Christy Lemire

A presence that initially was disturbing grows repetitive and almost predictable over the course of an entire film.

Perfectly serviceable and utterly forgettable, Honest Thief nonetheless offers a few pleasing details to keep it from being a total slog.

Director and co-writer Susanna Fogel has trouble achieving a tonal balance between the comedy and the action, which only grows increasingly glaring over the course of the film’s overlong running time.

Blake Lively gives it her all in The Rhythm Section, but the movie only meets her halfway.

Schwarzenegger has turned into your elderly uncle, dancing like a goofball at your wedding after a couple glasses of champagne. He knows he’s being silly, and he knows that you know, and that alone is supposed to be good for a laugh. But it’s not. It’s just sad. He has essentially become McBain.

The ending — with its revelation of what these girls were really after all along — is so frustrating, you’re likely to wonder: Is that all there is?

A terrific cast can only do so much with superficial, maudlin material in the coming-of-age dramedy Wildflower.

Writer/director Camille Griffin’s feature filmmaking debut is an ambitious but muddled mix of Christmas comedy and apocalyptic drama.

An impressive team comes together in front of the camera and behind the scenes for the heist thriller Triple Frontier, but the results are frustratingly uneven.

It’s structurally awkward, jumping around in time needlessly and sometimes confusingly, rendering Nureyev’s story weirdly inert until the final 20-30 minutes.

Being a mom is hard, a universal truism that "Nightbitch" explores in ways that are occasionally inspired but mostly blunt and banal.

The Glass Castle is at odds with itself. Maybe that contradiction is by design. Maybe it’s inevitable, given the emotionally complicated terrain it treads. But the result is a film that never quite clicks tonally and doesn’t do justice to its harrowing central story.

The mythology here is both dense and frequently silly, with the movie grinding to a halt around the one-hour mark for an extensive information dump. By the end, you may still be unclear as to what’s going on, but you also may not care.

The multiple twists, double-crosses and leaps in logic are more likely to prompt giggles than gasps, despite the impressive production values and the earnest efforts of an A-list cast.

Hamilton deserves better. So do the other strong women who make up the film’s trio of warriors, fighting to protect each other and all of humanity from technological destruction. Again.

Tim Burton’s Dumbo feels like one of the big-eared baby elephant’s early flights: It’s adorable and earnest but it causes a lot of commotion, and it only sporadically, haltingly soars.

The Deliverance would have worked just fine if it had functioned solely as a domestic drama infused with the thorny, real-world issues of addiction, poverty and racism.

Life After Beth gets into the well-tread zombie-comedy territory in a clever and inspired way. Then it doesn’t get out of it nearly so skillfully.

So of course, Hardy applies that same intensity to the comic-book anti-hero origin story, Venom. And his fully committed performance is pretty much the only reason to see it.

It’s disappointing and actually kind of cynical in its unwillingness to try anything even vaguely innovative with these beloved characters.

Director/co-writer Chris Dowling infuses his sports drama with a grungy sense of place, making Run the Race feel a bit like a Christian version of “Friday Night Lights.”

It’s an inspiring tale based on true events with a worthwhile message about finding your voice and asserting your identity. If only it were good.

Every Day has an intriguing concept that’s hampered by problematic execution. And it raises several questions it never answers in satisfying fashion, leading to a conclusion that will elicit not just head-scratching but unintentional hilarity.

The wacky New York types with their lack of an internal censor and their wild ideas for what they’d do to the apartment provide a consistent source of laughs.

Zombieland: Double Tap is more of the same, but also much less. The cast is larger, the carnage is gnarlier and the comedy is even more meta than before. But while individual moments and action sequences might be amusing, the endeavor as a whole feels like a tepid retread.

The pacing is so jarring that the emotional payoff doesn’t develop as intended. And the overall irony, of course, is that this is a movie about the need for magic that could have used a little more of the stuff itself. But if it makes you think of your mom and dad fondly, even for a moment, well at least that’s something.

While we do indeed see the normalcy of her home life with her parents and younger brothers and the regular, teenage-girl instincts that exist alongside her courage, we never get a glimpse into her deeper feelings.

The glittering cast of Death on the Nile is all dressed up but, alas, they have nowhere to go.