There’s a stale emptiness to Living that doesn’t entirely dissipate in even its most moving scenes.

The talk is mostly in grunts and whoops, and the film sometimes reaches the brink of a Mel Brooks travesty, but never falls over. [18 Jan 1982]

Rodriguez and her fans deserve better than Miss Bala, a disappointingly bland and formulaic Hollywood remake of a much grittier and bleaker Mexican thriller.

This is an unusually soulful coming-of-age movie considering the number of spinal cords that get ripped right of bodies.

Taylour Paige is phenomenal, for one. The movie, though, is a bold and admirable experiment that doesn’t totally work.

It would be easy to hail The Naked Gun as something better than it is, since it simply existing is cause for celebration. But like most reboots, particularly comedy ones, the best thing about the new “Naked Gun” is that it might send you back to the original.

Bird may go down as a rare miss for Arnold but you can still see the keenness of her eye and the nimbleness of her camera, with her regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan. And that’s true never so much as when the camera is on Adams, a talent, whose melancholy eyes say more than all the theatrics around her.

Most of Mann’s toolkit is here — slick and moody camerawork, a poetic surrounding and heightened use of music, even the car porn of “Miami Vice.” But Ferrari — despite Mann’s leaning on Italian opera — fails to ignite.

In an extremely physical, committed, even exhausting performance, Pattinson takes what could have been an unwieldy mess and makes it much less, well, expendable.

By sanding off all the dark human quirks from their deeply human heroine, the filmmakers have left us a film that’s just filling the space.

Glum and meandering, the Los Angeles-set mystery about a Hollywood starlet and her assistant starts off promising enough but trudges along aimlessly to a deeply silly and maddening end.

That a movie called “The Sheep Detectives” tries to impart lessons of morality and mindfulness is, of course, laudable. A wide swath of entertainment aimed at children makes no such attempt. But “The Sheep Detectives” could have used more slapstick and less CGI sincerity.

CUTTER AND BONE can't decide whether to be a buddy movie, a menage-a-trois drama, or a murder movie, and hence fails at all three. Too bad, because Czech-born Ivan Passer has an obvious talent for creating mood and atmosphere.

They’re just two strangers thrust together by this surrogacy agreement and spending time with them is not fun, engaging or enlightening enough to sustain a movie.

Beneath it all is the story of a child’s love and guilt — and an education and judicial system letting her down — which propels her to bring her parents back from the dead, but that gets a little lost in the gross-out humor, Addams Family-level weirdness and shock-for-shock’s sake visual gags like a demonic teddy bear. For all the lovingly crafted spectacle, Selick’s agonizing, shot-by-shot film, is as overstuffed as that bear.

American Animals would be a legitimate cautionary tale if it wasn’t invalidated by its own existence.

Ultimately “Day One” could have been set around any old apocalypse. Tethering it to the rules of “A Quiet Place,” a smart premise whose novelty is impossible to recreate let alone build a world upon, just holds it back.

The real heist of Crime 101 is an old one: If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

McCarthy’s visual style is too fragmented, happy to capture his scrambling camera and sound operators in the frame and changing up his shots from guerilla-style jerky iPhone images to tasteful, polished portraits.

While its ideas are often intriguing, the movie feels like high-concept scaffolding that only thinly conceals it hollowness. It’s a Tesla without electricity.

These are interesting and fraught times that deserve an unflinching look at the perils of data rights and online privacy, but The Great Hack is a reminder that documentaries are not always journalism.

For the big tonal swings in A Simple Favor to work, the characters needed to be more plausibly grounded. Lively and Kendrick’s early scenes ping-pong nicely with odd-couple chemistry, but “A Simple Favor” loses the thread, and never shakes the feeling of a rushed Gillian Flynn knockoff.

The script by Jake Crane and Jonathan A. H. Stewart is a slow-burning affair that will have audiences tugging at the leash.

It's fitting that director Brian De Palma's latest effort, Carlito's Way, begins and ends inside a train station, because this is a movie that's seriously derailed. [09 Nov 1993]

A pair of other recent films — “Minding the Gap,” ″Skate Kitchen” — better explored the camaraderie and freedom of skater culture. But there are glimpses here of a more radiant, lyrical film.

Neither the divers nor kids, government officials nor families and volunteers really come into focus, staying as murky as the miles of submerged cave.

Peter Hastings, director, screenwriter and animal voice of Dog Man, has had a hand in Pilkey’s much better adaption of “Captain Underpants,” but this time smashes together characters and plot lines from several of the books in a way that is hard to follow even for fans.

Tigertail comes off more as an idea of an arthouse movie than one propelled by its own volition.