Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

As a director, Minahan knows his way around a track, but on the evidence of this film, he’s not yet ready to run wild.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

Listening to “Sweet Caroline” feels like a hug — warm and fuzzy to some, smothering to others. Watching Song Sung Blue has a similar effect.

Despite a snoozer of a pat ending that strains to bring its themes full circle, the live-action iteration at least proves that the franchise, with its notion of ohana and several films, spin-off series and countless plushies sold to date, hasn’t lost all its heft — just its original spark.

What it establishes is hard to put your finger on. It's not a sensibility, exactly; it's more of a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in the right place -- that she is a sophisticated, caring, feeling person.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

J-Lo is essentially an elaborate distraction, which is just fine as the story goes, but not exactly a kinetic position for a star.

Beecroft’s screenplay — which the actor turned filmmaker wrote after moving in with Tabatha and Porshia, off and on, for three years — is not as strong as her visual storytelling. Some of her dialogue trips over its own bootlaces.

Almost every narrative choice is ludicrous. And yet, “Mercy” is also a hoot and a half.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

The movie does not demystify a rarefied world, or paint an emotionally accessible portrait of the artist, but rather assembles a somewhat stuffy compendium of literary references and insider-y bons mots aimed at tickling theater aficionados.

I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.

Without demonizing either side, it shows how Israel’s pattern of mistakes, if not arrogance, may have helped set a pot on the stove that is now boiling over with venom.

Making memories it ain’t. But making 89 minutes of your life disappear almost painlessly has its place, too.

Too often, in a film about an ostensibly peaceful form of dissent, it feels like adversaries are being targeted, albeit subtly, when the real enemy is war itself.

It’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

The script by Nick Lepard never quite figures out how to fill its 98-minute run time with new cat-and-mouse (or shark-and-marlin, as Tucker dubs her) twists, and “Dangerous Animals” loses steam treading familiar trope-filled waters en route to an oddly mawkish ending.

The screen writers have come up with a simple-minded scenario, true, but it is enlivened with enough laughs to make up for the shortcomings.

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.

An astonishing lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence keeps Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” from falling apart — which is ironic, given that the new film depicts her ripping at the seams.

It’s a mark of creative achievement that Zlotowski’s film manages to dwell in uncertainty — about what’s really going on, where Lilian’s marbles have gone and, for that matter, why her ex is so game to chase them around with her. Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny, low-key unsettling but far from provocative, and elbow-deep in dreams and memory but without much discernible revelation.