Calum Marsh

One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.

What ultimately holds the film back, I believe, is its tendency to err too far on the side of that sweetness — it indulges too often in the hallmarks of the mediocre indie, the stuff a press release might call quirk, to level its more substantial points with real seriousness.

What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”

The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.

Effort goes only so far, and The 4:30 Movie doesn’t surpass Smith’s usual limitations.

We all have childhoods to remember. Art needs to do more than just remind us.

Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.

The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel.

"Lyle” has a brisk, whimsical momentum that is utterly infectious in the early going. Then it stops dead.

The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic.

Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.

It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.

Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny.

The cast can only do so much with thin material, and Waltz, duping and swindling grandly, isn’t equipped to make the long con interesting.

Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.

The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.

Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.

A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.

Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.

In any given moment, the movie is either overstating the importance of its subject or trivializing it.

Papushado’s flamboyance feels cocky and indiscriminate, as if he’s simply trying really hard to make every image seem cool.

It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.

While the details are meticulous, the attitude is all wrong, trading the simple, unaffected charm that has served the character so well since his introduction in 1981 for a snarky and fatuous air that leans hard on winking humor and bland, hackneyed irony.

Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.

[Aja] has outfitted Horns with enough talent that the film is rather easy to admire aesthetically. The problems are more foundational, even conceptual—and they are thus harder to reconcile.

Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material — of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context — that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame.

The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.