Most of all, I enjoyed the picture's subtext, which is that Smith has become so sensitized to Internet abuse -- that the cathartic climax consists of tracking down bellicose posters (all of whom turn out to be adolescent dweebs) and pummeling the crap out of them.

Trolls World Tour was made to play in theaters that can’t open, celebrating a kind of performance that’s on indefinite hold. All I could feel watching its climax was how much I miss that feeling of being together in the dark, and how long it’ll be before it feels safe to do it again.

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

George Lucas does it his way in the pallid Phantom Menace. Even cultists will wish he'd hired a director and some writers.

I can understand wanting to skip Ender’s Game as a matter of moral principle, but you can also feel free to blow it off just because it’s not that good.

As a portrait of a subculture few non-Hasidim ever get to glimpse, it's funny, deft, and sharp. The movie's first half goes to great trouble to establish the texture of life in Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn; the second half is a rushed and unfocused tour of the Amsterdam rave scene.

There's just not quite enough to the movie: not enough jokes, not enough obstacles, not enough sex.

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

The fact that Marry Me contains anything so formulaic as a third-act separation montage should spell out clearly what you’re getting in for.

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.

What's disappointing about Anonymous is that it isn't dumb enough.

As a movie, Super is unfocused and bafflingly inconsistent. It is also the most genuinely surprising new release I've seen in a long time.

The film is too metronomically paced for Kilmer's routines to develop any rhythm. The direction by Phillip Noyce is fluid but impersonal. Endless studio tinkering seems to have dissolved its spine.

That City by the Sea isn't laughed off the screen is testament to Caton-Jones' attention to actors and to some tightly written scenes.

No Strings wants to be raunchy enough to pull in the dude crowd and snuggly enough to draw couples on dates. Instead, it's an inoffensive bore with occasional R-rated sex scenes that strain for cutesy shock value.

There are enough genuine moments of surprise to make this genre exercise an invigorating one.

Weitz, meanwhile, can’t decide whether the movie should be a political thriller, a relationship drama, or something else entirely, as the actors trudge through expository dialogue with the directness of opera lyrics but without any of the emotion behind them.

In short, Elizabeth Gilbert is the Julia Roberts of writers, which means that the film adaptation by Ryan Murphy (the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee) got at least one thing right.

Planet of the Apes has been designed and photographed (by Phillipe Rousselot) with real artistry, but in all the ways that matter it's hack work.

A pretty good action flick -- twisty, marvelously acted, and energetically (if not always coherently) staged.

Borderline incoherent, theologically unsatisfying, and short to the point of dwarfism on suspense.

Rebirth’s dinosaurs are everywhere, but the more you see, the less it means. They’re good for a scare now and then, but the sense of awe is long since gone.

The biggest problem with The Hunt is its phenomenally lazy script, which is by Damon Lindelof and his frequent collaborator Nick Cuse. (Booting the movie into the next year prevented Lindelof, who created HBO’s Watchmen, from having his name on one of 2019’s smartest entertainments and one of its dumbest.)

Five years from now, this bland and forgettable throwaway will be remembered only for Breslin, who will by then be a poised and gifted 16-year-old actress.

Directorially, Dedication is a bit of a mess, unable to settle on a tone or visual style. But it leaves you wishing the oddball couple well.

Corny, predictable, and packed with gay stereotypes.

The movie got me where I live, but I think that even non-Park Slope real-estate owners will have a blast at Duplex: It's one of the most unnerving slapstick extravaganzas I've ever seen.

A mere clever conceit isn’t enough, and here, the action smells stale and the humor staler. There’s no explosion we haven’t seen before, no quip that feels fresh and new. I suggest you save American Ultra to stream on a lazy snow day this winter — even then, the deep sleeper who needs to be awoken might be you.

In other words, while it might not return with previously unseen treasures, what it does rummage up pairs perfectly with a large bucket of popcorn and a slushy drink.

Management remains for the most part as endearing as its leads. Steve Zahn is a wonderful actor who's spent too long in the "hey, it's that guy" best-friend role.

Not even the actress' soulfulness can save the generic climax, in which she tussles with the badder bad guy on a collapsing terrace above a crashing surf. As a colleague muttered, "Murder by numbers is right."

It has been sexed up, opened out, and finished off with a disappointing bang-bang climax, but it's still good fun.

