What the movie lacks in originality it makes up for in personality, as Kosturos brings the kind of rare alchemy to the role of Ali that makes all present feel as if they’re watching the birth of a movie star.

There are some very funny bits and pieces scattered amid the proceedings, along with a few darkly comical gags that appear to belong in a different movie, but are more than welcome here.

The new film, while just okay enough to get by, takes a step back from the audacity of “Bad Moms” to something more cautiously conventional.

An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.

Gorgeously shot, and helmed with a sense of daring and verve that belies Hamilton’s greenness to feature filmmaking, this is a debut of obvious promise, although its story never quite rises to the level of its craft.

Although it sporadically errs on the side of sentimentality and simplification, The Case for Christ sustains interest, and even generates mild suspense, while offering a faith-based spin on the template of an investigative-journalism drama.

Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

Victoria & Abdul is a pleasant enough entertainment, and it will bring the inevitable awards chatter Dench’s way (is her acting ever less than pinpoint? Never). But as prestige period pieces go, it’s far from top-drawer (more like second drawer, or even third), because its cozy lack of enlightenment is echoed in the standard but far from scintillating play of its drama.

The Commuter’s breakneck incoherence — not to mention a generally dour demeanor, shorter on incidental humor than most of the helmer’s work — makes it a notch less fun than those previous ex-trash-aganzas.

As the leading man, Chan keeps the ball rolling with an assortment of neat acrobatic tricks and martial arts sparring, but his days of life-risking physical exertion is over.

It isn’t bad, but it’s kind of a trifle. Though it treats its themes with reasonable honesty, it can’t help but come off as a bit diagrammed.

This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.

Churchill is a small, watchable, rather prosaic backroom docudrama.

It has a few traumatic and bedazzling scenes of combat, but mostly it’s about the backroom bureaucratic gamesmanship of war.

The more Dayveon attempts to up the dramatic and moral stakes of its narrative, the less persuasive it is as idiosyncratic, indigenous storytelling.

Though it mostly resists contrived “opening-out” devices, and preserves the decidedly low-tech visualization of the play’s sci-fi premise, Michael Almereyda’s well-cast film never finds a suitably complex cinematic language for its tangle of intellectual and emotional ideas.

The film would be a routine affair if not for its baroque aesthetic gestures and a captivating turn from star Abbie Cornish.

The notion of a larger-than-life theme-park world as a projection of what June is going through comes directly out of “Inside Out,” but the comparison does Wonder Park no favors, because the earlier film was a masterpiece of bursting ingenuity, leaving this one to play like the scaled-down toddler version. On that score, it must be said that little kids will like Wonder Park just fine. But there’s a difference between a great escape and a winsomely crafted pacifier.

True to their brand, Illumination has engineered another easy-to-swallow confection designed to maximize audience delight, whether on first or fortieth viewing, although this time, there’s almost zero nutritional value.

The result is a “What if?” exercise that ultimately doesn’t take its starting premise to any place that’s terribly interesting. However, for at least as long as it appears to be heading somewhere, Bokeh holds attention with polish and resourcefulness on a limited budget.

It’s admirably well-crafted within its mostly savvy limitations.

Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.

The movie is murky and disjointed, held together not so much by what happens as by a vague atmosphere of obsession.

It’s dutiful, but it’s also superficial and polite, and it commits the genteel sin of the old biopics: It turns its hero into a plaster saint.

After a taut, flinty opening that sees Huppert and Chammah sparring to quietly heart-ripping effect, the air trickles out of this sensitive but cliché-laced drama

Accomplished visually and busy sonically, it nonetheless falls short with a story of rock ‘n’ roll demonic possession that scarcely begins to exploit the ideas embedded in its serviceable premise.

At least its failings aren’t formulaic ones — or perhaps they’re the fault of jamming in more fantastic-cinema formula than one modestly scaled film can support.

It’s all quite nicely handled by Adams’ direction and his script (co-written with Jeremy Phillips), though the latter ultimately somewhat disappoints.

