Elisabeth Vincentelli

This amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.

The pace is slacker than it should be, but still, “Fire Island” fits neatly alongside Kristen Stewart’s lesbian Christmas movie “Happiest Season” on Hulu’s rom-com shelf.

After a dillydallying slow start, Brown ratchets up the tension efficiently, summoning a mix of gross-out body invasion, eco-mutation and large-scale cosmic dread on a small budget.

Clock is a psychological thriller, or perhaps even a satire, in horror clothing, tantalizing us with thought-provoking ideas, only to abandon them: nature versus nurture, the influence of the wellness-industrial complex over minds and bodies, the oppressive expectations placed on women — including by themselves.

A pulsating rage at the way society neglects women in particular, its weakest members in general, courses through the movie. More than the displays of flayed flesh, it’s what sticks.

Roy grows as a killer over the course of the movie, which involves an increasingly tedious amount of repetitive violence played for laughs — he’s like Wile E. Coyote, brushing himself off after falling off a cliff or being blown up.

For the most part, though, the X factor of elegance, sensuality and verve that made MGM musicals so memorable is missing here. You want to give an encouraging grade for effort, but effort is also the last thing you want to see in a musical.

The movie feels shaggily shapeless, as if Rabins and Rose were unsure what, exactly, they were trying to say, or how to get to the mourning prayer that gives their movie its title — and does, eventually, provide an emotional coda.

It’s hard to begrudge Unfinished Business for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.

You Can Live Forever sticks to a fairly common coming-of-age trajectory.

Rotting in the Sun is sharpest when exploring the two men’s love-loathe connection because Silva threads a provocatively fuzzy line between fascination for and irritation with Jordan and, by extension, Firstman himself.

The movie is middle-of-the-road rather than bad — hard to hate and harder to love.

The film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.

It’s unclear what Mandico is trying to say, if anything, and the film overstays its welcome — even the wildest visuals lose their power to stun after a while — but “After Blue” certainly is sui generis.

Violent, law-defying cops would be a tough sell at any time, but “Rogue City” is oblivious to the changed context surrounding their stories. They don’t hold much romantic allure nowadays.

Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers.

The charismatic Nyong’o is easily the best part of this feeble Australian horror comedy.

The minimal plot purports to endorse spartan storytelling, but after a promising start the movie detours into an overlong flashback. This may be to give Franck emotional weight, but it only creates belly fat.

Shook is done in by its final reveal, which manages to be simultaneously improbable and conventional. For engagement, we’ll have to look somewhere else.

Maggio ends his story in the early 1980s, even though Stigwood lived until 2016. He is thinking small about a man who used to dream big.

[A] sluggish, blandly slick time-travel romance.

Even the sight of the two frenemies wiping out racist goons is not enough to make up for the desperately frantic action scenes (hope you like interminable car chases), joyless jokes and hackneyed clichés.

Adding insult to bodily injury, the director, Tommy Wirkola (“The Trip,” “Dead Snow”), and the screenwriters, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, can’t even muster any decent set pieces. Instead, the movie unfurls as a tedious series of bloody deaths and witless dialogue.

A rom-com that so scrupulously fulfills every cliché of the genre, it might as well have been devised by ChatGPT.

It’s not so much that Gray Matter is formula, but that it is clumsily made formula. Except, that is, for Isaac’s performance.

Stupefyingly sluggish.

There is no getting around it: Mark Raso’s Awake is bad. But at least it’s so bad that it’s often ludicrously laughable: Netflix may well have a cult turkey on its hands.

This scenario’s predictability could be forgiven were the movie effective on any level, but it just isn’t, from Cho and Waterston’s wooden performances to jump scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo.