Even those who know Mirza Sahiba may have a hard time reconciling the way this decorous present-tense melodrama is juxtaposed with pompous period flashbacks to that story.

The plot can sometimes feel like a chaotic melange stretched too thin, but White, who wrote the Illumination avian charmer Migration, elevates the overall narrative by injecting doses of his perennial interest in the social codes of the rich. The Minions get a zany B plot that becomes one of the film’s strongest threads, and a strong voice cast keeps the film engaging and nimble.

The Ticket is underwhelming in several ways, but the performance driving it is magnetic — and helps alleviate some of the bludgeoning obviousness of a morality tale that New York-based Israeli writer-director Ido Fluk hasn’t fully figured out how to tell.

The movie probably runs on a little too long considering the lack of complexity in the script, but it achieves moments of pathos that speak eloquently to our present mood of discord, tempered with a tentative hope of reconciliation.

Something less than monumental, The Monuments Men wears its noble purpose on its sleeve when either greater grit or more irreverence could have put the same tale across to modern audiences with more punch and no loss of import.

Punctuated with bursts of explosive energy, this is a contained, cerebral film.

Though some plot elements are pushily therapeutic, they're offset by others whose novelty distinguishes Rudderless from movies of its sort.

The best two performances belong to Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell. For the film to work, though, the two best roles should belong to Tony-winning Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the title roles.

Directed with contained intensity and sharp character observation by Matthew Saville, the brooding thriller covers familiar territory but does so with sustained tension and psychological complexity.

Self-consciously button-pushing pictures like this one usually leaven their transgressions with at least a bit of winking irony, but no humor is to be found here, from the opening frames (slo-mo shots of pro-life and pro-choice factions shouting at each other) to the last.

It is uncompromising filmmaking, certainly, but also insular filmmaking that will make a tiny little circle of intellectual cinephiles very happy while leaving everyone else — this critic included — completely cold.

Silence is both the film’s main asset and its principal limitation, creating moments of suspense but also leaving us in the dark, to the point that it feels more like a gimmick than anything substantial.

An amiably clunky, unapologetically silly summer confection that nevertheless lands sufficient lethal slams to the funny bone.

Directed with a workmanlike lack of style by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and written by Kevin A. Rice without the required ambiguities to feed the protagonist’s paranoia, this pedestrian wrong-place-wrong-time manhunt through Greece never really sparks. And the jury that’s still out over whether John David Washington is movie-star material gets shaky evidence to support that case.

Individual scenes are charged with energy, tense confrontations are numerous, and Hillcoat and Cook's intentions were undoubtedly partly to tease and taunt viewers with uncertainly about where they, and the characters, stand, to figure out who's got the power and who doesn't. If it was possible to give a damn about any of them, it would help.

Jolts of humor and fantasy bring welcome texture to the romance-novel sleekness, as do the leads, who both have an uncommon, idiosyncratic allure.

An affectionate and sometimes vibrantly imaginative biographical sketch, Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards could have used more shoes and fewer people.

While it might not amount to epic animated filmmaking in terms of scope and invention, Epic, a 3D, CG adventure-fantasy from Blue Sky Studios, nevertheless makes for pleasantly engaging viewing.

We have a monotonous conjectural melodrama for the faith-based crowd that does nothing to reach out to others. It does indicate how a very important seed was planted for the blossoming of Christianity, but is banal where it needed to be charged with passion and a palpable religious compulsion of its own.

The pic musters just enough dark-comic energy to recall early Sam Raimi — albeit without the frenzied camerawork that helped make Evil Dead a classic.

Ironically, what the comedy lacks is the sly imagination and satirical underpinnings of the best sex comedies from that (Doris Day) era. Instead, exposition is poorly executed, genuine laughs come infrequently and you quickly lose confidence that the filmmakers even understand what their basic joke is.

All elements click in "Sun," a shimmering, deeply felt film.

Terse and understated, this is a spy vs. spy tale designed to minimize talk and maximize action, not at all a bad thing in movies but over-worked to near-exhaustion here.

An earnest tale about a faded rock star who discovers he has a teenaged daughter and takes her on the road, Janie Jones follows a predictable path and despite decent performances it does not catch fire.

The film’s first half is a slog as Chism sets up the minefield for Wade, with every (fully visible) mine certain to explode.

Emotions run raw in this behind-the-scenes look at drummer Patty Schemel and her drug-fuelled run with the 90s grunge rock band, Hole.

Bilal is a grand-scale, fast-paced animated adaptation that is both empowering and inspiring in its call for social justice and equality.

Reitman keeps a strong grip on all the aspects of the story to prevent it from becoming corny, unduly melodramatic or obvious.

An utterly formulaic but sweet movie that does what a crowd-pleaser is meant to do.

The result feels more like a B-grade thriller that’s been elevated by a good cast and a script with some clever moves.

An intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target.

In some ways, the thoughtful, dense script marks an improvement on the original, and the cast is certainly tonier this time around. What’s missing is the original’s evil wit, amoral misanthropy and subversive slipperiness.

