Kravitz almost pulls it off. With the help of a terrific cast, she offers strikingly confident, brashly entertaining filmmaking, until everything seems to break down in a mess of porous storytelling.

The Prom works hard to be a good time, and I hope it is for many who could use one.

Mufasa: The Lion King has one very important thing going for it: an original story.

You’re probably not coming to Finch for lessons, you’re coming to Finch for Hanks. The good news is that he’s not just the reason to show up, he’s the reason to stay around as well.

A Neil Simon comedy it isn't, although some bright one-liners shine through. [18 March 1985]

Beau Is Afraid takes a long road — and one with a lot of yelling and sniveling along the way — to not get very far. That could, of course, be the point. But the simpering sad sack Beau — despite Phoenix’s typically committed and sympathetic performance — remains curiously void, stuck in a one-note nightmare.

This film’s biggest lack is the connective tissue — we don’t ever really understand, alas, how young Trump became President Trump.

Eventually, the movie does seem to get where it’s going. A scene between Alice and Roberta touches upon issues of literary ownership and artistic license that haven’t yet been fully mined. It’s a bit late in the game. But the ride has been pleasant.

Usually, it’s pleasingly aware of its own silliness. But there are blind spots.

With so many murky motives, there’s little to care about, no way to anticipate the next con and no sense of real peril.

Maestro is a fine portrait of a complicated marriage. But for a man who contained symphonies, that leaves a lot of notes unplayed.

Bourgeois-Tacquet, making her feature debut, struggles to find ways to tell the audience what’s going on her heroine’s head.

You needn’t have watched all five seasons of “Luther” to take a chance on Luther: The Fallen Sun. But there’s also a chance that you may find yourself wanting to afterwards.

A film like this should give life to its characters and reveal essential truths beyond the book-report versions of their existence. But Ammonite keeps you at a distance on a rather vacant, but beautiful, journey.

Unlike Robert Eggers’ 2024 “Nosferatu,” which was beautiful but bleak to look at and featured an ugly, fearsome vampire, Besson imbues his main character with a swashbuckling sexiness that suits his star’s craggy appeal.

Lawrence of Arabia it ain't. But who cares? The fighting is great, the action nonstop and this guy has killer legs from hell that can drop a 500-pound ninja before he can say Bruce Lee.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and the design team do a great job in every department but are let down by a derivative and baggy screenplay by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani that goes from one violent scene to another like a video game in order to paper over a plot both undercooked and overcooked.

Migration is vividly animated with warm cartoon tones that would do Daffy proud. But it never quite spreads its wings.

Book Club has a script that’s often so heavy on the corn — make that corn syrup — that it strains credulity and leaves you groaning. But then, darn it, suddenly it makes you tearful, with an unexpectedly genuine moment, or laugh out loud. It’s a credit to the cast, and the cast only.

At times Spoiler Alert feels like an edgy, clever film that plays wittily on the main character’s lifelong obsession with TV. At others, it feels like a more formulaic, holiday-themed tearjerker — the passing years are marked in a Christmas card montage! — that wrings our tears in unsubtle ways.

Master ultimately suffers the fate of many promising films with many good ideas and not enough time to develop them — some paring down would have improved the latter part of the film.

The question, ultimately, is whether Bombshell ought to have spun quite so snappy a movie out of such a story. It does cartwheels to make a vile tale compelling, and it can feel like a parade of starry impressions rather than something genuine.

Like all sequels, the second suffers from not having the delicious surprise of the first, but the seed to a third film is hinted at in the closing credits, which is more than the first film promised.

Within a conventional rom-com package, the ending of which isn’t the slightest of mysteries, tropes are subverted, big questions are asked about marriage and love, and a warm spotlight is shined on Pakistani culture.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, hotly awaited by devotees of the decades-old role-playing game, makes darned sure to be fun, and funny — enough to laugh at itself. And that’s the thing that makes it work.

As with all of Iñárritu’s films, “Bardo” isn’t just deeply felt but impassioned to the max, with grand designs to not just plunge into his own soul but that of Mexico, too. For a filmmaker always pushing for more — including those titles that stretch on and on — “Bardo” is his most ambitious and indulgent film yet.

While neither of their character’s gets enough depth, McKenzie and Taylor-Joy sustain Last Night in Soho, a movie filled with reflections to both past fiction horrors (Straight on Till Morning, Suspiria) and today’s #MeToo terrors.

The mythic simplicity is part of the point of The Northman, but the movie’s single-minded protagonist and its elemental conflicts verge closer to “Conan the Barbarian” territory than perhaps is ideal. Eggers’ film is only fitfully enchanting and squanders its mean momentum.