Keanu, directed by Peter Atencio, only provides you exactly what you expect and nothing more. In many ways, it plays like a less subversive sketch from the duos magnificent, defunct show “Key and Peele," been ballooned to 98 minutes — the film’s greatest problem.

Irons is the gawky one. His Hardy is a socially inept bachelor who is ill-suited to the role of nurturing mentor and father figure.

None of the actors are able to find a way to rise above the material, instead just plowing through in the broadest manner possible while trying not to look too obviously embarrassed.

Sworn Virgin is not the first film to give the impression that, in current European art cinema, religion is the one subject that dare not speak its name.

This movie, which is what you’d call a god-awful mess.

Not bad enough to dissuade prospective viewers' from their curiosity. In fact, the whole feather-light affair is practically redeemed by a single entry: writer/director Anthony Scott Burns' superbly spooky Father's Day segment.

As much candy as the movie encourages the eyes to gorge on, Tale of Tales is 135 pretty minutes of empty calories.

As Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of David Eggers’ novel proves, it’s entertainment just to stare back at Hanks.

What does all of this add up to? Damned if I know. But it's fun to see a film that plays by its own rules to such a degree that any comparison to anything else falls apart.

You’ll see some durable makeup in Nina. What you won’t see is any justification why this film should exist.

You will be hard-pressed to remember anything about it even only a few minutes after watching it, which should come as a relief to everyone involved with its production.

If you liked “Frozen” but wish it had been angrier, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is for you.

A diminutive and misleading title for such an affecting, often profound film.

Only fitfully entertaining or illuminating.

I suppose the fact that I was affected as I was by Wedding Doll is testimony to its emotional effectiveness. But while Hagit is able to crack a smile at the movie’s end, I feel a pall wrapping around me every time I contemplate her predicament, or the predicament of her real-life models.

The premise of My Big Night is fine, but the film's execution is what really sells it.

The movie's conclusion is: of course, fashion is Art, or at least that's what we're apparently expected to garner from the montage of intricately, ornately designed pieces from famous designers of the contemporary and modern eras.

Casting goes a long way with this project, to fill some of the gaps of charisma the story itself lacks.

Watson and Bruhl give it their best, and Nyqvist makes a powerful villain, but Colonia winds up being a movie that wants to get its way on too many levels, and winds up not satisfying on most of them.

The Measure of a Man may be a hard film to watch at times, but with Lindon's great performance at its center, it is one from which you cannot look away.

Rio, I Love You feels like little more than an extended tourism promotion video.

You have to take the bad with the good here: Green Room may be too schematic to fully capture the essence of its characters' groddy milieu, but it's also economically paced, and gorgeous.

John Carney has a humorous and loving eye for detail, an intuitive ear for dialogue, and the film is extremely personal in a way that is universal.

Criminal is the kind of dunderheaded enterprise that leaves viewers reeling from the idiocies they have just endured, wondering how something like that could possibly get made in the first place.

Barbershop: The Next Cut belongs, as the entire series does, to Cedric the Entertainer.

Talking with the residents of these different worlds, and contrasting their different lives, is where the film’s heart and greatest insights reside.

If truth in advertising applied to movies, they would have titled this one "Reheated Cultural Leftovers."

In every way, this quietly majestic film should be considered a triumph.

Boonyawatana provides a confident and distinctive vision of his own in this, his debut feature. While his spiraling from one genre to another may produce a final lack of coherence, it’s a nervy, purposeful strategy that keeps clichés at bay while engaging viewer interest throughout.

The whole cast (which also includes Oliver Platt as a simpatico family solicitor) sinks its teeth into the material, which is reasonably meaty.

While Watts is reliably vulnerable, it’s Judah Lewis as her son Chris who does the heavier emotional lifting.

A dinner-party-from-hell scenario best served as unspoiled as possible. After all, a psychological thriller built upon slow-simmering tension is only as good as its surprises.

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.

The latest example of what I call an emperor’s-new-clothes film is Neon Bull.

Sometimes its meandering approach can feel a bit more detached than in Trier’s best work, but this is ultimately a delicate, complex film that lingers, unpacking itself in your mind. You remember it in the same kind of fragmented images that haunt its characters.

Simply falls short.

If his work still shocks, it stirs the soul, for he was a classicist reaching for the perfect form.

The film does an excellent job of letting us inside Lakshmi's physical and emotional experience.

Strategy combats chaos, strategy focuses people on one goal, and with strategy, winning is actually possible. That's what The Dark Horse is all about.

