As a 20-minute short or even a 50-minute TV program, London Road might maintain its sharpness and its potency, but as a feature film, its cleverness wears a bit thin and its messaging gets too overblown.

Nothing feels remotely fresh, let alone savage or zany in The Wild Life. It’s a dull, uninspired and frantically tedious animated re-telling of the Robinson Crusoe story, complete with a menagerie of ditzy, caterwauling beasts.

The performances are dedicated, but the camaraderie feels perfunctory, outside of a few ruminative exchanges between Hawke and Washington.

She’s a woman gamely surviving the pitfalls and pratfalls of her own desperation and insecurities, and Zellweger creates a hugely sympathetic character.

While Hacksaw Ridge is undeniably made with great care and skill, for all of its good intentions it can never refute that famous Truffaut observation that making an anti-war film is essentially impossible, since to portray something is to ennoble it. In celebrating this legendary pacifist, Gibson and company ennoble the hell out of violence.

It’s a wealth of information The Ivory Game vitally offers, and action it means to incite. That may well be enough to get audiences involved.

The story of a woman dismissed by those around her who asserts herself through art testifies to the indomitable power of creativity. Why turn that compelling story into a predictable romance?

Una keeps drifting away into flashy and superfluous details.

It’s a humanist film; it’s about people, and it’s got a pulse. It presents characters as idiosyncratic, domineering, but mostly fearful — timid creatures ambling through life in the hopes of finding refuge.

"Louis Drax” is a curious melding of sensibilities, as eager to show off its mysteries as it is to neatly resolve them. It’s a pleasant enough reverie, but one from which you won’t mind waking.

Sully, an honest, skillful rumination on what makes a hero, is just one more example of how Eastwood, having directed movies only slightly longer than his protagonist had been flying planes, is still a masterful pilot himself.

Instead of a film that’s gleefully outlandish (see: “Sausage Party”), Yoga Hosers is a drag. It contains none of the vivacity of “Clerks,” “Mallrats” or “Chasing Amy,” and plenty of references to those days of yesteryear. It’s a cannibalization of all that we once loved about Smith and his movies.

Nocturnal Animals packs a real punch and confirms that “A Single Man” was no fluke.

White Girl wants credit for its provocations, but it’s not provoking us towards any particularly insights, just pointing out that white privilege exists and then calling it a day. It’s “Woke af: The Movie.”

It’s not impossible to give audiences both a puzzle-box narrative and an exploration of life choices and what it means to be human, but the balance just doesn’t play here.

The musical is as malleable and eclectic a genre as any other, and Chazelle reminds us how effectively it can be applied to intimate moments as well as huge ones.

It’s a grand, old-school saga full of sacrifice and betrayal and loss, and just when the audience is gearing up for a powerfully tragic resolution of the kind that Thomas Hardy might have written, the movie veers off into Nicholas Sparks territory instead.

The truest test for unrepentant treacle like this is to imagine how invested one would be if Lewis weren’t headlining his first movie in 20 years.... The answer is, barely invested at all, considering how simplified and pandering is Noah’s approach to issues of grief, aging, and family dynamics.

Whatever its flaws, this is a rare genre movie that allows two women — both Mara and Taylor-Joy are coolly riveting, particularly when they’re playing off each other — to take center stage in both the drama and the action, both of which get pretty intense.

Even flashy, grumpy Jones can’t act like a defibrillator powerful enough to crank this generic movie into competition for Statham’s better solo outings.

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.

The Intervention is a movie whose small moments are worth savoring even when the big ones don’t come off as intended

The Sea of Trees is a movie about guilt and grief that elicits just that in its viewers: guilt and grief. Because for every ephemeral moment to admire in Gus Van Sant‘s latest film, there are about a half-dozen more that make you wonder what went wrong.

Don’t Breathe makes a striking first impression but overstays its welcome.

For all its presidential trappings, the movie is most powerful as a straightforward romance with two endlessly charming black leads, of a kind that, as far as movies go, is outrageously rare.

Unfortunately, the new biopic Hands of Stone...is too often content to play like a lot of other boxing flicks instead of forging its own path.

It’s a story of closed borders in Europe, and foot-dragging immigration bureaucracy in safe countries, together spelling ruin for countless displaced victims.

The star’s transformation from nebbishy office kid to a frankly imposing skinhead street soldier is unsettling and impressive.