Once in a long while, it even comes tantalizingly close to that rarest of modern film commodities -- ribald wit.

A film that appeared exceptional turns mundane.

Whoopi Goldberg can make you laugh and make you cry, and she's attractive and kind of come-hithery in her own bug-eyed way. [10 Oct 1986, p.D1]

Windtalkers is to movies what Paris is to weather -- if you don't like the show you're watching, just wait a minute and an entirely different picture will blow into view.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer and editor, pulls out nearly every cinematic trick he has to elevate Koepp’s material, but the film too often tip-toes when it should run: Every narrative and character beat feels muted, as if the tech-thriller is being apologetic for its own place within the genre.

Schreiber has one major casting coup in Eugene Hutz, the New York-based Ukrainian/Gypsy/Punk musician who plays Alex.

An entertaining family comedy full of both tricks and trickery.

In the end, a few genuinely funny moments aside, the script is simply too predictable and unvarying to earn the viewer's loyalty.

The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.

Braff's deadpan performance and dry reactions are deft, and his ability to shape a scene to a punctuation point is impressive, but he's all over the place as a writer.

A classic private-eye tale updated for a multicultural London, director Pete Travis’s noir is entirely watchable, but it’s only because of to Ahmed’s captivating presence.

Restoration is a middling thing, indifferent good, albeit much enlivened by Robert Downey Jr., who did act Merivel with the full vigour of his profession. [31 Jan 1996]

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 1981]

On the plus side, bloated narratives make for a busy action star, and Bruce is quite the workaholic on this outing, clearly eager to rekindle memories of his "Die Hard" glory days.

Most of all, though, it comes off as unsure, even afraid, of just what it wants to say about America today, resulting in a sometimes amusing, sometimes stilted lecture that indicts everyone, and no one.

Straight Time is an exquistitely crafted film, loaded with good performances, propelled by excellent direction and brimming with heart-wrenching suspense. Unfortunately, it is also overwhelmingly depressing. [24 Mar 1978]

The charming Johnny Flynn ultimately struggles to find the right tone for the boyfriend, not helped by a director who hasn’t quite mastered the rhythm required for his surprise ending.

Less “amazing” than persistent.

An exuberant mess of a movie. You despair at the mess, at the narrative and structural chaos; and yet you delight in the director's sheer infectious energy.

The spectacular Italian locations, jazzy score and vehicular action finally go somewhere in the third act, when Ritchie riffs a few stylistic conventions of the era. Mesmerizing and clever, but more style than substance.

Too busy to be boring or deeply engaging, Tarzan is an efficient Disney treatment of a time-tested story. The results aren't bad, just not quite worth a chest-pounding victory yell.

Irresistibly funny in its brightest moments. At other times, this comedy about a black-white culture clash sags until it scrapes bottom.

The film version, competently directed by Clint Eastwood and beautifully acted by Meryl Streep, isn't about to mess with a popular formula - this is a straight-up adaptation as faithful as a fawning spouse.

If the cinematography lacks the up-close-and-personal drama of "Blue Crush," it's still adequate to the occasion -- after all, like any star worth her salt, the ocean has yet to meet a camera she doesn't like.

The movie is often both smart and creepy, but it's still a novice effort. After an initially engrossing start, it stumbles through a series of implausible coincidences and murky events, barely held together by the magnetic performance of Javier Bardem.

If you’re up for mild startles and unchallenging entertainment, a trip into The Forest should be right up your alley, if not your path.

Add it all up, and Extraction’s many creative solutions to reinvigorating the genre nearly balance out its many generic genre problems. So, it’s good enough to take a shot on, especially after a stressful day of isolated modern life. But just one shot.

This is a well-crafted, Bechdel-passing film that prioritizes an intersectional female friendship, yet Lilly remains nothing but our Trojan horse into the 1980s Ethiopian refugee crisis.

The movie is entertaining on a rudimentary, never-to-be-taken-seriously level. On the rare occasions when it does rise above the material, it's because Pierce Brosnan is chillingly effective as an assassin with the body temperature of a snake. [26 Aug 1987]

CQ has a modicum of IQ and a dash of style -- the jury's still out on the extent of the inheritance, but the kid clearly learned something at his pater'sknee.

Creepy, cool and loaded with style.

Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.

Silent House is a bundle of horror-flick tropes yoked together like a package deal.

The film never catches fire, but White and Strong do their very best to give it a spark.

When Howard focuses on the head-scratching mechanics of the mission itself, Thirteen Lives excels – and its many claustrophobic underwater scenes likely play excellently inside the confines of a darkened theatre. But by the time we’re in pure rescue mode, it is almost too late. What should be the highest of high-stakes dramas arrives with a drippy thud.

