David Fear

The result is inspiring, which isn't something you associate with this series.

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

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

There’s a sense of sniggering that lurks behind all of the provocation, which thankfully never crosses the line into full 4chan territory. But the fact that so much hinges on the poking of a wound doesn’t automatically make it audacious in a way that’s taboo-breaking. It’s the sort of too-edgy-for-the-mainstream movie that’s not nearly as edgy as it thinks it is.

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 universal rule of sequels dictates that you give viewers another helping of the same thing yet somehow make it different, the sort of koan that only makes sense to lifelong Zen masters and studio suits. Yet, against the odds, the creators of this continuation have managed to do more than just produce a carbon copy with a new number after the title.

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.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

Until someone delivers the definitive 360-degree chronicle on the populist uprising, this collection of dispatches from the front is the best primer you could hope for.

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.

Should you care to dig into a contemporary interpretation of a centuries-old canon work, you can skip this Carmen. If you feel the need to watch a sweaty sex symbol pound a punching bag while shirtless, we have a movie just for you.

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.

New World dishes out enough of the genre’s oldest pleasures to make it worthwhile.

Any argument that one doesn’t need a new spin on the Douglas-Turner black comedy is rendered more or less moot by the way [McNamara] sets up Cumberbatch and Colman with such gleefully profane, razor-sharp barbs.

This bloody, messy action film devolves into a plain ol' bloody mess.

It's only during the last third that the film finds its footing, as the PTSD fallout and collective sense of disillusionment suggest a bigger picture regarding why we fight, etc. Otherwise, this decent, if decidedly personal, look at small-town soldiers works better as an erratic scrapbook than a representative statement.

The film's notion that a little understanding and a lot of e-mailing would basically solve the Middle East crisis, however, is as reductive as it is utopian.

Consider the movie a testament to Rahim's screen presence. If nothing else, Free Men proves that the can't-take-your-eyes-off-him charisma the Franco-Algerian actor displayed in Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet" was no fluke.

As a chronicle of grief and passion, however, the film is perilously close to being an exercise in tactile but touchy-feely passive-aggression.

Despite the fact that the movie is stocked to the gills with screen talent — both Nick Kroll and Melanie Laurent stand out as fellow team members; Simon Russell Beale’s cameo as David Ben-Gurion deserves its own three-hour movie — it’s really a two-man job.

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.

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.

Suffering through flatlining romantic and dramatic interludes isn't any less painful now than it was in '84, but when this musical occasionally kicks off its Sunday shoes, the dynamic memory-lane trip actually approaches - Kevin help us! - something resembling genuine fun.

That’s the Lee you get in this near-hagiography: a peek at the man, a whole lotta the myth, and almost none of the messiness. Definitive isn’t the goal here, clearly. Printing the legend on a splash page is. It’s less a doc than a Stan Lee infomercial.

It may hint that the bad guy at the center of if all wasn’t the primary villain. But the movie does prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is its own worst enemy.

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

The first-person passion is genuine. The form its being presented in feels slightly secondhand.

Hard to ding something for wanting to be a cult rom-com so badly, especially when it’s so well-acted.

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.

Outlaw King does stumble. Its tension-and-release game is not exactly tight, and its dramatic rhythms have a way of losing the beat.

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

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.

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.

We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.

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.

The closer we get to a climax (and the more that absurd reversals keep getting piled on), the less effective Dupontel’s brutish charisma is in keeping things interesting and afloat. You pray the next he-man outing makes better use of his presence.

A certain leap of faith is required. But for those believe that movies can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description, and tap into the same transcendent state that great pop music does — that sensation of temporarily floating into some other dizzying realm — this is for you. It isn’t the movie you think you’re walking into. Amen for that.

The movie nearly killed him (Gilliam). Yet the victory isn’t just that he finished it, but that he’s fashioned something so magnificent in its messiness. He should be proud as well as relieved. The impossible dream is dead. But long live The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Christy is a decent movie, and a way better proof-of-concept regarding Sweeney’s willingness to go the distance for a project.

Wicked may take great pains to recreate the musty Britain of the 1920s, but don’t be fooled by the cloche hats and frilly frocks. The female rage that powers every frame of this comedy didn’t go away when that decade ended. It’s regrettably more recognizable and still more righteous today one century later.

