David Fear

You’ve seen this before. Think of it as a potent dose of sci-fi/horror Methadone to keep the withdrawals at bay.

There is so much dead space between the death-defying set pieces that you can feel things grinding to a halt long before the next adrenaline spike hits.

The combination of provincial accents and Stormare's patented creepiness make "Fargo" comparisons inevitable, though Canadian filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly's tongue isn't anywhere near his cheek.

You may feel, with its immersive 3D set pieces and screensaver imagery blown up to IMAX proportions, that you’re entering a bold new world. But transportive is not the same as transcendent. The piles of ash here looks and sounds phenomenal. What you would not give to feel some actual fire burning behind all of this.

Watching the elder statesman spin ring-a-ding wisdom is one thing; witnessing his generosity to another artist who couldn't handle her own talent, however, speaks volumes about what actually lurks under his placid, seemingly imperturbable surface.

Director David Frankel understands that familiarity may breed contempt in other areas of life, but sequels, especially long-awaited ones to fan favorites, thrive on a light rinse and repeat.

Once the murderer starts relying on the lad’s kindness, all the preceding kid stuff starts to take on a purposefully sour tang.

It is, in essence, a light, breezy, better-than-average Disney movie that just happens to feature a most-valuable Pixar player, while barely feeling like a Pixar movie at all.

You just wish the moviemaking were as consistently graceful and momentum-fixated as the film's rail-grinding subjects.

It works far better as a partial document of life under lockdown than as a genre mash-up.

The gorgeous cinematography and generosity to Plummer’s emotive gifts almost make up for the mumbo-jumboness of it all. Almost.

The result may occasionally be more of a journalistic scrapbook than a Wisemanian all-points portrait, but the impact of seeing such unvarnished public activism in the raw can't be overestimated.

As [Murphy] proved in Oppenheimer, his silences can speak volumes, and some of Steve‘s best moments simply involve you watching him think.

Guerrero's handling of the bond between these two teens feels too coy by half; the film thankfully resists being either a typical coming-out movie or an ethnocultural curio, but it doesn't offer much insight into the twosome's attraction, platonic or otherwise, to each other.

This kind of Cold War-a-go-go, deadly-honeypot intrigue is harder to do well than you might think — just ask the folks behind "Red Sparrow." So you appreciate it when someone like Besson can make it move like a pro.

That’s the real Boss Battle of Bodied: Major Rush vs. Missed Opportunity. Whether you pick a winner here or think they fight it out to a draw is your call.

Ignore the documentary's regrettable low-rent look and that kitschy "Love, American Style" soundtrack, and just focus on how this portrait turns a work of art into a sociological flash point.

This is Williams’ spotlight, and it’s worth slogging through some of the soapier-to-sludgier aspects to watch her ply her craft

This is a passable substitute for the real thing. It could have burrowed so much deeper.

Maybe our expectations were too high. Maybe we should have said his name — Burton Burton Burton — three times, and the filmmaker who did that beloved original would reappear, grinning maniacally and giving us something a bit less undead and a bit more alive.

Assassination Nation thinks its a f*ck-you punchline. It’s actually the film’s most honest admission — its one true self-own.

It can't decide whether it wants to be magnificently toxic or merely mediocre. Mileage may vary on where the movie eventually lands, but either way, this is a "romp" that's keen on going nowhere ... and sloooowly.

You spend a good deal of Keeper forming theories about what’s going on, keenly sifting through clues in the hopes of possible answers. Once everything is revealed, however, you wish you’d gone back that previous ignorance that now seems like a state of bliss. To say that Tatiana Maslany is a saving grace here is obvious, given that she’s rescued a few projects from utter disaster.

This is a pulpy B movie that is dying to be a prestige project, and there’s a big part of you that wishes everyone had just leaned into the teensploitation aspects more.

Does it tick off the boxes of what we’ve come to expect from this series? Yes. Does it add up to more than The Chris Farley Show of Alien movies? Well … let’s just say no one may be able to hear you scream in space, but they will assuredly hear your resigned sighs in a theater.

If nothing else, How to Make a Killing is an abject lesson in how to hire the right person to salvage your movie.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You’ll leave still loving Gilda. The movie, not so much.

At its best, this tale of a young female assassin seeking vengeance and wreaking havoc is one more chance to see expertly choreographed mayhem. At its worst, it plays like a Wick-ipedia sub-entry ambitiously pumped up to main-event status. Let’s just say the balance tilts toward the latter more than you’d like.

There are much worse things than semi-stylish, slightly generic horror films, especially those channeling the sort of moody children’s-lit work of authors like Maurice Sendak (an alt-title: Where the Wild Things Scar?) in the name of creepiness. There are also better movies to seek out in the name of mining childhood for nightmare fodder.

Look, it’s not like Tron: Ares, the third entry in this film series that now spans four decades, doesn’t have a few things going for it.

There are a few decent numbers left. Erivo still makes you feel like she owns this role. But for better or worse, For Good mostly feels like a mere reprise of the first film’s candy-colored cacophony, only with the volume slightly turned down.

Jessica Chastain isn’t just the reason to seek out The Eyes of Tammy Faye — she’s the only reason to see this curiously tepid biopic at all.

The only thing this second-rate scarefest truly succeeds in doing, however, is giving Sweeney a hell of a showcase.

You can feel the narrative hitting predictable beats like it was upshifting an ATV’s gears, from infatuations with the outlaw life to blowing off good influences, getting sucked into the game to bad decisions leading to bodies dropping.

Reynolds is like a puppy dog who moonlights as a male model, or maybe vice versa. He’s the only reason to see Free Guy, but you already know this going in.

It still feels like you’ve wandered into a Mob-themed animatronic presentation at some amusement park — the Disney Hall of Famous Mafia Bosses — and dutifully watch as landmark moments in crime history are checked off and re-enacted. Take away the De Niro Con: The Movie bona fides, and you’ve got nothing but a fancy Discovery special.

There is the slightly conspiratorial sense that the team behind this trip down movie-memory lane simply fed the scripts of various canonized sci-fi epics into an AI program and waited to see what sort of composite it spit out.

It’s something closer to an amusement-park attraction named Generic Blockbuster Cruise, where you slowly glide past a bunch of prefab set-ups — over there you’ll see some thrills, look out on your right for some spills and chills — and the whole thing moves inexorably forward on a track, while a skipper cracks the same corny jokes.

As a distraction, it’s inoffensive. But you can tell it wants to be the juggernaut on wheels, the unstoppable giant mowing down or devouring everything in its path. It’s really the smaller thing trying desperately to outrun oblivion. It’s all scraps and nothing but.

You can’t say that Cat Person is shy about taking the medium to task for selling a romantic ideal that’s more than a little curdled. If only it was this rigorous and incisive about the source material itself.

There are too many splendid little touches in this tale of letting go to dismiss it entirely, and too many latebreaking wrong turns it takes to completely forgive it. What you’re left with is the cinematic equivalent of a clipped-wing plummet.

The best thing about The Highwaymen by a long shot is seeing Costner tap back into that Gary Cooper mode he once perfected and add older, wiser touches to it.

There’s so much wasted potential here, so little sense of how to get across a notion of solidarity in the face of catastrophic danger, and sexism, not in that order.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

As a portrait of a friendship, one tested by decades of high times and lows, successes and failures, bad behavior and forgiveness, Nyad the movie is trawling deeper waters. As a bio-dramatization of one human’s resilience — and thus a stand-in for the triumph of the human spirit overall — it comes perilously close to merely treading them.

A sexual-revolution pioneer, a “gay renegade” who was also “pre-gay,” a cultural saboteur, a sad old man in denial — we get a lot of opaque Scottys, all semi-attached to an alternate “history” that feels maddeningly incomplete and barely surface-scratched.

Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend's life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. We now have an answer. It was not the one we wanted.

Alas, this isn't the Trump-trolling toon you're looking for. People may search for protest art hidden among the potty jokes, but the closest they're going to get to a subtextual statement is the Beatles' "Blackbird" on the soundtrack – and that's been repurposed as a lullaby.

An extended rom-com meet-cute that just happens to have monsters lurking about, The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph something more intimate.

Headley’s book is a hard nugget crackling with urgency. This feels like soft-boiled pulp.

The problem here isn't excessive pandering; the sheer existence of this second movie is already 100-percent fan service. It's that it doesn't give you much beyond a very subjective view of what these guys find hilarious.

The movie starts out desperately wanting to be E.T. It ends by pretending it’s the second coming of Field of Dreams.

You’re left to wonder whether you’ve watched a freshman college course with laughs, or a failed comedy with a lecture surgically grafted on to it.

No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.

By the time a final showdown snaps your suspension of disbelief and suggests there are bigger hornet’s nests to kick, The Beekeeper has crept out of the realm of pulpy B-movie thrills and falls just short of being a Bee movie dabbling in deep-state paranoia-mongering.

The amount of casual charisma and commitment Pitt is bringing to this is the one thing that actually differentiates this from being just another stylishly lit, stupid-hip snarkfest.

A moviegoer has to be a scholar in the now-convoluted cosmology that powers these Potterverse expansion-pack prequels or abandon all hope of understanding a fraction of what’s happening — and even a lot of die-hard Harryheads may find their hippocampus getting seriously taxed while trying to catch up.

As is, The Lost City is less of a lost opportunity than something happy to stick to its middle lane and bide its time.

Just when you want to outright dismiss it, a pinprick of sound and vision peeks through the straight-to-DVD dross. And just when you start to think someone’s starting to gin up that old black magic, the whole thing simply topples over with a loud thud.

Debate all you want about whether this movie actually teaches you how to train a dragon. What this movie is actually trying to accomplish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is how to train their audiences to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again.

It’s the kind of film that works well if you don’t feel like getting off your couch. Zeke would definitely approve.

While it has its share of highlights...there’s a lot of celebrity malaise and hot air masquerading as insight here.

You can accuse Lemon of a lot of things. False advertising in the title, however, is not one of them.

In trying to show what a heartless heap our partisan world has become — and could be heading towards — The Oath suddenly just turns into a mess of its own. This is not what we signed up for.

Most of the student body quivers in Regina’s presence, and the movie seems to tremble in awe of Rapp’s ability to make you think she’s not a Queen Bee but the Queen Bee. Her limits don’t exist. You wish the rest of Mean Girls rose to meet her.

