Marshall-Green’s directorial debut is an intriguing story centered on a flawed protagonist, and with more polishing in the second half of the film it could have really sailed.

Despite trying to be forcefully meta (McGee explicitly says he hates biopics), the platitude-plagued script and mostly mundane filmmaking underscore how ultimately unadventurous Creation Stories is.

Awash in bold colors, bright patterns and ebullient kids, director Ava DuVernay’s new take on A Wrinkle in Time dazzles its way across time and space even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

100% pure Statham, and after many years where audiences had to settle for the diluted variety it’s a welcome return to form.

The cast is just as game for the broad humor as it is for the emotional beats; the latter’s familiarity doesn’t detract from its poignancy.

We keep getting glimpses of a compelling subject, but it’s hard to know what Nichols is really going for, since he tosses so many disparate elements together without tying them into a meaningful thread.

It may be odd and insular, but it’s very much intentional. Even the heavy-handedness feels genuine.

While the film far outshines most of Cage’s recent efforts (he was direct-to-VOD when direct-to-VOD wasn’t cool) in terms of art direction and fearlessly madcap storytelling, the results are nonetheless muddled and messy.

It’s easy to forgive cheap aesthetics and a rushed finale when the middle of the flick, the sharktastic bloodletting where no character is safe, is such a hoot.

A big heart and strong cast go a long way towards elevating its prosaic approach.

The film is stuffed with so many plot strands and so many different genres (sports movie, YA rebellion movie, bounty-hunter movie) that it never gets moving.

A day can be mind-numbingly dull or fate-alteringly momentous. Person to Person expresses this duh statement with scarcely more wisdom, nuance, or emotional pull.

It fills up the uncharted territory between parody and pure fan service with a guileless weirdness that the biopic genre never knew it could accommodate but, in a post–“Walk Hard” world, could stand to emulate.

If all you want is another Beverly Hills Cop, here it is. If you want a great new Beverly Hills Cop, keep waiting.

It’s the movie equivalent of a multi-course banquet of colorful foams: wisps of flavor emerge here and there, and admiration reigns, but in the end you’re unlikely to believe you’ve actually had a meal.

Phoenix’s transformation from a scotch-soaked pile of tweed into a homicidally self-righteous ubermensch is fun to watch, but Allen too frequently loses sight of the story he’s telling.

It’s a quiet, eccentric comedy-drama about artistic inspiration that won’t knock your socks off, but it has its own awkward charms about how artists forge their identity while wrestling with professional boundaries.

Reynolds has this drily ironic fourth-wall business down pat, and Savage makes for an entertaining foil.

As Katsoupis’s exhibitionist experiment teeters between prickly psychological suspense and yawing pretension, it’s always Dafoe — perhaps channeling the audacious immersion of his roots in Wooster Group theater — who mesmerizingly portrays this “Inside” job as if his life and art counted on it.

Abrams certainly knows how to manipulate, but when he does it, you can see the strings. How much or little you enjoy The Rise of Skywalker will rely almost entirely on whether or not you mind that every laugh and tear and jolt feels like it’s coming right off a spreadsheet.

It feels like an attempt to transpose the mix of thrills and prestige of a film like “Argo” onto a different true story, a paint-by-numbers approach that’s far less compelling than drawing outside the lines would have been.

Luckily, and perhaps where it counts the most, the action in The Killer is, well, pretty killer. Jang is a confident, competent leading man, slick and entertaining to watch, as gruff as he may come off to his peers and adversaries.

Generation Wealth is ultimately a string of subjects in search of a binder. And the director’s interests don’t count.

For the most part, writer-director Stephen Susco (“The Grudge”) sees the Internet as a gimmick, a way to get some attractive, disposable protagonists from Point A to Point B. (Point A is “alive,” so…).

When it comes down to it, you can’t have a strong horror movie without a strong villain. Given that Chucky is currently working overtime to torment an entire community, surely Annabelle can do more than offer up a couple of creepy grins before calling it a day.

The cynicism of Donnybrook is overpowering, but unfocused. It’s easy to see why some people would react strongly to its ugly tale of misery and violence, and yet without context and contrast, without making statements beyond “the world sure does suck,” Sutton’s film feels frustratingly hollow. It makes an impact but leaves no impression.

