Andrew Barker

The problem is that so many of its virtues feel compromised.

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.

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.

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.

Effective enough as a cautionary tale about willful ignorance and as a showcase for Will Smith...the film is let down by its confused and cliche-riddled screenplay, which struggles mightily to take a complex story and finesse it to fit story beats it was never meant to hit.

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

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 Scorch Trials offers virtually no character development and only hints of plot advancement, mostly just functioning to move a group of obliquely motivated characters from one place to another without giving much clue where the whole thing is headed.

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

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.

As spine-tingling as a number of individual scenes are, the film struggles to find a proper rhythm. Scene-to-scene transitions are static and disjointed, settling into a cycle of “…and then this happened” without deepening the overall dread or steadily uncovering pieces of a central mystery. Curiously, It grows less intense as it goes.

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.

The pic gets quite a lot of mileage out of several note-perfect musical choices...and Fletcher includes just enough odd angles and quirky compositions to suggest a slightly stranger, loopier vision for this film lurking somewhere beneath.

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

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.

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.

While the effort is admirable, the result is a bit unwieldy, casting too wide a net to really plumb its subject’s depths, and defanging some of Steadman’s acid wit with an overly busy, hit-and-miss aesthetic approach.

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.

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

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.

Well cast and funny just often enough to recommend.

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.

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.

In the end, In Harm’s Way struggles to please so many theoretical audiences that it winds up feeling like a film for no one at all.

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

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

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.

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