You can’t accuse Dicks: The Musical of phoning in a half-assed take on material that demands you bring the big-dick energy or GTFO. But there’s a big difference between being loud and rude and being hilarious, cutting, or even clever. The movie keeps it up for a good long while. It could just use a few more inches.

Hiddleston’s soft shoe gives you a glimpse of how the ordinary can become extraordinary. The movie surrounding it, however, seems determined to make the extraordinary seem as bumper-sticker simple and banal as humanly possible.

This is a perfectly fine postapocalyptic mash-up that really is just the sum of its parts, and nowhere near a gleeful, shriek-inducing whole. For some, that might be considered a feature. For the rest of us, it’s most definitely a ginourmous, gaping-jawed bug.

To start as a genre resuscitation and end up as simply generic — that’s a far more fatal ending than any curse befalling the characters onscreen.

What you get is, regrettably and rather surprisingly, something that’s a lot less exciting than the sum of those particular parts.

To watch The Quiet One at this particular moment in time is to feel that not only is this a highly subjective take, but that you’re being a little jerked around here. Even the most diehard Stones fan is bound to leave feeling a little conflicted. It’s a documentary that lives up to its name in all the wrong ways.

Boring is the last word you should use for a sports-hero-turned-spy story like this; it's the only one that comes to mind after you've seen the film.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any movie starring Olivia Colman can’t be all bad, of course, and Empire of Light wisely knows how to play the ace tucked snugly up its sleeve.

The one light at the end of this long, slogged-through tunnel is, surprisingly, Willis.

The one thing this Corporate Animals has going for it — the reason you may wanna plunk down cash to see it regardless — is Demi Moore.

No one’s denying that American Samoa’s brief moment of victory — it didn’t make it to Cup playoffs, yet it’s never been in last place again — is a major coup. So why does this feel like such a lost opportunity for all involved?

For something so reliant on dramatic engagement in addition to spectacle and giggles, Love and Thunder feels oddly unengaging; even the love and death aspects often feel like cold transmissions from distant sources.

Pikachu Detective does not make it easy to get on board. It’s not here to convert — it’s here to preach to the already converted. You the viewer may choose this movie even if you aren’t a Pokéscholar. That doesn’t mean it’s willing to choose you.

Only a hair overlong at two hours, this is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon.

You go in with high expectations about what this collection of talent can do with this bats**t pulp fiction. You leave feeling like you owe Brian De Palma a thousand apologies.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is the sequel that many of us have waited for, if not exactly the sequel we wanted. It’s amusing rather than hilarious, gently ribbing rather than gutbusting.

The film may offer a Cliff Notes history lesson and a scrapbook take on a life, but it does make you wish Shirley was still around, talking truth to power right now and offering one more aspirational example for those who might step up and disrupt.

Death on the Nile has its joys and flaws apart from that Armie factor, but it’s almost like trying to assess whether the appetizer course could have been slightly undercooked while an elephant stampedes over the whole dinner table.

On the surface, this may sound like a nice, trashy little diversion. We can confirm the “trashy” part, and you know that any time you give Moore the chance to either weep, become enraged or, in a best case scenario, do both at once, it’s going to reap some sort of dividends.

Watching [Hanks] in this career footnote now is a little like seeing an unformed lump of sculptor’s clay and knowing that there’s a famous statue just a few well-placed moves away.

Part intellectual-property barrel-scraping, part pumped-up star vehicle and part fumbling bid for Sony to cross media-revenue streams, Uncharted isn’t the worst attempt to bring a beloved video game to the screen — just the latest bit of evidence that these things are really a zero-sum game.

You wish the movie wasn’t content to be a feature-length meme and truly deserved what Cage is doing with this long, hard look in the fun-house mirror. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not unbearable by any means. It just should have been so much better.

Why does this Last Dance feel so impersonal, so rote, so step-by-step predictable?

So why the hell does this feel so generic, so by-the-numbers, so instantly forgettable? The whole thing resembles the blockbuster version of a readymade, assembled from various, recognizable spare parts and elevated only by virtue of its name.

That remembrance of Saturday matinees past is there for a bit in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Until it very much isn’t, and you’re largely left with what you imagine you’d get if you programmed a 21st century A.I. program to write up nostalgia-bait for the children of the late 20th century.

It’s a new chapter in a saga, yet like its characters who’ve been practicing the art of war since Sun Tzu coined the term, the sequel somehow feels ancient and a little creaky.

Set mostly in modern-day Shanghai and involving two other girlfriends (also Li and Jun), this parallel plot feels less like an attempt to broaden the book's horizons than to cash in on "Joy's" cross-generational appeal while doubling down on cheap-shot melodrama.

This is what it looks like when you Glee a beloved Broadway production to death.

It’s just that the delivery system designed to get you from one showstopping mano a mano to the next begins to feel so derivative that not even the pulp pleasures of Beetz kicking mondo ass can keep this from feeling like a reheated fast-food binge.

The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.

There’s a true-crime aura that hangs over every scene like a shroud — an unshakable sense that you’re not watching a Western so much as a ghost story.

Dog Pound only rarely finds the live-wire energy needed to make up for its amateur cast and staunch adherence to well-worn archetypes: cell-block bullies, sadistic guards, fresh-fish innocents, etc. Neither the film’s bark nor its bite leaves much of a mark.