Yes, it’s derivative to a fault — but a deserved midnight-movie cult following is all but assured.

No one wants to rock the camakau too much here, and the overall sentiment seems to be something like Sequel 101: You loved the first movie, so here’s a second movie that’s a lot like the first movie. This is the good news if that’s what you’re after. If not, well: It’s one hour and 40 minutes.

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.

It’s a great excuse to watch Washington be a Movie Star in the most natural and unfiltered way. If this is the last of this duo’s brand-name vigilante thrillers, at least it’s going out on a properly pulpy high note.

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.

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

You don’t have to be a filmmaker or a festival veteran to appreciate Sophie Letourneur’s tale of three women cruising for dudes at Locarno’s annual cinematic shindig, but trust us: It helps immensely.

All ye searching for Primal Fear redux, abandon hope. The character-driven drama he (Curran) offers viewers instead is something far more complex, cracked and unique for an American movie boasting big-name stars: an unblinking glare into the abyss.

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.

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.

Once the sharp, clever satire gives way to what feels like a special must-see-TV episode, the movie’s promise slowly deflates.

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 a juicy story, though that doesn't excuse Jarecki from fixating above all else on the tabloid-ready twists and pop-psychological turns of Durst's story.

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

As with his previous film Golden Door (2006), Crialese proves that he’s more adept when evoking a lyrical naturalism practiced by his directorial ancestors than when he’s hand-wringing over social issues.

Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

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.

It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.

We've been here before; you may now yell "Cut!," print it and call the concept a wrap.

The Laundromat ends on a pre-credits image that feels destined to become a meme. Everyone’s hands are dirty, it tells us. Maybe it’s time hold folks accountable and clean up our act.

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.

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.

Thor accomplishes its essential goal and little else, which is to introduce the mighty warrior to the Marvel screen universe.

Both a great excuse to stage brutal fight scenes and relieve a more-ripped-than-usual Jake Gyllenhaal of his shirt, this modern take on yesteryear’s guilty pleasure is twice as goofy, three times as violent and a solid tribute to both its predecessor and the art of bodily harm.

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.

Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

This writer-director still has some evolving to do.

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.

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.

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.

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

Audiences with infinite patience and no need for linear storytelling do get an intimate tour of The Anchorage's picturesque island off the coast of Stockholm, its landscapes lensed with loving appreciation. Past that, the experience of sitting through Ulla's daily routines yields little more than a travelogue and a vaguely contemplative vibe.

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

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.

The Fall Guy is at its delirious best not when it’s ginning up sound and fury and mayhem, but when it simply lets Gosling and Blunt trade screwball banter and give every scene they share a will-they-or-won’t-they tension.

The tongue is in cheek and the tone is ironic and bleak, at least until the should-we-stay-or-should-we-go climax punctures the mood. Still, welcome back, Danis.

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.

For once, trying to expand into a bigger exploration of the zeitgeist actually proves to be a misstep; the movie works best when it simply shuts up and concentrates more on the anatomy of a prank gone pop phenomenal.

If nothing else, Charlie Says puts Van Houten, and to a lesser extent her sisters in crime, in the center of their own story.

Other than an impromptu spectacle in a downtown record store, little of the chops and charisma Buckley fils had in spades is channeled; this is still the usual Let Us Now Praise Famous Men karaoke session, wrapped up in some extra-discordantly warbled notes.

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

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.

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.

Rage, not righteousness, is the mode here, but the muted, disbelieving, draining kind. Simple answers aren’t on the menu.

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.

Redford’s devotion to old-school liberalism and ’70s socially informed dramas has been a directorial-career constant, and at its best, The Company You Keep feels like a movie you’d have seen in 1975 — one informed by political righteousness and made for adults.

You can’t say that Gyllenhaal hasn’t gone for broke with The Bride!, and the more you watch the actors give life to the central idea of a meeting of scarred bodies and equal minds, the more you feel like you’re watching something not just perversely over-the-top but personal.

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

What the true legacy of Jenkins’ addition to the catalog may end up being, however, is a template for honoring the past while still managing to move things a few steps ahead. The circle of life, indeed.

An attempt to detail the plight of North Koreans in their new homeland, The Journals of Musan doesn't soft-pedal the hardship; Park, however, apparently felt obligated to stack the deck against the film's passive protagonist to a ridiculous degree.

