Even knowing what's likely to come-the doors opening on their own, the skeptical characters scoffing at metaphysical explanations, the unheeded warnings from paranormally gifted guests-doesn't make it any less nailbiting to watch.

The more subversive Instinct gets in proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department.

There is nothing wrong with the action sequences beyond their sheer length and number. They're in the "Road Warrior" mode: hyper-fast and vicious.

I found myself curiously willing to overlook Admission’s weaknesses, or even to reinterpret them as strengths — couldn’t those inconclusive endings be seen as a refreshingly un-rom-com-like embrace of life’s open-endedness and complexity?

The movie is at its best when it can revel in inventiveness, scrappiness, and camaraderie, and you feel the “We’re coming together! We’re beating the Big Bad!” vibes run through you.

It’s not that One Child Nation needs to cater to both sides of the argument, but it would have helped contextualize how often the acts of violence the film chronicles actually happened.

It's a textbook example of a well-crafted movie, beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and structured like an elegant three-act play. So why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?

Far From Home, which brings back Homecoming director Jon Watts and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, sometimes strains to match the intensity of the all-out battles in its dialogue scenes, and there are too many exchanges where characters reel off a dozen overlapping half-jokes in the hopes that you’ll come away with the feeling something funny was said.

I Want You Back is a sometimes underwhelming vehicle for Day and Slate’s considerable comic talents, but it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company.

As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.

As lurching, awkward, and dirty-minded as the three horny man-boys at its center--but not, in the end, quite as funny or endearing.

Both actresses deliver vivid, tender performances; they generate all the movie’s fire, but they’re obliged to do it inside a chilly, ritualized framework, the aesthetic equivalent of a softcore mausoleum.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

If Spectre has any saving grace, it’s Craig, who remains the best non-Connery Bond. It is not merely his physical presence, which is formidable enough; he has a unique ability to make peevishness dramatically compelling. And the subtlety of his sense of humor is one of the better aspects of his 007.

The Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor.

All in all, Cruella is much better than it needs to be, and is hampered primarily by the fact that it’s a Disney movie, both in the sense that it has to heel to its animated and live-action predecessors, and in that making its main character a genuine antihero isn’t an option.

So slight it's almost diaphanous--an hour after seeing it, what the movie leaves behind is not so much a memory as a mood. Still, it's a fine mood.

Though the result is thematically slight, it's structurally sophisticated enough to reward a second viewing (or at least, unlike Grey's previous work, to be watched all the way through).

To work onscreen, Thank You for Smoking needed to be fast, scruffy, and offhand. But even the good lines here last a self-congratulatory beat too long. Aaron Eckhart is likable, but he's too hangdog and naturalistic for a part that could have used a brisk young Jack Lemmon type.

Kill Bill is about nothing more (or less) than its director's passion for the mindless action pictures that got him through adolescence. It isn't sex without love: It's an orgy with just enough love.

The dogs learn to fight for themselves and eventually tangle with a (computer-generated) leopard seal in the movie's most thrilling encounter.

Watching it, I was excited that such a strange piece of science fiction got made—and disappointed to realize that it is strange in just about all the ways that Interstellar is. But while even Nolan’s detractors couldn’t deny his skill at manufacturing awe, the primary emotion that Arrival evokes is puzzlement.

A big part of the reason for this movie's nose dive around the one-hour mark is that, seen up close, the Infected just aren't that scary.

A thriller of serpentine excitement all the way up to that dud of a climax.

Full Throttle is full-throttle camp: It's like a third-rate Austin Powers picture cut to the whacking, attention-deficit-disorder tempo of "Moulin Rouge."

A too-pat but very funny comedy.

The film is seamlessly made, its mood balanced dreamily between sexy-funny and sexy-scary.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

A documentary about one of the most mediated, image-conscious people on the planet sounds like an oxymoron, and though director Lana Wilson is no hagiographer, Miss Americana is hardly warts-and-all.

One magnificent piece of agitprop.

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

The movie's more than cute, funny, and (at 81 minutes) brisk enough to move families in and out of the multiplex in mass quantities, like the social insects we are.

Mostly, the jokes and the recurrent attempts to tweak the superhero genre serve as a reminder that somebody else has already done it better. Sure, Megamind is pretty good. But why settle for less when you the best is already available on DVD?