Like all abstract art, At World's End is best approached non-narratively, as an experience rather than a story.

That's the best thing that can be said about Fur: It feels good when it's over, and if you see it with a smart friend, it's a blast to hash over afterward.

Less a rounded narrative than a pair of suggestive -- and unresolved -- exercises.

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.

For a movie whose story hinges almost entirely on sex, The Other Boleyn Girl is disappointingly demure.

Like most movies in which a central story element doubles as a toy tie-in, Prince of Persia isn't overly burdened by ambition.

Instead of merging the Western and the sci-fi genre to form some new, transcendent class of popcorn fare, Cowboys & Aliens just regurgitates the conventions of both genres. Double the high concept, quadruple the clichés.

Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.

Cassandra's Dream is not unredeemably bad. MacGregor and Farrell hack away at their implausible dialogue with admirable intensity (though when Terry starts to descend into mental illness, Farrell touches his limits as an actor).

Chloe remains engaging for longer than any movie this schlocky and overwritten has a right to be. But the movie loses what little goodwill it's managed to build up by the last act, which feels clumsily grafted from a completely different film.

The premise cries out for take-no-prisoners, Terry-Southern-style sick humor; it gets instead a lot of clunky, self-congratulatory in-jokes, and Pacino is left to ham in a vacuum.

Politically noncommittal and dull. But that's exactly the problem with this 90-minute piece of cinematic trompe l'oeil.

Howard and his writers are so in love with their own hip self-consciousness that it's a wonder they don't feature film critics discussing their movie.

2012 isn't a bad movie that, out of sheer boredom, you might snicker at once or twice; it's a two-and-a-half hour laugh riot that plays on our expectations of the genre by anticipating and exceeding them.

It’s a relief to see an autistic woman played as more than simply a bundle of symptoms.

A high-concept comedy about the domestication of a work-obsessed woman that nonetheless managed to win me over.

Tron: Legacy is the kind of sensory-onslaught blockbuster that tends to put me to sleep, the way babies will nap to block out overwhelming stimuli. I confess I may have snoozed through one or two climactic battles only to be startled awake by an incoming neon Frisbee.

A fun ride. It's loud and obvious, but it's also the first high-tech, sci-fi thriller to think through some of the implications of cloning and capitalism.

The screenwriters seem to have meticulously researched the inner workings of the White House by watching DVDs of "The West Wing," but, despite their hard work, casting sinks the film. With Longoria and Sutherland onboard it feels like an uneasy marriage of "24" and "Desperate Housewives."

It’s the (Russo) brothers’ touch with comedy (they collaborated on the wisecrack-rich script with their former Marvel co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) that sets this hyper-violent, stylishly shot thriller apart from your average espionage-themed bone-cruncher.

Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci--all fine actors at the peak of hireability--must have been coming off a collective coke bender when they agreed to be in this murky, straight-to-video-looking piece of crud.

The movie's curious capacity for self-erasure makes it a tough one to write about; less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.

I don't know if Howard had fun directing, writing, and starring in this thing; but he had to have gotten more masochistic pleasure out of it than the audience does.

A good summer movie isn't just an uninterrupted crescendo of cacophony. You need stuff IN BETWEEN the fireballs and the cyborgs.

There isn't a mummy at the center of The Mummy, exactly, but a mutating Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect.

If Bohemian Rhapsody’s superficial gloss on the band’s rise sometimes feels like a useful feature, the hackneyed way it treats Mercury’s life and fall is close to fatal. And after you leave the theater, you may find that first part isn’t such an asset after all.

The climax, a multipart showdown in the corridors of a hospital, is unforgivably manipulative. What self-respecting director still cuts away to shots of a heartbeat monitor flat-lining? Hancock isn't the only underachiever on the premises--the talented Berg settles for far less than he should.

The last 20 minutes are horrifically violent, relentlessly claustrophobic, and irredeemably pointless. Von Trier has us on the hot seat, and he's going to walk us through his most primitive sexual nightmares--not because they'll bring us to a greater understanding of madness or love or grief, but just because he bloody well feels like it.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

The most shocking thing about I Think I Love My Wife isn't the language, the sex, or the racial humor. It's the fact that it's not a funny movie. At all.

If it isn't the worst sequel ever made, it's only because it has too much competition: Impersonal and frenetic, it's a landmark Hollywood disgrace.

