Being played by Gregg himself makes the transition more organic than it was for Rockwell in "Choke," but it still rings false.

Though How to Be Single marks progress from the standard genre narrative and gives Alice in particular a chance to be herself, it’s not a clean win. But I certainly had fun getting dirty with it.

The Man in My Basement is a slow burn, to be sure, and though things come out fully cooked, there’s little flavor and more flash than sizzle.

For the Plasma immediately throws its viewer into the deep end. Unique beyond measure, its mumblecore, indie affectation is contradicted by a bold ambition in the form of big, complex ideas which don’t always make sense in reality, but pave the way for some interesting insights.

Makes sense as a picture focused on spectacle. The story almost seems secondary to the flights of fancy.

While the sexuality is pushed far too far for mainstream audiences, it's also true that Noe's conception of sentiment and romance pulls the film back from being truly transgressive about its gender or sexuality politics.

Surge takes pointlessness to a whole ‘nother level: cruel, empty, airless; a glass storefront with nothing to see inside.

Ultimately, it’s hard and a bit pointless to nitpick Jack The Giant Slayer because it never sets out to be or presents itself as anything more than a slightly beefed up fairy tale.

Even if the movie is based on an existing property, a beloved French graphic novel, as a producer and designer, Besson should be lauded; ‘Valerian’ is out of this world. But next time, he might want to reread the comic for its characters, checking the little word bubbles to see if there’s actually something there.

With a bare minimum amount of suspense, and a screenplay that needs too much work for one that has so many long stretches of silence, this film leaves you with too many reasons not to care about it.

There is some fun to be had with Bird Box. Despite its sporadic eye-roll moments, the film is charming. It’s the epitome of a rainy day movie – a flick that you can watch wrapped in a blanket with a hot cup of cocoa when it’s too dreary to leave the house.

Song of Back and Neck is worth a watch—even if you’ll scratch your head more often than you’ll laugh.

Snitch is just a big, dumb, ugly-looking waste of time, one that turns one of cinema's most charismatic heroes into a restless drone. As they say in the joint: snitches get stitches. But Snitch deserves to be put down for good.

Project Power, especially from these “Catfish” and “Paranormal Activity” filmmakers ultimately feels like a big let down— a captivating idea about the way the system preys on the disadvantaged and the constant exploitation and appropriation of black and brown voices, that fizzles out fast once the high of its concept wears off.

Hollywood has been showing people hanging off of things for over 100 years, and if that’s something you enjoy, Skyscraper is the pinnacle of this trope, forcing The Rock to dangle, hang, and swing at insane heights above the street time and time again. This is the MO of the whole movie, taking things that have worked before and pumping them up to The Rock-sized spectacle; it’s not too original but it provides what it promises.

The Face Of Love has splashes of brilliance without and within its overtly saccharine story.

The film is almost unrepentantly nasty towards its characters.

Taurus may not reach the existential heights of “Last Days,” but it’s a step in the right direction for Sutton and a continued reminder that Baker needs more roles that reflect his skill set.

In a Relationship lays out the director’s talents (working with actors and crafting tone) while also showcasing the areas where improvements can be made.

Full of humor and humanity, Nobody Walks is an emotionally complex, acutely observed and sensual film.

As prophetic as it is provocative, exploring dysfunction, in a recognizable but no less satisfying way.

For a movie that is all about accumulation, it adds up to very little, and for a story all about connectedness, 11 minutes, intermittently enjoyable though it may be, never connects.

Beyond Dumbo’s cuteness (which was so overwhelming that I now want a baby elephant for a pet, which is surely not the point of the film) and Keaton’s perfectly over-the-top performance, there’s little to latch on to in this Disney film. It throws so much at the audience that nothing really sticks, leaving such a small impression for such a big movie.

Mixing equal parts of “The Hangover,” “Very Bad Things,” and “Bridesmaids,” Rough Night is a comedy cocktail that goes down easy. It adheres a bit too closely to the recipe established by its predecessors, but it works well enough to keep the audience laughing.

An unremarkable but solid genre exercise, one that shows off Jackie Earle Haley’s chops as a director.

