Andrew Barker

As an indictment of Wall Street chicanery, it’s largely toothless; as a pure thriller, it only quickens the pulse once or twice; as a conspiracy saga, its central mystery falls flat. Yet somehow the film hangs together surprisingly well.

Plenty entertaining and occasionally very funny, “Ninjago” nonetheless displays symptoms of diminishing returns, and Lego might want to shuffle its pieces a bit before building yet another film with this same model.

As handsome as his compositions are, Eastwood’s filmmaking simply doesn’t have the snap or the feel for rhythm that the script’s rapid-fire theatrical patter requires, and the relative dearth of prominent musical performances turns what could have been a dancing-in-the-aisles romp into a bit of a slog.

An impressive yet drama-less concoction that can’t totally disguise its slightly stale aftertaste.

This is a shaggy, easily distractible film that consistently defies expectations to both charming and baffling effect.

This earnest, slight romance doesn’t generate enough sparks to overcome the anxiety of its obvious influence. But as a simple valentine to Hong Kong’s expat nightlife, the film makes for charming, breezy viewing, and the director shows promise going forward.

Humor Me manages to earn its audience’s indulgence, if never its full affection.

Fresh off of memorable supporting parts in “The Edge of Seventeen” and “Support the Girls,” Richardson gives a star turn every bit as charismatic and assured as the film is formulaic and forgettable, bringing soul, style and nuance to a character that could have easily been a condescending caricature.

Its translation from stage to screen looks to have been a bit rocky, and the film never manages to transcend its actors-workshop aura and develop into something deeper.

Most of the surface pleasures of filmic Potterdom (the chiaroscuro tones, the overqualified character actors, the superb costuming, James Newton Howard’s warmly enveloping score) have survived intact, but real magic is in short supply.

The action sequences are competently directed, but exhibit virtually no flair or invention.

Oh aces her leading role with customary aplomb, and Stewart makes for a game scene partner, but Shim’s economical-to-a-fault screenplay rarely allows them enough downtime to fully flesh out their characters.

Maria Sole Tognazzi’s ultra-sedate romantic comedy A Five Star Life is full of aesthetic sophistication and luxurious ambiance, but its pleasures are all secondhand, and the whole endeavor is too starved of incident to really stick in the memory.

A melodrama with soft-rock ballads where its beating heart should be.

Though it offers a decent enough primer on dance music history, it’s so eager to play all the hits that it never quite settles into any particular groove.

It’s hard to say whether a film this bonkers “works” or not, but it’s impossible not to admire both the craft and the extravagant bad taste behind its go-for-broke energy.

Is this all wildly self-indulgent? A bit. Does it feel like the product of a filmmaker with plenty of fresh ideas? Not really. Has Smith lost his fastball as a writer? You could certainly make that case, and the screenplay’s attempts to recapture some of the rapid-fire pop culture references and x-rated musings of the director’s heyday often land painfully wide of the mark. But there’s something strangely poignant about it all the same.

Downplaying some of the property’s sillier elements when not jettisoning them entirely, and streamlining the narrative into a rousing and at times even emotional action film, “Death Cure” is the most successful entry in the franchise by far.

Well cast and funny just often enough to recommend.

Too often plays like an earnest yet unsatisfying adaptation of a cult graphic novel, with most of the charm lost in translation.

Mercifully free of tongue-in-cheek meta-humor, Escape Plan is a likably lunkheaded meat-and-potatoes brawler that never pretends to be more sophisticated than it is.

The film’s central fivesome prove charming pallbearers throughout the film, which alternates between inspired and insipid as it hits its hagiographic marks.

Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.

Despite the indomitable Shaye’s best efforts, however, new director Adam Robitel is rarely successful in shaking the cobwebs off this increasingly creaky franchise: The Last Key is wildly uneven, confused and confusing, and it appears to leave the “Insidious” saga written into a corner yet again.

Full of warmth and refreshingly matter-of-fact sexuality, the film has its heart in the right place, yet it’s ultimately a bit blander than its subject matter ought to demand, and its chamber-piece intimacy and pileup of coincidences scan particularly awkwardly given its convincingly wide-open depiction of New York.

