David Lewis

It’s hard to deny that Shyamalan remains one of our most prolific, longstanding filmmakers, and that his work continues to make an impression on our culture. His tense, never dull “Knock at the Cabin” makes us uncomfortable at times, and few punches are pulled. Perhaps he’s found a formula that will take him to new, interesting places.

Halloween Ends is far from a great finale, but it’s a decent showcase for Jamie Lee Curtis, whose place in film history has long been assured because of this role. Will this be the last we see of Laurie Strode, or the “Halloween” storyline? It’s best to wait for the box-office reports. After all, franchises never die — they just change shape.

The movie’s midsection, by far its most effective part, offers its share of heart-pounding moments.

Both McAvoy and Horgan handle the rapid-fire dialogue with gusto, and for a while, their devastating banter is amusing. But eventually the effect begins to wear thin: These vocal diatribes need a more developed story to hang on.

To be sure, Big Pharma execs make for natural movie villains these days, but this story could have used a tad more subtlety, something that was in short supply here.

The by-the-numbers film is not hard to sit through and won’t offend anybody, but its lofty, worthwhile message doesn’t feel earned.

The Virtuoso covers well-worn territory — the assassin story is almost a genre unto itself — and director Nick Stagliano, hampered by a predictable script, can’t bring much new to the game.

The technically elegant Voyagers, about a space colonization trip run amok, is easy enough to sit through, but it’s a story in need of more rocket fuel. There isn’t a bad scene in the movie, yet there isn’t a really good scene, either. It’s a quiet psychological thriller, even when it’s trying to stir mayhem.

My Salinger Year, which is basically The Devil Wears Prada set in the literary world, is a film that feels like it’s ready to take off at any moment, but stalls every time it tries to do anything.

Still, Silk Road remains watchable because both Robinson and Clarke are interesting screen presences. And there’s some humor, which consistently lands better than the thrills.

Monsoon, an offbeat story about a man’s cultural dislocation in Vietnam, is more of a slow drip than a torrential downpour. It’s a lovely film that suddenly and magically can wash over you, then lose you in its opacities.

Ting’s conceptually solid film is briskly paced, and its heart is in the right place. With a more fine-tuned screenplay, it could have been better than a serviceable movie.

It all gets a little unwieldy at times, but Shooting the Mafia is far from boring. We can’t take our eyes off it, just like a photo that’s out of focus, yet somehow remains arresting.

The most refreshing thing about the movie is having a more mature woman at the center of the action, and August knows not to overreach here. She is dryly funny, but also subtly affecting, and it’s a pleasure to watch her heart and mind slowly but surely open up to life’s possibilities.

For a film about an unexpected reunion between two daughters and their long-lost mother, there is shockingly little talk about family. We have no idea what these women see in each other, let alone want from each other. This strips the film of the emotional authenticity that it ultimately craves.

This project is in many ways a nod to the films of the French New Wave, and even if the surprisingly unsexy A Faithful Man doesn’t quite measure up, it’s never boring and keeps moving at a brisk pace.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about the filmmaking, but Becoming Nobody does its job: helping spread Ram Dass’ message in a polarized world in which we tend to emphasize our differences, not our similarities.

By the time the credits roll, we don’t achieve a much deeper sense of who John DeLorean really was — only a better understanding of why this complicated figure continues to befuddle screenwriters. DeLorean probably would have preferred it that way.

A B-movie with a few thrills and plenty of inane dialogue.

JT Leroy is on safer ground when Albert and Knoop are matching wits, mainly because it’s a pleasure to watch the perfectly cast Dern and Stewart on the screen. It’s easy to understand what attracted these fine actors to these roles, but the script allows them to only scratch the surface of this maze-of-mirrors story, where the truth remains deliciously elusive.

A movie that moves slower than it should and that keeps us detached for long periods of time. Most of the problems can be traced to the script, which does a poor job of establishing the characters and giving us a sense of how they relate to each other.

The film is a reasonably entertaining trifle, though it’s overstuffed with battle sequences and peripheral characters that often consume the main story line.

Apocalypse also doesn’t excel in the teen angst department, because the characters are not fleshed out enough. The love triangle is not convincing, and except for Anna and her father, we don’t care a whole lot about what happens to the characters, perhaps because we didn’t get enough time to know them in the beginning.

Though the ambitious Outlaw King doesn’t always fire on all cylinders, moviegoers deserve this chance to see it on the big screen, before it starts showing on a laptop near you.

This is a film that wears its anti-tech bent like an old James Bond wristwatch.

Assassination Nation won’t get any points for narrative cohesion or character development, but it’s a timely, visually arresting statement about how pandemonium in this country threatens to become the new norm.

Throughout the film, we always feel ahead — way ahead — of the narrator, even if the movie does contain a certain sense of dread for Trump detractors, as the inevitability of the election draws closer.

The Nun is certainly not a terrible horror movie – the production values are stellar, and there is a decent backstory about the abbey. But the film won’t be remembered as one of the top entries in the expanding canon of the Conjuring Universe.