Christy Lemire

A strong cast giving their all — including Jon Hamm, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Catherine Keener and Amber Tamblyn — can’t do much with such heavy-handed, self-serious material.

Last Days is a scattered, superficial depiction of a sad tale that requires deeper analysis.

Just like the titular vehicle, the movie sputters along toward its intended (and entirely predictable) destination. Even having tremendous actors like Sutherland and Mirren in the front seat can’t enliven this vacation.

Despite a few musical bright spots, you’ll leave humming the costumes.

It’s a hollow replica of its source material.

It’s a harmless animated adventure that will provide a bland diversion to young viewers.

It brings me absolutely no joy to report that The Marvels is terrible, and the worst film yet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It goes soft and nice and wants us to care about these characters who barely resemble human beings. After all, it’s Christmas. But everyone involved here should have asked Santa for a stronger script.

The Boy Next Door has its share of so-bad-they’re-good moments – and details, and chunks of dialogue – but not nearly enough. Mostly, they’re just bad. And it had such potential too, starting with the casting.

Director and co-writer Jessica M. Thompson establishes an unsettling mood that suggests we’re about to enter a dark and twisted world. But then eventually, her film is just dark – as in, it’s hard to see what’s happening, with herky-jerky visual effects that are especially off-putting. And when the twist comes as to what’s actually going on, it’s like: Really? That’s it?

Pistorius does solid work throughout in expressing various states of panic, but she’s mainly reacting to Crowe’s improbable omnipresence.

It’s meant to be a tale of uplift for faith-based audiences, but instead wears viewers down with a heavy-handed narrative, an overbearing score and voiceover that spells out everything in cringe-inducing, folksy tones.

Despite the dazzling, sun-soaked scenery, the long nights of partying and the sight of these attractive actors stripping themselves bare—physically and emotionally—for their roles, the harsh truth of Monday, and its accompanying hangover, comes all too soon for us.

Davis’ dialogue remains clunky and he never misses an opportunity to punctuate every feel-good moment with overwhelming, swelling music. He draws stiff performances from most of his actors, whose interactions are often painfully awkward. And as was the case with the original film, the structure is predictably episodic.

Rio, I Love You feels like little more than an extended tourism promotion video.

Director and co-writer Sarah Adina Smith offers some inspired moments and laughs here and there, but too often, running bits simply don’t pay off.

As it stands now, Aloha feels like several films at once, crammed together and sped up, with results that are emotionally hollow and narratively confusing.

Dark Meridian ends up being is a generically violent gang drama full of bad guys standing around grungy warehouses, explaining themselves before shooting each other in the head.

American Ultra tries to combine a sweet, slacker romance with a slick, super-violent action flick. If that sounds jarring to you, that’s probably because it is.

Despite the slick variety of shadings and textures Mandler employs to bring the story to life, the ending feels anticlimactic, like the tidy wrap-up at the conclusion of a TV procedural.

It’s just dull and hollow — a massive waste of time and money. The characters are flimsy, the dialogue is stilted and the amount of destruction is ridiculous.

Typically reliable actors like David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan can only do so much when they’re given so little to work with on the page.

Last Knights is so thoroughly mediocre, so dully empty, that it’s difficult to summon the enthusiasm to trash it.

It never quite works on its own. What’s crucial at the core is creating a character who feels like a real human being; Susan is more of a collection of quirks and bad choices. There just isn’t much to her. And the novelty alone of seeing Hayes play a woman is not enough to recommend this, although he does offer sporadic glimmers of vulnerability and humanity.

If you liked “Frozen” but wish it had been angrier, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is for you.

Despite its many perils, both natural and human, The Ice Road is surprisingly dull.

Love, Guaranteed is the kind of movie you leave on the TV because you’re lying on the couch with a cold, and the remote control has fallen off the blanket onto the rug, and you don’t feel like going to the trouble to reach down, grab it and change the channel.

It’s like a surreal, extreme version of “Bad Moms.”