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.