The 24th has its share of unevenness. It also has the blessing, and the curse, of necessity. It’s a story that has to be retold.

This tale of self-involved millennials, a mystery machine, and a whole mess of purposefully mistaken identities is the kind of mashup of high-concept horror and ham-fisted satire that mistakes complicated for complex and a pile-up of confusing plot twists for storytelling.

What keeps Adrift from feeling like just a travelogue tacked on to a tragi-sploitive star vehicle is, ironically enough, its star. Shailene Woodley has always been great when it comes to bringing the radiance – she's like a sunbeam made sentient – and even better when she can use that California Dreamin' glow semi-subversively a la "The Spectacular Now" or "The Descendents."

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.

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.

There is a sense that it could have gone farther out and pushed even more boundaries, especially before tying everything back up with a “happy” ending that feels mostly but not quite completely earned. But there’s still a bark and a bite here in the way that its allowing a specific strain of too-often stifled female rage to really bloom.

The Deadpool movies were once a much-needed counterpoint to all those dead-serious MCU sagas. They still act like the foul-mouthed class clown in the back row, but now it’s just more white noise dressed in red, yellow and black.

You’re left enduring a bumpy ride on a road to nowhere, in other words, and neither the film’s wane familiarity nor its welcome, pro-smut good intentions can make the journey worthwhile.

Director Paolo Sorrentino’s gorgeously gaudy, chalice-runneth-over satire, is really about one person: Silvio Berlusconi.

You can't deny the fun of seeing Depp retro-construct a muted version of his Vegas mugging like De Niro riffing on Brando's Don Corleone. (His reaction to swigging homemade rum is worth the price of admission alone.)

The movie adaptation's version of religion may be more nuanced than the usual Left Behind fire-and-brimstone sermonizing you find in much contemporary pro-Christian cinema, but it still leaves behind a sulfuric stink.

This Age-of-Aquarius relic's dedication to utopian ideals is great; this superficial portrait, however, is merely grating.

For all of the multiplex-friendly fun Wright’s conjuring with this over-the-top spin on dystopian sci-fi blockbusters, the prevailing feeling here is dread. Most filmmakers would have diluted the grit and genuine sense of moral free-fall. Wright doubles the dosage. Every adrenaline rush comes with a chaser of low rage and simmering despair.

Somehow, The Beach Bum is even nuttier, less logical, more visually beautiful and down-in-the-gutter uglier than the film you just imagined from that description.

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

What really hurts is seeing Jamie Travis's name attached; for those of us who love his extraordinary "Patterns" trilogy, watching the talented Toronto filmmaker add his characterically kitschy touch to such a witless, faux-edgy movie can only be described as a Travis-ty.

There are better adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and there are far, far worse adaptations of Wuthering Heights. Yet you will certainly not find a hornier version of this material than Fennell’s fast-and-loose spin on the torrid tale of Heathcliff and Catherine, childhood pals turned paramours who can never truly be together and genuinely can’t keep their hands off each other. It may in fact be the horniest literary adaptation ever made.

A throwback WWII men-on-a-mission adventure marinated in modern bloodlust and movie references, this particularly pulpy take on a Dad Cinema staple couldn’t be more violent and more derivative of past works. It also couldn’t be more of a blast to watch if you enjoy a certain strain of carbon-dated derring-do mixed with cheeky carnage.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

Despite toggling among the three characters' story lines, the film is barely concerned with the who, what or where of the incidents, much less a deeper why. It simply wants to milk this real-life example of courage (and chaos) under fire for multiplex thrills, reducing everything to a cheap adrenaline rush set to a pulsing soundtrack.

Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.

This is the sort of lazy, slapdash, self-impressed excuse for “edgy” entertainment that makes you enraged. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good; this is so bad you’re tempted to kick those responsible for it right in the jingle bells.

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.

This much-beleagured cinematic universe has finally hit upon a winning film, and one that will be forever tainted.

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

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

If such outré flourishes don't fully lift the story past the limitations of innocence-lost storytelling, they do suggest Ávila is an artist worth keeping an eye on.

It’s not a bad film, just a generically bland one.

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

We like our secondhand vengeance as sleazy and bloody as the next grindhouse fiend, but even an intentional throwback shouldn’t feel content to coast on so much déjà vu.

