Elisabeth Vincentelli

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.

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

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.

Good thing Union steers The Perfect Find with such sunny warmth and relatable poise, too, because the director, Numa Perrier, and screenwriter, Leigh Davenport (adapting Tia Williams’s 2016 novel of the same title), are not as assured.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie is bursting at the seams, as if Choi, in his first outing since the 2015 historical action drama “Assassination,” was drunk on pure filmmaking pleasure and threw every cinematic genre into a gigantic blender.

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.

Stupefyingly sluggish.

The prospect of spending more time with this crew is not a bad one.

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

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.

Avery (“Samaritan”) drives the film at a pace as caffeinated as Amorth himself, and manages to incorporate legitimate scares into a plot halfway between Indiana Jones and a Dan Brown potboiler, with camp touches worthy of Ken Russell.

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.

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

Is a cliché turned on its head still a cliché? “O’Dessa” will keep you wondering, and that counts for something.

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.

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.

Whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb.

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.

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.

Admittedly, the film is more dutiful than artful, ticking one box after another, a tendency that is especially obvious when it ventures to the dark side of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on employees and customers, the lack of diversity among the catalog models).

Despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.

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.