Pure ham and cheese.

It’s imaginative and even brilliant at times, and then it starts to cave in. But then we think no, maybe not, maybe everything’s going to be made right . . . until it collapses completely. A cynical, smart movie about the dangers of mass culture gives way to a sentimental embrace of the very thing it’s criticizing.

A solid piece of in-the-moment entertainment that fails in its attempt to be something more.

But this soggy, sentimental tour through a rural dreamworld of salt-of- the-earth versus supercharged intelligence never quite gets deep enough to touch the soul -- or to make sense.

Quintana brings a stunning visual flair to his film, and Sheen has a fine moment when he ponders the thin line between miracles and tragedies. But we keep waiting for the film to wash over us, and it never quite does.

Has a certain charm and is sure to appeal to tweens, at least the female variety.

The story doesn’t deliver. The songs are forgettable. And the magic never descends. Supposedly, Mary Poppins returns, but that’s not Mary. Emily Blunt stole somebody’s umbrella.

Undergirding it all is a light but ever present tension between living up to the philosophy the men were taught as teenagers and making their way through the realities and compromises of American adulthood. Tran’s not preachy about that, but the filmmaker’s killer move is showing how his heroes’ souls can be as fragile as their aging bones, yet resilient when the situation demands.

One can almost feel the movie Away We Go might have been, if only we could believe that Verona loves Burt - or understand why Burt loves Verona.

Goes disappointingly soft despite two dynamite lead performances.

Still, for much of “Madame Web,” even when it turns bad, it’s a pleasure to see Johnson in this kind of movie.

It’s summer, weed is legal in California now and laughs are a scarce resource. You could do worse than Rough Night.

Your enjoyment of the movie will depend on whether you can suspend your disbelief — and confusion — and let the magic of misdirection wash over you.

The story is painfully simplistic, and it becomes quickly apparent that the narrative is a crude cement to hold together the carnage.

That its premise is a fundamentally corny one we’ve seen a million times before is a separate matter, but filmmaker Kuosmanen (“The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki”) and his two lead actors camouflage that well in naturalistic behavior and psychological depth.

The filmmaking seems caught between a genuine desire to present life as it’s actually lived and an obligation (self-imposed) to be politically correct at all times. Even so, the filmmakers, here and there, craft scenes that have the ring of truth.

Falls victim to some surfing cliches.

Most of its screenplay is far too vulgar to recount. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy, every word is an obscenity, including "and" and "the."

Brosnan has never been so opened up, so emotional and yet so precise in his work. It's a lovely performance in a film that only sometimes deserves him.

That gift doesn't desert him [Crowe] in Elizabethtown, but he clutters his movie with plot elements that confuse the focus, the central character and, ultimately, I suspect, Crowe himself.

Penguin is the film’s most fleshed-out character. We know the bird’s origin story, but nobody else’s.

This is a pretty good action movie with the added kick of Liam Neeson in the lead role.

The Others is great as a collection of acknowledgments, but a ghost story made of a bunch of ghoulish thank-yous isn't that haunting.

Greta is not just silly but obvious, and without any hint of a larger purpose, beyond hitting the various plot points of the human monster genre. Twenty minutes before the finish, it degenerates into a joke, and not a good one, but just fair enough to see through to the end.

As the film meanders, the powerful moments barely outnumber the ridiculous. And another excellent performance from McAdams isn't quite good enough to mask the distractions.

Preposterous.

Earnest but unconvincing film.

With a handful of blackly humorous jolts and some game performances by a good cast, Thin Ice is a watchable, if not terribly original, piece of Midwestern noir.