Perhaps the biggest issue for The Mauritanian is that the screenplay by M.B Traven and Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani tries to accommodate too many protagonists.

The original Aladdin was an innovative motion picture, heralding a new era of CG-assisted animation and celebrity stunt-casting. It was bold and exciting. The remake rehashes the original in a pleasing but perfunctory way.

The Forever Purge sometimes loses its focus, but at its best, it’s still a riveting, violent, disturbing projection of how far America could backslide into the nation’s worst impulses.

As stark corroboration that this country was built on hatred and death, Emancipation successfully rattles you, but it can hardly be described as revelatory. Still, some could argue that today, as segments of society willfully wish to ignore the past and to prevent new generations from learning about it, a ruthlessly straightforward reminder is needed.

Attempts to be a psychological campy thriller but gets so lost in trying to construct a message that all the exaggerated thrills die before even lifting off.

What Palmer is, in every sense of the word, is decent. It’s familiar, and predictable, and a little bit hokey. But it’s also genuinely moving and surprisingly memorable, thanks to its two leads.

Audiences looking for quality stories about faith and patriotism will find Indivisible to be a thoughtful and satisfying motion picture. Although it never reaches the emotional and cinematic zeniths that might make it great, it does what it sets out to do, by offering hope and guidance to audience members who need it. And that’s kinda great in itself.

I guess when you take something that works and make it work slightly less, it still kinda works.

The consistently disjointed ensemble dramedy She Came to Me never settles on a sensible tone to match its anxious, but well-meaning characters, most of whom are neither so ridiculous nor so tragic to be either laugh aloud funny or convincingly dramatic.

While the film sometimes struggles with disparate tones, it’s a solid, subtle drama that opts in most cases for restraint over excess.

It’s a meandering experience defined by the broadest of narrative strokes, cardboard cutout characters and musical numbers that start fun before growing more oddly obligatory in nature.

The Amazing Maurice just has a frustrating way of making smart ideas seem uninspired and funny jokes not funny. It’s all in the execution, and the executioner has their hood on backwards and keeps swinging the axe anyway.

Where Anderson went to great lengths to address some salient topics in his novel — like colonialism, the American healthcare system, and the obsolescence of the working class — Finley’s “Landscape” lacks the worldbuilding necessary to make any such strong connections. This could be a scathing indictment of our country’s growing class divide. Instead, it’s a nice-looking, entertaining movie that conveniently pulls its punches.

The unfunny, unmoving, and uninspired Penguins never persuades us of its need to exist. Sure, there's a muddled lesson at the end, as tacked on as a Post-It on a piece of week-old cake.

Perhaps a little too slight to be memorable in the long run, this sensitive and charming tale reassures without, somehow, completely ignoring reality.

Mr. Edwards has given his film a strong narrative spine — depicting years in the life of young Abraham Lincoln as his family suffers and strives to succeed in Indiana — with such committed actors bringing life to the tale that the audience can't help but be engaged even as the staid, stark visuals keep viewers at arm's length.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is just good enough to make you painfully aware of all the ways it's not good at all.

What’s at play here is how sex and the sexual impulse can unleash destructive forces, and Roth enjoys conveying that destruction visually as he lets the ladies loose all over this bourgeois house.

Hoult’s charm and sweetness is tempered by Cage’s showy, maniacal performance as Dracula and it’s frustrating that there aren’t more scenes where the two just play off each other.

That you may learn a good deal about an unusually driven man, but never quite feel emotionally connected to him, means Ross has hit a workmanlike middle, crafting a handsome textbook more than a blood-pumping portrait.

It feels like Dunham hasn’t progressed much after all this time.

As directed by Ari Sendal (“The Duff”), the film keeps its low-key, harmless energy at a steady simmer. Every once in a while a joke is funnier than you might expect, or a monster looks surprisingly spooky, but overall this is a safe, by the numbers Halloween family film.

Jonathan Jakubowicz’s drama doesn’t add as much to the beyond-crowded World War II genre as it could despite the genuinely compelling true story on which it’s based.

It’s surprising that this effort from Clooney is as flavorless and unrooted as it is, because his better directorial turns are the ones grounded in character more than style.

