A.A. Dowd

This stunt-driven nonfiction project rearranges the well-reported dirt on the church, placing it into the context of something considerably less useful: a documentary about how hard it is to make a documentary about Scientology.

The result, unfortunately, is a movie featuring a teenage hero who spends most of his screen time watching from the sidelines, passively observing events that just sort of happen around him.

For all its casual mayhem, Free Guy turns out to be a rather cuddly crowdpleaser, a high-concept blockbuster trifle with bubblegum ice cream clogging its circuits.

Despite a few deviations, About Last Night is basically the same sanitized rom-com, bearing the slightest hint of resemblance to its source material. In other words, most of the perversity of Perversity has again been excised — the Chicago too.

The film still feels more like a game of cards with a stacked deck than a story that demanded to be told.

Una demonstrates that when it comes to the staginess of stage adaptations, the cure can be worse than the disease.

Like the "Conjuring" films, Annabelle: Creation is a symphony of cheap tricks; its scares are strictly of the funhouse variety, not the keep-you-up-for-days kind, but they’re executed with precision and panache.

Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.

A Glitch In The Matrix unfolds as a flood of exposition and conjecture, accompanied by a gaudy infotainment montage of video-game footage, movie excerpts, and computer-animated recreations.

All the comic-book elements are accents; what we’re really watching is the highly conventional, highly familiar tale of a good guy trying to extricate himself from a bad situation, the life of crime he’s fallen into to provide for his family. There is a formula here. It’s just had a Tony Stark suit of armor thrown on top of it.

Much of the first half of the film plays like a straight drama, establishing the conflicts simmering between two couples on a weekend getaway. This setup is so credible, in fact, that it’s doubly disappointing when the thriller elements do finally materialize and then promptly fail to thrill; it’s as if someone snatched the remote and changed the channel to a half-assed slasher starring the same characters.

There’s a certain muddled ambivalence to the movie; one gets the impression that Reichardt is more interested in these people than their ideas, but she never quite cracks Josh, who’s much more impenetrably aloof than the beleaguered travelers of "Meek’s Cutoff", her masterpiece. Night Moves is a portrait of outsiders that leaves its audience on the outside.

For all its virtuosic showboating, the film belongs as much to its screenwriter, Damien Chazelle, as it does to its director, Eugenio Mira.

In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease.

Enemy dives into material Villeneuve has described as “personal.” But it’s hard to see much more than platitudes in the metaphoric muddle of its plot.

From the sincerity of the lead performances to the cartoonish gore offered by Werewolves Within director Josh Rubenn. There are much worse ways to spend Valentine’s Day than a genre cocktail for saps and gorehounds alike.