The film is so understated with regard to Loung’s basic predicament that we don’t recognize her driving desire...until the movie is over.

The movie feels a little too sparse and literal in places.

[A] solid yet unexceptional documentary.

Though he clearly admires the woman, O’Haver doesn’t want to let her off easy, which makes for a more nuanced portrayal than the stock canonization another director might have chosen (it would have been just as easy to paint her as a devil).

The film’s lack of a traditional narrative will no doubt alienate many, but for the more adventurous, it offers a uniquely weird take on loneliness and lunacy.

Yet for all its surface pleasures, it’s a likable but underimagined one, with more enthusiasm than surprise and, at the same time, an overprogrammed sense of its own thematic destiny.

Even as some of the supporting players and subplots veer toward caricature, the family dynamics at the film’s center remain entirely relatable.

Where the film runs into some difficulty is in sustaining its initially very promising mood of incipient violence. Withholding revelations can be an effective strategy, but it’s perhaps slightly overused here, as the result feels ever so slightly dry.

Unforgivingly rigorous to its final, exactingly composed monochrome frame, I, Olga Hepnarova shows us scarcely a flickering moment of light or joy in its anti-heroine’s short, loveless life, depicted on screen from adolescence upwards.

While art by definition must trigger certain emotional responses, occasionally there’s too-obvious a feeling of really being manipulated and stroked. Fact that Rocky gets his big chance from cynical schemers–with a black public hero as the instigator–rests uneasily at moments. Then there are occasional flashes that the film may be patronizing the lower end of the blue-collar mentality, as much if not more than the characters who keep putting Rocky down on the screen. However, Avildsen is noted for creating such ambiguities.

The real question with Rocky III was how Sylvester Stallone could twist the plot to make an interesting difference. He manages. As usual, Stallone the writer-director is less successful in handling all the dramatic interims than staging the battles.

All This Panic is more remarkable for the way it looks than the actual, somewhat banal, girl-talk content.

Ultimately, the film’s elaborately-mapped plots are unraveled in a blow-by-blow account that doesn’t give the brain much of a workout, but makes it suitably accessible for a wider audience.

Berg, when he wants to be, is a surgical craftsman of chaos. Yet Mile 22 has little weight or resonance.

Writer-producer Rishi S. Bhilawadikar’s too-busy script nevertheless scores legitimate points about the complexities and paradoxes of the visa application process, the resulting limbo in which many legitimately productive immigrants find themselves, and other frustrating and soul-searching issues facing ethnic communities.

Polina is vivid as dance but vague as drama.

Director Pete Travis’s film is distinguished by some transposition of noir tropes into cultural spaces not traditionally associated with the genre — from the London bar scene to a mosque — that keeps things from feeling too déjà vu.

Another Evil is somewhat unpredictable and nicely played, but so low-key that the comedy as well as everything else feels almost too modest for feature scale; it has the throwaway, anecdotal tenor of a droll short.

If, overall, Obit is merely pleasant in a predictable, innocuous way, it’s nonetheless well-crafted and moderately educational.

A standard-issue piece of heart-tugging reportage better suited to small screens than art houses.

Though it’s little more than a one-joke premise, director Michael Lehmann gets maximum mileage from the low-octane script by Rich Wilkes. Wisely, there’s minimal interest accorded the narrative, with emphasis on the off-kilter characters and their social milieu.

All of this is reasonably interesting, but not as dramatic as it ought to be.

There was a time when audiences lined up around city blocks to see the movies of Lina Wertmüller. Behind the White Glasses lets you revisit a bit of that passion, without quite nailing what it was.

It is entirely well intentioned. But the fair-mindedness of Lennon’s approach also contributes to a sense, ironically enough, of godlike detachment from the slivers of life and faith the film comprises.

The dialogue is dirtier than ever, and the gags outrageous, and yet, like the two central characters and the seven-year relationship they labor to keep alive, “Love Off the Cuff” shows signs of fatigue.