Yes, you would watch these two in virtually anything. You just wish it wasn’t this. They deserve something sturdier and far less head-slappingly preposterous, and that’s the truth.

Even with the actors’ laudable work—especially Simm, who finally shakes off the notion that he’s a poor man’s Simon Pegg—there’s not enough going on past the temporal trick to make the humanistic elements pop. Gimmick aside, the title is regrettably apropos.

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

Once this cultural exploration devolves into just a forum for grating geek griping and Jar-Jar Binks hatred, however, you'll wish you could escape to a galaxy far, far away.

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.

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

The result is a fascinating, if somewhat scattered, meta attempt to straddle modernism and realism, creating an aesthetic purgatory oddly similar to the film's geographical one.

It's Weiss's sheer gonzo energy and his determination to keep it together (barely) in the name of justice that initially fuel this underdog tale, giving it a far more manic, unpredictable edge than your usual courtroom handwringer.

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 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.

If you’ve ever wanted to the man formerly known as Stringer Bell cold-cock the King of the Jungle, Beast is the movie of your dreams. Take that specific wish-fulfillment out of the equation, and what you’re left with is just a modern variation on a 1970s animal-slasher flick.

Cracks simply doesn't make the grade.

Awkward banter, a lack of narrative thrust and concentrated character deep-digging, and a performance by Sally Hawkins as a Russian maid that seems beamed in from another movie all contribute to the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked fruitcake.

Like the other Bad Boys movies, this is the cinematic equivalent of exquisitely prepared fast food, empty-calorie entertainment that people love to eat because it tastes good going down.

Whistle-blowing works best without gratuitous pop-doc debris, but there are only so many dry, fact-heavy testimonies from engineers you can take before a certain dullness uneasily settles in.

The First Purge isn’t the beginning of the end of the franchise, just the start of where the narrative’s “civility” starts to erode and where that leads.

The overbaked, underwhelming, narratively restless movie itself is 0.0 percent watchable.

All of this is presented with Director Park’s usual eye for extraordinary compositions and the occasional baroque flourish — dig that shot from the bottom of a boilermaker, as it’s being consumed! — but rest assured his tongue is resting comfortably in his cheek.

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

In all aspects, The Girl can’t help it — this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic.

Though the director includes a few brief humdingers — a fight that involves a Rube Goldberg–ish tangle of wires; some munitions-fueled mayhem in a farmhouse — it’s not enough to keep viewers from wishing they were thumbing through a John le Carré novel instead.

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

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?

If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that "Son of Saul" does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice.

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

If you’re seeking anything chewier about the pitfalls of modern dating, or con artistry in the age of social-media enabling, or what women want — from careers to friends, life, love — look elsewhere, pilgrim. But when Shlesinger opens the passenger door to her star vehicle and turns it to into a full-blown buddy comedy, the movie goes from being merely good on paper to being great onscreen.

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.

Like the movie itself, the performance doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel in terms of how a good man goes evil. But both the actor and Ballad seem to respect the fans and the franchise, not just in terms of investment but in building out things sideways instead of forward.

The movie will make you tap your toes; don't expect much for your head or your heartstrings.

It’s not a stretch to say that Linda Hamilton is the main reason you should rush out to see Terminator: Dark Fate posthaste.

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

This Wrinkle in Time is undoubtedly flawed, wildly uneven and apt to tie itself in narrative knots in a quest to wow you with sheer Technicolor weirdness. It's also undeniably DuVernay's movie as much as Disney's, and works best when she puts her feminine energy, high-flying freak flag and sense of empathy front and center.

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.

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.

It’s the work of a young filmmaker. But it’s also very much the work of a genuine filmmaker, bursting with creativity and refining their vision in real time. To quote another member of this cineaste’s clan: Attention must be paid.

It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.

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.

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.

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.

Annabelle Comes Home is not out to reinvent the wheel, or to even rotate the franchise tires. It may not leave you petrified to the core, but it won’t you leave angry, and in this, the Summer of Our Perpetual Disastrous Sequel, that’s no small feat.

Kevin Macdonald’s drama is determined to put a name and a face to the legion of largely anonymous casualties of the War on Terror — not the victims of attacks, but the other ones, i.e. mostly Middle Eastern men who, by some circumstantial evidence, slivers of association or maybe just their nationality, became wards of the state held in a perpetual purgatory.

