Glenn Kenny

As competently put together as this movie is, it imparted to me no sense of a higher calling, and thus left me unmoved.

Too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares.

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.

The plot’s central mystery suffers from “Body Double” syndrome in that the movie has so few characters that the villain’s reveal can only elicit a shrug.

This is a perhaps even more misbegotten remake than the Farrelly Brothers' update of "The Heartbreak Kid."

As conventional and stiff as Max Rose itself is, Lewis’ performance in it is full of virtues: he’s committed, disciplined, and entirely credible.

The movie’s flabbiness, its unfocused flopping from scene to scene, its disinclination to provide any individual scene with any dimension beyond its immediate impact, practically vitiates the entire theme of Dickie’s ostensible mentorship of Tony Soprano.

Strange Magic is essentially a jukebox musical so song-laden as to practically be an operetta, and the songs are so eclectic that they never quite fit into the movie’s flying-insect world, which is divided into dark and light forests.

Aside from race jokes, Ted 2 offers a nearly staggering number of weed jokes, a couple of which are mildly funny, or at least funnier than the rape jokes.

I’m not even going to discuss, in detail at least, the elephant in the ideological room that Passengers inhabits, which is its spectacular sexism.

If you saw the trailer, you got the best the movie has to offer.

For adults -- even adults with fond memories of the TV series -- this is one bizarre mess.

The directorial pyrotechnics keep Solace from “dragging” in a narrative sense; the very real boredom it nonetheless elicits is more existential.

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

The reason for all this dull-to-offensive story stuff is, of course, the dancing, which has its moments but overall seems so calculated to impress that it loses all other reason for being.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

It’s not involving; it’s not scary; it’s just kind of miserable.

To top off all of the ineffective weirdness, the movie ends on a tone-deaf “got a sequel if you want it” note.

Wan wants to have something both ways, and in the end, he gets almost nothing. As Clint Eastwood said in yet another genre picture: A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Django is for the most part everything Reinhardt’s music was not: listless, glum and meandering.

Victor Frankenstein is, despite bravura performances from committed young leads Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, all kinds of obnoxious and pointless.

Paltrow, whose previous directorial feature was the somewhat more apt 2007 showbiz romcom “The Good Night,” is an attentive student of cinema, as his mini-homages to the likes of Antonioni and Lucas in this story testify. But his story is a veritable nothingburger, here and there recalling notes from the likes of “Giant” and “There Will Be Blood,” but never really connecting on levels emotional or intellectual.

This really is a paint-by-numbers action movie with two good things going for it. Those are brevity — it’s only 93 minutes long — and immediate forgetability.

The all-live action section of this movie is lit and shot almost exactly like an episode of “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”

The tonal weirdness and the philosophical fallacies and the general level of treacle did not sit very well with me. Then again, I have to admit I’m really more of a cat person.