As ambitious and vibrant as it is ugly and scattershot, Pain & Gain is the most charming Michael Bay movie in a long while.

By expanding the play’s world, Gaines opens himself up to new scrutiny. Beetz does the best she can with a thinly drawn character, but it’s hard not to wonder what The Dutchman would look like if Gaines showed any real interest in her.

It’s a testament to .Paak’s own journey, and the seemingly healthy relationship with both this genre of music and his child, that this movie eschews so many of those struggle-bus tropes. I just wish it translated to something with a bit more oomph, rather than another blandly sincere family film.

While Wilson peters out at the end, one can’t totally dismiss a movie that gets away with a visual “Umberto D” joke and showcases probably the worst tramp-stamp tattoo ever.

If you are hungry for dazzling eye candy and don’t mind a less-than-meaty narrative, this might please your palate.

The film is good to excellent in every way except morally, and there it's questionable more often than it should be, not because it's an evil film, or because the filmmaker or actors are bad people, but because the interplay of means and ends have been under-thought or misjudged, to the point where the film becomes a catalog of obscenities.

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

It’s as if Lim and fellow co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao saw the antics in Malcolm D. Lee’s “Girls Trip” as a challenge to top. It’s safe to say the crew in Joy Ride do top the outrageous factor, but whether or not it’s as effective will depend on the viewer’s stomach for bawdy humor.

Claire's Camera is, like many of Hong's best comedies before it, amusing without necessarily being laugh-out-loud funny.

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.

The good news barely outweighs the bad in Dracula Untold, a lightweight war-adventure that is ultimately stranger and more enticing when it remembers it's also a horror film.

Writer/director Chad Archibald still shows some promise here, especially whenever he lets his actors, cinematographer, makeup, creature, and production designer sell what is, at heart, a generic possession story. He thankfully does this often enough to keep the plot’s familiar and slowly dispensed beats from feeling too rote.

That mashup — of feminine beauty and insanity-inducing toxicity —is a good cipher for everything about Belladonna of Sadness (“Kanashimi no Balladonna”).

For Plummer’s plum of a performance alone, you might want to make an exception for The Exception.

It would be reductive to call it a “girlboss” story, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to, either.

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.

Tomas Weinreb and Petr Kazda’s film, on the other hand, narrates a true-life crime but fails to provide an element that might’ve lifted it above tasteful art-house ordinariness—an engaging point of view.

When you’ve hired human actors to do nothing but sneer, shout, and shoot guns, their onscreen function can get ever so slightly monotonous. This is not the movie’s only reliance on commonplaces but it’s the most prominent.

While this remix of "House Party" may leave some nostalgic for the original, it smartly doesn't try to copy the first film. However, it does stay true to the first version's celebration of friendship.

Customs Frontline is not quite as thrilling or as relentless as Yau’s other recent successes—particularly “Moscow Mission” and “Raid on the Lethal Zone”—but it still delivers more twists and surprises than you might expect from this tip of sudsy, formulaic cop drama.

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 would be impossible not to be emotionally moved by this story, and in that way, The Rescue delivers. But between Vasarhelyi and Chin’s inability to speak with the boys or their families, and the documentary’s initially languid pacing, The Rescue feels like half a story told fairly well, but still, half a story.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead is laid-back and funny but ultimately whiffs on its swings too many times to make a lasting impression.

I've never participated in Blackout, but based on The Blackout Experiments, I can tell you that it's an intense, aggressively confrontational and deeply disturbing recreational experience.

Director Raoul Peck, no stranger to connecting the past to the present as he did with “I Am Not Your Negro,” collaborates with the Orwell estate to retell the story behind the man who gave the world 1984 and Animal Farm and explore the themes Orwell illustrated in those works to current events to show how Orwell’s warnings have gone unheeded through the years. The result, “Orwell: 2+2=5,” is an ambitious work that is provocative but sometimes convoluted.

Fans of cheap thrills and cheesy B-movies are sure to be frustrated by The Requin, a new shark pic that waits about an hour before introducing major carnivorous fish action. That alone might turn off viewers since The Requin only lasts about 89 minutes, and most of the movie plays out like a soapy two-hander about survivor’s guilt.

Saw X returns John Kramer to the root of his mission, showing people the error of their ways and asking them what it truly means to be alive. A few severed limbs along the way are just a bonus.

At 105 minutes, Elstree 1976 became a bit of a slog for me. Visually, the talking heads-style of documentary can be very dull.