We sing O’Connell’s praises so loudly because he’s really the only reason to check out Max Winkler’s tale of blood bonds, brotherly love and bloody bareknuckle bouts, and to remind you that sometimes, even the best and brightest can’t save something so banal and by-the-book.

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.

The writer-director does have a wonderful eye-a shot of a tractor wheel sticking out of the Hudson River is museumworthy-but his grasp of the melodramatic could use a little more grounding.

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.

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.

Given the talent involved, Fly Me to the Moon should be the stratospheric answer to our summer-movie prayers. Instead, it can barely get off the ground.

The rule for sequels is: give them the same, only different. Happy Gilmore 2 adheres to this concept beautifully, along with doling out enough blatant fan service to choke a one-eyed alligator. (R.I.P., Morris.)

Parthenope wants to be a feminine epic. It’s really just an update of those Bardot arthouse skin flicks, Italian style. But it can take solace in easily being an early contender for the horniest movie of the year.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

Trap is… well, you wouldn’t say it’s good...It is undeniably camp, however, and we look forward to attending one of those midnight reclamation-revival screenings à la Showgirls, where everyone screams the dialogue and dresses like Hartnett’s normcore Norman Bates, a decade from now.

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.

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.

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.

Huppert fans have long been tolerant of her hit-and-miss filmography, and while her double act with the rubber-faced Poelvoorde provides a few well-played scenes-two words: horsey rides-it's not enough to liven up a trite story of loosening up.

This full-clip misfire reminds us of a valuable lesson: Not even talent, tastefully dressed tough guys and a metropolitan backdrop dripping with after-hours menace can compensate for a complete lack of momentum or drama.

It’s capable of quickly upshifting from tense to intense, and also of having the appearance of a scary movie rather than being one.

The less enamored of Eleanor the Great you become, however, the more and more thankful you are for the presence of June the Magnificent. There’s a lot of joie de vivre she injects into even the most morose moments, and Squibb knows exactly how to use spoonfuls of sugar to help the regret, the side-eye snark, and the heartache go down. The film’s just good enough. She’s great.

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.

While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding; it's hard to tell where D'Elia's own psychotic cinephilia ends and the character's begins.

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’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.

Whoever enlisted Jorma Taccone to direct this deserves a raise, given that the charter member of the Lonely Island understands how to consistently ramp things up to levels of high ridiculousness.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a threadbare high-concept story given the high-thread-count treatment — a lovely piece of luxury pulp. It’s also the creepiest and classiest bit of late-summer counterprogramming you’re likely to find, which may say more about our current landscape of cinematic pleasures than the movie itself.

There’s such beautiful artisanal touches that Russo-Young adds to what could have been a standard YA-lit flick and so much that the actors do with scenes of people just talking that you can’t write it off. And there are too many dramatic moments that flatline when they should spike, too many plot turns that feel false and too much reliance on “coincidence” as some higher-power string-yanking to say it completely works.

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

A favorite at this year's SXSW, Kyle Smith's real-time look at curdled relationships is a modest take on indie psychodramatics - and little else.

It takes a lot of hard work and the perfect alignment of movie stars to make something this god-awful.

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

This is a movie too enamored of its own tawdriness, turning every violent act and violation into gratuitously salacious grindhouse set pieces.

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.

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

It’s a fast, not as cheap, and much better than decent cover version of another song, one that knows very well that it’s a cover version.

There’s a constant feeling that a lot of hands were wrestling for the steering wheel of this biopic behind the scenes, with various parties pushing the story this way and that, even with the united goal of collectively crafting the greatest love letter of all. Yet Ackie just keeps her eyes on — and her energy directed toward — delivering a screen-worthy Whitney, scaling the heights and earning her Hall of Fame status.

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

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.

Fixed should have been, by any measure, the fix we needed in terms of balls-out hilarity about neurotic, sex-crazed creatures, or even just a parable from an animation godhead about humans being just as beholden to animal instincts as our four-legged friends. Instead, we get a wildly uneven, totally obvious, and often painfully unfunny 80 minutes.

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

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.

It’s the kind of two-hander that relies solely on the chemistry of the actors, both of whom banter, parry and bum rush their way through various left turns with grace. Their pas de deux almost makes up for this threadbare tragedy’s no-win endgame. Almost.

