear still emerges as a hell of a high.

The whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.

Toxic behavior is eternal, and Evil Eye sincerely depicts both those who do not recognize it, and those who are all too familiar with it.

The sheer talent of the cast here sometimes provides enough depth to get audience members to the climactic shoot-out, and there are a few definite MVPs in terms of ensemble, but it’s hard to envision this film having anywhere near the cinematic legacy of those that inspired it.

Good on Paper sometimes gets silly, sometimes serious, but it never waivers from its mission of being funny through it all.

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling Sympathy for the Devil godawful.

Michael Pearce’s grim thriller “Echo Valley” is a melodramatic mess redeemed by the performances of the film’s exceptional cast.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez is the latest to tackle the rich implications of Bluebeard in his film Elizabeth Harvest, bringing a modern horror-sci-fi sensibility to the story. The horror is already implicit. Gutierrez makes it explicit.

“Snow always lands on top” is the longtime credo for Coriolanus and his family. The question of how it falls, and whether it sticks, makes “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” a surprisingly suspenseful prequel.

It’s a movie that's constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. A few big things too.

The setting, with many of the same locations from the first film, is used effectively; the peaceful, bucolic beauty of the countryside contrasts with the war news and underscoring the children’s adaptability and resolve.

The Holocaust drama “White Bird” is a sensitive, well-meaning but ultimately rather programmatic film, presenting the tragedy mainly as a school lesson for present-day kids.

The film gets increasingly hallucinatory as it progresses, and there's a vivid sense of growing danger.

Wood, whose whippet-thin appearance in this dank noir-ish drama semi-draped in mystery could be described as Kristen Stewart lite, fully dedicates herself to embodying a rather unpleasant and contradictory character as she attracts her prey and then goes about abusing them physically and emotionally.

Part of the thrill in watching Niccol’s movies is in seeing him thoroughly curate dreams of our future that play off like logical possibilities.

Loosely based on the graphic novel Une Nuit de Pleine lune, The Owners doesn’t feel new or groundbreaking by any measure. Still, this increasingly bizarre film is grisly and absurd in all the right, self-aware ways; qualities that the comparable (and far superior) “Don’t Breathe” also possessed as another recent horror film that turned the tables against its lowlife aggressors.

Familiar, even universal issues of growing up, identity, and intimacy are presented with a lyrical, dreamlike tone.

It’s a fascinating premise by screenwriter Gregory Poirier, one that is methodically and quietly built, but ultimately loses any grit, atmosphere, suspense, or emotion it could possibly carry because of a few narrative headscratchers. Even Keaton, usually a sure bet, doesn’t land what the movie is selling.

The 95-minute runtime also aids the dramedy’s success: Short, silly, and sweet, the perfect recipe for audience satisfaction.

The Signal continues to get weirder, and creepier, and to bring up unusual questions for the viewer.

Hamilton deserves better. So do the other strong women who make up the film’s trio of warriors, fighting to protect each other and all of humanity from technological destruction. Again.

Black and Blue is a B-movie through and through — and that’s actually a compliment.

The overall experience of “The Empire” is one that is consistently surprising and rarely dull. That being said, it’s not necessarily successful as a comedy.

The absolute ending of Some Velvet Morning is a stunner, one that is sure to irk and awe viewers in equal measure (I’m in the latter camp). LaBute may not be saying anything novel about constricting gender roles and the cynical ways in which we sell ourselves out, but he is saying it in his signature, provocative style.

Empire of Light never entirely coheres, but it's worth seeing for the power of Colman's lead performance and the expertly judged backup acting.

Genndy Tartakovsky brings back all the fan favorites from the previous two films and sets them all on an overcrowded, doomed cruise, but the thin plot feels less engaging than the previous films and the jokes less inspired.

Woo is a virtuoso. This movie is music.

An odd mix of beautifully bleak atmosphere and hammily mannered performances, A Single Shot is simultaneously understated and overpowering.

The Dead Don't Die is far from Jarmusch's best, but there's something to be said for its zonked-out acceptance of extinction.

The look of buried terror and resentment in Hawke's eyes tells the deeper story. Still, Adopt a Highway wanders ("Ella" is just the first chapter) and the redemption narrative isn't so much heavy-handed as it is super-imposed.

