The picture is essentially a brief for Wise’s case. And as such, it’s as dry and uncinematic as a dusty legal document.

It’s a detective story. It’s a spy thriller. It’s a cautionary tale. And it’s true.

You’ve seen this cheery, slapdash blend of raunch, cocktails and summer dresses before.

There’s a funny, offbeat movie lurking in the details here.

Sometimes hilarious, ultimately poignant, Swiss Army Man is a picture like no other.

Engaging and constantly surprising.

If you’re partial to the Northwest outdoors, co-writer and director Alex Simmons (best known for documentaries) makes the long trip a visual treat, too. Indeed it is time for fresh air.

The casting was spot-on in “Dollhouse”; here it seems haphazard.

The biggest, baddest, berserkest Purge so far.

Much of The BFG, perhaps a little too much, is devoted to watching Sophie madly scurry away from the giants; it’s a beautifully rendered chase but still just a chase. When the movie slows down to allow Rylance and Barnhill to converse, it finds its magic.

Its theme of white man as savior of black Africans is, to say the least, highly anachronistic in these days and times.

It’s pretty. It’s empty. It’s pretty empty.

By the end, you look at the musician’s faces — particularly Ma’s beaming smile — and find a truth: through music, we can always find our way home.

A virgin, defiled. A pact with the devil, consummated. Erotomania, running wild. It’s Belladonna of Sadness, and in it there will be blood. And watercolors.

Despite promising elements of mixed-genre thrills, the film is finally the underwhelming sum of too many plot devices.

Unfortunately, it’s so ambitious that it’s constantly straining to find a focus.

It’s cheesy, but director Jaume Collet-Serra knows his genre thrills and builds layers of suspense and dread, along with some hypnotically beautiful aerial ocean shots.

You wish Perkins would have shown up with his red pencil during the screenwriting stage, when he might have done some good.

It’s Honeyglue, a romantic drama, which fittingly, given that title, is sticky with sentimentality.

Gaup deftly keeps track of the major betrayals without making them seem too obvious.

For all the witty voices and great escapes (maybe one too many of the latter), Finding Dory is ultimately a character story, and DeGeneres’ lovable, brave Dory swims right into our hearts.

The blend of Johnson’s laid-back hero-dudeness and Hart’s whippet-fast comic timing should have been good fun. But somebody, alas, had an idea, though not a good one: Make Johnson the comedian and Hart the straight man.

Time to Choose tells us all is not lost — yet. But the hour is late.

Alpha-male sparring is the name of the game in Chevalier, the new deadpan comedy by Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari. And it has rarely looked this deliciously goofy.

It’s a sweet, faintly screwball, faintly Shakespearean look at love, families and what happens when a well-made plan goes just a bit awry.

Should you decide to watch all of Blackway, a decision I cannot endorse, you’ll get to know Lillian (Julia Stiles), a determined if rather personality-free woman who’s moved back to the small Oregon logging town where she grew up.

Paula Patton, playing a half-orc, half-human female warrior, is the most sympathetic character and actually gives something approaching a fully fledged performance, but for the rest of it … ugliness as far as the eye can see.

Try to remember this movie, a few days after seeing it, and you’ll find that — like magic — it’s disappeared.