Inkoo Kang

The parkour is breathtaking and the plot twists are off-the-charts ridiculous.

First-time writer-director Jocelyn Towne takes an admirably novel stab at familial dysfunction in her father-daughter drama I Am I, but she proves unable to keep the film's originality from rapidly curdling into preposterousness.

Most impressively, the film admits that the line between faith and magical thinking isn’t as solid as most believers would care to admit — and the Church knows it. Unfortunately, these worthwhile ideas are contained in a phony-baloney tale more artificial than a polyester teddy bear stuffed with Splenda and Cheez Whiz — and just as appealing.

That Rosa never encounters another character with English fluency — nor grasps her Eurocentric limitations — makes director Threes Anna's film less the intended portrait of cultural isolation than an illustration of how a lack of imagination can lead to despair.

Overstuffed and far from spry.

False gravity weighs down 2 Jacks, a father-son drama less interested in exploring familial relations than in tut-tutting the millennials.

This somber work about the worthiness of living has little life in it.

An unconvincing, poorly conceived hybrid of end-of-the-world thriller and relationship drama.

It's so predictable in its beats and pedestrian in its execution that a viewer can slip in and out of consciousness, confident she won't miss much and will know exactly where in the story she is when she awakes.

The Kings of Summer plays like an extended sitcom episode, and not a very special one at that.

With its observational dispassion, My Friend Dahmer doesn’t quite help us understand why Jeff is so into killing, and it’s pretty much useless when it comes to clarifying how he justifies committing such atrocities to himself.

Though Page-Lochard manages to make his passive participation in violence compelling, Around the Block remains more lecture than drama about racism and its tragic consequences.

The film is rescued from its own lumbering self-seriousness by Weber's sensitive portrayal of teen dynamics, but it's never as scary or as creepy as it needs to be.

Personal or not, this lazy fantasy doesn't offer many more pleasures than an Instagram account.

Bledsoe leads an impressive cast, but there's only so much the actors can do with writer-director Tony Glazer's underdeveloped script.

The Attorney is on the side of justice, but it's a ham-fisted dramatization of real-life events that mistakes anger for persuasion.

Timely but dreary and dramatically inept.

Despite its moving conversations, Who We Are never transcends its lecture format.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women celebrates the bravery and creativity of Diana Prince’s mastermind and his muses, but with a tepidness toward the complications of their lives. The result is a gauzy, sexy ode to unconventionality that feels distinctly and disappointingly conventional.

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

Lines that should be funny are sacrificed to the breathless exigencies of the plot. The movie starts to feel like a slow suffocation.

Director-star Livia De Paolis sets out to reassure everybody that the Internet won't destroy all relationships in her agreeable but unnecessary family drama Emoticon ;).

The raunchy, feminist-revenge jokes are the best part of this feel-good, you-go-ladies sports comedy.

The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service.

Banks seems to hope that merely spending time with her subject will somehow create an illusion of intimacy. But her film's secretive opacity only makes Callahan a little prince, far away on his own planet.

instead of focusing on the comedian’s complexities, Come Into My Mind focuses on his heartbreak. Perhaps Zenovich wanted to offer closure to fans still shocked by Williams’ final choice. But any artist is far more than their struggles. A proper remembrance would have understood that.

Its structure is so meager it's downright skeletal.

Where Charlie’s Angels really falters, though, is in the jokes, as Banks is the only actress on screen with any real comic chops. One can’t help wondering what might’ve been if she’d concerned herself more with being her weird self and less with trying to make every woman in the audience feel validated.