Chism's cast is game for her shenanigans, and the biggest pleasure of "Peeples" is watching them cut loose under her direction. This movie has one hell of a cast.

It’s an inspiring tale based on true events with a worthwhile message about finding your voice and asserting your identity. If only it were good.

Actors of the caliber of Brolin and Winslet can do nothing but the best with what they're given, struggling to find nuance and humanity in romance-novel archetypes.

You’d have to be totally cynical, with a heart of stone and ice water in your veins, not to be even the slightest bit charmed by One Chance.

Consistently boring in a manner that almost feels defiant, “Slingshot” plays as a shallow COVID lockdown allegory for most of its runtime, before insultingly spiraling off the rails. It feels like a movie that hates its characters. And hates you too.

I didn’t laugh once, but there were several lines that, in context, got a wide fool-grin out of me.

The main thing wrong with Robocop is that it's dumb, and it's trashy, and it's both of those things in a not-good way.

Ultimately hollow as director Bertrand Bonello keeps his subject somewhat emotionally at bay, the movie is also at times quite addictive — much like Opium, the controversial name of Saint Laurent’s famous scent. As a diversion, it isn’t exactly good for you but it does provide entertainment.

There’s a version of Jerry & Marge Go Large that’s more like an early Tom McCarthy film, a movie that takes itself seriously as a character study instead of resorting to the simplicity of a generic comedy.

Tim Fehlbaum’s The Colony has many ideas about the future, and while not all of them quite stick together, there’s a few interesting aesthetic and narrative choices to make it something of a curiosity. There’s enough going on to capture your notice for brief stints before trailing off into dense plot details or well-worn sci-fi tropes.

But because the movie is at heart as fake-sentimental as any other such motion picture, or greeting card, or what have you, there's a lot of backpedaling after, say, a random attempt to milk laughs out of human trafficking.

It's not about the hard work that's intrinsic with all of wrestling, so much as the WWE's open willingness to sacrifice its core values for lazy family-friendly amusement.

For the most part, “William Tell” is stuck in multiple in-between phases, and filmmaking modes. It’s far too violent and disturbing for little kids, but feels a bit too popcorny to pass muster as a serious epic drama.

Pure evil meets unshakable faith in Katrin Gebbe's torturous Nothing Bad Can Happen, a film that begins as a meditation on human behavior and belief but crosses the line into pure sadism.

Here’s the thing: The Intern, while having its share of silly moments, is the most genuinely enjoyable and likable movie that Meyers — a longtime writer and producer before taking up directing — has put her name to since, oh, I don’t know, 1984’s “Irreconcilable Differences.”

Ford's voice — always deep, lowered an octave by age and one more by William's longing — is even more powerful. This is Ford's best performance since "The Fugitive," maybe since "Witness."

With Girls of the Sun, she handles the action sequences with a deft hand and a feel for tension, but her character development is woefully lacking to the point of empty cliché.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through.

Kuso may often feel unproductively loud, and monotonous, but it is a head-scratcher worth contending with.

The indelible, unmatched voice of Houston may live on, but I Wanna Dance with Somebody lacks the ingredients of what made Houston a force that permanently altered every person who truly heard her.

Clumsily conflates our country’s racist genocide of Native Americans with the era’s marginalizing of women and their lack of rights.

These guys still know how to not just hold our attention but grab it, even if their current film needs them more than they need it.

This is a movie that’s annoying in part because it doesn’t care if you’re annoyed by it. It doesn’t need you, the individual viewer, to like it. It just needs a crowd to see it. Whether you’ve been entertained or enlightened is immaterial. It’s Barnum time. You don’t like it? This way to the egress.

You’re Cordially Invited is reheated comedy leftovers, for the most part, but there’s enough warmth, sentimentality, and belly laughs to make for a raucous timewaster.

There are signs of clichéd filmmaking from the beginning in the flat close-ups and over-used score, but the performances carry Suicide Theory for a surprisingly long time.

The Neon Demon only works when Refn finds the right middle ground between obliquely hinting at and explicitly spelling out what his movie's about.

Sorvino is great in the small role of Clark's tear-stained, checked-out mother.

This Beautiful Fantastic is not meant to be realistic. It's supposed to be a fairy tale. That's fine, but it's a very low-stakes fairy tale, wrapped in a strained garden metaphor.

Close is aces when it's watching its star move through the world, silently checking everyone and everything out, hiding her mental math until it's time to kill some dudes. The action is frenzied but comprehensible, brutal but not wantonly sadistic.

The World is Full of Secrets concerns text more than anything else — not the visuals within filmmaking or performance, but the stories being told. As an experiment with the sensory experience of film storytelling, it backfires. To best engage Swon's massive amounts of text, you’re better off closing your eyes.

These ideas are presented by a cast of well-seasoned actors who help the film survive its occasionally clunky dialogue. In fact, one of the film’s bigger pleasures is listening to these thespians plow through their numerous monologues. Their performances are the film's saving grace.