Even when engineering a howler like this, De Palma does it in such high style, with such a confident swagger, that the movie is half over before you realize how little is there.

A disgusting piece of work; I still can't believe how much I loved it.

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?

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

30 Minutes or Less is a second movie that feels more like a first: slipshod, derivative, and unsure what tone to take toward its own sometimes distasteful subject matter.

I don’t know how long the boys can keep tapping the well of their surreal imaginations before they become exhausting. But I do know that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain made me laugh so hard I missed a number of jokes.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

Much of K-Pax consists of Spacey grinning like Stevie Wonder behind sunglasses, -- taking dippy steps, and bobbing his head as if attached to an invisible Walkman.

The movie is good enough to put a chill into the late-summer air. Salva has nasty surprises in the grim, minor-key last third, during which the feeling dawns on you that sleep for the next few nights won't come easily.

Feels fresh and satisfying. Maybe it's the presence of Jason Statham, the British action star who has a physicality like no other actor out there right now.

His (Lee) Oldboy is relentlessly unpleasant and difficult to watch, without offering audiences much moral or aesthetic payoff for its hour and 40 minutes of graphic violence and abject degradation. Oldboy is both original and uncompromising, I’ll give it that—it just doesn’t happen to be any good.

The action is never topsy-turvy enough for 13 Hours to be mistaken for a Paul Greengrass film, but it’s also not so operatic that it feels like Bay is turning a tragedy into Bad Boys III.

A too-pat but very funny comedy.

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."

Through sheer force of weird meta gags and explosive viscera — they might have made the most fun movie in the franchise.

A minor but satisfying entry in the "what if" historical-fantasy genre.

The neat thing about Jonathan Parker's modern-day Bartleby (Outsider Pictures) is that it brings out all the vaudeville undercurrents in Melville's dark tale and turns it into a surreal tragi-sitcom for our own era.

It's a measure of Brooks' stature that he survives the self-sabotage and comes through with his most engaging performance in years.

Like Barnum himself, it’s an elegant fraud, nice enough to look at as long as you don’t look too close.

If you’ve ever watched a slasher movie and rooted for the killer, you’re ready for Dashcam, a found-footage horror movie whose COVID-denying protagonist is the scariest thing about it.

At times, you could actually mistake Tears of the Sun for a blunt modern parable instead of an opportunistic mixture of up-to-the-minute atrocities and old-fashioned corn.

Wing and director Peter Segal and Sandler and Barrymore have built a comedy around the thrill of first attraction, the sadness that comes from knowing it can't last, and the challenge of finding something in the heart to hang onto.

The result feels like a sketchbook, both in a good and bad sense; it's alive and spontaneous and surprising in some parts, underdeveloped and shapeless in others.

An obligatory setup for a sequel slows down the final moments, but until then, Tomb Raider feels like a perfectly paced trio of espresso shots, with a shot of adrenaline to the heart as a chaser.

It's the feel-good movie of the year.

The worst thing about I'm Still Here is the fact that it exists.

The movie isn’t perfect. I’m not even sure if it’s good. For one thing, it can feel reductively boilerplate in its treatment of it-girl Megan.

The strands in High Crimes don't coalesce. Those red herrings somehow take over the picture; the thing itself turns into a giant red herring.

The Farrellys have set themselves the awesome task of arguing passionately for the non-importance of appearance while at the same time making relentless sport of it. The happy news is that they pull it off: In Shallow Hal, they've contrived a deeply humanist gross-out comedy.

In its last 20 minutes, Angels does attain the status of good bad movie, with a transcendently absurd climax that's great fun to rehash later over burgers.

What was already a raucous put-on, a goof on Aldrich's brutal action movies, is now a hyperbolic, gross-out cartoon, with a cast of enormous ex-football stars (plus the 7-foot-2-inch Indian wrestler Dalip Singh) only adding to the air of facetiousness.

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 doesn't have any undercurrents, psychological or cinematic. -- The Blessed Mother ends up looking like a drunken housewife.

I Feel Pretty has more nuance than the trailer suggests. Unfortunately, those shades of meaning get mangled up in nonsensical plot contrivances and tired running jokes. If it’s offensive, it’s because of its blandness, not its political incorrectness.

The best thing you can say about The Strangers: Prey at Night, the sequel to writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion creeper, is that it reminds you the original exists.