Frank Scheck

Shot inconsistently in the series’ mockumentary style, which often finds the characters delivering direct addresses to an unseen camera crew, the relentlessly tedious film is devoid of laughs.

Offers a few spooky thrills to get you through another night stuck at home.

Unfortunately, despite all its good intentions, Shooting Heroin lacks the cinematic urgency to get its important message across.

Although episodic in structure, the movie holds together beautifully thanks in large part to Tiefenbach's compelling performance. Looking and sounding like a young Woody Allen, the actor superbly conveys Hanan's initial fear and insecurities and then his gradually increasing confidence as he begins to live up to the demands of his new profession.

The film offers enough low-key goofy pleasures to provide an amusing diversion.

Despite its talented, overqualified cast, Lazy Susan simply feels like a mistake.

It never manages to overcome its air of overfamiliarity, straining mightily but giving off little but flop sweat.

Dolphin Reef benefits greatly from the gorgeous cinematography and canny editing typical of Disney nature docs as well as Portman's soothingly lighthearted, bedtime story-style narration that turns serious at just the right times.

Impossible Monsters at times gets too baroque for its own good, straining for a Ken Russell-like hallucinatory style that it doesn't fully succeed in pulling off. But it's an admirably ambitious and accomplished debut for its tyro filmmaker who should easily move on to bigger things.

A hard-hitting psychological drama about an actress who surreptitiously monitors her former assailant and his current prospective victim, Tape benefits from its well-executed thriller mechanics and terrific performances by its three leads.

Despite the best efforts of the talented lead performers and an overqualified supporting cast, this is a movie for which you should practice social distancing.

The filmmakers are clearly hoping that Patterson's name will be enough to attract moviegoers, but this misbegotten effort only serves to further tarnish a cinematic brand already diminished by 2012's Tyler Perry-starrer Alex Cross.

While this cinematic adaptation of W. Glasgow Phillip's acclaimed 1994 novel isn't wholly effective in handling its complex storyline, the film offers compelling performances by its two leads and enough provocative elements to make it worthy of attention.

More often than not, I Still Believe feels like the cinematic equivalent of the sort of Christian pop songs its main character performs, filled with soaring choruses and heavy-handed lyrics. Every emotion is telegraphed to the hilt, with results that feel more manipulative than affecting. The fact that it's a true story only partially mitigates its more cloying aspects.

Only proves more intent on establishing an ominous mood than providing thrills. Muted and restrained to the point of tedium, the picture offers little that's distinctive to set it apart.

Spenser Confidential seems to be aiming for a buddy-film, action-comedy vibe, but the problems are that there's virtually no chemistry between Spenser and Hawk, the gags (many of them revolving around Spenser's deepest relationship seeming to be with his dog) are lame at best, and the action is strictly pro forma.

The Booksellers tends to be a bit too digressive at times, lapsing into many tangents that are never uninteresting but tend to cause it to lose focus. Nonetheless, the film provides an evocative portrait of a way of life that is hopefully not completely vanishing anytime soon.

Unfortunately, despite its uncomfortable resonance, Beneath Us barely scratches the surface of its provocative ideas, sacrificing nuance in favor of cheap shocks.

The doc serves the valuable purpose of shedding a much-needed spotlight on a problem that, as anyone who's recently walked on any city's streets can attest, only seems to be getting worse.

[Paul's] warm personality and sense of humor are on ample display in this engaging documentary that makes a strong case for his influence and importance.

Scream, Queen! feels a bit self-indulgent at times, exploring so many tangents that it tends to lose focus. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating sociological examination of the circumstances surrounding a film that inadvertently became a camp classic.

Although touching on a multitude of aspects of its disturbing subject matter, it never really digs particularly deep into any of them, with the result that it ultimately proves unsatisfying

Balloon simply doesn't feature the sort of cinematic thrills necessary to keep us fully invested in the travails of its central characters. It's not that the events are depicted in anything less than bombastic, hyperbolic fashion. It's more that the filmmaker lacks the directorial finesse to calibrate the suspense for maximum cinematic effect.

The results aren't fully satisfying on any level, despite a terrific cast that includes rising star Ana de Armas (Knives Out), soon to be seen in the upcoming James Bond film "No Time to Die."

The results are visually disorienting, to say the least. Although Notary and the special effects team do as good a job as technology allows, the expressive Buck never quite looks real. And you keep expecting him and the rest of the animals to burst into song.

VFW ultimately lacks the cinematic flair to be truly memorable. But the pic succeeds on its own terms of being a nostalgic throwback to the days when such B-movies routinely opened on double and triple bills in urban grindhouses.

From its desert landscapes to its principal setting of an architecturally distinguished house to its extremely photogenic lead actress, every frame of the psychological thriller proves visually stunning to behold. While the film never manages to achieve the level of suspense that would make it dramatically riveting, it certainly earns its art house credentials on a purely visceral level.

Her (Zoey Deutch) wildly entertaining performance proves the standout element of the picture, which never quite reaches the comic heights for which it's aiming.