Dark Harvest misses many beats necessary for a fully realized narrative. And yet the concept and its action-driven execution make a fun watch with some laughs of incredulity.

It's anchored by committed performances and fascinating details, but it never quite figures out how to lock the audience into whatever odd groove the storytellers have obviously decided to settle into.

Compact in its runtime, “Chestnut” offers a softly lyrical glimpse of young life on the precipice of a new and uncertain future.

Doin’ It is more of a fling than one for the books, but it’s a fun one, nonetheless.

The performances and the inherent power of the true story keep it from being a complete disaster, but one hopes Serkis moves on to more challenging material with his follow-up.

Writer/director Alex Scharfman’s script is clever, but this truly feels like the kind of project that collapses with the wrong people in it. Every member of this film’s ensemble understood the assignment, elevating this unique creature feature from just another disposable “Jurassic Park” riff into something memorable through their comic timing and group chemistry.

As Danica, the head witch, draped in a bright-red gown with matching lipstick, Rebecca Romjin gives a very perverse and funny performance, all icy intimidation and glamorous power.

It's reverential rather than revealing, predictably admiring where it needs to be nuanced and challenging.

The result feels strained and slapped together, crammed as it is with silly mistaken identities and misunderstandings, adolescent jealousies and slapstick jokes. It’s a sitcom in a sari.

It's a lovely way to open a film that is at its best when it is displaying dancers in motion and exploring the complex dynamics of a rehearsal space.

What makes it a crummy picture is that it really doesn’t turn into something harder.

Think of How to Be Single as a cinematic Whitman’s Sampler: There are enough pieces that work to offset the pieces that don’t.

Watching these two performers grapple with a text as rich as Mosley’s only leads one back to wishing the film around them trusted them enough to take more risks and to really go somewhere other than the first floor.

If nothing else, McConaughey's goofball autodidact's intensity certifies that there is, in fact, a "Matthew McConaughey" type of character, and that McConaughey originated it.

The meta-oddity of For the Plasma is certainly not for everyone, but it’s such a charmingly strange film, a movie that feels devoid of the cynicism that often plagues every genre from which it cribs, but particularly modern sci-fi and low-budget cinema. It is a movie that is happily strange, joyfully bizarre and particularly unforgettable.

By the end of the film, we don’t really gain any new moral clarity about what it means to confront a world where might makes right, and we are left with the discomforting idea that the only thing ultimately protecting women from violence is a good man with a gun.

Love may not always be enjoyable, but it leaves an abiding mark.

Still see this film, but see it for what it is: a ferocious showcase for Whishaw, who’s never been nervier, and a promising first feature from a filmmaker with energy to spare.

In keeping with our current “poptimistic” age, “Kids Vs. Aliens” keeps the aggressive neon splatter, but loses the cynicism—a choice that, for all the F-bombs and fake blood, makes it a surprisingly pure film.

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between the United States and Mexico in which it is set.

But Live From New York! is required viewing only if the network’s own 3½-hour marathon salute to four decades of skit hilarity earlier this year was not enough of a retrospective for you.

Most of this is interesting enough, although a little too self-congratulatory at times, but A LEGO Brickumentary never really goes much deeper than that.

Human Capital is so exquisitely cast, down to the smallest role, that it puts viewers in the unusual position of wishing a film were a TV series or a much longer movie, the better to take advantage of its best assets.

Most viewers will find themselves wishing that writer/director Patrick Ridremont had come up with a few variations on this standard theme in order to liven up this competently executed but painfully familiar genre exercise.

Most of its strength emerges from a well-directed ensemble, one able to convey the high concept of a nightmarish situation without losing their relatable humanity.

It takes great effort to find what interested director Wash Westmoreland and company in the source material in the first place, but it feels like a project that reaffirms something I’ve long argued: just because something works in one medium doesn’t mean it will in another.

Ultimately, Quasi is a decent effort from talented dudes but a missed opportunity at something memorably hilarious. It's a few decent jokes in search of a better movie that needed a bit more improvisational effort in the comedy department and a lot more shaping in the editing room.

It might be kind of tedious, kind of sloppy, and mostly silly, but you could never accuse Dangerous Lies of false advertising. The new Netflix thriller, directed by Michael M. Scott, is practically designed for rainy day viewers who initially laugh at the title, and that’s not a bad thing.

In terms of both actual storytelling and subtext, there’s so much that the creators of Project Power could have done, but they chose the path of least resistance, turning a story of reclaimed control and buried human strength into a dull action movie that only gets by on the charisma of its stars and speediness of its filmmaking. It’s almost like they were afraid to unleash the power within their own project.

With enough enjoyable originality to differentiate it from the numerous takes on the super men and wonder women that so heavily populate film and TV these days, We Can Be Heroes flies Rodriguez back to one of his main areas of interest.

Desperation destroys comic timing, and this thing is drenched in the flop sweat of a stand-up comedian who knows he’s losing his audience.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

The film plods at points, trudging along, and there are a few misguided narrative "devices" tacked on, but still, Trial by Fire bristles with anger.