With its retro-video-game score and “Goonies”-style gang of misfit characters, the movie plays like a throwback to Spielberg-produced adventure films of the ’80s. And yet, the premise feels wobbly at best.

“Camera” scores more points for an intriguing premise than for its execution, which grows more muddled conceptually as the horror elements grow more prominent. Still, this is an accomplished effort that holds full attention while you’re watching it, even if it leaves a few too many questions dangling at the end.

I Am Heath Ledger is a catchy and seductive portrait of an extraordinary artist, but it leaves you wanting more, because you know it’s not close to being all of Heath Ledger.

Cretton captures the incidents of Walls’ childhood (too many of them, to be honest, as the film really ought to be half an hour shorter), but struggles to connect them to the grown woman Larson plays in the present.

What do you call a movie about a midlife non-crisis? How about tame, competent, mildly touching, and a little dull — except for Catherine Deneuve's fearless turn as a boozing, ailing wreck.

Loathe to mar his exquisite package with the least hint of vulgar commentary, Ancarani arrives at something that is at once luxuriously alluring and a little too like an advertisement for luxury products — dazzling, aloof, uncritical and fatuous.

A giant data dump of diverse archival and interview materials shaped into an admirably cogent if cluttered two-hour whole, “Caught” provides a fascinating albeit extreme illustration of the intersection between fame, greed, copyright and technology in the internet age.

What’s ultimately missing is a definable point of view which would tie together the myriad events on display and fill in the blanks which Hill has imposed on the action by sapping it of emotional or historical meaning.

While this grim story is one worth telling, it’s a pity that in relating the bum’s-rush Strzeminski got in later life, Wadja couldn’t have communicated more of what sustains his legacy as a great artist and innovator.

Smrz brings considerable gusto if not much conceptual originality to the pileup of dire crises, keeping the pace brisk and seriocomic tone variable.

Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one.

Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it.

With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.

For a film with such a narrow scope, this one oddly refuses to ask some of the basic questions that might have enriched our understanding.

Creatively speaking, however, A Ciambra is something of a step sideways for the Italian-American filmmaker, consolidating his considerable formal and observational gifts while fumbling a bit as storytelling.

Writer-director Brian De Palma's Blow Out is a frequently exciting $18 million suspense thriller which suffers from a distracting emphasis upon homages to other motion pictures.

A creepy vampire tale that also offers some clever commentary on bloodthirsty tabloid journalists. While not the most memorable of King adaptations, it’s far from the worst of them.

All the performances are very nicely turned in a movie that deliberately excludes any significant adult presence in order to immerse us fully in an adolescent world.

Bad Influence proves a reasonably taut, suspenseful thriller that provides its share of twists before straying into silliness. Rob Lowe doesn’t really project enough menace or charisma to pull off his role as Alex, a babyfaced psycho who slowly leads Michael (James Spader) through a liberating fantasy that ultimately turns into a yuppie nightmare.

Managing to transcend the formulaic plot are Frewer and Bergin, whose performances make the film work. Frewer, reunited with his “Max Headroom” director, Farhad Mann, veers from the real — and still somewhat dull-witted — Jobe to the megalomaniacal virtual Jobe without missing a beat.

Brooks, who directed and cowrote with Monica Johnson, is irrepressible but always very human.

A Madea Family Funeral isn’t good, exactly, but it’s Perry good. It combines weaponized comedy and sexualized soap opera in a way that defuses all shame.

It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.

This worthy but flawed attempt to examine an independent young woman of the 1980s was lensed, in Super 16mm, in 15 days but doesn’t appear jerrybuilt.

Frankie and Johnny is an all-star, high-gloss, feel-good romantic feature sitcom. Amiably written and performed but fearsomely predictable, this middle-of-the-road adaptation of Terrence McNally’s off-Broadway hit [the 1987Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune] invites audiences to indulge in watching beautiful movie stars play lonely little people struggling to find love.

The documentary is too tepid to generate anything like excitement or outrage, and elicits admiration more for its intentions than for its execution.

