There’s nothing particularly unexpected in Lawrence Lamont’s buddy comedy, but when it has no issue providing laughs thanks to stars Keke Palmer and SZA and their supporting cast, you can escape to the theater and have a good time rather than laughing by yourself in front of your TV.

It’s impossible to watch a film in which Jesus Christ says it’s wrong to profit from religion and then watch the filmmakers panhandle for profit at the end. At least, not without imagining the screen getting struck by lightning.

It’s a sweaty, intoxicating, all-nighter of a movie, and its allure cannot be denied.

It’s impossible not to root for President Viola Davis as she takes down incompetent, mediocre white guys who want to crash the world economy. She stares down this generic production and walks away with another victory under her belt.

Its baseline competence is perfectly watchable. It’s just hard to imagine anyone signing onto this project with the explicitly stated goal of only making it watchable.

For all it throws at you, it’s neither consistently funny nor scary enough to leave a mark.

The most accurate summation of A Minecraft Movie is probably “It is what it is.” It’s what it’s supposed to be. It probably won’t dig up many new converts to the game, but should strike box-office silver, at least. (And fans, be sure to stick around for two credits scenes – especially the second one.)

Screamboat' is not a great movie by any stretch but if Ricky Jay was editing this footage in a scene from 'Boogie Nights,' he’d have to turn to Burt Reynolds and admit: 'It’s a real film.'

The filmmakers have managed to make a bracing, scattered and somewhat revelatory look at a period that’ll go down as a misstep in which the Smart Beatle was fumbling to figure out what to do and intermittently coming up with a satisfactory answer.

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.

The word Competent! rarely makes it into a movie’s marketing materials no matter how accurate it is.

A rock musical like 'O’Dessa' only works if it sufficiently rocks, and 'O’Dessa' somewhat rocks.

There’s nothing wrong with Disney’s live-action remake of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' that couldn’t be fixed by making it 26 minutes shorter, 88 years ago and in hand-drawn animation.

So let me be absolutely, 100% clear: “The Alto Knights” is indeed a bad movie, but not the good kind. It doesn’t make you feel alive, it makes you feel dead. It’s a tedious, directionless, bumbling chore of a gangster picture, incoherently written and edited, featuring two of the limpest performances of Robert De Niro’s career.

Opus is a Cheeto without the Cheeto dust, so of course we feel cheeted.

Everything in The Electric State feels done for convenience, so there’s no tension in the storytelling or the emotional stakes. It glides on a smooth track from point to point without ever considering how narrative friction would deepen the characters and the story.

Trying to do right by Hutchins is what stops “Last Take” from playing like just another salacious true crime doc. Its focus may be scattershot, and it may not change a single mind when it comes to placing blame, but like with grief, working through the pain is never clean and tidy.

We watch The Parenting in blasé curiosity, as we engage in the purely intellectual exercise of sussing out what’s gone wrong.

A captivating portrait of a man who can’t seem to remember who he is and may not ever be able to, Duke Johnson’s live-action feature debut is an enrapturing film that speaks in this language of half-remembered dreams before descending into something closer to a nightmare.

While Landon has made fun genre outings before with “Happy Death Day,” “Happy Death Day 2U,” and “Freaky,” Drop is, at its best, never more than just down the middle. At its worst, it’s an oddly clunky experience that strands its performers with little to work with.

It is her performance that ensures every tonal shift lands as it goes from playfully comedic to delightfully dark and back again. Despite how overstuffed and unwieldy it gets, seeing Kidman work her magic at every turn will never not be a joy to see.

Jack Quaid was born for a role like this. The actor’s unassuming cheerfulness provides the perfect comedic counterpoint to the film’s increasingly absurd gross-out action gags.

May very well be [Lithgow's] creepiest performance since Brian De Palma’s “Raising Cain” — and that’s saying something.

An incredibly direct motion picture, and sometimes the limitations of its budget put a strain on the ambitious multi-decade narrative, but it’s a film — and a cast — that demands thunderous applause anyway.

Human weakness is 'Black Bag’s' greatest strength. It’s an insidiously great spy movie, mature and satisfying.

It’s a grim slog through the wastelands of human civilization, which makes a big deal about the generic parts and glosses over all the thrilling weirdness.

My Dead Friend Zoe' is a noble film, seemingly honest and open. It’s not a terribly exciting one, and it struggles to justify its modest length, but plot isn’t everything.

I’ve spent over two paragraphs now talking about the various movie trivia Cleaner reminded me of, since Cleaner doesn’t provide much other food for thought.