Pure misery.

It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness.

Until its resolution, Bad Times is a fun-enough romp through retro genre pleasures. But when it drags in the real world in its final scenes, it reveals itself to be just as fatuous as most such nostalgic pastiches tend to be.

Its fancifulness is at times too clunky, its pathos too strained. But Barnz has a secret weapon, one that's 4 feet tall and looks to weigh about 60 pounds: Elle Fanning.

Fascinating for the issues--ethical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic--it raises. But it doesn't fully come together.

I was onboard with the gentle charm of Safety Not Guaranteed until these last few scenes, when the genuine trauma suffered by these characters - especially Kenneth, whose paranoia and isolationism seem like symptoms of real mental illness - gets glossed over in an unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending.

For a movie about the policing of borders, couldn't this one have policed a firmer one, between credibility and incredibility? Between seriousness and self-seriousness?

The movie is sweet but deeply suspect: It's like "Lost Horizon" re-imagined by a realtor.

This kind of movie is superfluous yet strangely compelling. We don't need to see Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman sing a duet next to a Roman fountain any more than we need to see an elephant pirouette in a tutu, but wouldn't you be crazy to pass up the opportunity to see either?

Although Dolan has called it by far his most accessible film, Tom at the Farm is hardly paint-by-numbers.

The sum amounts to far less than its parts, but oh, what parts!

A simple, chronological history, narrated with melancholy gravitas by Morgan Freeman.

The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy.

It's a daring and original effort, yet so noncommittal--so purposely vague--that it's apt to leave you flummoxed: at once stricken and etherized.

When every character is always operating at maximum loathsomeness, it can be difficult to recalibrate your disgust-o-meter. I suspect this sense of moral vertigo, and the resulting nausea, is part of what Cronenberg is after, but his skill at evoking those states in the viewer doesn’t make the experience of watching Maps to the Stars any less sour.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

There's no buildup, no narrative arc, just one scene of comically debauched partying after another.

The great flaw in most of the Coens' work is, surprisingly, an inability to sustain a plot over a two-hour span.

That minute and a half of still photos packs in more dense, economical laughs than all the laborious gross-outs and chase sequences that came before. Maybe The Hangover Part III should consider restricting itself to the slide-show format.

Fearless as these racers are, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for a movie that plays chicken and then swerves about a mile before the collision.

While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.

It's a movie that's thought-provoking without being intelligent and candid without being truthful. The same aesthetic choices that Toback seems convinced will set his documentary apart are also what diminishes its credibility.

I must admit that I find those motifs -- and the Farrellys' universe in general -- more sweet than offensive, and I liked Say It Isn't So just so. So there.

Rambling and conflicted as it is, it's one of the most entertaining African-American comedies of manners ever made.

Garry Shandling is poignant and hilarious as an alien stud.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.

The Wackness may not have much that's new to say about being 17--it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama with a couple of noteworthy performances--but it's a definitive compendium of trivia about 1994 (by Levine's lights, the best year ever).

It’s 80-year-old Ian McKellen who can best answer that last question, having the most fun of anyone as Gus the Theater Cat, lapping out of saucers and rubbing up against corners like the true thespian he is. And really, for all its flaws, what more could you possibly ask for from Cats?

If you can watch all 17 seconds of the "surprised kitten" video on YouTube without even a twinge of longing to crush said kitten with love, skip Babies. If you find yourself clicking "replay" to watch the kitten again, pre-order your ticket now.

If this particular franchise’s material feels at times a bit thin to be spun out even to two hours, it may be simply that three solo movies per Avenger is more than enough. But this weekend, if the lure of an air-conditioned summer blockbuster summons you like a sacred Asgardian hammer, you could do worse than this Easter egg–colored, classic rock–scored frolic.

If the latest escapade is not quite as sparkling as its predecessors—in 2021, the second entry briefly surpassed Citizen Kane as one of the highest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes—it retains their warmhearted and cheekily funny spirit.

Hobbs & Shaw is a ridiculous movie, and sometimes it’s in the best way. I laughed at the audacity of its stunts, while shaking my head a little bit at their silliness. But I also despaired a little bit when I checked the time at what felt like it might be the climax and discovered there was still an hour to go.

It's almost criminal the way the central relationship of High Fidelity has been left such a void.