Telling the entire story of Chaplin's 88 years was probably a hopeless goal, but the biopic does offer the saving grace of a truly remarkable central performance by Robert Downey Jr. and some lovely moments along the way.

The most significant Bond ingredient missing from Live and Let Die is Q, whose gadgets still play a central role. The film also offers a few key additions, including an illuminating glimpse of Bond’s home.

Enjoyment requires denying the increasingly problematic truth about Bond: As heroes go, 007 represents a bygone notion of the privileged white man taking what’s his and leaving destruction in his wake.

Triple X posed an ideal opportunity for the series to rectify its dismissive treatment of women until this point, putting a lady on equal footing with Bond. To its credit, the film does feature a bit of screwball badinage between the two (a clunky bit about female drivers, unfortunately), but it has yet to introduce a single female character who doesn’t want to sleep with our hero.

Whatever connection Bond had to the real world has now been severed in favor of delivering the most satisfying possible experience for audiences, such as a throwaway scene of Q using an electromagnetic device to beat the slot machines or allowing homosexual henchmen Wint and Kidd to devise elaborate (and yet easily escapable) traps.

The idiosyncrasy and resourcefulness are impressive, even inspiring to a point. But at 80-odd minutes, the self-conscious novelty begins to seem stretched, enough so that you notice this clever conceit is never particularly funny or meaningful — just cute.

A film that, for all its tinniness of craft and carelessness of storytelling, gets by on sheer force of personality.

Helen Shaver, playing the lead, does a most commendable job as a character who starts by being all tied up inside, and ends up by melting and opening up to emotions she couldn’t even conceive before.

The Andromeda Strain is a high-budget science-fact melodrama, marked by superb production, an excellent score, and intriguing story premise and an exciting conclusion. But Nelson Gidding's adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel is too literal and talky.

Haaga and crew aren’t aiming for realism (let alone plausibility) in their raw-luck tall tale, but they straddle cartoonishness and cruelty evenly enough that what some will find hilarious may strike others as just gratuitously mean-spirited.

There are a lot of compelling ideas afloat in “Amnesia” that never fully congeal, but the undeniable sincerity and personal commitment of Schroeder’s vision help to carry the film over its rough patches.

Lemon is a comedy of miserablism that keeps poking you in the ribs — and, quite often, fails to hit the rib it’s aiming for. Yet it’s a watchable curio, because beneath it all the director, the Panamanian-born Janicza Bravo, has a more conventional sensibility than she lets on.

Pittsburg-based auteur George A. Romero is still limited by apparently low budgets. But he has inserted some sepia-toned flashback scenes of Martin in Romania that are extraordinarily evocative, and his direction of the victimization scenes shows a definite flair for suspense.

Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson render such startling performances in the romantic fable Benny & Joon that they almost overcome the trappings of an emotional tale that is not particularly well written or directed.

We may never know how Spacey would have been, but Plummer is easily the best thing about a film that is technically accomplished, yet a bit too mechanical in the way it sets up and executes the high-stakes kidnapping at its center.

More apolitical moviegoers are likely to simply enjoy the runaway train of action set pieces that Wu propels with his flimsy but serviceable plot, and dismiss all the jingoist chest-thumping as roughly akin to John Rambo’s stated desire to refight the Vietnam War — and, dammit, win this time! — in “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”

Watching this picture a question keeps recurring: what would Woody Allen think of all this? Then you remember he wrote and directed it. The film is populated by characters reacting to situation Allen has satirized so brilliantly in other pictures.

A by-the-playbook, family-friendly basketball comedy that never strays outside the paint, Thunderstruck likely won’t score much coin during its limited theatrical runs. Still, this lightly amusing confection — a Warner Premiere presentation that all too obviously resembles a typical made-for-homevid product — could rebound during playoffs in smallscreen platforms.

For nearly two hours of its 151-minute runtime, Wonder Woman 1984 accomplishes what we look to Hollywood tentpoles to do: It whisks us away from our worries, erasing them with pure escapism.