What makes The Big Ugly watchable are the authentic locations and the veteran actors who bring admirable conviction to their tough guy roles.

The screenplay... seems to generally lack a throughline or focus, coasting from party scenes full of drugs and alcohol to work-related drama but rarely managing to get inside the head of the self-destructive character the designer had become by the 1970s.

This utterly toothless, glorified Hallmark movie for Paramount+ proves the director is only as good as his material.

Despite dialogue devoid of subtext, weaknesses in the screenplay and uneven performances, the story, as rendered, has a disarming innocence.

This is a laborious film that dulls the human drama at its core. Rather than pulling you into the protagonist's gradual acquaintance with his unfamiliar conscience, it shuts you out, leaving you bored and indifferent.

Linsanity reaffirms that the best sports stories originate with dimensional, relatable subjects who earn respect and admiration through their personal struggles and triumphs.

Nicely cast and made with as much conviction as can be brought to something so intrinsically formulaic.

Labine and Punch invest their performances with enough anarchic comic inventiveness and genuine chemistry to make their characters’ courtship and relationship issues funnily entertaining.

This is the sort of generic “things that go bump in the night” chiller that seems more suited for late-night cable than theatrical release, especially in an era when superior efforts have lifted the horror genre to a higher level.

A crass, clumsily constructed romantic comedy.

Gebbe has made a robust and compelling first feature, deftly shot and ably acted, especially by its younger cast members.

Given the vacuity of the script, it must be admitted that Hathaway achieves something of a triumph. She’s always engaging and keeps the character on a human rather than superhuman scale.

An elegantly confected cream puff of a melodrama, The Age of Adaline plays like an exercise in handling a preposterous story, booby-trapped for maximal ridiculousness, with tasteful conviction. Far from the bloated tearjerker suggested by the trailer, the film is pleasant, respectable and a bit dull, reining in the inherent silliness of its material and taking few risks.

Girls of the Sun (Les Filles du soleil) is at once mildly harrowing and completely over-the-top, intermittently intense yet so unsubtle it winds up doing damage to its own worthy discourse.

Clever and giddily entertaining ... Hazanavicius is smart enough to apply an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach, keeping nearly everything intact except for the language and cast.

Sensitive readers should be informed that Kuso is not for you; even those with a strong tolerance for monster-movie gore are far from guaranteed to accept its warm, clumpy bath of repugnant ickiness.

Critics will sniff, as they invariably do, about the familiar conventions of the music biopic. But the spirit of I Wanna Dance With Somebody transcends those conventions far more often than it gets weighed down by them. Anyone who loves Whitney Houston and her music will leave the film with that love reinforced — especially anyone who sees it in a theater with a wall-shaking sound system.

Despite the estimable talent on hand both behind and in front of the camera, the story never comes to convincing life and doesn’t, in the end, have anywhere particularly surprising or interesting to go.

A "soft" epic, a film touching on childhood fantasies with sturdy, unwavering characters driven to evil or good. More "Harry Potter," in other words, than "Beowulf."

Skateland is every coming-of-age-after-high-school movie you've ever seen with a formulaic plot and well-worn characters.

A Walk in the Woods serves as a terrific showcase for two exceptionally durable stars.

Bayona not only nods to the histories of classic monster movies and the legacy of original Jurassic helmer Steven Spielberg; he brings his own experience to bear, treating monsters like actual characters and trapping us in a vast mansion that's as full of secrets as the site of his breakthrough 2007 film The Orphanage.

Snowboarders are given their Dew in this nicely shot but lengthy exercise in corporate branding.

Ferrell works hard, very hard, to put the material over, and to his credit, he occasionally succeeds by dint of his boundless comic energy. And Witherspoon, returning to the sort of broad comedy with which she triumphed in such films as Legally Blonde, matches him effectively with her sharp timing and appealing screen persona.

The movie displays an almost preternatural disregard for women's feelings — call it Pygmalion, with a heavy accent on the first syllable — but the comedy is so slickly delivered that audiences may be content with chuckling over its polished surface charms.

Managing to avoid facile sentimentality, the story grows emotionally more and more engaging thanks to Moretti's impeccable comic timing and neurotic acumen.

If one thinks of "Babel" minus the melodrama and histrionics, you get a clearer picture of what Moodysson has done here.

Although at times the film gets bogged down in psychological murkiness, the relentless pace and brooding charisma of its star overcomes its narrative deficiencies.

This meta-theatrical attempt at creating a comically subversive film is far too self-indulgent to provide insight into its important themes.

An old-fashioned, Robin Hood-style revenge tale that favors self-serious storytelling over action and suspense, Arnaud des Pallieres’ Michael Kohlhaas provides a few quick thrills and some beautifully photographed landscapes, but never really convinces as an intellectual’s swords-and-horses period piece.

A technically polished but mostly unmoving example of a genre (the watch-kids-do-something-hard doc) assumed to be inherently charming.

So much better than one would expect for a fifth installment in a franchise, this tribute to female friendship and girl power is a kick.

Debuting directors Damon Maulucci and Keir Politz have a better sense of storycraft than the filmmaking on display.