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.

There are tiny glimpses of someone who has genuine chops behind the camera, almost but not quite enough to make you think that, given more time and focus, he could have made something out of these spare parts. Or maybe, just maybe, this whole botched Operation is designed to make his older, possibly lesser work look better.

Like a particularly concise, purposefully elliptical short story, The Woman in the Yard quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it’s worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation.

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.

It helps that Davis is insanely charismatic onscreen, but her ability to showcase the vulnerability and scar tissue beneath this human embodiment of an extended middle finger gives the movie a semblance of depth.

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.

The odor of musty, late-’80s nostalgia may still hover around this already threadbare brand, but you simply don’t see movies that leave both the curious and the fans who truly care this viscerally satisfied anymore.

It’s gratifying to see Eisenberg move past nerdy-cutie parts; his slim shoulders, it seems, are capable of handling more than Michael Cera’s leftovers.

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

Just because you tart up a typical romantic comedy with trash talk doesn't make it edgy or real.

There’s much to gasp and fawn over here, and too much forgettable filler. But at least audiences have a chance to see it, so Serkis and his collaborators can finally turn the page on this particular book.

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.

What you’re ultimately left with is the typical catch-and-release horror template that occasionally sags under the weight of its own ambitions, as well as one that, having exhausted the idea’s potential early on, simply limps to the finish line.

Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

It makes sense that Last Christmas isn’t coming out at the end of December but right on the cusp of Thanksgiving. It’s a bona fide holiday-movie turkey.

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.

Old-school intrigue, informants and assassins, life-or-death pursuits in crowded places, characters who are adults and do not wear capes or pilot robots: This is pretty much what any filmgoer over the age of 13 pines for in the dog days of summer, so this courtroom melodrama/surveillance thriller should be manna.

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.

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.

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.

The Hunt is neither a harbinger of Western civilization’s end nor quite the Swiftian satire its creators want it to be. It’s simply a better-than-decent B-movie, the kind that takes pride in its sick kills and throws a lot of punches that only occasionally connect.

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.

This Snow White may not be the worst live-action adaptation of an animated touchstone, though it’s a strong contender for its blandest. The movie does earn points as a bedtime story, however, because it will definitely put you to sleep.

The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.

Given how prominent the postcard sultriness of her backdrop is compared with the story's emotional ping-pong, all she ends up with is a kinder, chicer Adrian Lyne movie.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is all feedback. It talks loud and says next to nothing.

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.

Summering works better as a mood than it does a movie, succeeding in channeling a certain feeling of transition despite ambling, or occasionally stumbling though more traditional kids-flicks narrative beats.

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.

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.

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

While no one could accuse Ticket to Paradise of being a “great” movie, or even a “very good” one, there’s something about watching Clooney and Roberts butt up against each other in front of a screen-saver background that scratches a long-dormant itch.

There’s a lived experience pulsing at the center of this slice-of-life tale, which helps guide it over some of the more generic elements and weaker patches, especially when things threaten to detour directly into poverty-porn and/or Amerindie miserablism territory.

It Lives Inside knows you can use the cover of monsters and things that go bump in your psyche to examine the real-life horrors. But when the message starts to eclipse the medium, it’s time to get out.

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.

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

Only Leo, always a dependable supporting actor, turns her character into something resembling a three-dimensional person. Watching her tentatively reconnect with her maternal instincts is a welcome surprise. Everything else here just feels like another descent into mediocre Amerindie miserablism.

Barkin may be the equal of Gena Rowlands or Liv Ullmann. Her director's clumsiness, however, suggests he isn't fit to hold Cassavetes's or Bergman's old camera cases.

They quickly smother whatever greatness was inherent in the material. Faulkner’s vivid, tragic and tender world is nowhere to be found here, and it's a deal breaker by any other name.

Titillation and tentative stabs at gender studies do not a cogent cri de coeur make. It's simply a provocation that's all hopped up with nowhere to go.

Though Summer of Goliath has its share of grace notes and gorgeous shots, the anxiety of influence hangs heavy over every real-time interaction, every direct testimony, every re-creation (and re-re-creation) of allegedly true incidents.