By trying to cram in as many explanatory info dumps as possible, Burger neglects to tend to the elements of the film that could easily make up for any narrative deficiencies: namely, a sense of place and a feeling of urgency.

The film – stately, well-acted, and ultimately unsubstantial – dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.

Rock Dog is cluttered with incompatible subplots that never quite seem to belong in the same film.

Being Charlie is far from a home run, but it’s the kind of solidly struck single after a string of strikeouts that can be just the thing to help set a veteran back on track.

Dellal’s likably chaotic direction and a bevy of solid performances make sure the film’s beating heart outweighs most of its contrivances.

Despite a thoroughly committed, impressive performance from Tom Hiddleston as Williams (and an even better one from Elizabeth Olsen as his first wife, Audrey), the film tackles the life of one of the 20th century’s most seminal musicians with all the passion of a stenographer, making for a dull, unfocused slog through what should have been an effortlessly cinematic story.

Less a steadily escalating thriller than a guided tour through a county-fair-style haunted house, Poltergeist offers some quality jump scares, and Kenan has a knack for staging solid individual setpieces. But he proves weirdly incapable of modulation or mood setting here.

Employing just about every trick from the Hammer Horror playbook without wasting time trying to make any sense, it provides a serviceable 96 minutes of standard-issue jump scares and supernatural hokum.

Though energetically shot and blessed with some appealing performances (including winningly strange cameos for theater darlings Lin-Manuel Miranda and Darren Criss), Speech & Debate never manages to make a convincing case for itself.

Though boasting a few adequate action sequences, and foregoing the more gonzo schlockiness of peer projects like The Meg and Shark Night, the film’s human characters make for drab company, leaving one with little to do but admire the scenery, waiting for dinnertime.

Attempting to naturalistically capture the hugely internal process of mourning, but rarely managing to offer much of an opening into that process, Curran’s tasteful, challenging yet ultimately inscrutable debut feature never quite lives up to the caliber of her fine cast.

The film has its razor-sharp grace notes and a seductive stylishness, neither of which can override its relentlessly adolescent worldview.

Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt substantial audiences, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in fact a moderately entertaining film, not deficient in old-fashioned costume drama when it pleases, nor in the power of being clever where it chooses, but awkward and unsatisfying.

The film never captures the bonkers, go-for-broke energy that made the ill-fated likes of “Cloud Atlas” or “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” such enjoyable noble failures, too caught up in hitting the same old blockbuster beats to stop and wonder where the story’s weirder threads might have lead.

Snyder has set a Sisyphean task for himself. That this very long, very brooding, often exhilarating and sometimes scattered epic succeeds as often it does therefore has to be seen as an achievement.

By any normal standards, teen horror flick Wish Upon is a pretty bad movie. But its badness is of such a distinct and kooky character that it can’t help but exert an inadvertent charm.

After providing some blissfully stupid B-movie thrills for its first hour, the film suffers from spectacle overkill.

Groping for grand tragedy and finding only actorly melodrama, shooting for political contrarianism but landing instead on reactionary conventionalism, American Pastoral is as flat and strangled as its source is furious and expansive.

Muniz uncovers a raft of intriguing people and stories, with subjects ranging from sports to astrophysics, gender politics, history and developmental psychology, but he never sits still with them long enough to ask any probing questions, and the film never arrives at any real point.

Viewed in a vacuum, it’s hard to fault the movie’s earnestness; Hallström’s canine cinema pedigree (which includes the superior “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”) shows through; and Rachel Portman’s score is understandably sentimental without going completely saccharine.

It benefits from a smart, snappy script and a well-rounded cast, and gives its director the chance to employ virtually every camera trick known to man. What it can’t do, however, is generate even the slightest bit of interest in what happens to any of its characters.

Rarely do five minutes elapse between some sort of laugh-out-loud absurdity, and the distinction between the film’s intentional and unintentional comedy grows hazier as it goes.

The haunted house setpieces provide reliable doses of jolts, even if one can see the scaffolding of each scare being built from miles away, and director Landon has fun with some clever camera placement here and there.

Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.