While Powell’s film is highly bloody and invested with psychological realism, it lacks a pulse and curiosity that doesn’t befit the excitement promised in the title.

The British WWII drama “Munich - The Edge of War” starts off as a prim spy thriller and ends as an insufferable civics lesson.

There's a lot here that feels insufficiently shaped or fitfully realized, but at the same time, there's a lot to like. It's the Platonic ideal of a mixed bag. The newness of the new parts counterbalances the ineffectiveness of the stuff that seemingly every fantasy blockbuster does, and that this one doesn't do well.

It's a real shame that "The Beekeeper" isn't the righteous trash masterpiece that it keeps threatening to turn into. There's a great pop hit in here somewhere—probably one that focused exclusively on Adam and the awful people he's going after. But the film is scattered and annoyingly glib at times.

Lively does her best to add emotional layers to Lily so we see her internal growth, but this process is often hampered by the film around her.

This fairly laugh-packed comedy aims to address the desire for intimate companionship in older adults, an increasingly topical issue as more Americans live into their nineties.

The entire story takes place in and around a spectacular house with curiously sterile interiors that are more like the setting of a magazine ad for expensive liquor than a home real people live in. The bigger problem is that the world of the characters is not fully inhabited either.

The dénouement of The Artist’s Wife, wasting compassion on a character who has earned only the minimum, winds up fully validating an ideology and morality that is complicit in women’s oppression.

Anenome is Ronan Day-Lewis stretching his canvas beyond his background in painting, and while there are some interesting crossovers between the broody visual style and eye-catching surrealism, he still has much space to fill.

No movie with Nicolas Cage, directed by the wonderfully weird Japanese director Sion Sono, should be this taxing, drawn out, and plainly boring.

The problem with “Deep Water” is not that it is a bad movie (which it is), but it’s a gratingly familiar one that doesn’t have a single point of interest to call its own. Instead, it prefers to spend two hours rehashing elements that even newbies to shark-based cinema will find devoid of any real inspiration.

There’s a makeover montage in Dumplin’, and it’s a lulu. It is overseen by drag queens who specialize in doing Dolly Parton, and it doesn’t get any more extra than that. Like so much in this film, this makeover comes with a refreshingly smart, funny, wise, and warmhearted twist.

The visual bonanza cooked up by Rodriguez, cinematographer Bill Pope and editors Stephen E. Rivkin and Ian Silverstein is enough to power through any narrative bumps with quickly paced action and bleak, yet colorful, imagery.

In the end, there's a distinct air of solipsism to this tale.

Various characters populate Person to Person, but they rarely register as actual people. And while some of their storylines intersect throughout the course of a day in New York, they rarely connect in ways that have actual meaning.

My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?

While the world becomes a more divisive, tumultuous, anxiety-producing place by the day in Summer 2024, there’s something almost comforting about a movie that, like the no-nonsense cop of its title, gets the job done.

This ABCs of Death is, either as a result of a surfeit of artistic freedom or just my own narrower-than-the-producers’ strictures of taste, as much of a hit-and-miss affair as the first, which came out in 2012.

Where Maya Dardel really works is when it sticks to being a character study.

The film seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of itself, to coalesce into a statement, to not fade away. This feels right. Knight of Cups is not a young man's movie. It's an old man's movie. A philosophically engaged, beatific, starchild-as-old-man's movie. The end is coming.

It is nonetheless a very well-mounted film, with outstanding contributions in Alvarado’s cinematography and Eric Andrew Kuhn’s subtly expressive score.

It is not merely a bad film. It is a collection of notes for a film that never quite evolved to the rough draft stage, much less cohered into a finished movie. That makes it more dispiriting than other notorious Woody Allen misfires.

One of the most refreshing things about Laurie Simmons’ similarly provocative feature directorial debut, My Art, is in how it challenges the very notion of what constitutes a happy ending.

Those not on the Deadpool bandwagon already will probably not be converted by this version and those who are fans may find it to be a vaguely interesting curio they'll watch once.

There's not much wrong with this film on paper—there's just something wrong with the execution.