Perhaps now more than ever, the Pixar folks seem to be stuck inside their corporate heads instead of listening to their beating hearts.

S#!%house genuinely engaged with the complexities of insecure, imbalanced romantic relationships, and the flawed men who pursued them. Cha Cha Real Smooth settles for a sickly sweet sitcom approach. As Andrew might sigh during a bar-mitzvah shift: oy vey.

A lascivious comedy that might have been produced by The Big Lebowski’s fictional pornographer Jackie Treehorn were he given far too much money, Drive-Away Dolls proves that there is a yawning gap between “a Coen Brothers film” and a “film by a Coen brother.”

The film’s most egregious misstep, though, is sabotaging its own best stunt: the high-wire chemistry between Gosling and Blunt.

There are multiple endings of various potency, secondary characters who bizarrely drop out of the proceedings, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the real-life tension that drove so much of the trial’s backroom machinations, with the most fascinating element of the central Goring-Kelley relationship reduced to a quick line of end-credit text.

We’re still a long, long way from the heights of animation titan Pixar. But you (parents, that is, not whichever five-year-old might have a Globe subscription) might also put your phone down for a stretch to see just what’s happening on-screen. At the very least, you’ll see which toys you’ll soon have to buy. Yelp!

The entire experiment feels limited, constrained by both unfettered admiration and nostalgia for a time that Linklater never experienced firsthand. It is a movie of limits, whereas Godard knew none.

It is at once highly watchable and baffling.

What I see is a social media influencer before social media, a person who did whatever it took to keep us looking, especially if that meant she didn’t have to look too deeply at herself.

To its credit, Heart and Souls aspires to being nothing more than a standard bauble of summer movie entertainment, funny a lot of the time, heart-warming some of the time, sad once or twice. And unless you see it in a sour mood, you will be entertained. [13 Aug 1993]

While it’s not as much of a slow-burn of psychological torture as Bertino’s original, Chapter 1 sticks to the course and doesn’t let up on its lead characters once.

[Buckley's] all-in performance is riveting, and well balanced by Paul Mescal’s quieter intensity as the Bard, making the film worth watching – but never rescuing it from the cheap biographical determinism of its third act.

The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.

September 5 splices together its thoroughly researched dramatic recreations with the actual programming ABC aired, an initially nifty back and forth that quickly wears thin.

Kuras’s film, especially the paint-by-numbers script credited to a trio of writers, seems to oddly object to such a strong spirit, boxing the character into the most formulaic of narratives.

The viewer is left feeling like they’ve been sitting in a double-decker tour bus: You’re exposed to a lot, but it’s all surface level.

The movie bites off way too much. It lumbers inelegantly between confrontations with grief and fascism. The performed seriousness of it all stifles most attempts at having fun, which makes this an even harder prospect for young audiences.

It’s a shame that both Umair Aleem’s script and Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) direction ultimately feel rote because both Winstead and Martineau’s performances are fun to watch. Their playful, natural chemistry keeps the film from dragging on and lends a necessary levity and wit to the movie’s 106 minutes.

Disney and Pixar’s latest outing delivers on some frontiers, but puzzles on others.

It is the kind of screenplay that erases itself with one minute of second thought.

The dead-seriousness with which Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli approach their subject is admirable, as is the former’s unsettling lead performance. And you won’t find another film this year that subverts the male gaze in such a brutally naked manner.

Despite its shortcomings, Beckett manages to be a semi-effective thriller, with Washington holding enough attention to get the audience to root for his titular protagonist, but the lack of character development means viewers are never fully invested in his story.

As sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.

Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is a taut little suspense yarn. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is an engaging blend of character deftly revealed and plot-twists nicely unravelled. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa succeeds. And then . . . [14 May 1990]

The performances nearly save the film from itself.

It is as if every time Forster is presented with an opportunity to do something mildly unconventional – or even, gasp, European in sensibility – he defaults to the easy and cheap Hollywood option.

Exceptionally overlong, crammed with miscast performers putting in half the effort they should, and so overly pleased with its various (and rather middling) twists that it leaps from “clever” to “pompous” in one fell swoop, Wake Up Dead Man represents a hard and rough fall from grace.

If we’re ranking those films, the latest lands somewhere between the ‘80s-set prequel Bumblebee and Michael Bay’s 2007 original, which is pretty much as good as it gets. Rise of the Beasts splits the difference between the former’s Steven Spielberg-light likeability and the latter’s alternately thrilling and mind-numbing spectacle.

Hey, Viktor!, a raucous mockumentary, is a mixed bag, veering wildly from self-deprecating humour and a downright cringefest to moments of heartfelt candour.