Though cheerful and highly polished, the doc's storytelling is less effective than it might've been, a failing balanced by the likability of its lead characters and the scrappy spirit of their project.

It's a wonderful idea with good crowd-pleasing potential and, had the story-telling been more credible, this could have been a major coup for all concerned.

Hit man thrillers are a dime a dozen, but director Dru Brown's Aussie variation on the familiar genre takes some seriously clever, nasty turns.

It's in the accelerating spiral of crime that the weaknesses of the script and direction become hard to ignore.

Eric Hannezo’s debut feature showcases some skill in the craft department, but remains a strictly B-level enterprise in terms of content.

The intended metaphors and commentary about the interchangeability and disposability of bodies are entirely clear, although from the evidence it would appear that Refn is perhaps even more entranced by the surface glamour of the world he so voluptuously depicts than he is repelled by it.

Gurukulam succeeds in its goal of immersing the viewer in its gentle and spiritual setting. Whether you'll achieve enlightenment watching it is another question.

Writer-director Simon Aboud doesn’t push the quirk factor; even when the narrative is at its most playful, he keeps it rooted to a lived-in reality. Mining familiar territory with an earnest clarity, he shapes a mild yet winning fantasy about hearts opening and friendships blooming.

Through it all, Ellington's performance remains effortlessly subtle and lived-in, bringing unexpected depth to the quiet play of emotion on the character's face and giving this loopy episodic tale its heart.

Rapace gives the film her all, delivering an intense, physically demanding performance, but Close doesn't get close enough to transcending its action-movie clichés.

There's little in terms of the tension associated with police thrillers, but it's also not a socio-realist drama or a character study, instead echoing parts of these genres at different times so there's a constant sense of deja vu and reminders of other, better films without the material ever really coming into its own.

While the rapport between the middle-aged Paul and the thirtyish Alice is a fascinating give-and-take — they are essentially equals because one’s lack of experience is compensated for by the other’s lack of ideas — there is no real room for either to grow or be transformed. Their relationship, while full of exchanges, is finally quite stagnant.

This Vietnam War-themed drama is one of the dullest films made about that oft-dramatized conflict.

Closely based on the director's own troubled youth, Farming is rooted in rich, complex, potentially gripping material. But Akinnuoye-Agbaje slaps this story together with so little subtlety, he ends up seriously diluting its dramatic power.

A little bit like finding an eyewitness to history and then describing everything he feels but not much about the event itself, it leaves the viewer with a sense that something very important has been left out.

The comedy never quite settles into a comfortable rhythm, and eventually backs itself into a corner so far away from any recognizable reality that it threatens to undermine the very message it wants to send.

No one enjoys beating up on a film in which the writer has invested so much of himself and his pain. But Cayton-Holland and Duplass have somehow made an authentic tragedy feel phony and unaffecting.

The lead role of a working class former smuggler who dirties his hands again to save his family fits Mark Wahlberg like a glove.

Breathe is clearly aiming for the same heart-wrenching emotional heights as James Marsh’s Oscar-winning Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. But this is very much a crude copy, its noble intentions hobbled by a trite script, flat characters and a relentlessly saccharine tone that eventually starts to grate.

With its ambitious gonzo premise, Death of a Unicorn starts off on strong footing, but it’s quickly apparent that the story doesn’t have that many places to go.

Hugely ambitious but often failing to live up to those ambitions, Terry Gilliam's long-awaited The Brothers Grimm emerges as a folkloric adventure that intermittently entertains.

The film's main draw is its cast, all of whom have seen more illustrious career days but nonetheless can still deliver the goods.

It’s a fun concept, but the feature lacks the deft touch required to make disembowelments and virgin sacrifices actually seem amusing, although gore-hounds will certainly get their fill.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a sluggish also-ran compared to its predecessor.

Self-destructs in its quest for comic outrageousness.

There's a palpable element of honesty in Lapica's writing and lead performance that gives this indie production, the edge over other troubled teen dramas.

An amusing, accomplished debut on its own modest terms, Next Door works best as tart meta comedy, becoming increasingly cramped in scope and setting as it spirals into an obsessive revenge thriller.

The gorgeous physicality is more impressive than the sketchy storyline of this dance-centric drama.

The film, with its intersecting vignettes, might ultimately feel like more of a sampler platter than a sustaining smorgasbord, but it's effectively rooted in a lovely Morgan Freeman performance.

The movie ends just when complications start to set in, which makes you wonder how invested Allen really is in the little melodramas within this comedy.

Hugely entertaining for much of its short running time before a third act that's problematic for various reasons, the film benefits from a top-notch cast and some sharp dialogue but will leave many viewers scratching their heads.

Todd Phillips' follow-up to the most successful R-rated comedy of all time serves up its share of laughs while not actually providing a terribly enjoyable time because of a queasy undercurrent that never goes away.

That the film works to the extent that it does is largely due to the superb performance by Kilcher, who imbues her starring turn with a radiance and magnetism that makes you fully believe in her character's ability to woo audiences