Geoff Berkshire

Even a prickly pro like Sutherland can’t do anything to elevate a hokey self-help lecture disguised as family entertainment.

The film’s strongest assets are undoubtedly its actors.

The Land feels a few drafts away from succeeding on its own terms. Still, there’s enough on screen, beyond Lendeborg’s confident star turn, to label Caple as a filmmaker to watch.

Visual spectacle still takes precedence over coherent plotting, and the human characters retain all the gravitas of generic placeholders who accidentally made it into the shooting script.

Tweel masterfully assembles roughly four years of footage, much of it shot by Gleason himself, and the result is painfully raw at times but undeniably rewarding.

So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness.

It’s not necessarily artful, but it’s also never less than compelling. If anything, Soechtig has only refined her skills at packaging a slick, audience-friendly documentary with a subject that feels even more urgent.

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

Siegel’s likable perf keeps the audience on her side and highlights Maddie’s knack for thinking on her feet. Gallagher is even better as the mysteriously motivated antagonist.

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

In a welcome gender reversal from the father-son dynamic of “Heaven Is for Real,” Garner and Rogers deliver fully committed performances that credibly convey the physical and mental anguish endured by sick children and their caregivers.

This is the kind of movie where a major development in a character’s personal life instantly telegraphs his ultimate fate in the trenches.

Lack of originality feels like a fairly meaningless complaint when Roth’s film was derivative enough to begin with.

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.

Filmmakers Josh Kriegman (a former Weiner aide) and Elyse Steinberg utilize their seemingly unfettered access to deliver a rollicking and never-dull insider’s view of a political campaign in crisis mode, but the most fascinating questions surrounding Weiner’s epic fall remain unanswered.

Page is simply superb in a complex role that perfectly plays to her gift for balancing deadpan comedy with surprisingly deep emotional reserves.

Joshy offers a strange mix of elements that never quite add up.

Solid performances and some genuinely sharp humor elevate writer-director Rob Burnett’s second feature.

The intense focus on the two lead characters emerges as both a strength and a weakness. There’s a lot of walking and talking, and what begins as rather charming ultimately turns tedious, even with a fleet 80-minute running time before closing credits factor in.

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.”

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

Writer-director Eli Morgan Gesner (a clothing designer and skateboarder who previously helmed the skateboarding and hip-hop doc “Concrete Jungle”) could have milked the premise for gleeful counterculture exploitation (like a 21st-century “Basket Case”) or campy John Waters-style gross-out comedy, but settles for mean-spirited banality.

Against all odds, “Nashville” series regular Peeples keeps the film watchable, delivering a capable star turn with enough flashes of soul to belie the script’s artifice and credible pop vocals to boot.

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.

Empty cynicism isn’t a substitute for well-reasoned critique, and Roth winds up looking more clueless than the so-called “social justice warriors” he’s trying to satirize.

Although Captive largely succeeds as a two-hander, it stumbles in the minimal attempts to broaden the scope beyond Smith and Nichols’ time together.

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.

The directorial debut of visual artist Corin Hardy is never less than arresting to the eye, but thin characters and a familiar story hold this Irish chiller back from entering the top tier of recent horror entries.