By the end of the ride, the movie’s messy humanity has officially calcified into After-School Special clichés; given the choice between handcrafted whimsy and heavy-handedness, we’ll take the former, thanks.

While Fischer handles every emotional curveball, she's not helped by the film's reliance on rote notions of piecing your life back together. Is it worth putting a good actor through the screen-martyrdom wringer for a minuscule payoff?

We know how these bargains turn out, so all we're left to do is watch pretentious exchanges about grief pile up, laugh at the way the movie exploits its Indian-girl-as-innocence-personified notion and wish that Eddie Marsan's giddy cameo as Hell's personal weapons dealer were much, much longer.

While Bier doesn't offer easy partisan answers, she still dilutes a social issue down to the level of soap-operatic background noise and back-patting platitudes. It-and we-deserve better.

All Turbo does is give Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and Snoop Dogg the easiest paychecks they’ll ever make, and its corporate overlords the chance to sell a few toys.

The closer this parable inches toward tragedy, the more you can feel the gap between good intentions and generic exotica-grandstanding widening into an unbridgeable chasm.

But while you can’t fault this labor of love’s conception, you can take issue with its leaden execution.

It’s essentially the Snyder Cut of every science fiction and fantasy touchstone of the past 100 years — a jam-packed, ransacked greatest-hits reel posing as a saga.

You don’t blame Braff for wanting to craft a movie around [Pugh]. But you can blame him for the movie itself that surrounds that performance, as well as a seriously ludicrous climax — one of several — set in a Williamsburg house party and a coda so self-aggrandizingly lachrymose that you’ll have to resist the urge to scream.

The disparity only makes Reeves's earnest-but-monotonous turn that much more pronounced-and the film that much more dismissible.

An adaptation of Mike Batistick's Off Broadway play, this stagy character study about immigrants living off the crumbs of the American Dream revels in cut-rate street smartness. Then comes the third act, at which point the film moves from obvious message-mongering to the beating of a post–9/11 dead horse.

Becomes a clumsy gringo approximation of something else. In this case, it's the old respectable-man-obsessed-with-fallen-angel cliché, which Demy fils tweaks with broad melodramatic strokes and Freudian flotsam, as well as a complete lack of focus or storytelling chops.

Director Jeanne Labrune (Vatel) makes the most out of having a compellingly watchable movie star at her disposal, but neither some odd stabs at humor nor Huppert's versatility do much to enliven what's essentially a superficially sexed-up soufflé.

More of a massive back-patting for bleeding hearts than a comprehensive-or even semi-comprehensive-survey of DIY protest art, the film unintentionally makes the perfect valentine for the OWS version of radicalism: It's righteous, full of rage and cripplingly unfocused.

This is the same old safe, sappy movie that shows up on TBS every weekend.

The big question isn’t whether middle-aged romance will bloom, but rather, how much sub-Jarmusch deadpan humor and pathos can you take?

The movie meanders like its dissatisfied, part-time pothead protagonist, not wisely but too well.

It can give you something approximating action. What it can’t give you is a watchable action movie. That’s where it truly fails to go the distance.

A set piece involving a skyscraper and a sports car proves he can induce sweaty palms, but one nail-biting moment and some much-misssed Murphy mouthiness won't keep you from feeling like you're the one being ripped off.

This story is both uplifting and awe-inspiring. It deserves to be told better.

If its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.

Third times are rarely charms in the movies, much less fourth go-rounds, and it takes more than ho-hum 3-D and video-game-ready action sequences to liven up diminishing returns

Capital ends up being neither a high-stakes thriller nor a cutting commentary on real-world bad behavior. It’s just CEO exotica, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

The novelty of their industry aside, there's little to differentiate this from any other relationship-centered Amerindie.

Enter at your peril…of major eyeroll strain.

Even before an ending designed to avoid resolution and cause moviegoers to stifle screams of “Wait, seriously?” this well-intentioned look at how close we are to the brink of extinction is the cinematic equivalent of an unexploded ordnance. For something so blessed with timeliness and talent, it leaves you feeling like you’re buried in a hovel of disappointment.

Even the admittedly thrilling gameplay footage and time-capsule news reports are couched in contexts that seem crudely sketched out.

Only Andrea Riseborough comes close to rising above it all, and even she’s undone by what may be the crassest climactic slo-mo montage ever. The lucky will have logged off by that point.

The Fifth Generation filmmaker has aced such recipes before (e.g. The Emperor and the Assassin); this time, both the spectacular and the human elements have apparently been offered to the gods.

It isn't long, however, before the film's caricatured bad-guy shtick starts to wear gossamer thin, and an overabundance of "clever" twists-no one is [Yawn] who they seem to be! - begins to sap whatever little goodwill has been built up.

Kudos for stepping outside your comfort zone, sir, even if the result just translates as old-fashioned cultural slumming masked as tear-jerking humanism. Better luck next time.

This charmless movie thinks it can soft-sell its date-night love story and its media meta-jabs without people feeling they've been bamboozled on either count.

To her credit, Howard’s performance as a class-obsessed Southerner is decent enough to keep things from completely devolving to community-college level. But such weak work needs strong hands all around to guide it, and one pair isn’t enough.

