Andy Webster

Offers mild youthful rebellion and even milder youthful ardor.

It is Ms. McAllister who is the brightest light amid the talky, often sentimental exchanges. She lends charm and conviction to a character who might otherwise have proved insufferable.

Mr. Nakashima, it must be said, does have a knack for composition. But the torrential, if glossy, violence — he adores juxtaposing innocuous pop ditties with gruesome set pieces — grows tiresome.

It is a competent if sometimes heavy-handed affair, a mosaic of fictitious and underexplored characters who hear the assault but are too self-preoccupied to act.

The Paranormal Activity movies have always been about carnival-ride sensations, the narrative through-line secondary. That’s fortunate, because those seeking closure to what continuity there has been will go home mostly disappointed.

Ventura Pons’s stagy drama Virus of Fear tries to walk a thin line about its volatile subject — child sexual abuse — as it weighs a man’s possible innocence against a mob’s rage. But its attempts at ambiguity work against it.

The trouble lies in Tyler Hisel’s script, which teems with wheezy conventions.

Mr. D'Souza stumbles when interviewing George Obama, the president's half-brother, an activist who voluntarily lives amid squalor in Nairobi, Kenya. "Obama has not done anything to help you," Mr. D'Souza says. "He's taking care of me; I'm part of the world," George Obama replies.

Mostly, Last Weekend is an elegiac ode to affluence.

Despite its sense of mission, the film suffers from soapy excesses and narrative disjunctures.

24 Exposures plays like an exercise. With a thin plot — the usual parade of possible killers — it falls to the actors to provide zing.

Story clarity and emotional depth tend to evaporate amid the visual pyrotechnics.

[A] strained, overheated thriller.

Sure, the new action workout Kickboxer: Vengeance — a reboot of a foot-fighting franchise from the 1980s and ’90s — follows a tiresome martial-arts movie formula. But amid the hoary conventions are agreeable inklings of an alternate sensibility.

It’s all very solemn, convoluted and a bit bloody, but not engrossing, despite impressive cinematography by Jasmin Kuhn and Mr. dela Torre and the best efforts of a hard-working cast.

It’s all high-end flash, but less romantic than wearying.

A modest effort only fitfully attaining its aims.

As with other staples of the screen-parody genre, the comic bull’s-eyes arrive only intermittently.

If not for Mr. Jones, “Resurrection,” while competently edited, would be devoid of humor, an area where Mr. Statham has shown promise in the past.

Its willful determination to be outré proves its undoing.

When the Rangers engage in “Transformers”-lite mayhem, an intriguing group portrait collapses into generic pyrotechnics.

Deficient even in most of its set pieces, In the Blood does Ms. Carano (and Caribbean tourism) few favors. Somebody, please give her a better script and director.

Fortunately, Camera Obscura has decent actors to flesh out its dubious premise.... But their diligent efforts cannot raise the whole enterprise above a mere exercise.

Relationships unfold with a bright, glossy and antiseptic sentimentality in Park Hyun-gene’s Like for Likes, which brings abundant social media usage to shopworn rom-com contrivances.

For all the healing here — the revived include a bird, an ailing uncle and a blind man — The Young Messiah performs no miracles.

For all the movie’s flashy pyrotechnics and pulverizing techno-ish musical numbers, gleaning an emotional pulse can be challenging.

The film is about exotic locations (including a volcano), garish humor (often at the expense of Mr. Chan or women), fisticuffs, stunts and frenetic visual bombast.

For all its spectacle, The Fatal Encounter is wanting for profundity.

Tai Chi Hero merely fills the eye, offering little that stays with you.

The conventions are trundled out in Stanley J. Orzel’s cross-cultural romance, Lost for Words, but not the tension or the chemistry.

[A] glossy, fawning valentine to conspicuous consumption.

What Lotus Eaters can take pride in are Gareth Munden’s stunning black-and-white cinematography and Ms. Campbell-Hughes, a riveting visual subject suggesting miles of internal depth. She makes this wallow in callow company watchable.

Although the subject is potent, the film, directed with a seemingly effortless commercial acumen, doesn’t burrow deeply.

While this unrelentingly midtempo movie milks Brooklyn for its chic, it manages to denude it of its color.

The script, by Mr. Dekker, spirals into a muddle of ambiguity, leaving only the imagery and the performances to save the movie. And try as they might, they cannot.

The emotional dynamics in domestic violence, for the abuser and the abused, are often too disturbing and complex to be treated as superficially as The Living does.

