Finally, a woman — Sophie Barthes — has directed and co-written a film version of Madame Bovary, but strangely, that doesn’t result in any more richness or enlightenment.

Despite the sense sometimes that Moselle isn’t driving “Wolfpack” in the way needed to make it truly work, she undeniably finds some beautiful moments in the trajectory of the Angulos, although they are sometimes so fleeting as to frustrate when they aren’t further developed.

Other than that acquisitive movie-mad mindset, it is a pandering, self-flattering mess, featuring unearned catharsis, lazy clichés and characters presented in broad, sometimes-offensive stereotypes.

It's possible to filter out the irritating aspects and enjoy the movie as a raucous, often brilliantly assembled spectacle. But we shouldn't have to. The fact that we do makes an otherwise hugely impressive sequel feel small-minded.

An odious stew of murder, revenge, casual racism and overt misogyny that is all the worse because of its apparent celebration of those ingredients.

An uneven but satisfying hostage crisis thriller that is also a perfect example of the type of late-period films martial arts star Jackie Chan has decided to make after entering middle age.

Once the viewer finds him or herself comfortable with the idea that it’s going for mildly-spine-tingling rather than gut-punching and eyeball-violating, all holy hell breaks loose. Which in this case turns out to be a pretty hellishly good thing.

This is one of those movies that is as dull as it is well-meaning and man, is it ever well-meaning.

While the mix doesn’t always cohere, the film boasts moments and scenes that rank with Duvall’s best work.

It is earnest and tortured and pointless, in a very self-serious suffer-for/with-art fashion.

It is about those human elements that transcend the five senses—loneliness, jealousy, fear, etc.—and how they are heightened in times of stress. However you interpret it, Vogt's film lingers, haunting like imagery that refuses to fade away in memory.

An intimate epic, Testament of Youth has great historical sweep yet remains focused on the human vicissitudes experienced by Vera and her circle.

The Nightmare is more effective than the esoteric "Room 237" because it represents a full immersion into a common human experience. The re-enactments are superb.

The result is a story that’s hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of Wilson’s life.

It wants to scare the hell out of you, and it does that quite effectively with several serious jumps. About a half-dozen times, I’d say, Whannell creates moments that are legitimately surprising and frightening because he uses silence so well in contrast.

It’s a series of comedic sketches about people who are too self-involved to empathize with each other. It’s also a plaintively blunt wake-up call, and an effective demand for viewers' vigilant sensitivity.

As a distaff version of James Bond in Spy, Hollywood’s reigning empress of ha-ha Melissa McCarthy has a license to not just kill the audience with laughter but also to slay us with her acting skills.

Without Piven and Dillon to keep it entertaining, it would be absolutely dreadful.

The movie ventures into the realm of pure grindhouse sadism. It’s borderline reprehensible, in spite of Kumar’s intentions.

A coming-of-age drama that's also Southern Gothic ghost story, is an unusual, ambitious failure, mostly because the film's hyper-naturalistic style is meant to evoke a supernatural mood.

Silver’s latest film Uncertain Terms finds some substance within its ideology of evaporated ambitions, though there’s plenty of empty space in which the film is still able to limit itself.

If it falls victim to a bit too many college film student clichés, it’s easy to forgive Meyerhoff due to the great performance she draws from her talented young star and what this film means for her bright future.

The problem is that while it never lapses into complete cartoonishness, it never does much of anything else either, and pretty much plays like a film made for basic cable that is buoyed for a while by a couple of relatively strong central performances before eventually succumbing to terminal mediocrity in its silly final scenes.

The result is a work that—like a whole sub-species of French films of the recent decades—fetishizes its own hyper-naturalistic visual style and performances (all but one by non-actors) while offering no original or striking insights into the world it portrays.

Sure, the events are scrambled, with minor changes here and there, but if you know what happens in “Madame Bovary,” you will not be surprised by this film. In fact, you’ll probably be as irritated as I was by Gemma Bovery’s attempts to be clever and meta.

Results is not entirely successful but it does have a charm and a style that works. In its own weird way, it is quite romantic, while acknowledging that romance is sometimes unpleasant, always messy, and hooking up with someone represents the beginning of a lifetime of getting into messes and digging oneself out. That quality alone makes Results a really refreshing film.

It is both light as a feather and emotionally resonant. It is defiantly episodic and yet has a cumulative power in its storytelling. It is both airy and emotionally lived-in at the same time.

As it stands now, Aloha feels like several films at once, crammed together and sped up, with results that are emotionally hollow and narratively confusing.

There are really no surprises here. But the action is bracing, Johnson’s performance is solid and, within its extremely narrow parameters, entirely convincing, and Gugino and Daddario are both gritty and attractive. The result is a pretty exemplary popcorn movie.

There’s an infectious joy to how the actors handle the morbid humor here, and it is never mean-spirited.

A cynical, and consistently unpleasant film with creators who try very, very hard to push as many of your buttons as they can.

