Chris Klimek

Critic Chris Klimek offers a remembrance of the late illusionist, author and actor Ricky Jay, for whom he worked as a personal assistant over a decade ago.

The sequel to 2015's winning overhaul of the venerable Rocky franchise is "is a more listless and ordinary film than Creed by any measure, but still a rewarding one."

Director Luca Guadagnino follows up last year's Call Me By Your Name with a "punishing" and "confounding" remake of Dario Argento's beloved horror film about a dance troupe of witches.

Tom Hardy fully commits to this "limp-but-not-enervatingly-awful" anti-(super)hero horror-comedy that doesn't make a lick of sense.

Director/co-writer Shane Black's attempt to infuse snappy dialogue and dark humor into the alien-hunter franchise works until it, suddenly, doesn't. Blame a mess of a script and cheap-looking effects.

The director of Taken tries out the formula with Jennifer Garner, but the result is a "desultory drag" of cliched emotional stakes and dark, muddy action scenes.

Mark Wahlberg plays a CIA operative trying to extricate a mysterious informant (Iko Uwais) from a fictional country in this disjointed film that underuses Uwais and overuses Wahlberg.

It's a "somewhat self-aware, mildly sci-fi tinged, numbingly unimaginative watering down ... of a genre landmark, relocated to Asia and aimed squarely at the world's largest movie market: China."

Kate McKinnon is dependably great, but this overlong and shaggily plotted action-comedy never generates enough laughs or surprises to make it anything more than an "August time-waster."

Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie returns to the M:I franchise with jaw-dropping stunts and set pieces, ensuring that "Fallout's sky-high thrill quotient obliterates that of all competitors."

Despite the lazy cliché that triggers its plot, The Equalizer 2 is a "reasonably well-written and (of course) beautifully acted serving of geriatric-virility violence porn." If that's your thing.

The lackluster sequel to 2015's moody and violent Sicario is missing that film's director (Denis Villeneuve), its stars (Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya) and its artfulness.

In this derivative but fitfully inventive fifth installment of the Jurassic franchise, our heroes try to rescue Isla Nublar's dinosaurs from extinction-by-lava, only to get their ash handed to them.

The revamp of the classic low-budget 1972 flick Super Fly softens that film's main character and careens between tones "like a Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado that's had its brake lines cut."

John Cameron Mitchell's "sweet, slight comic fantasy" explores what happens when a young man (Alex Sharp) in 1977 London meet-cutes a young woman (Elle Fanning) who's from ... out of town.

"There's something weirdly serene about a film that doesn't try any harder than it must," says critic Chris Klimek.

Anderson imbues this stop-motion-animated film about loyal dogs exiled to a lonely island with his signature formalism, but there's real emotion in those pups' wet, soulful eyes.

The film depicting the origin story of Lara Croft's raider of lost tombs "isn't awful," says critic Chris Klimek, "but its invasive, thudding mediocrity will make you wish it were."

A skilled director of visceral, real-world horrors, Bigelow dramatizes a 1967 incident that left 3 young black men dead at the hands of the police. The result is unflinching and effective.

Christopher Nolan's taut, suspenseful film tells three interwoven stories of a massive troop evacuation during World War II.