John DeFore

Eli Roth and screenwriter Joe Carnahan could have done the same thing, manifesting the rages and fears that afflict the country we live in right now. Instead they offer a cheap and dishonest Death Wish that (references to social media notwithstanding) is interchangeable with get-tough knockoffs that have flooded cinemas for decades.

Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.

In terms of real horror, nevermind sexual-politics provocation, "Grave" can neither re-create its predecessor's impact nor compete with stranger new beasts like Lars von Trier's "Antichrist."

No legitimate distributor would bother with a film "whose crackpot elements aren't even exploited in a way that will appeal to those watching solely to make fun of them."

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

This Bannon is a snooze, occasionally making a wry aside but nearly never saying anything unusually smart or new. ... It's hard to see what ordinary viewers at any point on the political spectrum will gain from this particular status report.

The film becomes a hodgepodge that will enlighten few viewers.

A seemingly well-intentioned but deeply flawed film about dementia that becomes as erratic and misguided as its protagonist, Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman does no favors to those afflicted with cognitive disease or those hoping to understand them.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

Small-screen comic talent is all over Fresno, with key players from series including Parks & Rec, Arrested Development and Portlandia teaming up for a tale of two sisters stuck with a hard-to-dispose-of dead body. The feature, sadly, exhibits none of the smarts or agility that fuel those series.

Dead air left in conversations may be meant to unnerve viewers, but is more likely to bore them.

Rather than engage in slow-build horror, Pascal Trottier's screenplay flips the switch into Poultergeisty chaos.

The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.

When the gags a movie is most confident in — the ones it uses three or four times, as if they were sure things — involve pushing unsuspecting pedestrians into a bush or riffing on "Bond, James Bond," something's wrong in the yuk factory.

The movie soon devolves into an extremely familiar escape-the-monsters affair, with all the compounding dumbness usually involved when our fleeing heroes are forced to keep filming the action.

The only people sure to love this concoction are those working for Rio's tourism bureau.

Instead of improving on the original's visualization of the liminal state between life and death, director Niels Arden Oplev turns the conceit into just another excuse for rote haunting, making this Flatliners often indistinguishable from its 2017 thriller peers.

The thrill is long gone in Anna, a lifeless and instantly forgettable spy flick whose lead, Sasha Luss, shows zero promise as a movie star.

Speed-Dating seems designed to exploit the black indie theatrical circuit but hardly merits even a DVD release.

From laughs to smarts to a credible interest in rehabilitation, lovers of love would do better to go see "Trainwreck" again.

A poorly imagined crime flick that comes nowhere near justifying its 2.5-hour running time.

With one senseless set piece after another, the film's eponymous forward movement should carry it out of theaters quickly, notwithstanding the brief presence of a slumming Morgan Freeman in a role that might well have been shot in half a day.

The mob-war stuff here could not possibly be more rote.

Sans a compelling marriage of danger and eroticism, much of the third-act suspense fails to captivate

A film as soul-sucking as any of the fang-baring bores who populate it.

A rom-com whose agreeable individual elements aren't enough to sell the witless contrivance around which they revolve.

Jonas is, it should be said, the most likeable thing about this watered-down noir.

The silliness of the conceit is far from the biggest problem in a picture that has no clue what to do with the wealth of talent in front of the camera.