The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

Whatever one thinks of “The Last Jedi,” if that film was trying to build a new house on familiar land, this one tears it down and goes back to an old blueprint. Some of the action is well-executed, there are strong performances throughout, and one almost has to admire the brazenness of the weaponized nostalgia for the original trilogy, but feelings like joy and wonder are smothered by a movie that so desperately wants to please a fractured fanbase that it doesn’t bother with an identity of its own.

Honour, for good and bad, is nowhere near as gruesome and downbeat as its subject might suggest.

There’s a definite beginning, a doughy middle, and a gaping end to “Project Wolf Hunting,” but they somehow don’t cohere into a feature-length spectacle.

Big Ass Spider! wants to serve two masters, the ones who unabashedly enjoy this type of movie without shame, and the ones who openly mock it with false senses of superiority.

While some of the film's wide emotional turns—from over-caffeinated road movie to magically-realistic melodrama and back again—are not handled with care, the film is more than the sum of its unequal parts.

We meander from one story to the next until every idea, big and small, gets cast aside with childish zeal.

Where the central four characters' friendship and intersecting romantic relationships are meant to be the film’s grounding center, there's nothing but flimsy connections and dead air. There’s no chemistry between the characters and no genuine feeling in their performances.

Night Patrol is far from perfect, but it’s got a certain something that pulls you in. The bleakness of its worldview is matched by the integrity of its filmmaking and performances. The life it depicts is not sugarcoated. It’s drenched in blood.

Greenfield wraps up this compulsively watchable movie with observations of family love and some of its characters striving for redemption and/or an honest living. But she doesn’t quite dissolve the bitterness of the pill. Because it really can’t be.

The biggest difference between the two films is that "Unfriended" is dynamic and cruel while Unfriended: Dark Web is unbelievably stupid and sadistic. Neither movie is especially smart or incisive about the Way We Live Now, but they don't really have to be.

With her debut feature, Bang Gang, Eva Husson captures the restless rhythms of adolescence—the push-pull of angst and boredom, of self-consciousness and the yearning to lose oneself completely.

If only the half-baked story could also meet our expectations, or at least match the logic of the previous two “Annabelle” films.

Worse still: because The Emperor's New Clothes is often beholden to the whims of Brand (star of "Get Him to the Greek," and that tedious "Arthur" remake nobody saw), it too often feels like "Button-Pushing Encounters with Russell Brand."

Here is a movie that wants to traffic in Coen Brothers-style nihilism yet lacks any of their storytelling skill.

The YouTube Effect is a chronicle of extremely recent history and doesn't cover much new ground. If you follow YouTube, big tech, or any controversies surrounding social media, you will be familiar with everything here.

The Mauritanian fails to humanize the story it’s telling, never coming off as something more challenging or interesting than a superficial, manipulative accounting of true events.

An absorbing coming-of-age drama that suddenly, pointlessly self-destructs with an onslaught of cheap ironies and overkill.

Ray and his co-stars’ easy chemistry makes you want to hang out with Will, if only to see where the plot twist takes him. “Destroy All Neighbors” wouldn’t really work without that essential playfulness; the fact that it works at all suggests that Ms. Lee and her team are the movie’s real MVPs.

It is sweet without being sugary, colorful, and very charming, with terrific voice talent and a lot of music. It’s the best of the three.

It’s a dancing elephant of a movie. It has a few decent moves, but you’d never call it light on its feet.

Although immensely entertaining, Theodore Melfi’s screenplay has some unexplained potholes here and there which will have audiences scratching their heads from time to time. Regardless, it’s clear that director Paul Dektor’s empathy and heart dwell in the right place for a story ultimately asking the questions of what one needs to be happy, how far we are willing to go to achieve it, and what role does loneliness play in these life-altering decisions?

The performances are better than the material deserves—particularly those of De la Reguera and Huerta, whose reactive closeups have a silent-movie expressiveness; and Lucas, who once again proves that he's willing to play deeply unlikable characters without signaling to the audience that he's a nice guy offscreen, actually.

Emancipation becomes an exhaustive, vicious, and stylistically overcooked recounting of a man whose very visage led the abolitionist charge. Emancipation is a hollow piece of genre filmmaking that rarely answers, "Why this story and why now?"