There's no sense to the scene in which the boys get together for a close-harmony rendition of "Afternoon Delight" -- just pure pleasure.

Just what we didn't need: another kick-ass cop flick in which we know the guys are macho because they rough up their wives and the gals are hot because they totter on spike heels like hookers.

Jolie is inspired casting. She plays the role like a gathering storm, moving from terror to a fierce resolve. And Eastwood, at the peak of his artful powers, tightens the screws of suspense without ever forgetting where the heart of his film lies.

The fact that Shyamalan seems to be working out some issues onscreen doesn’t stop him from crafting a thriller, and one which goes about its job with steady determination in Cabin’s cryptic, superior first half.

Just when you're ready to puke, the old Bill Conti theme ("Gonna Fly Now") kicks in -- are you feeling it? -- Stallone steps in the ring and every day is Christmas. All together now: Rock-ee! Rock-ee!

Depp swans through this swashbuckler with a scene-stealing gusto unseen since Marlon Brando in "Mutiny on the Bounty." He's comic dynamite, but this plodding, repetitive bore should walk the plank for timidly refusing to light his fuse.

Miller's wake-up call is meant to be ours. Too little and too late? Maybe. But even in this Bourne Zone, Damon and Greengrass haven't shirked their duty to enlighten and entertain.

This riveting film qualifies as the anti-crowd-pleaser -- but Penn makes it unthinkable to turn away.

In updating Shakespeare’s "The Tempest," writer-director Mike Cahill focuses on the magic worth finding between a father and daughter. That’s why the film sticks with you. It’s a gift.

Damsel won't work for everyone. It's too quirky for that. But it goes its merrily deranged way with prankish enthusiasm and a genuine sense of the absurd.

These performers keep you mesmerized, making the most of what they're given even when the film sinks into a swamp of whose-dick-is-bigger competitions and sports clichés about product endorsements.

River may not be high art, but it is the perfect high old time for audiences in the mood to be tossed into the spin cycle for a pulse-pounding thrill ride.

Foy's performance is something you don't want to miss. Whether spewing f-bombs, kneeing a suspected assailant in the balls, or promising a blowjob to Nate for a few minutes on his secret cell phone, Foy comes on like gangbusters. Fans of her prim, proper regent on "The Crown" are in for a shock.

It's no go. Green and Gothic make for a clumsy fit.

Don Roos's script for Single White Female, from the 1990 potboiler SWF Seeks Same, by John Lutz, is as empty as a hack's head. Schroeder goes through the motions — the movie is elegantly made — but this synthetic Hollywood package panders shamelessly to the baser instincts.

As Alien, a gun-crazy Florida drug dealer with tats, beaded cornrows and a grill any rapper would envy, Franco is a bug-f--k blast. Too bad the movie itself is rarely as outrageous as he is.

Elegant, funny and unexpectedly touching, this whodunit about a murder aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst represents a bracing comeback for Peter Bogdanovich.

The ending -- a more devastating surprise than "The Village" could manage -- caps eighty sweat-job minutes of imaginative, jolting suspense.

The callous inequity of what you see and hear will floor you. It can't happen here. But it did. It does.

A brightly-colored, dizzying pinwheel of 3D animation in which nothing much happens. Sounds like summer is here early.

The actors try their best, but Östlund’s insistent conceptual droning overtakes them.

It’s not hard to be sympathetic to Let Him Go’s desire to broaden, drift, be all-encompassing; that’s what yarns are good for. It’s what makes the movie an okay hang as is. And it’s also what may make you crave a better movie.

Del Toro is the movie's force field. This is a performance you will not forget.

In Cry-Baby, Waters has created a crackpot jamboree that captures the Fifties, then parodies and transcends the period; any resemblance to Nineties greed, prejudice and repression is intentional. At forty-three, Waters remains unrepentantly juvenile. It’s his saving grace. What he can’t fight, he ridicules. The mirror Waters holds up to the world is distorted, turning everyone into a grotesque. But we can still see ourselves in it And laugh.

World War Z is still as smart, shifty and scary as a starving zombie ready to chow down on you, baby, you.

Even when the film fails her, Field never loses her focus.

This hilarious, high-kicking nonsense cost two cents and looks it -- hell, it was shot in 19 days, but you'll laugh helplessly anyway.

This might have degenerated into a cheap gimmick if not for the way Shyamalan lets us inside the childhood trauma that pushed his tormentor into multiple personalities.

Alpha is not a perfect movie, and it is occasionally a way-too-pumped-up pulpy one relying on big-budget bulk. But it is most certainly a tonic in an age when every blockbuster film feels like part of some endless multiverse-cum-marketing scheme.

A fiercely funny human comedy with jokes that sting and leave marks.

Seen more as a complement to that actual interview than a forensic breakdown of the story behind it, the movie succeeds in showing viewers that, even in this age of clickbait and quick hits, the slow and steady professionalism of real journalists attempting the Quixotic quest of practicing real journalism can still bring down a giant.