As with so many middle parts of proposed trilogies, Halloween Kills feels designed to get you from Point A to a future Point C. It forgets, however, that a middle chapter still has to work on its own, and that stranding fans, completists, casual moviegoers, etc. in a weak-link entry runs the risk of permanently turning people off of the whole endeavor.

Forget the title; the film barely works itself up into a half-hearted trot. It isn’t even howl-worthy in its campiness or badness, with one notable exception.

The fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

The basic spell remains the same, updated for the age of inclusivity, toxic masculinity and Princess Nokia. The magic, however, is M.I.A.

It’s a mediocrity no matter when you release it.

Feste's ode to showbiz clichés is closer to contemporary Nashville pop: twangy enough to qualify as Southern-fried, but too slick and disposable to be truly deep.

Lise Birk Pedersen's documentary offers some compelling peeks into Russia's bureaucratic skulduggery, but her attempt to frame the situation through a young convert's coming of age never really coheres. Innocence was lost; so, apparently, was much of the insightful commentary.

No one's asking for a somber account of simian life, but perhaps Buzz Lightyear could keep quiet for a bit and let the monkey business speak for itself.

Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.

Mona Achache's character study plays like a Gallic version of a Sundance flick, complete with on-the-nose references - Igawa's character is named Mr. Ozu - and just enough offbeat touches to make it seem more deep than it actually is.

This slapdash parody will simply inspire shrugs.

Cracks simply doesn't make the grade.

Only the mighty Fonda cuts through the claptrap; the rest is just a long, predictable trip.

Director Maya Kenig's film never decides whether it wants to be a social satire, a familial drama or a parable about Israeli life during perpetual wartime; that it neither picks a route nor cohesively combines any of those strands doesn't make a fairly generic father-daughter story any more colorful.

This writer-director still has some evolving to do.

Palmer's acknowledgement of his own involvement in, and thrill at watching, these events speaks volumes, but simply showing generations of pasty, fat men pounding each other to a pulp shouldn't be mistaken for an in-depth exploration of Gaelic machismo.

Although Reminiscence doesn’t try to hide any inherent metaphors — what are most movies these days, really, but nostalgia machines, designed for those stuck in the past? — it doesn’t do much with the material besides fashion something like a dull-edged Blade Runner.

Fightville doesn't pummel you with outsider viewpoints - it doesn't seem to display much of a point of view at all.

There are a million coming-out stories in various naked cities, and filmmaker Bavo Defume's contribution to the genre initially differentiates itself with a vibrant, creatively campy color scheme. Once the visual touches fade away, however, there's nothing to stop the parade of clichés.

As its title suggests, this is more of a self-conscious attempt to court quirky cult-film status. Nice try.

This is little more than an episode of VH1's Classic Albums writ large. You'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the making of this chart-topping behemoth - except for insights about the man in the mirror who created it.

The one real takeaway here is not that things are tough all over, or that movie stars equate slumming with authenticity; it’s that no actor should be asked to do a sexy dance to Crazy Town’s “Butterfly.” Ever.

Other than giving Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura and Lola Dueñas plum supporting roles, that's the best you can say about Philippe Le Guay's trite-to-intolerable tale on the discreet eye-opening of the bourgeoisie.

There’s slow-burning, and then there’s simply slow; the difference between the two has never been so apparent.

There will be fresh heroes to cheer, fresh villains to hiss at, fresh metaphors about power and corruption and history repeating itself to scratch your chin over. Yet a curious sense of staleness starts to set in even before the first act of director Wes Ball’s entry pits ape against ape.

The historical tragedy that's dramatized is heartrending; the movie itself is merely one cliché piled atop another.

Seriously, this should have been either a “special episode” played out over 45 minutes or a six-hour miniseries, in which the relationships among this trinity could have been better fleshed out and the jarring tonal shifts relegated to separate chapters.

The experience is not Rashomon Redux so much as enduring a bad rash.

The whole thing feels so stiflingly familiar that you wonder what has more spare parts, the robot or the movie it’s in.

Despite the mix of succession-focused handwringing and a lot people busily running around, extremely little actually happens in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — certainly not enough to justify a third feature.

It’s too chintzy to be a proper high-octane action flick and not nearly over-the-top campy enough to be the conduit for a great B-movie endorphin rush.

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

So it's no surprise that what starts out as a beer-soaked cringe comedy about stunted masculinity ends up deep in the woods with noise-loving Japanese tourists and exploding craniums - or that such detours into psychotronic oddity for its own sake can make even a 75-minute running time feel like an eternity.

The more the veteran actor strives to give Joe a final dose of funereal dignity, the more the film around him seems intent on deep-sixing its MVP.

It could have been so much worse; we wish it was a lot better.

Whether the ideas they’re toying with here offer a booster shot of relevance to a modern slasher story is, frankly, debatable. What we can say is: congratulations on being both first out of the gate and an instant subgenre footnote.

Non Stop doesn’t know how to hit it and quit; it’s a rock doc that screams loud and says frustratingly little

It has homicidal fantasy critters, lots of sharp and pointy horns, and absolutely no teeth.

Cool, it's a rom-com featuring the man who'd influence Romanticism.