Madeleine (Adele Haenel) does not know that she is a character in a rom-com. She thinks she's in a war movie. Or, better yet, a dystopian post-apocalyptic movie. Anything but a rom-com. She does not smile until an hour and 20 minutes into Love at First Fight.

It is filled with the luscious, beautiful 2D animation that we’ve come to expect from Ghibli, and if the storytelling sometimes gets a bit lethargic for its own good, we’re more forgiving just to have one final dance in the moonlight.

Intermittently compelling but rather unfortunately titled documentary.

There are a few decent performances, a nice riff on the technology fears that drove the original movie, and a centerpiece of horror that works, but never once do you get the feeling that the people behind this remake are here because of artistic passion or creative drive.

An intelligent but not terribly effective drama. And its discussion of military ethics, especially with regard to what it means to be able to kill people without physical consequences, is promising, but it does not go far enough.

Best debut feature I’ve seen in the last year, best Mexican film in recent memory, and best (black and white) cinematography since Pawel Pawlikowski’s equally stunning but very different “Ida.”

If you treat Tomorrowland mainly as an immense cinematic theme park that unveils a new "ride" every few minutes—just as Bird's last feature, "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" was mainly a series of action scenes—its weaker aspects won't be deal-breakers.

I could not see it as anything more than a giant bore that presents viewers with the most familiar plot devices imaginable but fails to present them in a way that makes them worth sitting through once again.

It's also genuinely warm and involving because of the participation of everyone from Carmen Vega, Giger's widow, to Sandra Berretta, Giger's former assistant and self-described "life partner." The film is, in that sense, an effective memorial, one filmed after Giger himself admitted that he had said all he wanted to say in his art.

The Film Critic takes a light and knowing tone, spoofing the sacred cows of the critic world, and cramming every scene with visual film clichés that act like a "Where's Waldo?" of cinema.

What went wrong? How did so many talented people devote their time and energy to a film that came out this generic, dull, and flat?

Those looking for a courtroom drama or the emotional tugging that might result from a mother’s 30-year fight to get justice for her daughter will find little to chew on here.

From first till last, this tale of a hard-boiled bounty hunter helping a Scottish lad on his quest to find the woman he loves, who’s on the lam in the old West, is a tissue of creaky contrivances and outright absurdities.

There are a couple of things that make Animals effective, the main one being the performances of the two leads and the symbiotic relationship they create.

While the results inevitably pale in comparison to "The French Connection" — which could be said about virtually every other film currently in release — they do make for an above-average work that offers viewers a new perspective on a familiar story.

It’s always a pleasure to see Blythe Danner in a movie. And it’s even more of a pleasure to see Blythe Danner in a good movie. No, not a good movie. A really good movie.

To be fair, the slow burn does eventually catch fire and there’s lots of screaming and heavy breathing and dark tunnels and running and what-not. The relatively tense final half-hour is clearly the reason that very smart producer Jason Blum thought this would be a solid follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” It’s that first hour that is the reason it took six years to (barely) get released.

As for the a capella performances, there is something a little prefab and not as organic as those in the first film.

From its very first scenes, Fury Road vibrates with the energy of a veteran filmmaker working at the top of his game, pushing us forward without the cheap special effects or paper-thin characters that have so often defined the modern summer blockbuster.

This movie's makers haven't met a formula cliché that they don't like.

Older audiences are likely to find the film less amusing than risible.

It doesn't go quite far enough into melodrama to fuse all of its different pieces together into a satisfying whole but it's an engrossing film all the same: intelligent, sincere and unabashedly goodhearted.

One of the more unique, evocative and deeply felt coming-of-age films to come along in quite some time.

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.

Only the really strong cast, including great chemistry between the leads, keeps Playing It Cool from totally derailing.

The wacky New York types with their lack of an internal censor and their wild ideas for what they’d do to the apartment provide a consistent source of laughs.

Pulling back the curtain to see how Carrol Spinney "does it" is not only a revelation of technique but a reminder of just how brilliant he is as a puppeteer and as an actor.

This kind of story has been told endlessly in dramatic movies and TV shows, but rarely has a film offered characters like these telling their own stories.

The movie goes for grin-and-cringe-inducing, and instead achieves “excruciating.”

Maggie” is Schwarzenegger’s “Cop Land,” that is, a feature designed to highlight and showcase that which an action movie hero could only hint at in glancing moments between explosions.

This movie, as it happens, is a comedy, but it’s a frequently grisly one, and one that makes rollicking fun of a lot of dark Swedish preoccupations.

As a delivery system for a newly minted and reasonably engaging if not always laugh-out-loud comedy team — Reese Witherspoon and Sophie Vergara — Hot Pursuit works.

The film will only work for you if you expect it not to make sense, and enjoy jokes that go on and on and then suddenly (and repeatedly) jack-knife off a cliff or two.

This is a comedy that encourages viewers to be impulsive, and pointedly seek love and acceptance outside of "normal" social institutions, especially when it comes to family and romance.

