There's something endearingly bookish about a movie whose single most frightening shot involves the possibility of an ax being taken to a typewriter.

You walk out of this uneven but soulful movie with a smile on your face, maybe because that’s the default expression of Forrest Tucker, a man who practices grand theft with the stubborn passion of an aged master painter unwilling to put down his brush.

Though this is a sweet, clever, gorgeously animated movie I’d be glad to take my kid to on a Saturday afternoon, I’m not sure it’s one I’d insist all my grownup friends drop what they’re doing to see.

A slender thing, with a perversely undernourished color scheme: grainy blue exteriors and old-time sepia interiors. The fullness comes from the faces of its two protagonists.

The comic surface of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is all polished brilliance, with surprisingly few dull patches...The movie doesn't deliver in the kiss-kiss department, though.

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.

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.

Better than anyone dared hope: bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab bag of scatological gags that are almost as riotous when you think back on them.

Even if you don’t harbor fond feelings for the 1986 Top Gun, a movie that upon its release was seen by many as a glamorized recruitment commercial for the Reagan-era military buildup, it’s hard not to appreciate the care that went into this lovingly tooled sequel—a far better film on the sheer level of craft than the original.

Because I'm a sucker--I was entertained...The script is good at making you think that it has better cards than it really does. And the actors constitute a royal flush--OK, OK, enough with the poker metaphors.

It's a good, thoughtful horror picture--and thiiis close to being a very good one.

The New World takes a shopworn American myth--and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy.

The movie is repetitious, crudely dramatized, and awkwardly acted -- in English, which seems to be the second or third language of everyone involved -- Yet the movie, heavy-handed as it is, serves as a powerful rejoinder to “Blind Spot.”

Director Gary Ross' adaptation, co-scripted by Collins herself, isn't quite as crackingly paced as the novel, but it will more than satisfy existing fans of the trilogy and likely create many new ones.

Neither movie is perfect, and each underlines the other’s flaws, but if you’re watching one, watch Fyre, which is both less self-righteous and less inclined to punctuate its insights with Family Guy clips.

This new Blade Runner dazzles the audience with plenty of staggering sights but never quite matches the original’s mysterious ability to suggest something even more incredible lying just beyond our ken.

As grim as the above might sound, it’s also a spry, funny, moving film that never heads in the direction in which it looks like it’s about to head, kind of like its protagonist.

Whether or not this one is really the last in the series, Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.

It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Inherent Vice’s spiraling, wordplay-happy script never quite resolves the difficulty of adapting this particularly confounding philosophical whodunit, but the film’s groovy sprawl is a fine place to hang out for 2½ hours, as long as, like Doc and his weed-toking cohort, you don’t mind spending a day in a pleasantly disoriented daze.

It makes bursting spontaneously into song seem like a perfectly reasonable--indeed, highly desirable--thing to do, and it leaves the audience wanting to do the same. I see a big uptick in late-summer karaoke parties.

Like most haunted-house stories, Mama gets steadily less scary as its (for the most part, fairly predictable) secrets unfold. But even if the beats are familiar, Muschietti sustains a remarkable mood throughout: wintry, elemental and stark, like a late Sylvia Plath poem.

No one rises above the material, though, except for Walken, who looks pleased with the paycheck and the top-shelf tequila. As a shady lawyer, Mickey Rourke is smooth and funny, but recognizable only by his familiar purr.

Feels more like a series of skits than a movie, though it does tie up several plot threads in a lyrical last scene worthy of vintage Woody Allen.

Prey dispatches with a great deal of the previous Predators’ baggage, and tries to pare the fat.

A bit of a philosophical muddle, but the climactic tennis scenes are galvanically convincing, with some long, nerve-racking volleys. And the rest of the picture works as "Notting Hill" (1999) with balls--and rackets.

There’s a lot of the stumbling and backtracking that comes with such uncharted territory — an authentic, conversational messiness we rarely see on screen.

It's formulaic, but it sticks to a classic Western formula instead of a cartoonish blockbuster one.