The actors have a ball with the fun and games. And you will, too, unless — as noted — you and the TV series have never crossed paths.

An uneven blend of mirth and malice.

Papillon pushes too hard with diminishing returns. Though Hunnam and Malek give it everything they’ve got, they’re denied the chance to make their characters as indelible as McQueen and Hoffman did.

It Lives Inside knows you can use the cover of monsters and things that go bump in your psyche to examine the real-life horrors. But when the message starts to eclipse the medium, it’s time to get out.

Unlike most revisits of previous box-office hits, it doesn’t rely on nostalgia for the original. It does, however, display a serious soft spot for a bygone era of moviegoing, when two photogenic stars, a simple high-concept premise and the promise of digitally rendered chaos was enough to put millions of asses in seats.

When it’s working, Three Thousand Years is an old curiosity shop of a movie, a cache of curios and strange conceits, many of which, when the movie isn’t working, are submerged into the bland uniformity of Miller’s stylistic approach to large stretches of this film.

The desert outpost, mostly shot in Morocco by the gifted cinematographer Chris Menges (a two-time Oscar winner for his camera work on The Killing Fields and The Mission), becomes a powerful symbol of human decency trying to hold out under the brutal siege of alleged law and order. It’s thuddingly obvious who the real barbarians are.

All the Old Knives is brief enough, politely suspenseful enough, for its stars to carry without much hassle.

Yes, The Piano Lesson hits a few bum notes. Its melody nonetheless remains intact.

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

The First Purge isn’t the beginning of the end of the franchise, just the start of where the narrative’s “civility” starts to erode and where that leads.

Malick has created a war film without a single scene of war, of Jewish persecution, of the thought process that helped Franz hold steadfast. It’s one thing to fashion a film about one man’s blind faith; it’s another to keep audiences in the dark about the fundamentals that made him human.

The premise is ripe; the thrills are rich; the payoff doesn’t come together quite as easily as the rest.

[Franklin's] music blows the movie out of the water — and the movie, at its best, is wise to let itself get blown away.

CODA knows how to work that conventional-to-a-fault indie feeling like a champ. You may exit smiling. Just don’t be surprised if you also experience the sensation of having just been Sundanced to death.

What’s missing is history. What’s missing is a sense that men like this really lived.

The strange thing is that for all its tricks — even that odd detour through The Wizard of Oz Taymor manages to serve us midway through — The Glorias still falls prey to the problem of making a movie out of a life far too vast for a movie. Which is to say, a deeply political life.

It’s a blockbuster that, with a few whirring movements and a half dozen clicks and beeps, transforms itself into something meant to be watched by actual thinking, feeling human beings. For once, there really is more than meets the eye.

There are times when The Good Girl is so low-key it damn near flatlines. Luckily, White creates compelling characters with a few deft brush strokes. The actors fill in the rest.

Courtesy of the stars, and of the filmmaker’s clear affection for her subject, there’s a little more soul here than there had to be, thankfully. That’s not everything. It’s also not nothing.

The movie is at its best when it’s twining together the stories of characters whose fate seems to be pulling them toward possibilities that they hadn’t only just dreamed of. Where it manages to go once they’ve gotten there is almost less satisfying. The getting-there, the discoveries made along the way, are not only the central pleasure, but the point.

Night Swim eventually runs out of places to go, but not before it weds some sneaky character development to a few good, solid jump moments. It might not find an audience, but it deserves one.

Every time things start to get goopy, we get silent-comedy slapstick like Pooh destroying the Robins’ household.

It’s slick and eager to elide the moral messiness of the material with its lightly empowering messaging, but also competently executed with a starry performance at its center. That recipe almost makes you nostalgic for what it’s selling: The old-school, middle-of-the-road tearjerker, the Starbucks latte of movies. It’s not going to blow your mind, it might taste a little burnt at times, but occasionally it does the trick.

The 24th has its share of unevenness. It also has the blessing, and the curse, of necessity. It’s a story that has to be retold.

Not even Jackman, one of the most persuasive actors around, can sell the argument that personal weakness doesn’t stain public character in the era of #MeToo.

This movie’s primary strength is in Wilson’s words, his facility with ideas and symbols and attitudes, and what the actors do with all of the above. The movie, as a movie, has its limits. But Wilson’s material remains unbound.

This film isn’t for everyone’s tastes. Then again, neither was Sorry to Bother You‘s mix of critical commentary and absurdist comedy; and, like that film, I Love Boosters takes a wilder, big-picture swerve in its third act. Still, you have to admire the fact that Riley is weaponizing his humor and using it to brusquely jostle your brain by any means necessary.