The story ends up being one wrong turn after another. A GPS hasn’t been invented that could get this plot-hole-riddled script back on track.

Hyena is such a nasty and brutish item that even the hardiest of moviegoers may find themselves repulsed by some of the sights that Johnson has in store.

What it falls back on, rather than the troubling truth illuminated in Camus’ story, is the movie-standard gaze of compassion, here proffered by Mortensen, who, it must be admitted, does it well.

A well-intentioned disaster, only slightly redeemed by a committed performance by Sean Bean, whose talent proves nowhere near enough to make this manipulative tripe more digestible.

It is a true peek into the life of a private superstar. How did he become a rock icon? How did he turn his childhood pain into art? How did his emotional demons overtake him? These are much more difficult questions for a filmmaker to answer than “Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam” or other such garbage of the traditional rock doc.

Whether his film is lush or rolling in the muck, it always has a tactile quality that makes it accessible, which is also true of the performances from his (mostly) well-chosen cast.

A humorous if occasionally horrific pitch-black satire.

The film is high-strung, nervous and slightly chilly in the New York scenes, but once the action shifts to the beaches of Venice, it slows down considerably, and fittingly.

Al Maysles, a great fixture in the New York film scene and an influence on several generations of documentary filmmakers, was a keen, understanding observer of human nature and behavior from the 1950s up until his death last month at age 88. Iris and another recently completed film, “In Transit,” will stand as testaments to his unique talents and contributions to the documentary form.

In its lumpy-porridge way, this film makes a better case than any other Marvel picture for the notion that quarter-billion-dollar-budgeted, CGI-festooned slabs of multimedia synergy can be art, too, provided they're made by an artist with a vision, and said artist appears to be in control of at least part of the production.

The movie, starring Zabou Breitman, Jacque Gamblin, Pascal Elbé, Sylvie Testud, and Tony Harrisson, has a more upsetting dimension than most suspense dramas as it’s based on a true story, a story that touches on issues still roiling France today.

It is nowhere close to being the worst thing that he (Travolta) has ever done, but it never for a single moment makes a plausible case for its own existence.

If you’re a big booster of any of the lead actors (I’m something of a Cannavale partisan myself), this will be worth your time.

It’s meant to be a tale of uplift for faith-based audiences, but instead wears viewers down with a heavy-handed narrative, an overbearing score and voiceover that spells out everything in cringe-inducing, folksy tones.

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."

The film's fuzzy mystical undertones are irksome as well. They seem less aligned with 19th century representations of Christian or Muslim spirituality than with fond childhood memories of "Star Wars."

It's hard to tell if Kevin Pollak's documentary Misery Loves Comedy is too much of a good thing or not enough.

It's all a dull, repetitive slog of talking heads saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways, and it never picks up steam.

Think of the worst movie you’ve ever seen – a movie that didn’t make you laugh, didn’t make you cry, didn’t move you or change you in any way besides giving you the desperate urge to flee the theater. Think of a movie that was a massive waste of your time and money. Hold that title in your mind. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is worse than that.

Though Sean Penn executive-produced the film and voices its spare narration, the doc has a very generic tone, so much so that it might seem to belong on TV rather than in theaters.

There is little else worth mentioning about this derivative, clunky, haphazardly written and visually dull sports movie except the performances by Christopher McDonald and Michael Nouri.

If you want to see cats chasing people in packs, falling over themselves to descend stairwells, and jump up trees to swipe at disposable human protagonists--you will probably enjoy Roar.

The Dead Lands doesn't add up to much, but it is always on the verge of becoming more than just a bed time story for guys that wish "Braveheart" had a biceps-kissing baby with "Ong Bak."

It tells a not-especially-interesting story about a not-especially-interesting couple from two different worlds that goes on and on before reaching its not-especially-interesting conclusion.

Watching Douglas behave like a narcissistic scumbag is an absolute pleasure, one in which viewers of action-adventure Beyond the Reach can happily indulge.

The movie’s quirky setting pays off dividends where you least expect them. At such moments, the movie’s humanism finally seems unforced, and everything is the better for that.

The movie might just make people associate bullying with a hollow, tedious endeavor that lacks any satisfaction.

You’re likely to laugh and learn in equal measure–and so will your little ones.

Although events unfold amid a gorgeous pastoral setting with rolling green hills and leafy trees, there is a silent starkness about this countryside that suggests Ingmar Bergman’s use of natural surroundings.

If this mess is what they ended up with after erring with the best intentions, I feel bad for them. If this is actually the end result they were going for, I’d be inclined to use the legal system myself, to file an injunction against them ever getting near a soundstage again.

Dior and I won’t tell you much about Simons’ personal life, or his family, or where he lives, or why he does this, which ultimately makes it difficult to connect with him. (Interestingly, a little online research reveals, he started out as a furniture designer.)

While hardly perfect, a movie that frequently displays surprising sensitivity and sensibility.

The bad news is that it still doesn’t quite work, largely because Gosling has bitten off more than he can chew, assembling ideas and images without the directorial vision to connect them.