To give filmmaker Russ Meyer his own due, the women here are freed up to love sex as much as are the men, although it's pretty obvious his message was less directed at 1970s feminists than at horny guys hoping beyond hope that chicks want 24-hour-a-day fornication. [31 Jan 2004, p.48]

If Darshi had truly embraced Mona’s messiness, it might have made for a more meaningful, even if tentative, conclusion.

Perhaps fittingly, the directors’ big foray into Hollywood is saved by the star power of the two industry legends headlining the film. Bening and Foster are absolute delights from beginning to end.

Hausner is clearly talented, and I’m all for a film without easy answers. But I wish this one was less insistently opaque.

It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of Women Talking. It is less about what is being said here – flawed yet fierce as it is – and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.

Unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.

While the new doc was spurred by Roher’s own existential anxiety about what kind of AI-dominated world he would be bringing his unborn son into, the resulting film feels so determined to walk the middle road between doom times and boom times (hence its cheeky title) that its message cannot help but land as something almost algorithmically mushy.

A compelling, if ultimately predictable, coming-of-age drama.

Oddly enough, the movie is both sumptuous and somewhat soulless.

For all its gestures toward trending conversations about our warped relationship with technology, and the entitled boys weaned on it, Companion is ultimately just a fun genre mash-up that pales in comparison to the superior movies it tends to pay homage to but elevated by its cast.

Where Mufasa distinguishes itself is Jenkins’s eye for balancing emotion with action.

Edel's Last Exit generates visceral voltage, but the nation illuminated is the pre-unification West Germany of a mere moment ago, not the United States of 40 years gone by. [04 May 1990]

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

Although One Love is not a great music biopic, it serves as an acceptable portrait of the man.

The Fabelmans contains reels’ worth of beauty and wit, all delivered with the honest and enthusiastic drive to entertain that has become Spielberg’s signature. But you will learn more about Steven Spielberg by watching almost any other Steven Spielberg film.

It’s Dano who floats away with the most goodwill, giving Hanus a tender, ultimately haunting air despite being, you know, a horrendously frightening creature that, in a parallel universe, might’ve inspired Stephen King to write It.

An extraordinarily French story is flattened into conventional Euro-pudding nothingness. There is little here to surprise, less to even expect and still savour. The performers sometimes, but not always, outwit their material.

It is a remarkably beautiful portrait of agony, anchored by Craig’s remarkably understated performance. But it’s also a film at odds with itself.

As nice as it is to see New York play itself or watch Ahmed and Worthington run circles around each other, the entire caper is rendered unsolvable by one big, meatheaded twist that undermines everything that came before.

It helps that Quaid is so good at landing every punchline, if not punch. His Nathan may not have any sense of pain, but Quaid gives him a great sense of humour.

There is some drama here, all right. But the curtain can’t draw down soon enough.

Russell’s film is not remotely playable. Amsterdam so badly wants to be a light romp with heavy-duty meaning that it cannot help but be flattened by a sagging self-exhaustion. It is an exercise in interminable madcappery.

There is a certain charm to Shaw’s deadpan comedy – and I genuinely appreciated what I can only assume was an intentional callback to Michael Cera’s fate in 2013′s This Is the End – but one visit to the Cryptozoo was enough for me.

Álvarez eventually gets there, with the third act of Romulus impressively nauseating. But otherwise, the filmmaker isn’t developing this cinematic universe so much as he is stunting its growth.

More Tusk than, say, the goat who runs wild in The Witch. I won’t make the obvious joke and say it’s baaad. But its sheep thrills are mutton to write home about, either.

The trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

The film’s central problem is that it takes Fuqua forever to make the inevitable happen, and when he gets around to it, the entire set-piece arrives with all the refined taste of an overcooked noodle swimming in a bowl of ketchup.

Ultimately Murder Mystery 2 is the most business-as-usual kind of Sandler shtick, its only real surprise being how the production manages to pull off one solitary, very lonely surprise toward its end (it involves a quick appearance from Jillian Bell, bless her heart).

So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger.

The plot’s believability is stretched to the point of emaciation, even for this series. The comedy, which arrives on cue every other scene, is pained. And the action is now a fully cribbed and inferior sizzle reel of Bay’s greatest hits. . . Still, there are a few flashes of fun.

Nelson seems content to just swing one giant axe after another, hoping that he busts as many guts as he does brains. His intentions are naughty, and the result isn’t so nice. Even for those who prefer a little blood on their snow boots this time of year.

The film is neither heartbreaking nor thrilling, often feeling like a blown-up version of a Hallmark flick-of-the-week, its ambitions far greater than its capabilities.

Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there.