What's surprising is that Rogen and Streisand have a genuinely complementary chemistry, feeding off each other in a way that suggests that, given a halfway decent script, the two would make a better-than-decent screen duo.

Even if you can miraculously avoid comparing this take on rock & roll record maker Leonard Chess (Nivola) to 2008’s similar Cadillac Records, Jerry Zaks’s lukewarm biopic still won’t get your fingers snapping; it’d be a runt in any litter.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

Even with incredible fight footage, however, all we have here is a standard if formless ESPN hagiography, complete with a cheesy cop-show score and little sense of who these guys are outside of the ring.

By the time Darling‘s revelations are supposed to double as a call to revolution, you’re left with the sense that you’ve just witnessed the most well-designed, aesthetically pleasing angry tweet ever penned.

Even by the stultifying standards of everything's-screwed ensemble movies, Joseph Infantolino's thirtysomething drama feels particularly threadbare.

A single arresting shot of a photographer chasing a man on fire says more about journalistic ethics and the queasy power of the image than all of the speechifying and star-posing combined; if only the rest of this muddled movie had as much insightful Sontagian bang.

The sixth time isn’t the charm here. And it’s certainly way, way less fun and clever than it thinks it is.

You get the "girl," but little else; even as a tribute to one woman's determination, this semibiopic screams botched opportunity

These kinds of disease-fueled dramas already tend to be soap-operatic, but Kohlberg isn't taking any chances; by the time father and son end up at a Dead show in matching tie-dyed outfits, the director has aggressively, insistently overplayed audience heartstrings like Jerry Garcia in a long-winded solo.

More than a moral dilemma is needed to make up for the uneven performances, slack pacing and wonky dialogue, and while MacLean certainly has a keen eye, the rest of his storytelling facilities haven't quite caught up with it yet.

It’s content to be just one long, sick joke without a punchline, designed to occasionally punctuate a stylishly nihilistic P.O.V. with a lot of OMG moments. You may love it or hate it.

What is confusing is why director Catherine Corsini thinks anyone should invest in a po-faced bourgie drama with so little to offer.

Had Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley accidentally weaseled his way onto the set of E.R., it might have played out something like Lance Daly's medical-drama-cum-upward-mobility-thriller about a hospital's new resident (and resident sociopath).

There's a secret weapon embedded within The Watch, however, and his name is Richard Ayoade.

It takes more than a few good actors playing bad apples to sustain such familiar romps through regurgitated material. There’s no bounty to be plucked from Perrier’s Bounty. The treasure chest has long since been emptied.

Wah Do Dem simply mopes along before aimlessly stumbling to a halt.

Everything from the script to the film’s score seems stock, and echoes of past victories--Eyre’s dissection of infidelity in "Notes on a Scandal," Neeson and Linney’s chemistry in "Kinsey"--only remind you of what these talents are capable of when the stars actually align.

Given that Sarandon played this same role so sublimely before in "Moonlight Mile," her devolution into theatrical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth is particularly disappointing, but no one--not Brosnan’s shell-shocked–by-numbers patriarch nor Mulligan’s wide-eyed waif--comes out of this steroidal pity party unscathed.

If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive--like genuine art

This is a superhero movie that feels like it might have been made by anyone and no one at the same time, simply space-filler before the next big team-up movie.

Reducing an influential genius to a bohemian Zelig with a firearm fetish misses the forest for the flaming metal trees; in Leyser's biographical interzone, the superficial trumps the truly subversive.

This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture.

Even an Oscar-nominated GOAT can’t escape something that seems so perfectly put together on the outside and is so flawed, easily trashed, and barely held together on the inside.

The fact that Elemental can’t seem to get past its own elevator-pitch premise or avoid tripping over its teachable lessons, much less wring laughs and sobs from an opposites-attract love story, is a bit of a shock. It’s so busy trying to pen an op-ed that it forgets to give it a narrative structure and make it emotionally resonate. That’s just elementary.

It’s tough to shake the feeling that you are watching human mouthpieces lob rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some sort of profound insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.

You can look past it muting the spiky chemistry of Rudd and Coon, who deserve more scenes and their own rom-com together, or the way the narrative’s father issues feel so incredibly forced, or how so many of the sequences appear to simply be killing time until the final act. What’s less forgivable is the way that it gets so caught up in the mythology of its hollow nostalgia that is misses why the original meant so much to so many of us way back when.

Not even the presence of Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó as a slinky villain known as the Baroness could stave off a sense of disappointment.

These guys belong in the avant-odd pantheon. They also deserve a stronger, more penetrating tribute.

It’s a 60-minute documentary that feels like days of watching paint dry.

The film thankfully doesn’t offer some pop-psychology Rosebud to explain Jobs’s drive or near-sociopathic perfectionism, yet we walk away knowing nothing about what made this revolutionary tick.

Caan can’t seem to play up his strengths. He’s a raw talent who needs an editor for his scripts and a strong hand behind the camera guiding him. Mercy gives our guy neither.

If you know the book, you know the answers regarding the who, what, where and why behind its secrets. If not, know that all will be revealed and, past an investment in Fanning’s character (and an admiration for how she does more with less in terms of a low-key acting style within high-voltage scenes), little will hold your interest.