The Dreamers may go slack when you most want it to soar, but it also seduces with eroticism and resonates with ideas.

Goldthwait's movie, shot on video that makes it look dragged through puppy poop, is an unholy mess. But it also possesses a quick wit and an endearing tenderness toward Amy as honesty wrecks her life. It's sweet, doggone it.

Until the end, when Robinson allows the lunacy to run into rant, the provocative Advertising adds up to frightful good fun. That is, if you’re not put off by accepting a preening pocket of pus as a leading man.

The fierce and funny film version has been directed by Texan Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) with rare grace and compassion.

Free Fire may suggest Wheatley is deservedly moving up the industry food chain – it's executive-produced by Martin Scorsese – but it also merely a formal exercise, albeit one buoyed by the sense that the director is having the time of his life behind the camera.

Even when the laughs don't always snap, Key and Peele are ready with another one or a dozen that do. These dudes really are the cat's meow.

The natural world gives us the resources to live. It also gives us viruses. And while some characters seek to chart aspects of nature and others wish to pay loving tribute (and offer sacrifices) to it, the most resonant notion from Earth‘s characters is that nature is a living, breathing, and undeniably aggressive entity. How Wheatley translates this notion into a bounty of Pagan paranoia is what makes the film undeniably his.

There’s a lot of Big Cinema Energy pouring out of the screen, which alternates between thrilling and exhausting. Mostly the former, thankfully, yet you can feel where this fit-to-burst tableau of trauma takes a detour into Look-Ma-Check-This-Out territory.

Even before the murderer is revealed, you’ll recognize the method in which the movie dispatches its victims: They, like us, were probably bored to death.

Director Tom McGrath keeps the action spinning and trips lightly over the bummer spectacle of watching a bad boy go good.

It would be no country for movie lovers without the Coens. They still manage to run unmuzzled while the rest of Hollywood runs scared.

I was moved, impressed — far more than I expected to be. The emotional engineering of The Matrix Resurrections is exacting and rapturous.

DiCaprio, in his most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet, is the vessel Scorsese uses to lead us through the film’s laby­rinth.

The idea of the boiler room as a Y2K gladiator ring for disenfranchised youth provides a proactive new twist.

Amigo is combustible filmmaking, something that stays with you long after the final credits. In an entertainment universe of escapism and short attention spans, Amigo is a rousing antidote and a cause for celebration.

A potent and provocative look at life unhinged. Bubble is said to be the first in a series of six low-budget films from Soderbergh. If they all rock the boat like this one, bring 'em on.

Thanksgiving is less a movie than a messy attempt to coast off an oldie-but-goodie one-off without adding anything to the party. It can 100 percent go stuff itself.

It's a bitch telling a coming-of-age story minus clichés and sappiness. So Youth in Revolt, with Michael Cera in his best performance yet, is a small miracle.

This is a perfectly fine postapocalyptic mash-up that really is just the sum of its parts, and nowhere near a gleeful, shriek-inducing whole. For some, that might be considered a feature. For the rest of us, it’s most definitely a ginourmous, gaping-jawed bug.

Aussie director Anthony Maras, in his feature debut, brings a Hitchcockian feel for suspense and a documentarian’s eye for detail to the brutal events that transpired over three days in November 2008 when the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba initiated an attack on the city of Mumbai.

Director and co-writer Christopher Smith, mischievously blending "The Office" with "Friday the 13th," keeps things fierce and funny enough to give Steve Carell ideas.

As an actor, Burns has worked the Hollywood game from "Saving Private Ryan" to "Alex Cross." But his core passion is for making indie movies without studio interference, guerilla style. Because he takes his films personally, so do we. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas is one of his best.

Never adds up to anything more substantial than shrewd observations. There's no dramatic core.

Keeps the laughs coming, and a dynamo named Steve Zahn is the cheif reason why. It's a one-joke movie, but the cast knows how to sell it.

The explosive V for Vendetta is powered by ideas that are not computer-generated. It's something rare in Teflon Hollywood: a movie that sticks with you.

No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.

Director David Frankel understands that familiarity may breed contempt in other areas of life, but sequels, especially long-awaited ones to fan favorites, thrive on a light rinse and repeat.

Junkies for dark humor should prep for going cold turkey, despite the efforts of director Andrew Adamson to spice things up with combat and a rivalry between Caspian and Peter (good on Moseley for showing some backbone) that Lewis never imagined.

The movie ride delivered by Solo: A Star Wars Story is more mild than wild, a pleasant way to pass the time instead of a game-changer.

Lavishly produced swashbuckler that should have been far more entertaining.

For all the clanking armies of iron knights on display to dazzle the eager kid in each of us, this summer epic rings hollow. There's no one home inside the suit.

The irony is that Affleck's battering at the hands of fame has prepped him beautifully to play Reeves.

