The performances are strong across the board — all the scenes between Theron and Davis, in particular, overflow with empathy and understanding — and Cody’s writing has never been better.

A few sharp moments can’t compensate for a film that feels half-developed, and only half-heartedly told. Like its protagonist, Bad Samaritan isn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but it’s not good either.

Surely Ginsburg is far more interesting than her devotees, her enemies, or this film make her out to be.

Even as a welcome offering to audiences from a broad variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds, Overboard ultimately feels like one of the dinners that Kate assigns Leo to cook for his newfound family — a good effort with a few new surprises to spice up a familiar dish, but nothing special enough to truly transform it into more than a routine meal.

If there’s anything that Active Measures does most effectively, it’s to demonstrate the depths and the breadth of the corruption, the criminality, the immorality operating in contemporary politics.

This is a movie that notices things and people that we are trained to ignore, and you are not likely to forget it.

When films are made about straight men in this predicament, they’re often considered explorations of a “midlife crisis,” but Denis’ film poses the questions: What if crises aren’t limited to a certain age, and what if love itself is the crisis?

Even if budgetary restraints sometimes keep Timoner from fully capturing the time she is re-creating, nothing holds Smith back from making Mapplethorpe come alive again, in every sense.

It’s no easy task to find a fresh way to approach a familiar face, but D’Apolito does a wonderful job ushering us through the highs and lows of Gilda Radner’s life.

Oliver makes sure that every scene in Jonathan is slow, earnest, tidy, and very cautious, and he pulls back from anything that might be too dramatic.

If Boyd’s perspective is limited, his focus is sharp.

This is very much a vehicle for Parker, and it plays into some of her strengths and many of her weaknesses.

Though the material isn’t quite ready for primetime, Winstead once again proves herself a major player.

With Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams starring as its furtive, inflamed lovers, Disobedience has pedigree to spare. But the result feels wonky and lopsided, as if several crucial scenes were left behind on the cutting-room floor.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo move their many playing pieces around with as much grace as possible, and they offer up jolts of pleasure throughout.

This is the Sudeikis-Harris show, and it really works.

Dolezal desperately tries to align herself with absurd terms like “trans racial” in order to try to find some way of making her way of life acceptable, but she always comes up short, and it is impossible to have any sympathy for her because she is so transparently a manipulator and a guilt-tripper.

The inventiveness of the deaths is limited, and the geography of the film’s setting limits what kind of world its characters can create. The film is as barren of uniqueness or anything else compelling as the actual landscape is of foliage.

Even though they sometimes land a great joke, the troopers aren’t inherently amusing or even all that likable this time around. They’re undeniably corrupt cops, even if they are relatively benign about it. Super Troopers 2 still manages to be funny quite a bit of the time, but the word “funny” needs an asterisk next to it, warning that the laughs might carry with them a certain amount of guilt.

“More with less” is a rewarding concept when it comes to indie movies, and writer-director Peter Livolsi’s The House of Tomorrow delivers just that in a brisk 90 minutes, telling a sweet, tart, and intelligently life-affirming story of teenage friendship and outsider spirit with a supremely light touch, and a winning collection of performances.

It’s kind of hard to know where to begin with what’s wrong in Traffik, a movie where every scene takes about twice as long as it feels like it should, and the characters far too often make an escalating series of implausible and/or stupid decisions.

I Feel Pretty is an honest-to-God fiasco. Virtually every single aspect of this rigidly unfunny comedy is botched, from the characters to the plot, the themes to the core message.

It’s a sweet story about someone who doesn’t know what their story is. It’s a funny film about seriously figuring yourself out. It’s a serious film about pain, in which no one intentionally inflicts it. Craig Johnson might not have made a particularly strange film, but it’s a particularly kind one, and it’s worth loving.

At 75 minutes, the resulting feature is the definition of slight, but just winsome and optimistic enough to justify itself.

It’s a life — and now a film about a life — built from disparate strands of experience, but one that makes sense exactly because she is Grace Jones, and being Grace Jones means synthesizing Grace Jones from all available material.

The comic drama Krystal, marking William H. Macy’s third time out as a feature director, is so baffling that it must be appreciated at least for its ability to defy all logic.

Spiritual and earthy, forged in curiosity yet fortified with empathy, The Rider is why we go to the cinema, and it affirms Chloe Zhao as one of the most gifted new movie artists of our time.

Rampage is a movie that gets buried in its own top-heavy plot, collapsing itself under that weight just like the Chicago-area buildings do on screen.