There are some well-shot fights, even some decent use of weaponry to further ramp up the intensity a bit, but for a movie that wears its action ancestry fully displayed on its sleeve, more was expected.

Peter Rabbit isn’t without its odd delights, and while it won’t serve as the definitive version of Potter’s adoring, timeless creation, Gluck’s film may find a way to burrow into your heart.

Try as the filmmakers do to conjure a restorative kind of magic in its searching, yearning storyline of renewal, they are not able to come up with much more than a limping comedy about a woman with all-too-easily-explained mental issues.

The cast does its best with what they’ve got but only so much can be done. The mission might be complete, but it’s hard to call it a success, and there were undoubtedly casualties.

Is it fair to make Woman in Gold representative of the failings of the whole historical-true-story-designed-to-remind-an-older-skewing-middle-class-white-audience-that-people-have-triumphed-over-adversity genre? Perhaps not, but as one of its most egregious and fallacious examples, it's as good a line to draw in the sand as any.

It’s rare that we need two of essentially the same film, rarer than rare, but “A Man Called Otto” has earned a space in the list of worthy remakes for its big heart and emotionally charged performances that don’t skimp on the comedy.

It’s successful in its aims and will ably bring the book’s readers and romance fans both joy and tears.

Ultimately, it’s hard to figure out exactly what movie Anvari was trying to make.

It feels too thin too often and a missed opportunity when it comes to tapping into the franchise’s deeper emotional legacy. The journey could have taken us to worse destinations, but this feels like a good place to stop.

Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town is a well-made showcase for its talented star. And while it doesn’t quite establish Papierniak’s directorial vision, it does hint at what that might be. It’s a fun hour-and-a-half, inessential but entertaining nonetheless.

In the end, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” remains a classic banger, but Pretty Lethal never finds any remotely memorable rhythms of its own.

Seemingly primed to deliver daffy thrills, The Accountant instead goes about its noble-killer business with all the excitement of an IRS audit.

As always, Dinklage is exquisite in a mostly silent performance that conveys the pain and survivor’s guilt Del has bottled up inside him following the incident.

In a world where the clouds are puffy, the script is fluffy and the funk is funky, it’s easy to stomach all the glitter a second time around. If you do decide to rent this via VOD, now that DreamWorks Animation has broken the theatrical window, you will likely be in harmony with kaleidoscopic visuals, not to mention a bunch of greatest hits the whole family can enjoy.

White Bird in a Blizzard is worth seeing for Eva Green’s performance alone, and to experience the dreamlike quality of Gregg Araki’s individual, highly unique vision of cinema.

Over the twenty-odd years the film covers, Saint Laurent is scene-by-scene depicted as a genius, a manic-depressive, a polyamorist, a drug taker, a mercurial friend, a partier and a terribly, terribly sensitive soul. He undoubtedly was all of these things and more, it's just a pity he doesn't also come across as a person.

Some intriguing dialogue, and a closet full of fantastic frocks, can’t help an impressive ensemble cast save A Little Chaos from being a lackadaisical picture, far removed from anything remotely exciting as chaos.

For its few flaws, Sweetness in the Belly hits plenty of the right notes, featuring a breadth of insight possible only when a filmmaker truly knows the place the story is set.

As a mainstream sci-fi film, this enjoyable, occasionally poignant effort too often feels messy in the wrong ways.

If Ritchie had been willing to reflect on his relationship to his own body of work a bit more – the tropes of British gangster films that he himself helped create – then perhaps The Gentlemen could’ve found that next gear that would’ve made it something truly special. Instead, Ritchie’s film proves he might be best served by walking away from the genre entirely.

As a film that even passingly acknowledges the disposability of stars in a genre whose artistic merits are considered negligible (if they're considered at all), The Expendables 2 is indispensable entertainment.

Interceptor is about putting on a show, and Pataky has the muscular charisma to carry it.

The gore is top-notch, and things take a turn for the better in the last 25 minutes, yet it’s not enough to save the movie, which is decidedly not good, no matter what the octopus drummer-lovers in your life might tell you.

With no unique viewpoint on the story of its own, it’s perplexing why Papillon went in front of cameras at all.

