Joe Leydon

There’s really nothing new here. Still, it’s hard to deny the sporadically satisfying nostalgic appeal of this dash down memory lane.

Offers a relatively fresh take on standard-issue exorcism-melodrama tropes, along with a performance by Aaron Eckhart that is more than persuasive enough to encourage the investment of a rooting interest.

An aggressively sincere but off-puttingly saccharine drama.

As thrillers go, Shut In is conspicuously short of thrills. It’s an undistinguished and predictable hodgepodge, so blandly generic as to suggest that it was cobbled together by filmmakers referencing a how-to handbook who picked spare parts from other, better thrillers.

Everything leads to a third-act twist that is absurdly shameless, even by Bollywood standards. Unfortunately, Johar doesn’t appear to have intended it as another joke.

The screenplay by Chris Dowling and Tyler Poelle is, at best, predictable pulp with a smidgen of religion. Indeed, the characters are so thinly written that they are defined entirely by the actors portraying them. But director Ben Smallbone (brother of the movie’s lead player) is adept at generating suspense.

[A] drearily lame time-waster.

The fleeting counterbalance of seriousness makes the funny business marginally yet appreciably funnier.

The Original Gangsta Lizard gets a largely satisfying reboot in Shin Godzilla, a surprisingly clever monster mash best described as the “Batman Begins” of Zilla Thrillers.

Even dedicated Phantasm fanatics may be hard-pressed to discern anything resembling a unifying narrative thread. But the latter group — the film’s target audience — likely will be willing to eschew coherence for the opportunity to savor this chaotic reprise of familiar characters and concepts in the cinematic equivalent of a greatest hits album.

Brosnan is very effective at playing Regan as a wary technophobe who has become too comfortable with his power and success.

An illuminating and amusingly entertaining look at the thriving subculture of competitive poultry breeders.

[Banderas] acquits himself admirably with his restrained yet subtly detailed portrayal of an intelligent man subjected to the stings of intolerant attitudes and professional jealousies.

There are bad movies, and then there are worse movies, and then there are full-bore misfires such as Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?

There is more mood than matter to be sampled in “The Disappointments Room,” a spooky psychological thriller — or, perhaps, a psychological thriller with spooks — that is initially intriguing but ultimately, unfortunately, lives down to its title.

Scene after scene (or, if you prefer, round after round) of “The Fight Within” is clunky and didactic, and the movie as a whole has appreciably less mainstream appeal than several other recent, and much better, faith-based dramas.

By turns poignant and plodding, affecting and affected, Ithaca is the sort of frustrating movie that’s just good enough to make you wish it were a lot better.

The presence of a predominantly African-American cast arguably is the only distinguishing characteristic of this by-the-numbers thriller.

Starving the Beast repeatedly sounds cautionary notes that escalate to the level of fretful alarms. And yet, for all that, the movie never seems shrill or didactic.

Up until its unfortunate third-act detour from intriguing verisimilitude to frustrating abstraction, director Marcin Wrona’s Demon enthralls as an atmospheric ghost story with a cheeky undercurrent of absurdist humor.

In addition to everything else he does right in February, Perkins plays fair: When you replay the movie in your mind after the final fadeout, you realize that every twist was dutifully presaged, and the final reveal was hidden in plain sight all along.

Mostly due to the limp direction by Timothy Woodward Jr., Traded never really offers much in the way of suspense or excitement. But the sporadic outbursts of bloody violence are efficiently rendered.

Luis Guzmán and Edgar Garcia give the project much more than it ever gives them, sustaining audience interest and generating mild amusement more or less through sheer force of will as they amble through a threadbare plot.

Helmer Cheang and action director Li Chung Chi offer an impressive array of rock-’em-sock-’em setpieces — including a battle royale at a cruise ship terminal, and grand finale in a Hong Kong high-rise — and the performances, especially those by Wu, Koo and Zhang, are thoroughly attuned to the movie’s overall tone of fever-pitched martial-arts noir melodrama.

Disappointingly plodding and ham-fistedly obvious in its attempts to offer an up-close and personal portrait of a mood-swinging, self-loathing 59-year-old Ernest Hemingway.

Vaxxed comes across as a grab-bag of charts, theories and anecdotal evidence that would never pass muster by the editors of any major scientific journal (like, say, the Lancet), and too often resembles the kind of one-sided, paranoia-stoking agitprop that political activists construct to sanctify true believers and assault infidels.

The Girl in the Photographs is a slasher movie filled with smug and self-absorbed characters who are not nearly as clever as they obviously assume they are.

Sausage Party is something far short of Shavian in terms of sophisticated dialogue — really, there is just so much novelty value one can milk from repetitious fusillades of F-bombs launched by animated characters — but it is difficult to deny the hilarity quotient of a movie so exuberantly and unapologetically rude and crude.