There are times you even wonder if Cage and Dafoe should have switched roles. But the true identity swap tragedy is within Schrader, the filmmaker having substituted his trademarked thoughtful approach to unacceptable men with a cheaper, imitative brand of cartoony bleakness.

“The Devil Made Me Do It” opens with a disturbing sequence, set in 1981, that stands as the scariest part of the supernatural saga to date. That’s not to say that the nearly two hours that ensue are devoid of tension and well-paced jump scares, but the sheer chaos and malevolence on display right out of the gate are unmatched elsewhere.

Sadly, the film is a tedious and erratically cut caper, whose shape-shifting story feels like an uneven and over-plotted rehash of various recognizable films that we’ve seen before.

It’s honest about the deception that is inherent to celebrity, confronting us with one compromise after another, building to a pitch-perfect finale needle-drop over a captivating monologue that elevates the comedy into a work of grand, messy ambition.

There may be nothing new about America Underdog, but it’s still good enough, as far as non-perishable comfort food goes.

Cutting through the thick curtain of recycled lovey-dovey remarks and the proficiently dull craftsmanship of the production, Richardson’s radiant charisma acts as a lifeline. One would be hard-pressed to find a moment where she is not earnestly committed to the role’s convincingly bittersweet shtick.

Deep Water offers so many tawdry delights along the way that its flaws aren’t dealbreakers. Affleck and de Armas might not have lasted as a couple off-camera, but as co-stars, they’re a potent combo.

Detective Pikachu slogs, and its joys are fleeting, like a battle with a wild Mewtwo that you just can’t seem to catch.

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, Atropia is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism without authentically skewering or even poking at any of them.

You can think of The Quarry as a subtle thriller, but it’s more of a meditation on guilt, forgiveness and redemption in the West.

If you ever wondered what Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy would be like without the insightful writing, sharp directing and intuitive performances, Long Weekend will pretty much fill the bill.

Attractively made, good-hearted, and more than a little redundant even as it's trying a little too hard, Earth to Echo nonetheless will hit the sweet spot for parents looking for innocent PG-rated entertainment for their kids in a summer full of PG-13 spectacle and mayhem.

Most elements of Samba sound mockable, and are. Yet it does have oodles of charm, plus a cast of characters that feels like an impromptu family circle.

Director Gurinder Chadha (“It’s a Wonderful Afterlife,” “Bend It Like Beckham”) attempts to explore the cataclysmic human costs of the Partition without humanizing any of the Indian characters. And so we’re offered, on the 70th anniversary of the Partition (give or take a couple of weeks), another film about how brown suffering makes nice white people sad.

This is the kind of screenplay that offers juicy opportunities for actors, and Zendaya and Washington leave nothing on the floor.

Keaton’s terrific, and it’s sweet and airy and so unhurried you really feel like you’ve had a nice afternoon in the long grasses and cool breezes on the edge of the city.

Niche as some of the situations Arango poses are, his movie is the rare work of art that viscerally understands the immigrant experience but is cerebral enough not to oversimplify it, allowing it to appear messy and imperfect, and all the more truthful for it.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk winds up being a wearying experience, not because of its emotional content but because of its lack of cohesion and its ultimate collapse into gross and unearned sentimentality.

You, Me & Tuscany delivers the rom-com meat and potatoes: The beats, the scenery, and the great-looking people consumers expect. But it’s strictly fast food, when the sun-kissed Tuscan countryside, with its porcini, pecorino and Cinta Senese pork was there to savor with a nice chianti.

The Hollars feels so painfully familiar and so dramatically undernourished that even the great Margo Martindale can only do so much with this cliché-riddled script.

Despite the impossible stakes of their situation, the crew’s acts of backstabbing and self-sabotage feel curiously lifeless, bogged down by a completely unnecessary instance of on-the-job romance that comically comes out of nowhere. Though, in fairness, the ensemble gives it their all with committed performances.

Neither intelligent enough to be involving nor fun enough to be trashy, this is a movie that would only work if it were a little worse or a lot better.

Which version of the film each viewer sees will be a subjective choice, of course, but the fact that the lead character is so utterly guileless and innocent and kindhearted...makes Katie less a victim of the world and more a victim of first time writer-director Wayne Roberts.