The story might play out like a missed opportunity in some ways, as it’s staggering that a movie in which Jamie Foxx fights vampires can be so set on killing its fun with backstory. But while the worst parts of Day Shift want to be cute with all of this, Perry’s movie is saved by the inner bad-ass that comes out when it matters most.

So you have The Rewrite, which feels like it had a rewrite at some point, perhaps muddying the waters of the film's larger intentions. But there's enough from both halves — the more original dramedic vehicle and the less imaginative, predictable, mainstream-aimed entertainment — to make for one wobbly, yet enjoyable movie, if you just put your guard down enough to let it in.

Despite Seyfried’s gameness, we come away a little deadened from the experience and knowing precious little more than before about the person who inhabited the body, the life and the throat of Linda Lovelace.

Even with a handful of toe-tapping songs written by Maluma and JLo specifically for the film Marry Me is an off-tune rom-com that should make most viewers think twice about saying “I do.”

Sure, there's a bit of spectacle to the film's utterly ridiculous violence. Even that dulls, however, without character or stakes to inject urgency into the parade of broken bodies.

There's a pleasing egalitarianism to the film's history-through-the-eyes-of-the-ordinary-man concept, but the script rarely makes the case that their versions are compelling enough to warrant a film.

In terms of pure pop entertainment value, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more smartly constructed, beautifully shot, pulse-pounding movie this holiday season.

Ellis ratches up the intensity to an almost stomach-turning level. It’s partially the filmmaking. It’s also the recognition of how dangerous this mortality game has become.

While it’s not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, “Clerks III” is an achievement for Smith and definitive proof that the filmmaker is maturing.

It’s easy to accuse Soaked in Bleach for many things, being a typical conspiracy theory documentary that makes many leaps in credibility in order to support its narrative being one of them, but a lack of focus is not among its faults.

It is slow and it is ambiguous but it is supremely sure of itself, as it moves, with singleminded grace from chilly to all-out chilling.

While it’s tricky to pin down exactly what Trespass Against Us means to be, it’s easy to enjoy what it actually is.

With many successful technical elements that are a perfect fit for the premise, Serebrennikov certainly made an ambitious work, and perhaps there is a great movie hidden underneath this lacking final product, but its constant return to the same subjects without any further analysis becomes quickly tiring.

It’s, unfortunately, just one-dimensional, a little first-draft-y, perhaps rushed and hurried, and never as powerful or emotional as the film obviously hopes to be.

The film is exceptionally well-made... There is nothing warm about the style, yet it allows for moments of simmering tension, broken by a few emotional explosions that shatter its well-composed surface.

I Give It a Year groans on, with unmemorable scene after unmemorable scene, each one more contingent on coincidence and happenstance than by the actual, gear-filled mechanics of drama or comedy.

For fans of the franchise, The Death Cure is a fairly serviceable finale.

For all its flaws, Last Christmas isn’t a bad time, despite being a bad movie. Credit Clarke and Golding — or that rum-heavy egg nog you should drink before the opening credits.

It’s a solid, aspirant crowd-pleaser that may not reinvent the wheel, but it proudly boasts a good enough set of them and confidently stays on the tracks.

The sloppy reveals of the third act can be seen from miles away, turning this into a low-impact actioner where characters are turned into chess pieces, and the narrative’s aim is to strategically assemble the parts like a play set.

Comedy can succeed based on either its relatability or sheer absurdity, and A.C.O.D. favors the former approach, while not entirely forgoing the latter.

It’s kind of a blast, with fully enough plot to fill a two-hour feature crammed efficiently into less than half that time in a manner that demands nothing from you except that you enjoy the ride.

Its lack of visual cohesion and bizarre finale get in the way of enjoying the whirlwind of fists, bullets, fantastical fights, and a sword with katana-like powers of cutting bodies in half. No one can accuse this film of becoming boring, but its over-stuffed narrative never quite delivers on its promising start.

What dooms Hit and Run, which, charitably, is not as generic as it's name implies, is that the film itself comments on its own sincerity.

A would-be but not-actually-inspiring movie about a landmark LGBT rights case that loses sight of the flesh and blood people at its heart, gets bogged down in tedious municipal politics and fails to find a way to compellingly dramatize an important story.