The first commandment of Dogma: Thou shalt not stop laughing.

The four actresses supply enough humor and heart to light any movie’s fuse, even this cliched retread of Thelma and Louise. Like the characters they play, the sisters deserve better.

Given Helgeland's rep as a screenwriter (including an Oscar for 1997's L.A. Confidential), it rankles that 42 settles for the official story. The private Robinson, who died of a heart attack at 53 in 1972, stays private. We stay on the outside looking in. Let it be.

Cool stuff. Cool movie.

Baldwin is a marvel in a casting surprise that pays off.

Seeing the scaly dude side with Mother Nature against the freaks is almost worth enduring the blather that precedes it. I said "almost."

Even when the film goes too far over the top to be saved, McConaughey mesmerizes.

Niccol is too good a screenwriter (The Truman Show, Gattaca) not to know that Hollywood cliches are hell on a film's political bite. They muzzle it.

Craig Lucas’s prince of a play has been turned into a toad of a movie.

Polanski has great wicked fun with sex, love, cruelty, books, movies and, of course, himself. If you don’t go along with the joke, you’re in for rough sailing.

It's rare to find a movie that uses music to define love without sentimentalizing it. But Begin Again, with songs by Glen Hansard and New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, is a wonderfully appealing exception.

The actors could not be better. Sarsgaard, Scott and the luminous Clarkson negotiate the film's razor-sharp laughs and bone-deep tragedy with resonant skill. Lucas' powerfully haunting film gets under your skin.

Even the film's missteps (the score, by Barrington Pheloung, is cringe-inducing) can't stop this meditation on love -- Martin calls it "Jane Austen for the twenty-first century" -- from melting into heartbreak.

Blethyn's solid-gold charm turns Saving Grace into a comic high.

Brad Pitt doesn't really act in Ocean's Thirteen, he just glides through the third chapter in Steven Soderbergh's heist-flick annuity on the magic carpet of his own unimpeachable cool. Don't knock it. Genuine star power is rare. Pitt has it in spades -- all aces.

Smash acting debut of Combs, who brings ease and charm to a crime lord.

The movie’s ambitions exceed its grasp, and it’s hard not to wonder if the ideas here might not have been better served in a shorter, tighter format.

It's Knightley who makes The Duchess a royal treat.

It is not only bludgeoningly nasty but also, viewed from a May 2021 standpoint, quite staggeringly un-prescient.

It’s a tough, achingly tender film that refuses to trade in false hopes or cheap sentiment. That truth is what makes Beautiful Boy hard to take and impossible to forget.

Maybe our expectations were too high. Maybe we should have said his name — Burton Burton Burton — three times, and the filmmaker who did that beloved original would reappear, grinning maniacally and giving us something a bit less undead and a bit more alive.

A recent showing of Burton's artwork at New York's Museum of Modern Art attracted long lines and critical brickbats. Maybe that's why Big Eyes, for all its tonal shifts and erratic pacing, seems like Burton's most personal and heartfelt film in years, a tribute to the yearning that drives even the most marginalized artist to self expression no matter what the hell anyone thinks.

Director Wolfgang Petersen puts such a fresh spin on the familiar that it all works like gangbusters.

The Gift delivers the lurid goods as a scary, sexy, twist-a-minute whodunit.

Macdonald uses the "Das Boot"-like claustrophobia for maximum tension, then deadens the thrills with flashbacks to Robinson and his estranged wife. Ah, jeez. Law and the scrappy cast work best when submerged and going at one another like beasts.

With Red, White & Royal Blue seemingly attempting to straddle the line between BookTok virality and on-screen sensuality, the film is content with being merely rewatchable.

Thompson never disappoints, nailing every nuance of a judge who lets the world in at the cost of losing her own judgment. This is acting of the highest order.

The dialogue is clunky, the A-list actors are slumming and, yeah, you've seen it all before. But Kong: Skull Island is a creature feature that's damn near irresistible.

Timely and smartly entertaining.

The gifted Myers lets his once and (I hope) future shag king get lost in an elephantine Hollywood franchise. The first time was the charm, baby.

The uniformly fine performances are a tribute to Washington, who plays the shrink with his customary command.

It's Bell – riding high with the Disney-animated "Frozen" and Showtime's carnal-fixated "House of Lies" – you want to follow anywhere. Bell is irresistible, and she makes us care.

The Doors is a thrilling spectacle - the King Kong of rock movies - featuring a starmaking, ball-of-fire performance by Val Kilmer as Morrison.

Despite Bates' mastery at bringing unexpected depth to unhinged characters, Dolores is a few pints low on chills and challenge.

At times director Lasse Hallstrom lets the film slip into an upscale version of Brett Butler’s Grace Under Fire sitcom. Even when melodrama threatens, Roberts’ steadying, sharply observed performance keeps things touchingly real. Khouri’s script has the buoyant wit to deal with Grace’s anger without turning her into a lethal avenger.