Even though the conspiracy theory that NASA faked the moon landing is deeply and depressingly cynical, there isn’t an ounce of cynicism in Greg Berlanti’s sweet, comical and joyous film. “Fly Me to the Moon” uses great screenwriting and good old-fashioned star power to bring a far-fetched concept back down to Earth.

Even a better political satire would have a hard time keeping up with the bizarrely eccentric vaudeville currently taking place on cable news, but Our Brand Is Crisis can’t even come close.

Alone Together frequently hints at Holmes’ gifts as a storyteller, so it’s disappointing that she has a proclivity for romance-novel fodder. If she could have workshopped the script somewhere and honed in on authentic feelings outside conventional narratives, she has the potential to be taken more seriously as a filmmaker.

While Thomas and Eyre slip occasionally into feel-good vibes, they ultimately leave intact his narrative’s essential anger about the bureaucratic threat to community health care.

It’s a valiant effort from Berry, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark, weighed down by a formulaic script, uneven fight direction, and little depth in exploring how a female fighter’s experience might change when a role written as a white, Irish woman is played by a Black actor.

The wispy depression drama A Mouthful of Air floats more weighty ideas about mental illness and suicidal ideation than its episodic narrative can accommodate.

Ultimately, American Chaos isn’t bad, it’s just kind of too late to do any real good.

If audiences expecting a cute penguin movie are forced to engage with the fact that any government which abducts people for having different political views is evil, and that everyone must do everything in their power to stop that miscarriage of justice, then nobody can say 'The Penguin Lessons' isn’t at the very least well-timed.

Monstrous offers a strong premise and some fresh twists, particularly in a genre where gimmicky filmmaking has prevailed.

“Extremely Wicked” winds up a thought-provoking piece of cinema that avoids the easy temptation of shock value in favor of a more philosophical take on a diabolical murderer.

Sadly, I’d rather watch any of Smith’s fake movies than The 4:30 Movie, because at least they seem enjoyably weird.

You could argue that Sorrentino is treading water after the deeply personal explorations in “The Hand of God,” but these are rich and mysterious waters to tread. “Parthenope” is a work of casual mastery; you could say that it’s great and it’s beautiful.

It’s a sweeping, sweet and unique romance that works across different mediums to deliver something thoughtful that isn’t afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve.

Blackhat is such a massive fiasco that it’s hard to know where to begin analyzing it.

There’s no question that Elba is a talented actor, but his debut on the other side of the lens falls a bit short. Director needs to make decisions to get a story across, and Elba appears to have been too shy or too reluctant to make them. Yardie suffers for it.

Out-pranking the prankster, [Berman] turns a documentary about an unpredictable subject into a meditation on what it means to make a documentary about an unpredictable subject.

Part unlikely friendship tale and part potpourri of genre tropes orchestrated as a parade of red herrings, this debut feature takes on modern culture’s blatant disdain of aging and veneration of youth. ... Greatly entertaining.

A movie about identity that doesn’t know its own identity, Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf starts in the wilderness, and pretty much stays there as it tries to tease sympathetic human drama out of the singularity known as species dysphoria, a condition in which people believe themselves to be not human, usually an animal.

Little Boxes has good intentions if not the subtlest delivery.

This feels less like a movie and more like one of those reunion specials where the cast of a beloved old TV show returns to play their characters again, recreating their pratfalls and repeating their catchphrases.

As a vehicle for Shaye, a veteran character actress getting the most screen time she’s ever been given, it’s a blast to watch her anchor this atmospheric look at the personal costs and triumphs of devoting your life to duking it out with nasty presences from the other side.

While the provocative title promises a film that will reveal new information about the infamous Koch brothers, there's little on display here that regular viewers of “The Rachel Maddow Show” won't have already heard.

It comes across less like an actual documentary you would show to a curious audience than a good-job-everyone piece of internal documentation you’d screen at a company party or to potential outside investors.

You’re grateful for the time spent with a genuine epic of ideas and rueful that such heady themes weren’t more fully explored in a better film.

Boulevard consistently evokes the road not traveled, but doesn’t particularly stand out alongside other dramas that have explored the same terrain.