For Francofonia, Sokurov returns to the art museum, but perhaps taking a cue from its Parisian setting, this film wanders like a flâneur between past and present, traversing space and history, crossing from fiction to nonfiction and back.

This is not a film for people unfamiliar with Tsai and Lee’s work. It’s a film for cinephiles who loved “Stray Dogs.”

It’s amusingly slick and mean for a while, but ultimately the film’s one-note nihilism grows numbing, and its stylish visuals and well-chosen soundtrack can only do so much to keep it lively.

Miles Ahead is a film of ugly, bold bravado.

Hardcore Henry is like a good roller-coaster in that it does not require a complex reason to be: it's there, it's fun, you ride it, and that's about it.

Throughout its last hour it keeps jumping into your lap and demanding love without doing anything to earn it.

Even by the standards of raunchy, comic spoofs, director and co-writer Deon Taylor’s film feels especially scattered.

There are serious movies about the Christian faith, about the persecution of the faithful, and about the intolerance that goes both ways. God's Not Dead 2 is not one of them.

When Linklater's style works (and it works in Everybody Wants Some!!), there is nobody quite like him.

The movie’s incredibly irritating characters made me remember why I only ever needed to watch “The Blair Witch Project” once, and its hobbling, dopey, drawn-out plotlines and xenophobic thematic threads made me think very, very kind thoughts about Eli Roth’s “Hostel” movies, which at least have ruthless efficiency going for them.

A sweetly-intentioned though somewhat awkwardly structured spin on a Hallmark Channel-style dramedy that strives to shed light on the disorder from a female perspective.

Baskin does what many horror films try and fail to do: it makes you feel like you're a passive prisoner/spectator, watching as an especially vivid nightmare unfolds.

The performers continue to exhibit those qualities forty years after the fact, reuniting in the evocative, sometimes puzzling, and sometimes moving Valley of Love.

It feels somewhat clichéd to call an animated adventure film a “delight,” but it’s the best word for the latest from GKids, April and the Extraordinary World, a joyful, accomplished movie that echoes “The City of Lost Children,” “The Adventures of Tintin,” “Metropolis,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and something unique into a, well, delightful piece of work.

The particularly outstanding cinematography is by Dante Spinotti, the craftsman who also shot the likes of “Heat” and “L.A. Confidential.”

The film isn't perfect, and in a lot of ways it doesn't accomplish what it set out to do, but if you're going to tell a story about Chet Baker you need to understand what it means to "get inside every note." Born To Be Blue does.

Over and over again, this is the level of humor in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 — this is the shrill note it hits.

Park coats the big heart he has for these people with warm LA lens flares, and finds energy from sharp cuts and wall-to-wall music. It’s the performances that prove to be spotty, with flat line-readings all around and displays of emotions that struggle to reach from the script to the audience.

There are a few brilliantly realized moments, the acting is mostly strong despite the weak script (Affleck and Cavill are both superb—Affleck unexpectedly so), and there's enough mythic raw material sunk deep in every scene that you can piece together a classic in your mind if you're feeling charitable; but if you aren't, “Batman v. Superman” will seem like a missed opportunity.

As comedy, the events are more often charming than funny; even when some sequences fall flat, they show a dedication to the surrealism that’s charismatic.

This ostensibly edgy comedy didn't wring a single laugh out of me until maybe fifteen minutes before the finale.

Watching Krisha is a revelation: there are expected "rules" for such material (a former addict returns home for a holiday), but then director/writer Trey Edward Shults breaks every rule, making those rules seem tired and arbitrary in the process, and he does so with bravura, confidence, flash.

My Golden Days exists simultaneously within and outside of its characters' headspace, a testament to Deplechin's powers of imaginative sensitivity.

As tedious as much of this sounds, an odd thing happened around “Allegiant’s” midway point. The fairly packed audience started vocally reacting “Rocky Horror”-style to some of the more overtly melodramatic turns with “oohs," “ahhs” and even laughter.

Midnight Special respects your intelligence, letting you come to its themes emotionally instead of narratively. It is a breathtaking display of visual storytelling, confidently rendered by someone who understands the power of cinema.

Bring tissues. Because whether you’re the faithful target audience for Miracles From Heaven, a non-believer or someone in the mass agnostic middle ground, you may find it hard to hold back the tears during various points in this real-life tale. And they’ll be earned.

As [Farhadi] does to such masterful effect in “A Separation,” here he constructs a story that keeps revealing new thematic and psychological layers, ones that often come to light through the shifting of perspective from one character to another, a technique that deepens our sympathy for the people we’re watching to the point of our realizing that, as in Renoir, “everyone has their reasons.”

