Geoff Berkshire

Loitering With Intent is essentially a 75-minute hangout movie, which would work better if the characters were worth hanging out with.

Every bit as sitcom-ish and saccharine as its predecessor, but considerably less distinctive.

The ADD overload combined with an understandably kid-friendly approach to horror (no one’s ever in real danger, and the monsters are never too scary) results in a disposable product intended to appeal to everyone but likely to resonate with no one.

A terminally quirky indie dramedy, Bottled Up risks trivializing prescription drug abuse in service of a trite middle-age romance.

Although the X-Men ensembles are usually large, there are simply too many characters for the action-heavy “Apocalypse” to properly juggle.

Earth to Echo reaches for the stars with its gentle sci-fi shenanigans, but the rote result remains decidedly earthbound.

Shyamalan has long been criticized for serving up borderline (or downright) silly premises with a straight face and overtly pretentious atmosphere, but he basically abandons that approach here in favor of a looser, more playful dynamic between his fresh-faced leads.

Despite a game lead performance from smallscreen star Katie Cassidy (“Arrow”) as a young woman with multiple personality disorder and an incorrigible punk attitude, this latest low-budget outing from helmer John Suits simply doesn’t have the imagination or resources necessary to pull off its clumsy stabs at visual pizzazz.

Its compassion and careful sidestepping of exploitation tropes can’t make up for a fundamental lack of depth and urgency in the storytelling.

"Spark” remains a lovingly made and shot tease, designed to ensure that what really happens at Burning Man stays at Burning Man.

It’s too bad the film doesn’t provide a better sense of what makes the Belgian Malinois so uniquely suited to the battlefield, or find a way to pay more than lip service to the deep bonds developed between military men and animals.

The sudsy quality of the production ensures all the performers look terrific, but aren’t given particularly impressive material to work with.

Despite an impressive global scope and admirable ethnic diversity among the interview subjects, the central thesis that women are leading the charge on green issues receives nothing but anecdotal support.

The graceful camerawork, precise editing and high-quality animation still can’t disguise the lack of imagination that went into the overall conception and the repetitive sameness that creeps into every bind the penguins find themselves in.

Less reliant on slow-burn suspense and larded with fake-out jump scares, this is the first sequel in the series that fails to advance the overall mythology in any meaningful way.

With plot elements cobbled together from recent animated hits, the blandly executed pic might as well be titled “Happy Minions of Madagascar’s Ice Age.”

Exploiting Lawrence's newfound fame is the only hope this ill-conceived, poorly executed venture has of connecting with audiences before poisonous word of mouth sends potential buyers in search of a more attractive address.

Daddy’s Home isn’t so much a lump of coal as an empty box.

Cheerfully exhorting imagination, creativity and bravery in children while demonstrating none of those virtues itself, The Hero of Color City proves to be a dispiritingly colorless feature-length babysitter.

Sidney Hall strings its audience along on a tedious journey that runs out of steam long before reaching an embarrassingly overwrought finale.

The film’s haphazard structure and freewheeling arguments only serve to reinforce tired pothead cliches — it’s paranoid, prone to starry-eyed dorm-room philosophizing, and it doesn’t know when to quit.

Overlong film quickly becomes tedious whenever the camera strays from the lions, who don’t have much personality but prove more compelling than the humans.

The timidly plotted proceedings never veer from romantic-comedy formula. There’s a whole lot of talk and very little action here, and not just because the squeaky-clean pic wears its PG rating like a badge of honor.

Character actor Michael Cudlitz’s first leading role is the sole selling point of Dark Tourist, a well-acted but rote and ultimately repellent character study of a psychologically disturbed loner.

The type of sporadically silly and patently predictable horror pic that would look like filler on Syfy’s weekend lineup, The Other Side of the Door brings virtually nothing new to the supernatural genre.

Matt Smith (sporting a jarring Midwest American accent) and Natalie Dormer (sounding like she stepped directly off the set of “Game of Thrones”) inject what little life there is in Patient Zero, a post-apocalyptic pandemic movie that's more grade-Z than “World War Z.”

The low-budget production feels chintzy and impossibly square, even by tyke standards.

Even a brisk running time, barely topping 80 minutes, is too long to ask audiences to stay in the company of these characters and their terrible self-inflicted predicaments.