Guy Lodge

Inasmuch as one can complain about a film having plot holes when it hinges entirely on a magic cellphone app, much of “Status Update” feels cursory and unconsidered by its hokey standards.

Needless to say, a historical anti-musical that makes [the previous film] “Jeannette” look like “Moulin Rouge!” by comparison is going to win the filmmaker few converts.

This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.

Given an inch by the surprise success of his raunchy teddy-bear romp Ted, writer-director-star MacFarlane now takes a drastically overlong mile with a film that flatters his moderate talent and subzero leading-man charisma at every turn.

The disappointment of Mrs. Lowry & Son is that it finds neither of its star attractions at the peak of their powers: Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.

Murray Cummings’ film is a cautiously peppy, unrevealing affair, showing little of the trial and tension that goes into artistic creation — just the finger-snapping moments when it all comes together.

Ritter’s performance is the liveliest thing in a callow, shallow cautionary tale, which wears its influences on its artfully frayed sleeve and no closer than that to its heart.

A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir.

Each setpiece is composed and paced much like the last, which only amplifies the sense of Dan as some kind of unflustered, largely unsympathetic man-machine, paused only by the script’s fleeting interpersonal conflicts.

There’s digital wizardry galore in this Beauty and the Beast, but precious little magic.

Penn’s veiny, sweat-glazed biceps are the most objectively impressive feature of this rote, humorless thriller, a distinctly unconvincing attempt to refashion the star — who also co-wrote and produced — as a middle-aged action hero in the Liam Neeson mold.

The Golden Glove may not celebrate its subject, but the intimate examination it offers him is itself a privilege — one for which this ugly, unenquiring film scarcely makes a case.

Strained, sexist schlock, which raises zero jolts and only fitful chuckles with its gamely performed tale.

From its rigid, symmetry-inclined compositions to its heavily worked one-liners, this is cautious, stifling filmmaking in thrall to a reckless, retrograde man, who does little in the course of 90 minutes to merit great fascination or pathos.

A thin, sparkless romantic comedy that takes satirical aim at a host of current hipster-culture targets, before concluding that merely identifying them is droll enough.

Despite a fine Continental cast and gleaming production values, Czech helmer Julius Ševčík has made a muddled, maudlin hash of what ought to have been a sure thing.

The sheer abundance of on-screen ornamentation isn’t quite enough to make The Huntsman: Winter’s War a beautiful film.... Still, it’s one that has been exhaustively designed by many hands — which only further shows up its inelegant patchwork in the writing department.

There are certainly enough dopey diversions here for The Last Witch Hunter to be considerably more fun than it is, but even its most extravagant bouts of silliness are hampered by desultory plotting and Eisner’s oppressively synthetic mise-en-scene.

Ambitious but tediously precious, sincerely conceived but derivatively realized, The Blazing World throws an ornate heap of production design at an anemically scripted psychological metaphor, and counts on a combination of fairy dust and sheer determined nerve to make the whole contraption fly.

While Wenders has argued intelligently in interviews for the merits of realizing character-driven drama in three dimensions, this isn’t the most helpful case-maker — not least because Norwegian writer Bjorn Olaf Johannessen’s screenplay has barely been rendered in two.

A dismal My First Heist thriller that is all-too-aptly nailed by its own title.

If anything, the film’s cross-pollination with faith-based cinema is detrimental to its already minimal tension.

'Aranjeuz” has less of a pulse than the already inert “Every Thing Will Be Fine."

In its shape and sheen, Fathers and Daughters seems dated even before Michael Bolton surfaces to cough up a gelatinous closing-credits ballad.

[A] stunningly joke-free comedy-horror hybrid.

This glossy but gloopy Netflix original is primarily out to serve its leading lady’s legions of fans, some of them perhaps young enough not to have seen it all before.

For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.

It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.

What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.

There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.

From its elaborate but incoherent premise to its clunkily staged time-freeze fight sequences, not one detail of “The Anomaly” hasn’t been borrowed from a better movie. That magpie opportunism would matter less if the film at least had barreling narrative momentum.

A tin-eared, lumpen-footed, almost perversely unfunny new spin on Noël Coward’s breezy 1940s farce.

Gitai’s latest is a murky, largely po-faced affair, in which no character’s story urgently distinguishes itself from, or even within, a general morass of discontent.

A queasy but strangely gutless exploitation pic.

Kevin James is at once the film’s most obvious brand signifier and its most surprising asset: As a heavily fictionalized Payton, his surly hangdog energy gives this corndog of a movie what flavor it has.

Writer-director Jonathan English’s dank-looking film delivers enough amputations, decapitations and other instances of rusty-bladed gore to distract undiscerning genre fans stuck between seasons of “Game of Thrones,” but serves no other obvious purpose.

What surprises Mortal holds largely relate to the oddity of its construction and its tonal whiplash, as a thin, repetitive narrative skips from emo “Twilight” moping to dour Scandi-noir procedural to dollar-store Marvel ripoff.

Merely pedestrian at the levels of direction, craft and performance, the film instead makes a grab for attention by peddling an ambiguous line on gun control and eye-for-an-eye morality. Any controversy that ensues, however, won’t disguise the phoniness of this exploitation exercise, which milks the worst fears of millions in pursuit of empty tension.

Vacuous, almost spitefully monotonous ... A dismaying creative dead end from an abundantly gifted filmmaker, the new film escalates its predecessor’s cheeky protest to a form of acute auteur trolling.

A virtual remake, down to the final shot, of Michael Winner’s 1974 exploitation hit ‘Death Wish’ – and lacking even that film’s adolescent grasp of street justice.

It’s a cheap, unloving death march of a movie — scarcely made more intriguing by the half-cooked theory it posits as to who (or how many) did the deed.

Kaminski takes a similarly dour, no-nonsense approach to what could be a cheerfully all-nonsense story — as if stripping junk food of its fat — and this “American Dream” dies somewhere in the impasse.