Great actors and inspired performances can only help a film so much. And in the case of “A Good Person,” Zach Braff presents another competent movie that checks all of the dramatic boxes but does so in a way that feels like ChatGPT has already invaded Hollywood.

To say it’s a step backward for the franchise is an understatement.

It's no surprise the film became a box office sensation in its native France; the characters are a delight to know and the whole movie goes down easy like a cold glass of Chardonnay on a warm summer evening.

Entertaining though it is in parts, it can’t really be said to mark any particular growth for McDonagh as a filmmaker, being both less angry and more cynical that the brooding "Calvary" and consequently less memorable and relevant too.

Fuqua’s movie, unqualified to create anything other than superficial poignancy, is empty, tiresome and uninteresting, satisfied with repeatedly communicating that if you exploit the innocent, harm the oppressed or abandon your code of conscience, Robert McCall will be there to set things right and severely punish you several times over.

Baena’s debut just never really comes to life and unfortunately lacks the bite the best of the genre has to offer.

Arnow sheds any trappings of fiction, presenting herself, her filmmaking, her relationships and her sex life in an at times shockingly frank manner. It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker embrace this honesty with such gusto (which, like life, is often painful or awkward to experience).

White interjecting its social commentary, “Snow White” otherwise tackles much of the same ideas—the notions of true love, the power of friendship, and the triumph of good over evil—but it’s all put together in a very familiar and garish package. The fairest in the land? Far from it.

Afternoon Delight succeeds mainly because although the premise is broad, writer/director Jill Soloway is determined to keep it real.

[Chan] brings energy to a film that desperately needs any kind of life, but there is only so much Chan can do.

Elusively told to the point of irritation, joyless and shot in chilly incarcerating rooms, War Story has the look and feel of an exhausted ashtray and borders on the pretentiously unclear.

As the film progresses, the narrative choices somehow become even less believable and Lellouche begins to throw everything and the kitchen sink at the screen.

It falls flat. There are a variety of reasons — one-note characters, an overly-familiar story arc, a laughable sequence of bee heroism (!). (Alternate title idea: “Secrets and Hives.”) Still, there is the work of Grainger and Paquin.... They make Tell It to the Bees watchable, and are worthy of high praise.

Lolo features long stretches of perhaps her most accomplished and enjoyable character-comedy yet. But as often with filmmakers for whom a certain register comes almost too easily, Delpy seems impatient with herself and her facility for spiky, verbal sparring and pithy self-deprecating put-downs.

It’s McAdams’ believability, even tangibly intense commitment to this absurd role, that really sells Dobkins’ winning film and makes it sing sonorously, warts and all.

There’s much to like, from Waltz’s performance to the typically rich production and costume design.

This outer space oddity is destined for the cult-classic section of some future camp horror and sci-fi B-movie aisle.

One of the most undersung and most potent pleasures of genre cinema is the excuse it has given us, time and again, to watch attractive people fall in love with each other, and if you’re in a romantic frame of mind, Racer and the Jailbird delivers so wholly on that front that it goes a fair way toward compensating for the film’s deficiencies elsewhere.

Overall, there is a fundamental lack of excitement or energy; it's a 95-minute movie that feels twice as long as "The Hobbit."

All in all, Summering is a very nice movie – sweet, affectionate, nostalgic, harmless – so it’s tempting to give it a pass. But “nice” and “compelling,” sadly, are not the same thing.

American Ultra hopes to leave you both shellshocked and blissfully stoned, but as perfect storm of aggressively repulsive choices, it’s a queasy bad trip worth avoiding at all costs.

Into the Ashes could have been a better film if only Harvey was less interested in making a by-the-numbers revenge exercise.

Jungle Cruise is a monument of zeros and ones, so reliant on CGI that it sacrifices jokes, fight sequences, and general wonder to the distracting notion of admiring how fake everything is, despite the truly incredible effort by hundreds of artists to make it appear as life-like as possible.

“Jeanne” is the passion project of a director who clearly fancies himself a humorist, yet the attempt translates unfavorably as pretentious self-indulgence.