Coasting for as long as it can on the considerable charms of its star, Breaking In is otherwise a work of profound half-assedness, running through the paces of its bare-bones framework with all the verve, energy and invention of a night-watchman winding down the last hour of his shift.

Cahill gets so bogged down in hair-splitting rules and exposition that he loses track of the bigger themes.

A professionally assembled genre mashup that’s too silly to be scary, and a bit too dull to be a midnight-movie guilty pleasure.

It’s difficult to get past the film’s restless, ill-fittingly bombastic style.

Unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe’s worst film.

The film itself, unfortunately, is generally less interesting than the business matters behind it, a thoroughly competent affair that tosses in just enough off-the-wall elements to liven up a fairly basic retread of the original’s formula.

Coley’s screenplay contains a few witty references and sharp one-liners, but they often work at cross-purposes with the overall narrative drive, drawing scenes out and stretching believability needlessly.

The franchise has lost a bit of its luster with every successive installment, but never has a “Pirates” film felt this inessential, this depressingly pro forma.

Most frustratingly, the film rarely manages to meld its two parent genres at all, with musical-theater pastiche dominating the early going, and straight slasher pastiche taking over around the halfway point, and rarely the twain do meet.

Roping a game Tom Hanks into the fold as the kindly woodworker Geppetto, and employing countless digital artisans to recreate the iconic character design of the protagonist to eerily lifeless effect, “Pinocchio” is a lavish yet hollow retread that will surely give the original a boost when it arrives on Disney+ this weekend.

Runs through spy-movie cliches with such dogged obligation that it often plays like a YouTube compilation of scenes from older, better thrillers, generating little overall tension and only occasionally approaching basic coherence.

It’s essentially a hangout movie populated exclusively with some of the worst people imaginable, rarely with any sort of solid scene-setting or straight-men to provide context.

The Sound and the Fury is certainly a folly, failing to capture the weird, entrancing, often maddening ambiance of the great writer’s elliptical masterpiece, and its surfeit of half-baked film-student flourishes and needless cameos occasionally give it an amateur-hour feel.

Noble intentions are derailed by deeply confused execution in writer-director Deon Taylor’s Traffik, which attempts to marry cheap genre thrills with an unflinching depiction of the horrors of international sex trafficking, only to cheapen the latter and cast a grimy pall over the former.

A classic case of a literary adaptation capturing the high-gloss trappings of its source without getting a handle on its story or themes, The Secret Scripture is like a nicely decorated Craftsman home built on a foundation of Jell-O, with a toilet where the kitchen sink should be. It looks nice on first glance, but spend any time there, and things start to get messy.

Serenity sees a usually reliable screenwriter-turned-director take a bold swing and miss the mark completely, so intent on pulling the rug out from under you that he never notices you weren’t even standing on it.

An almost bizarrely limp, emotionless, blank greeting card of a movie, this purported romantic comedy-drama contains little of the three, at best serving as a sort of extended L.L. Bean advertisement, full of fabulously shot footage of Eastern Canadian vistas and the well-dressed rustic yuppies who live there.

This derivative, ploddingly plotted WWII-set thriller goes through all the motions of an old-school wartime spy pic with plenty of technical competence but zero panache.

This reimagining features some fun production design and a performance of undiluted bug-eyed flamboyance from James McAvoy as the titular pale student of unhallowed arts, but its reservoirs of energy and ingenuity run dry long before the finale, leaving the film to lumber to its half-hearted conclusion.

Struggling to generate much tension, the film opts for sensory battery in the action scenes, rendering gunshots as loud as cannon fire and splashing blood every which way.

Runner Runner’s appeal increases dramatically whenever Affleck enters the frame.

Sporadically very funny, mostly very tedious, and sometimes truly vile, this 18-years-too-late sequel nonetheless exhibits a certain puerile purity of purpose.

Essentially recasting “Grumpy Old Men” with the senescent specters of Rocky Balboa and Jake LaMotta, the result is sporadically amusing, with some chucklesome sight gags and crowdpleasing supporting turns from Alan Arkin and Kevin Hart, yet it’s all so overcooked that it defeats its own purpose.

