The back and forth between McAdams and Bateman is what makes Game Night sing.

Bridges has evolved into a miraculous actor: one who signals wildness through the intensity of his containment.

Roadrunner is never less than fascinating to watch, but it is far from perfect.

That neither tale is especially interesting doesn't matter -- the contrast alone is enough to make Sliding Doors an irresistible romantic fantasy.

The inner life of the young Spider is just screaming to be taken to the next level--but Cronenberg mulishly won't go there. What goes wrong with Spider is pretty basic: The audience has no idea why it was made.

Adds up to a nice little gotcha! courtroom melodrama.

Like many before it, The Last Jedi has already been hailed as the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back, and while that’s true, it’s too faint a compliment. It’s a film of genuine beauty, one where you come away as eager to talk about the set design and the choreography as you do the fate of the galaxy or what might happen next.

One thing is for sure: The über-dream is both gorgeously animated, in Kon's shimmering, hyperreal style, and sickeningly scary.

More diverting is the increasingly desperate forensics the FBI resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal. But Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns.

A dumb, by-the-numbers romantic comedy. Yet I kept finding small things to enjoy in it, mainly because of the two hard-to-hate leads.

The action sequences in Incredibles 2, which was edited by Stephen Schaffer, are elegantly conceived and fluidly executed, as good as anything we’re likely to see on screen this year, in animation or live action, which only makes the rest of the movie seem that much clunkier by comparison.

Somehow, for me, this earnest, pretty movie never came to life on screen; it remained a curio in a cabinet, to be admired through a pane of glass.

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

Like its hero, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a little soft around the middle, but all the more loveable for that.

The performances are delightful, and the picture comes together.

Like the best noirs, Brick is a triumph of attitude, and there's no arguing that its brand of deadpan cool is precisely unique.

Blood Diamond is a by-the-numbers message picture, to be sure...But the director, Edward Zwick, is craftsman enough that the pace never slackens, the chase scenes thrill, and the battle scenes sicken. And if it makes viewers think twice about buying their sweethearts that hard-won hunk of ice for Christmas, so much the better.

It’s goofy as hell and borderline inexcusable at times, but it’s also kind of glorious.

Some of these revelations feel like clever reversals, others like calculated rug-pulls, but we never stop caring about what happens next.

Between the exhilaration of great movies and the disappointment of bad ones lie the particular pleasures of trash. Ma isn’t a bad movie, and it’s sure as hell not trying to be a good one, but it scratches a particular itch that neither noble failures nor cranked-out hackwork can touch.

At the end of Inception, I hadn't lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I'd seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.

I mean Serenity no disrespect when I say it's enjoyably junky.

Though Logan Lucky’s funny and committed cast (also including Dwight Yoakam, an underused Katherine Waterston, and a barely there Hilary Swank) provides a steady supply of good-sized laughs, this film struck me as underachieving on several fronts.

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, directed by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, tackles a long, illustrious, and sorely undertold story, and as such offers some much-needed shading to a history that’s still too often framed in stark polarities of black and white.

Though Hiddleston’s performance is evocative and compelling, he rarely betrays any emotion beyond a kind of stoned curiosity.

Though it never channels the raw DIY energy of the original Evil Dead series — what big-budget version could? — this polished, clever remake remains true to the spirit of the original, which was at once viscerally terrifying and weirdly lighthearted.

Doesn’t have the warmth of the Toy Story pictures, but it still boasts a very entertaining slapstick-farce structure and some neat hairy, oozy, tendrilly creatures.

It's so exciting to have a perfectly sung and acted Tosca (Avatar) on film that I'm prepared to forgive the new movie, directed by Benoit Jacquot, almost everything. But I sure wish Jacquot hadn't bungled the look and feel.