Documentarian Jon Foy spent a decade following both the phenomenon and those who've tried cracking the code, and while his film offers little in the way of answers, it says volumes about delusional obsessives.

All the put-upon boorishness of an office drone (Bateman), a chemical-plant manager (Sudeikis) and their sexually harassed buddy (Day) might be forgivable, were Horrible Bosses actually funny instead of sporadically amusing and desperately vulgar.

It’s as if someone had gently ladled a teaspoon of artificial political-thriller flavor over a substandard Marvel movie, being oh-so-careful as to not upset corporate overlords or the status quo. A better title might have been Captain America: Business as Usual.

Throw in some quirky interludes of a Norwegian quartet singing old American spirituals every so often, and you've got something that's truly messy, messy.

One of the movie’s major plot points hinges on the ability of some especially gifted psychics being able to erase their own memories. What we would not give for that particular power right about now.

Some will call The Color Wheel daring. Others will remember that it takes more than desperate shocks to add substance to the sloppy diddlings of a dilettante.

That this retelling has no time for the facts, given the book’s dodgy relationship to the truth, isn’t shocking. That it feels this surprisingly fun-free and generic to a fault, frankly, kind of is. Fans deserve better. If any of them want to collectively sue for defamation of character, let me know where to sign.

The idea of doing The Right Stuff of food stuff and treating the rise and fall of empires over a breakfast treat as U.S. History 101 is, on paper, a well-balanced meal. Onscreen, it comes off as a lot of half-baked self-satisfaction that leaves you woozy from the sugar crash.

No matter what the film says about sexual fluidity, you can't shake the feeling that 3 exists primarily to justify a shot of three figures impeccably posed together on a mattress. Everything else is reduced to trumped-up afterthoughts.

Hardcore fans may get their kicks from seeing Macchio and Chan together. Everyone else will just feel like tempted to sweep the legs of everyone trying to cash in on a recently revived franchise and wring it dry.

So-so contemporary shows and cantankerous arguments are favored over in-depth looks at Reid's legacy. Any genuine weirdness about a funky, filthy-mouthed freak running around in a costume is left AWOL.

Medina is simply content to let the film’s sub-Jarmusch vignettes slow-fizzle to their finishes.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, as the novel suggested, but steamy adaptations simply can't be doled out lukewarm.

Adding hot naked men to a predictable narrative doesn't equal titillating or taboo; it just means you've dressed up a messy melodrama

Zhang's mixture of unsparing violence, mawkish sentimentality and garish flourishes creates one uncomfortable aesthetic.

Has neither enough bite nor enough heart to sustain it as a female-revenge-fantasy-cum-romantic-comedy; even its “shocking” switcheroo and faux-edgy moments seem remarkably frivolous and flavorless.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

There’s no sense of what Wajeman is after here. A character piece should have some sense of a character’s who, what and why, right?

Until some sort of creative second wind blows in, casual moviegoers and deeply invested fanatics may have to simply keep enduring overly familiar, frustrating placeholders like this. Quantumania revolves around a powerful villain who wants to control time. The movie itself is merely killing time.

It's hard to truly hate any movie whose ending revolves around a clever Where's Waldo? gag. It's also near impossible to take it seriously for that exact same reason.

You can’t deny the inspirational qualities of the story or Parker’s screen presence, any more than you could accuse the film of subtlety or of masking its conspicuous pro-Christian agenda.

Atmosphere and acting can't save a script filled with easy-target irony ("Who ever heard of gettin' rich from workin' with computers?") and a plot that telegraphs every left turn miles in advance.

Protektor is simply another in a long line of diluted stories about life during wartime, one whose diminished returns only further trivialize a legacy of real-life horror.

The pomo thrill was already wearing thin a few "Shrek" entries ago; here, the reliance on self-referentiality really risks coming off like yesterday's Purina.

So why does this animated kids' film fail to come together? Bursts of manic pacing steamroll over most of the wit, a little of Sandler's thick-accent shtick goes a looong way, and by the time the requisite life lessons about letting your offspring leave the nest get rolled out, the undead-on-arrival jokes are outnumbered by anemic sitcom gags.

Coyle's got charisma to spare - imagine a hard-man version of Andy Serkis - but even his screen presence eventually gets smothered by the film's cartoonish version of ethnic gangsters, macho caricatures and bruised-heart-of-gold hookers. The phrase accept no substitutes has rarely seemed so applicable.

The original cartoon’s credit sequence, redone with modern computerized shininess, is indeed a gas to witness. The rest is basically corporate synergy, canine shenanigans, and hot air. Zoinks, indeed.

The Whale knows it has a dynamo at its core, yet still keeps trying to prove to you it’s a substantial, significant statement. It can’t stop itself from being crushed under its own symbolic and sensationalist weight.

You can feel Chbosky's blood, sweat and tears oozing out of this highly personal project, but that holy trinity of fluids isn't enough to wash away the sense that you've seen this before - many, many, many times.

Fans of the gritty, era-defining precinct drama will bristle at how the program's realism has been replaced by a generic Tinseltown U.K. slickness. But regardless of whether you’re a longtime devotee or not, you’ll be left saying, “This is The Sweeney? I’ve been rooked.”

The question of whether the couple can overcome respective traumas and inbred social attitudes is essentially moot; the real query is how much insufferable Gallic tweeness you can stand before simply shouting "no, merci!"