If Nancy Meyers ever decided to dabble in gothic romance, it probably would turn out to be something like The Face of Love.

This is a flat, boring affair.

If Susie Searches wanted to critique the true-crime podcast trend, it could have done so more directly. For now, we have a movie at odds with itself and its main character.

Taurus isn’t meant to lionize its protagonist. But even in offering a cautionary tale, all it can deliver is shallow provocation and monotonous cliché.

Killing bigots is a fine enough pretext for this sort of watered-down post-grindhouse entertainment, but if you’re honestly going to go there, you can’t stop til you’re past the point of apology.

An old-fashioned Biblical spectacular with fresh blood in its veins.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.

The two couples in this film are so annoying that I did not just want them to break up with each other; I wanted to find a way to break up with the movie, or perhaps scrape it off my shoe.

The film bizarrely takes what could have been a touching and powerful drama about the traumatic family ties that bind (and occasionally choke) and attempts to refit it as a straightforward, if mostly low-key horror exercise chock-full of scenes involving various things popping up out of the darkness with numbing regularity.

A handsomely mounted, never-less-than conspicuously intelligent but ultimately too-conventional historical drama, The Liberator shoehorns the epic life of early 19th-century South American revolutionary Simón Bolivar into two hours of intermittently powerful cinema.

The attractiveness of the scenery, and a quiet, dignified performance by Ms. Peña in what could now be her last movie appearance, wind up being the main redeeming values here.

The smaller details are the most fun, especially when the Grinch brings on an enormous, yak-looking reindeer named Fred to pull his fake Santa sleigh.

I suppose there are some who will get off on this movie’s competence and uber-sincerity, but I found the premise one or two bridges too far. Sam Elliott junkies, too, are sure to be delighted.

A Five Star Life shows something not often seen in American cinema, at least in films that aren’t police procedurals: It shows an ordinary citizen doing her job.

Just watch 11 Minutes like you're channel-surfing, only you don't have the remote and the roar of static between stations is steadily growing louder as the channels switch back-and-forth, faster and faster.

Cabrini is in no way a perfect movie, but a damn dignified one that honors the little-known efforts of these fearless women.

Tim Burton’s Dumbo feels like one of the big-eared baby elephant’s early flights: It’s adorable and earnest but it causes a lot of commotion, and it only sporadically, haltingly soars.

Rough Night starts out buoyantly, and it and features some wonderfully weird moments scattered throughout. But those scenes never truly gel with the movie’s eventual life-or-death stakes.

Director Jackie Earle Haley's Criminal Activities is the worst kind of Tarantino clone, one with no gas in the tank, and no clue about how to pull off Tarantino's swagger.

Pegg and Temple’s responsive, well-attuned performances are actually the most frustrating things about Lost Transmissions since they’re good enough to make you want to care, even when their characters don’t seem to be worth caring about.

While “Cleaner” may not be one of the most refined action movies this year, it has a bit more to offer than most, especially when it comes to Campbell’s thoughtful direction and Ridley’s committed performance.

Clearly there is a severe case of “Paddington” envy here and a hunger for yet another animated franchise. But easy chuckles are no substitute for genuine charm.

Damici gives his memorable protagonist enough life to hold it together more often that it would have otherwise. He’s great here. The movie around him, not so much.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

All the artistry and absurdity, glamour and the grit of the fashion industry are on display in the documentary Mademoiselle C.

It’s a privileged perspective with nothing to share for the rest of us.

The characters never take shape, not even as caricatures. There are elements of parody, but Operation Fortune is not broad enough to be a spoof. It's weirdly empty.

"Stanleyville" is part Stanford Prison Experiment and part MTV's "The Real World." It's part Milgram experiment and part "Squid Game."

While Mirren unquestioningly rules this roost, one cast member’s late arrival onscreen did get the audience murmuring in recognition. Namely, Lady Grantham herself — Elizabeth McGovern — who appears as a judge during one of the key moments in the legal case. One can assume that the “Downton Abbey” star took the slim part as a favor for her husband, who happens to be the director.

A Man Called Otto isn’t exactly as philosophical as “About Schmidt” or as socially conscious as “I, Daniel Blake,” two films that occasionally hit similar notes. But it’s nevertheless a wholesome crowd-pleaser for your next family gathering.

Luckily, many of the plot’s maudlin pitfalls are greatly mitigated by the film’s utterly infectious leading lady. Emilia Clarke’s performance is winningly immersed in charming gawkiness and heartfelt sincerity.

While the film does subvert basic audience expectations, it doesn’t really do anything beyond that as it stumbles through a choppy and meandering narrative that not even an admittedly committed lead performance by Danielle Deadwyler can help save.

Armie Hammer’s Will is definitely hollow at the core. Like a lot of protagonists of horror films, it is his overall weakness as a human being that makes him so vulnerable to the nightmare that unfolds in his life.