You applaud Seyfried for doing so much of the heavy lifting, and for once again proving that a close-up of someone looking unnerved is worth a thousand wonky exchanges. Still, not even she can keep the wheels from falling off when the second half tries to trade in gaslighting for ghosts and never finds the tone it needs to make the transition.

You could, however, accuse this Black Christmas of elevating the subtext of decades’ worth of slasher flicks to the point that the text itself starts to take a backseat, or that its third-act reveal may be trying a tad too hard to grab the social-thriller brass ring. You would not necessarily be wrong.

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.

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.

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

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

It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.

The Gray Man wants to remind you of what an old-school dopamine dump these types of entertainments are, and it has what seems to be the necessary ingredients to do it. Which, to be honest, only makes you wish this was tighter, tauter, tougher, better. It could be. It should be. The movie’s aims and instincts are killer. Its endgame has way too much filler.

The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.

A business-as-usual slog.

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.

Russell, to his everlasting credit, has made a film in which having cockeyed optimism, at this moment in the world, somehow feels like a radical act. For a movie that is all over the place, it’s determination to get back to a bygone moment isn’t just wishful thinking. It suggests, in own roundabout way, that a return to the past can also signal the beginning of a fresh start.

After the novelty of these backgrounds and comin'-at-ya bits wears off, Mars Needs Moms has to rely on Fogler's obnoxious Jack Black Jr. shtick, a weak subplot involving a '60s-obsessed Martian graffiti artist (Harnois) and rote video-game-y action sequences to carry it along-and that simply won't cut it.

Say what you will about this collection of less-than-feature-length films: There’s truth in its advertising. The sketchlike movies here are indeed shorts, and stars do lend their presence.

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.

You might not pay money to see this in a theater, but you’d watch it on your couch in a second, which is why Netflix makes perfect sense for it. A coda sets up a sequel. There are worse things to look forward to.

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

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.

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.

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.

You can’t say it’s unambitious, any more than you could call it coherent, and the result is less Dances With Wolves Redux and more Palms on Faces.

If nothing else, Damon and Affleck’s Beacon Street Wild Ride reminds you that movie stars plus car crashes, divided by gunshots and laughs, was part of a regular, balanced American-cinema breakfast.

At its best, The Predator is a movie that makes you forget there’s an iconic killer alien involved at all — with the exception of a slaughter in a lab and a shoot-out near a spaceship, the high points mostly involve the cast simply cracking wise with each other.

Shadows still functions as a study in superior sequel-itude, building a fine showcase for a reimagined character and the compelling, twitchy dynamo playing him. Should Ritchie ever learn to be elementary instead of epileptically overwrought, he may one day do proper justice to both.

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.

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.

For every camp element like Javier Bardem’s rainbow-vomit outfits or Diaz’s onanistic tryst with a car windshield, there are a dozen poetic-pulp moments that channel McCarthy’s pitiless view of the world to a tee.

The best thing you can say about Escape Room is that for most of it, you’re not desperately searching for the exit sign.

Tomb Raider may be a less camp, more cunning take on the arts and Crofts that have made the brand a hit, but to call this a better-than average videogame movie is to damn it with faint praise. Don't hate the players. Hate the genre.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

A corporate I.P. Easter-egg hunt posing as a movie, this horror-comedy raids the House of Mouse’s resident spoooooky ride’s signature bits while nudging your ribs as aggressively as (in)humanly possible. Even for die-hard Disney fanatics, it’s still about as fun as waiting endlessly in line for something permanently closed for repairs.

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.

The only time sparks fly are when that restorative tanning bed crackles and sputters.

The fact that director Darragh Byrne has laden things with a Celtic Whimsy 101 score and a sketched outline of a script makes it even tougher for Meaney to lift this film out of its social-drama rut.

The movie starts off as yet another Kill Bill, et al. clone. Thanks to its star, it at least goes out as something closer to Kill, Bill, Kill!

But at its best, Shock and Awe still feels like it strains to be Spotlight-lite and comes up lacking. The title feels like a misnomer.

They've given their star one rotten peach of a role, and Depardieu makes the most of it. Because of him, such surreal Gallic scuzziness has rarely seemed so sweetly tender.

What this feels like is a second-generation copy of a copy, and one that suffers from the typical franchise law of diminishing returns. No one expects the reinvention of the MonsterVerse wheel, but it’d be nice to have something that isn’t more of the same and less than the sum of its I.P. parts.