Everything from the direction of actors to the dialogue signifies the work of a filmmaker who favors easy audience-baiting reactions over dramatic momentum. Doesn't the man who would later teach Bruce Lee how to kee-yah deserve better than a chopsocky Punch-and-Judy show?

The movie's multitasking creator seems to have bitten off more then she can chew. Her friends should have advised "baby steps."

The result isn’t exactly Lock, Stock Redux. Only the “stock” part remains.

It's such a haphazard, absent-minded history lesson that you'd think the filmmakers had ingested some of the era's pharmaceuticals before concocting this tribute.

Kudos to Evans for making up for the galling lack of gay African-American screen representation while delivering hot-body eroticism, but reducing complex relationship issues to a typical indie-flick blatherathon—complete with performances of varying quality and stilted dialogue—isn’t helping anyone.

Only Kristin Scott Thomas channeling "In the Loop's" Malcolm Tucker offers a spark; the rest is simply hokum designed to land overly sentimental suckers hook, line and sinker.

Bibliophiles, librarians and graduate students may swoon at the sight of the author's signature grotesquerie.

When the sing-song Jones and beatifically smiling Streep are allowed to carry the dramatic weight, you can see the raw, tough-love film that Hope Springs wants to be - until Frankel starts trying to be lighthearted and cute, at which point you see the movie's real troubled marriage in full bloom.

Unless you really dig "Glee"-level displays of high-school drama geekery, you and your date may want to quickly exeunt.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

Hellboy wants to remind you that this Dark Horse Comics brute with a soul still deserves a place in the superhero-movie ecosphere. It ends up simply being a franchise reboot damned to be restaged as its own bloody hell. Some things are better left dead.

American Casino tries to connect the big picture regarding a major problem to a human pulse and comes up lacking on both sides. It’s a gamble that simply doesn’t pay off

By the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded.

You can probably skip this one and still sleep soundly at night.

All you’re left with is Wilson’s exquisitely left-of-center take on the master of friendly trees, which keeps creeping toward the sublime before Paint knocks it back into the middle of an undefined road.

Unfortunately, he's retained his previous work's touristy mondo italiano! vibe, all whimsical tunes and postcard scenery, while piling on enough ogling shots of nubile young women to make Hugh Hefner feel uncomfortable.

So it’s no surprise that, even with longtime screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala watching his back, the director never finds his groove with Peter Cameron’s tale.

It is an innocuous, pleasant enough way to kill a few hours. That’s the worst thing you can say about it. It’s also, alas, the best thing you can say about it as well.

This is fertile material for a darkly comic indictment. Instead, we get recycled cynicism (politicians are hypocrites! more dirty money, more problems!) and Spacey's gallery of impersonations-W.C. Fields, Stallone, Reagan-in lieu of a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being.

Bouchareb gives his actors room to roam, but you still get only skin-deep sketches instead of flesh-and-blood women.

The rest of us will just be left to puzzle over Aniston’s exhibitionism obsession and pray that Sudeikis’s smirking-douche leading-man shtick won’t constitute his entire post-SNL career.

Both Rock and Delpy the actor invest so much in their respectively harried, recognizably human urbanites that you wonder why Delpy the director keeps undermining things by engaging in easy Gallic caricatures and generically Gotham-ming it up at every opportunity.

Unfortunately, Malkovich thrusting in a metallic space suit may indeed be the sole takeaway of this attempt at a social thriller.

There’s one bright spot amid all the awkward groping and abundant onscreen texting, and his name is Zach Gilford.

Schemel is a major rock & roll survivor; Hit So Hard is a minor rockumentary at best, as well as a seriously missed opportunity.

This is a movie that doesn’t just heart the Eighties. It actually wishes it still were the Eighties, casting a fond glance to a simpler, more star-driven blockbuster era. Two hours later, however, and the thrill of getting this particular banana in your tailpipe feels like the most distant of memories.

What was once an anything-goes sensibility now feels like it’s stuck in a nothing’s-sticking gear. Dark, wearisome and bombastic, along with an ensemble cast clearly radiating that they’d rather be someplace else, is not what we come to a Marvel movie for. We already have the DCEU for that.

Lovers of the TV biker drama may find pleasure in the duo's surreal scenes together, but everyone else will likely view this story about a writer (Hunnam), his film-obsessed drug-addict brother (Chris O'Dowd) and a viral amateur-porn movie as one limp farce.

No matter how may times Identity Thief switches tracks, nothing works — it fails as a star vehicle, a recession-era satire, a WTF white-collar-grunt revenge tale, a "Midnight Run"–style buddy flick, a gross-out laughfest and a bathetic tale of broken souls. No amount of stolen guises can fix it.

The pleasure of watching the star sling barbs at Sarsgaard's sandpaper-dry android, shyly court sexy librarian Susan Sarandon and rage against geriatric befuddlement doesn't offset what's essentially a mediocre character study dipped in sci-fi conventions and Social Security–age sentimentality.

When Canet isn't dabbling in schmaltz, he's forcing text-message gags and metaphor-heavy vermin jokes down viewers' throats in a lame attempt at levity. Emotional fraudulence does indeed constitute a lie, just not a white one.