Somehow, The Wandering Earth II never feels tonally unbalanced or narratively convoluted, partly because Gwo and his collaborators keep their movie’s plot focused on feats of action-adventure heroism.

Destined to fade into obscurity in the presence of the other two films about Reality Winner, Fogel’s version should at least indicate to other filmmakers that they must leave this story alone and move on to other preoccupations.

Race takes a complicated, messy story and shapes it with the bland cookie-cutter mold too often seen in the biopic genre.

Our Time is even funny sometimes, albeit in the same kind of wryly mordant and cosmically alienated way as Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

The movie builds up enough steam, and has a sufficient supply of jolts, to make Old Man stick to the ribs at least a little by the time it’s over.

Though the picture is admirable on a conceptual level, its execution is incoherent, interminable and a colossal strain on the eyes.

Bad Behaviour is a frustrating watch. Englert doesn't wrestle the material into a manageable form, and struggles to find a consistent tone.

It’s interesting to witness the encounter and hear the thoughts of young people from such a bitterly divided land.

Being a mom is hard, a universal truism that "Nightbitch" explores in ways that are occasionally inspired but mostly blunt and banal.

Despite the familiar settings and tropes in director Sammi Cohen’s debut feature film, Crush feels refreshingly contemporary.

The end product is true to the spirit of the franchise while pushing its self-aware humor and fourth wall-breaks until it all seems like the result of a dare: how big can we make the air quotes around “sincerity” while still tugging on heartstrings?

Zephyr-light and plenty zany, Michael Duignan’s “The Paragon” serves up space-time shenanigans with a smile on its face, in a manner quaintly reminiscent of sci-fi and fantasy B-movies from a bygone era—think “Krull,” “Flash Gordon,” and “Masters of the Universe”—when stilted action sequences, preposterous plots, and kitschy costume design added up to mad spectacles of cheesy, cornball grandeur.

Co-stars Will Smith and Margot Robbie remain consistently charismatic, even once the script for this heist caper collapses in a punishing pile of its own twists and double-crosses.

Despite the care put into the story and its heavy themes, Live Cargo has no emotional impact.

The picture sometimes plays as an amalgam of Soderbergh’s “Che” and Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” only—and this is the crucial point—with the volume turned down from 10, or 11 for that matter, to about 4.

The smart script is brave enough to venture beyond yesterday’s fleeting Twitter fodder for its pop-cultural references. As a result, Paper Towns might be the only movie to ever pay tribute to Walt Whitman’s poetry, Woody Guthrie’s music and the empowering theme song from the “Pokemon” cartoon series.

Its lively finale is heartening, given the patience that Laaksonen was obliged to exercise before he could live his life out in the open. But the insights of the movie are too scant for much of a real impression to take hold of the viewer.

If anything, the picture is a touch too benign for its own good, though it does earn enough laughs to warrant a recommendation, at least in its first third.

Antibirth is novel, mysterious, and sometimes even dangerous enough to suck you in if you surrender to its confrontational, avant garde style.

The challenge for the sequel to a beloved film is maintaining enough of the original to make the fans happy without being too repetitive or confusing newcomers, and Hocus Pocus 2 gets that just right.

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.

This is the kind of piece that needs to move 100MPH from first scene to last for you to overlook its flaws. It slows down for too long to recommend the ride.

Everything in 1BR is over-exposed, often literally thanks to the movie’s basic camera set-ups and general emphasis on naturally and/or harshly front-lit close-ups, or medium shots of brown stucco walls.

There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the senior action flicks that have become ubiquitous.

Frustratingly poised on the knife's-edge of "pretty good but not as good as you want it to be," the movie might've benefitted from a more leisurely but focused pace that would've allowed the characters to breathe more, and the legal and scientific concepts to be explained with greater clarity.

The Fate of the Furious distinctly drops the level of quality in this series for the first time this decade.

If I wanted to read my way through a film that features words dancing around the screen as if they were waltzing Post-Its, I would have sat through a foreign movie with subtitles instead.

Little Accidents is quietly earnest, handsomely produced, and too dramatically inert and dogged by the commonplace to make much of an impact beyond conveying the dreariness (as opposed to the dread) of life in a coal-mining town.