Centered on characters who act without much in the way of logic, with much of its dialogue confined to clipped bursts of unsatisfying Hemingwayisms, “Dirt Music” is a fine-looking romance that never finds the right key.

The Hurricane Heist is...a perfect storm of deliriously watchable inanity and ineptitude. It may be a strong early candidate for the worst movie of 2018, but don’t let that deter you – bad movies this fun don’t come along every day.

Like many a poorly-plotted video game, “Kingsglaive” manages to skate by for a while on the sheer splendor of its visuals.

On the surface, Diablo would seem to have all of the proper ingredients for a rollicking retro Western, yet its sights are set a bit higher, which inspires both admiration for its moxie and disappointment that its script and direction aren’t up to the challenge.

The picture is still much too rickety, slapdash and surprisingly dull to qualify as a good barrel-bottom pleasure.

The problem with “Alice” is its lack of narrative imagination.

The film expends plenty of effort crafting a few memorable freakout setpieces and nailing down the logistics of its found-footage camera placement, yet it offers precious little in the way of real scares or engaging characters, and even less in original ideas.

In the end, it can never decide what kind of film it wants to be, drifting into drab formlessness when it needs to find moments of poetry, and reverting to dull clichés when it wants to indulge its thriller instincts, winding up as frosty and uninviting as its setting.

A mostly harmless yet plenty rough assemblage of musical numbers and rote chases that barely add up to a movie.

The film manages to be an often uncomfortable experience without fully embracing its own bad taste, starting with an inherently insane premise and somehow steering it through the most basic of romantic comedy paces.

A retread of such brainless, shameless lameness that it’s hard to imagine anyone begging for another installment.

The Transporter Refueled comes up strong where it counts, with frequent bursts of ludicrously implausible yet coherently directed mayhem.

Blended suffers from a fundamental lack of trust in its audience, following every unexpectedly smart exchange with a numbskull pratfall or one-liner, and every instance of genuine sincerity with an avalanche of schmaltz.

A few mildly tone-deaf jokes are hardly enough to sink Hot Pursuit. What does, however, is its tendency to belabor the laziest, most obvious gags beyond the point of reason.

Dull, flavorless, and fundamentally incurious, “The Outsider” is a clueless misfire, the cinematic equivalent of a study-abroad student showing off the kanji forearm tattoo whose meaning he never bothered to learn.

A splashy-looking yet depressingly empty exercise that is never more shallow than the times when it tries to go deep.

The film’s initial formulaic competence gives way to outright preposterousness rather quickly, hinging on idiot-plot character motivations.

Utterly witless, listless, sparkless and senseless, this supernatural actioner makes one long for the comparative sophistication of the conceptually identical “Underworld” franchise (with which it shares producers and a writer).

There may well be new and novel ways to spark audience shivers from not-so-bright homeowners inexplicably using their cameraphones to check out bumps in the night, but this series clearly has neither the patience nor the inclination to look for them anymore.

As a onetime Girl Scout den mother turned brass-knuckled avenging angel, Garner gives everything that is asked of her, from brute physicality to dewy-eyed tenderness, but this half-witted calamity botches just about everything else. Drably by-the-numbers except for the moments where it goes gobsmackingly off-the-rails, Peppermint misfires from start to finish.

So fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.

Laughs are few, attempts at feel-good catharsis fizzle out limply, and all of Murray’s most elaborate performance setpieces — especially his endless rendition of “Smoke on the Water” for tribal elders — fall embarrassingly flat.

If the drably derivative, infuriatingly improbable police drama McCanick is remembered for anything, it will be for its uniformly overqualified cast.

An exceptionally poor piece of holiday cash-in product, rushed and ungainly even by the low standard set by Perry's seven previous Madea films, yet it should be every bit as profitable.

Even when not fighting with her makeup, Saldana’s Simone rarely feels fully formed.

It should come as no surprise that “Happytime” comes up farcically short as a metaphor for racism. But its most fatal miscalculation is the decision to frontload so many of its crassest setpieces into the first 15 or 20 minutes, depriving the rest of the film of the shock value that is its entire raison d’etre.