The unfortunate result is that you wind up thinking how much more you'd prefer to be rereading that contemporary classic than watching this tedious exercise.

Performances are generally competent, but nobody in the cast has the kind of presence needed to overcome Ranarivelo's by-the-numbers dialogue.

Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

This is a documentary that will best be appreciated not by fans of The Little Prince but rather by linguists and ethnographers.

To truly be effective, Angel of Mine would either have to be far better or far worse than it actually is.

Deneuve's slyly self-satirizing performance ... ensures that The Truth remains a pleasurable entertainment.

While Travolta may believe he's seriously engaging with the character, following thesps like Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn into the always-dicey enterprise of mimicking disability, his performance is all shtick and no heart.

This well-intentioned meditation of the banality of evil packs a modest emotional punch, but it might have been more powerful if it had shown us a little less banality and a little more evil.

Jaunty but thought-provoking.

In and of itself, it is a mournfully intelligent, poetic documentary that once more seeks to link the vastness, grandeur and indifference of nature with the human horrors that Chileans have lived through. The search for meaning is so personal here (Guzman narrates most of the film in the first person) and so difficult that it is often heart-rending.

For those with only a glancing knowledge or none at all, this is as good an introduction as you could want.

Precious little is revealed and one is left with the feeling that the material needed a different kind of treatment to illuminate its protagonists.

Director Lopez offers no more lightheartedness than the film absolutely needs to show that their spirits haven't been crushed by squalor; meanwhile, her effects artists use mostly excellent CG to slowly hint at how interested the world of the dead is in Estrella's predicament.

Neither funny, insightful nor moving, it's mostly objectionable for its failure to exploit the facets of Coogan's screen persona that line up so neatly with the smug blatherers who dominate the AM dial.

Friedkin Uncut is at its most gripping when it discusses two early hits, The French Connection and The Exorcist, in which the theme of goodness struggling with the dark side explodes.

Neither Gan's screenplay nor his direction of the cast quite sells this scenario, but once he introduces some accidental violence, the picture can ride the familiar logic of crime-gone-wrong storytelling.

It's all utterly preposterous, and yet Waugh handles the big scenes pretty well.

As jumbled as all this is, the film never achieves the kind of sweaty intensity of the original.

A good-natured ride at first, its limited scope grows more apparent as it goes; still, a feel-good approach is unlikely to hurt it as it begins a road-show release concurrent with the band's 50th-anniversary tour.

The plot does, finally, allow the emotions Robbie won't express to erupt in a way that threatens everything, and Kenneally's script deals knowingly with the aftermath. But it doesn't always seem to understand the characters around its hero any better than he does himself.

If the pic is ultimately an entertaining ride, it is because Sudeikis takes the audience by the hand through this very unlikely story that was inspired by true events.

Bunuel is above all a good story elegantly told.

Aquarela takes a deep dive into watery realms around the world, offering up an experience that can truly be described as immersive.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy.

Richard Linklater's 19th feature becomes compelling in its final act, but before that too often appears tonally addled and dramatically dawdling.

Ready has a fine time with its setting (the trappings of old money are much more appealing here than they were in Netflix's Murder Mystery), and Weaving is sharp enough to play things straight as the ensemble around her goes for the occasional laugh.

Set disbelief aside, and primal phobias may well suffice to get you happily to the other side of this adventure.