A “EuroTrip” with balance sheets, the slick, innocuous comedy Unfinished Business fails to seal the deal.

Underlying this overlong and overheated enterprise is a surfeit of ambition. Maybe too much.

The film rests on the attractive but opaque Ms. Thorne, who is not ready for such weight. Commendably, she stretches her acting muscles, but Hazel’s internal struggle remains elusive. Viewers need more to connect with.

You’ll find beatings, shootouts, car crashes, awkward analogies and a measure of buddy badinage in “Bright,” but true enchantment is in short supply.

The biggest offender is the director, Imtiaz Ali, who, also again collaborating with Mr. Kapoor, actually celebrates two love affairs: Ved and Tara’s, and (given Ved’s universal adulation) Mr. Ali’s with his own self-aggrandizing vision of his calling.

The actors, including Erin Boyes as another captive, try to infuse their characters with depth, and the cinematographer, Scott Winig, lends the proceedings a professional gloss, especially in nighttime scenes. But their efforts cannot lift the story beyond its thin, lurid premise.

The Rambler...feels like a slender plot with additional scenes pasted on.

Penélope Cruz is an Oscar-winning actress we don’t see often enough in prominent leading roles. So how disappointing to find her having to carry Julio Medem’s florid Ma Ma, a melodrama only glancing at profundity.

[A] disposable comedy.

The horror anthology has a long tradition, going at least as far back as the British classic “Dead of Night,” in 1945. The best offer surprise endings or a sense of humor. You won’t receive much of either here. Just vertigo and maybe a wicked case of induced attention deficit disorder.

“He can move the mountains.” “I was blind but now I see.” Those lines are but drops in the torrent of clichés saturating Michael John Warren’s narcotizing documentary Hillsong — Let Hope Rise.

Marlon Wayans’s satire “A Haunted House” got to “Paranormal” first, and for a much smaller budget delivered bigger laughs.

Limp pacing and countless shots of Washington’s skyline plague the narrative. Ms. Smollett-Bell exudes an earthy appeal, but it’s the charismatic Mr. Jones who steals the picture. Given all the stifling preachiness, that’s to be expected.

The possibilities are intriguing, but the characters are underdrawn, and the pacing lags.

The film, financed by a Kickstarter campaign, looks polished enough. But its investors’ money might have been better spent elsewhere.

It’s depressing to see Ms. Moretz — so spirited in “Clouds of Sils Maria” and the “Kick-Ass” movies — reduced to constant mooning at Mr. Roe.

If you’re a boy between, say, 8 and 12 and wired to the hilt on Coca-Cola, the shrill, exhausting “Gold” might be for you. But only if.

Bad Kids of Crestview Academy traffics in exploitation movie flourishes.

This belabored comedy, directed by Benjamin Epps, has a slick visual veneer and some capable performances, especially by Ms. Rulin and Ms. King. But the script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amount to airplane pablum.

Feels like a religious tract more than a movie.

The sophomoric humor may be absent, but in its place is only a soufflé of whimsy, seasoned with soot, that fails to rise.

Disappointing plot twists ensue in a climactic brawl starved for snappier choreography and editing.

Despite Mr. Ransone’s goofy charm, Sinister 2 can’t claim the same finesse, substituting pedestrian plotting and a more graphic gore for the original’s restraint.

The familiar special effects are not the most disappointing element here. It’s the squandering of the talented Ms. Heche, who is given top billing but almost nothing to do.

It has little story to tell and few ideas to offer. Just a great deal of product to sell.

An entwined triptych of sorts unified by invective, slurs and characters demanding that others shut up, Run It is a very patchy affair.

A spare trifle carried largely by its leading actress.

Overabundant diffuse lighting and wide-angle perspectives only compound this horror movie’s deficiencies in plot and dialogue.

The Offering, a muddled horror film, falls over itself incorporating as many genre elements as possible. The result is the cinematic equivalent of combining every paint color on a canvas: a murky mess.

This is pap, plain and simple: scattered raunch-lite devoid of emotional resonance. At best, it sells itself on the spectacle of a TV show’s cast reunion — and even then it disappoints.

A smorgasbord of empty calories, the Vin Diesel vehicle The Last Witch Hunter, for all its overstuffed visuals, leaves you hungry. But not for more.

You won’t find much offensive in Kevin James’s slick, innocuous vehicle Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. You won’t find much prompting an emotional reaction in general, so familiar are the jokes and situations. If Mr. James’s character thinks of safety first, so does this movie, to its extreme detriment.

The humor, when it isn’t overcooked, can be downright insulting or worse.