For a filmmaker who in Videodrome and Dead Ringers so elegantly broached the unspeakable, Cronenberg has here made a picture that is all surface.

The plot is too erratic and incoherent to follow, but the constant barrage of noises and colors is more than enough to keep kids entertained.

Sully can feel like a dutiful, hagiographic slog, even though its actual running time barely tops 90 minutes and both Hanks and Eckhart give warm, understated, funny performances in the only two roles developed enough to qualify as real characters.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a luxurious, appealingly daffy spectacle, a true vision unchecked by the standards of good taste, and that in and of itself is a quality worth savoring. But its design is pixel-deep, without the underlying thought that makes great science fiction worth revisiting.

Even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as flabbergastingly gorgeous and charismatic. She's tall and lean and meteor-hard, and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien in its right mind would mess with her.

I left the film moved to tears, and still feeling like something huge was missing.

There's something too refined and emotionally neutral about Nowhere in Africa, as if Link had directed with white gloves. Maybe she knew how loaded this African-Jewish subject was and didn't want it push it too hard. Maybe that's why she won an Oscar.

What a shock when George Lucas finds his footing and the saga once again takes hold.

Carlos Cuarón's screenplay is rambling and unstructured but full of vibrant dialogue. As in "Y Tu Mamá También," the insults the two leads hurl at one another are creatively filthy.

Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly.

The whole movie starts to feel like a dare or elaborate game, the characters shuffling obediently about the board with no rules to guide them. Myths grow out of a need to understand the world, and to pass on an understanding of how to make our way through it, but Lanthimos just teaches you to be more cautious about his next film.

In short, The BFG seems perfectly self-sufficient in its bookness, in no need of the lavishly cinematic bear hug Steven Spielberg bestows upon it here.

The movie raises your pulse, it has visual wow. But I suspect that audiences will emerge into the light feeling more battered than entertained.

If you see Okja, and I hope you do, stay for the final credits. It’s not often that a stinger scene pops up at the end of a movie, not to pre-sell the inevitable sequel, but to leave you with something to think, wonder, and worry about.

Occasionally dissonant, but it's remarkably cleareyed.

This seesaw of shame and self-justification might not speak for the most murderous segment of the German populace, but it's a peculiarly eloquent representation of the silent, obedient majority.

It has a loping, lowkey charm and doesn’t require too much of your attention, and the plot is predictable enough that you could miss substantial chunks of it and not lose your way. You’re in the passenger seat, and it’s a nice ride as long as you don’t care where you’re going.

After a year of Trump, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for a president seen backstage working on his Greek pronunciation.

Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

It's true that the movie, arrested between documentary and drama, doesn't quite do justice to either medium: The actors playing Joe and Simon don't have anything like "lines" to simulate "drama," or even just "conversation," while the real guys often fall back on bland English understatement.

Though it wears out its welcome in one dreary stretch midway through, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (which premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming service the Roku Channel on Friday) is an appropriately goofy tribute to its subject and co-creator: a movie parody about the life of a parodist.

Elektra isn't half-bad--only maybe two-fifths.

The lack of a precipitating factor, the invisible impulses behind addiction, and the episodic nature of recovery don’t exactly lend themselves to a compelling narrative structure.

With his goofy interview technique and easy laugh, Spurlock has a way of putting his subjects at ease even as he tests the audience's patience.

After an electrifyingly feral opening, the movie settles down into a cogent courtroom drama, with no real cinematic highs but no jaw-dropping lows, either.

Brokeback Mountain could use a little more of it--by which I mean more sweat and other bodily fluids. Ang Lee's formalism is so extreme that it's often laughable, and the sex is depicted as a holy union: Gay love has never been so sacred.

It's alert to its characters' constantly evolving desires in ways that high- and low-culture movies, with their strict aesthetics or their mass-market formulas, tend not to be.

Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.

Spike Lee is a virtuoso filmmaker, a wizard at selling a sequence, but he'll never make an entirely coherent movie until he learns to go deeper into his subjects instead of wider with them.

Better than a finger in your eye. It's a perfectly passable, if instantly forgettable, date movie, lushly shot by Newton Thomas Sigel and with a script intelligently versed in American classics like "His Girl Friday" and "Hail the Conquering Hero."