Me Him Her might look cool on the outside, but it's a vapid mess.

If you came looking for the psychological sexing, or even just regular, good old fashioned erotic screwing, you’ll find it only if you’ve brought it to the theater yourself.

Hello, My Name is Doris is like a beacon of beckoning human warmth just waiting to be cherished.

The best part of Frot's performance, and the key to why Marguerite works when it does work, is how totally Marguerite believes in her nonexistent gift.

For fans of the genial, garrulous Gold, of Los Angeles culture or of films about food, City of Gold will easily merit four stars and its 90-minute length. For those less enamored of those subjects, its claim on any stars will be qualified by some serious questions about its cinematic worth.

As a techie, I expected more from Creative Control.

That’s one dismayingly archaic trend throughout The Young Messiah: the fiendish characters are also wildly effeminate.

This sometimes rewarding but also bothersomely uneven comedy is Julie Delpy’s sixth feature film as a director; she also co-wrote.

While Hood’s film says very little about American policy in this area, it does suggest that its terrible subject is likely to be with us for a long time to come.

As a full movie experience this did not drop my jaw in a consistently enjoyable way. And the movie’s Trump joke is pretty ineffectual. Sad!

Some of it is so predictable you could set your watch by it, but there is a welcome (and surprising) layer of complexity running through the film that makes it a little bit more than your standard fare. The likable and funny ensemble helps too.

A tight, tense thriller carried by excellent performances from John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

To her credit, Callies has an accessible presence and tries to provide more pathos and humanity than were supplied on the page, even as her character makes increasingly idiotic decisions in the name of parental love.

If Zootopia were a bit vaguer, or perhaps dumber and less pleased with itself, it might have been a classic, albeit of a very different, less reputable sort. As-is, it's a goodhearted, handsomely executed film that doesn't add up in the way it wants to.

By preferring to keep viewers in suspense until the film's finale, Pastoll makes it harder to recommend a movie that has many good ideas, but no clue what to do with them.

Unabashedly pro-choice, Trapped is not a debate itself, but it has no need to be.

A tidy and nasty and often effective thriller that doesn’t quite blossom into full horror.

What’s interesting about The Wave is stepping back and considering just how well-constructed the whole thing is. The slow-burn build-up is just long enough, the disaster itself is just harrowing enough and the final act is just intense enough to keep us engaged.

A visually impressive mix of hand-drawn and CGI animation with basic action-adventure elements that are always viscerally satisfying thanks to Hosoda's apparent warts-and-all love for humanity.

The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity.

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.

Is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot a horrible movie about a white outsider plopped in the middle of Afghanistan? No, that would be last year’s “Rock the Kasbah.” But neither does Whiskey Tango Foxtrot fulfill its assigned duty to provide evidence of Fey’s versatility.

A horrible and wildly unnecessary follow-up that might actually be worse than its predecessor.

The story’s ending, complete with lyrical voice-over, conveys the beauty and emotional attraction of the place and its traditions, virtues also relayed by Joshua James Richard’s sumptuous, sometimes breathtaking cinematography.

Too shallow to project real charisma, the film is instead questionably sincere from start to finish, as if it's trying to head off questions about why the filmmakers wanted to tell this particular story, especially from the grossly underrepresented but often-manipulated perspective of a person with disabilities.

Rather than presenting something akin to the heady youthful cravings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as contemporary versions of Romeo and Juliet, the equally tragic Marguerite & Julien often feels more like a version of Richie and Margot in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” crossed with the pre-teen runaways from “Moonrise Kingdom,” but minus the humor and insight.

This is not my favorite kind of documentary filmmaking. Eugene “Gene” Cernan, the subject of this film, who’s also the older fellow watching the bucking bronco, is a man deserving of a tribute such as this movie aspires to give him. The filmmakers, attempting to jazz up their material, get in the way a lot.

The central problem with A Country Called Home is neither the performances nor even the characters. It's the transparent ways in which the movie conjures easy resolutions to issues that it otherwise does a fine job convincing us are not so simple.

Petroni, in any case, is a skilled storyteller with a strong visual sense.

The movie also show’s Perrier’s humor, and his talents as a mentor.

A well-made, confident piece of entertainment that lacks the poetry and nuance of the first film and gets less interesting as its narrative thinness is revealed but never feels like something that’s being phoned in to make a quick buck.

There are movies about ugly, vile people, and there are ugly, vile movies. Triple 9 is the latter.