A dull-as-dishwater, paint-by-numbers cinematic hiccup with no discernible reason for being.

At least, director Gille Klabin tries to amp up The Wave with aggressive visual style, but it’s still a movie that’s rotten at its core because it suffers from the same problem of all those “American Beauty” clones in that it never satisfactorily answers the question “Who cares?”

If Wes Anderson were to mesh “Bad News Bears” with a live-action “Monsters University,” the result would look and feel something like Troop Zero, a whimsical, if not generic kiddie adventure more suited for young ones than grown-ups.

While the performances are stronger and the narrative is more coherent than you’d see in a “Madea” movie, for example, Perry’s latest still features many of the auteur’s trademarks: dizzying tonal swings, awkward blocking, drab lighting, jarring edits and a mixture of the salacious and the puritanical.

Weathering With You, Shinkai’s latest animated romantic-fantasy to be released in America, has the same spark of ingenuity and consistency of vision as his earlier work.

This film tells us that the gulf between what we want to know and what we can know may never be illuminated.

A wild whirlwind of a mess, without any coherence, without even a guiding principle.

Surprisingly, Bad Boys For Life is nowhere near as bad as its opening day schedule would indicate. It is the best of the three films, offering in some odd ways a corrective to the prior installments. Unlike the original, this one finds some depth in its female characters.

Citizen K is skillfully made, with a compelling story, or really stories.

Evocatively moody atmosphere, a timely subject, and a fine performance by Josh Hartnett cannot help Inherit the Viper overcome its clunky dialogue and formulaic storyline.

While Bloch's emotions and thoughts about the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation are deeply felt, the documentary’s finer points are a little less clear.

Three Christs opts in for frustratingly broad characters that feel like half-considered caricatures and Jeff Russo’s sentimental, strings-heavy score that flattens whatever modest edge the movie might have had.

Les Misérables is a gripping experience, tense and upsetting.

Underwater absolutely bullies you into liking it. There's no time not to.

Like A Boss is a movie written and directed by men which bears very little resemblance to how women actually relate to each other.

Can you recommend a horror movie based on its impressive meanness? Meet Nicolas Pesce’s new and improved take on The Grudge, which is often as nasty as you want it to be, its cheesy jump-scares and generic packaging be damned.

This is screen acting of a very rare sort, and Clemency is a vital emotional powerhouse sorely deserving of being seen.

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

Ip Man 4: The Finale is apparently going to be the last time Yen dons the familiar black cassock to play Ip Man, and Yip orchestrates a fittingly spectacular finish to the saga.

Sitting through it is like watching someone else playing a video game for two solid hours, and not an especially compelling one at that.

The ways in which the pigeons work wonders as a flock — to the point of becoming playfully weaponized in the name of good — is consistently inspired.

Little Women solidifies Gerwig’s one-of-a-kind voice on the page and behind the camera, opening up the classic in a blissful and innovative screen adaptation that feels ageless and vastly of today.

Movies like Just Mercy spoon-feed everything to the viewer in easily digestible chunks that assume you know nothing, or worse, don’t know any better.

Lush melodramas are a dying breed, especially masterful ones like Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life that wear Douglas Sirkian genre conventions on their sleeve proudly and abundantly.

The movie is affectionate because it has that sense of animal love that lets entire sequences rest on Togo’s charms, but is by no means letting the dog do all the work. Director Ericson Core (previously of the “Point Break” remake) clearly cares about animals, but filmmaking, too.

Sappy, slow, and mostly effective.

Cats suffers from a problem common in contemporary filmed musicals. The musical doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust that the dancing in and of itself is exciting enough to hold our interest.

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.