Guy Lodge

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The director himself has described the film as a “genre story without a genre,” and as such Ena effectively mirrors its protagonist’s equal detachment from all facets and possibilities of his fabulously floundering life. In theory, this makes sense. Dramatically, however, it’s a dead end, unaided by sporadic, leaden stabs at farce and whimsy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Carol Reed’s “Oliver!,” now 53 years old, feels more authentically youthful and vibrant than this try-hard “how do you do, fellow kids” exercise.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir.

A queasy but strangely gutless exploitation pic.