John DeFore

Steven Alexander's A Night Without Armor is a two-hander whose attempts to transcend staginess generally fall flat.

While some characters on the ever-escalating guest list provide the pair with welcome comic distraction, this day-to-night hangout pic doesn't really take flight.

Amusing but scattered and unconvincing comedy.

Fighting With My Family reminds us several times that the sport is as much about charismatic storytelling as it is about skill. Judged by that standard, the film is far from belt-worthy.

Lynskey's performance is sympathetic, but the movie doesn't fully convince us in its dramatization of her responses to Quinn's large and small blunders.

Following a few years after "3 Geezers," Schumacher's reviled feature directing debut starring Simmons and Tim Allen, I'm Not Here represents a great leap forward, but still doesn't hold out much promise for future efforts that aren't built around performances by Simmons.

A dicey blend that generates viewer goodwill but can't make its conflicting vibes gel, A Bag of Hammers will play best with the most soft-hearted viewers provided they don't mind rooting for unrepentant felons.

The director and his actors never really make the Gu-Lu connection persuasive.

As it moves toward a climax that will require Santa to connect with his inner action hero, the film works better than it should without being as enjoyable as its predecessor, the brothers' much less ambitious Small Town Crime.

Amusing but off-key in some unhelpful ways, it's a dorky time-killer that doesn't suffer too much for its familiar vibe.

Hossain's refusal to overexplain the details of his world — is the thing Jack's supposed to steal a drug? a weapon? — plays well in some instances; elsewhere, coupled with the film's low budget, it risks failing to convince us we're in the future at all.

Sensitive readers should be informed that Kuso is not for you; even those with a strong tolerance for monster-movie gore are far from guaranteed to accept its warm, clumpy bath of repugnant ickiness.

Director Bao Nguyen doesn't try to dig too deep, leaving serious behind-the-scenes lore to the SNL obsessives who've been poring over backstage accounts for years. Focusing on talking heads, almost all of whom say nice things about their experience of the show, he offers a puffy remembrance just a couple of notches more substantive than the supplemental doc in a DVD box set.

Perhaps because it wants to play to both sides, the film's viewpoint is awfully muddied when it addresses conflict between traditional DJs — who know how to handle turntables, read a crowd's mood and do their thing for many hours at a time — and those who premix a whole set to a USB stick, hit play and just bounce up and down onstage.

More stylishly compelling and seamlessly produced than it is imaginative.

The movie devotes an inexcusably short time to the many years Ronson worked after the Spiders from Mars disbanded — and, Hunter aside, talks to nearly nobody from that time.

Though not novel enough to attract non-devotees of America's Pastime, the film should please fans on the small screen.

Will charm many arthouse patrons, though some highbrow-leaning art lovers will find the subject unworthy of such attention.

Slate and Sharp (a Tony winner for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) can't be blamed for their lack of chemistry, and if sparks aren't flying between them, at least viewers can occasionally drown in gorgeous coastal scenery, shot nicely by Martin Ahlgren.

Handsome and weighty-feeling but less substantial than it seems.

Johnson creates a magnetic antihero, volatile and antisocial. He doesn’t fly so much as stalk the sky; he swats opponents like the bundles of weightless CG pixels they are. And this passion project serves the character well, setting him up for adventures one hopes will be less predictable than this one.

One unfortunate effect of the jumbling is that it cools off Statham’s slow-boil performance, and prompts us to question the logic behind H’s plan.

Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev's script neither brings it to life nor quite has us rooting for its destruction.

Tixier paces the narrative well, but some viewers will resent his heavy reliance on anthropomorphizing the animals and the little sequences invented to add drama to the narrative.

Less successful as a drama, the out-all-night period piece is overshadowed by many similar coming-of-age tales (the best of which are often made by artists with first-hand knowledge of the period they're depicting). But like its twenty-ish hero, it is well-meaning enough that some viewers will be forgiving.

Gourmel's film never stops identifying with the teen; that unshowy compassion will win some viewers over to a debut feature whose pulse rate never rises to the level its plot would seem to demand.

While its protagonist is believably eccentric, the people surrounding her look more like transparent plot devices the more of them we meet.

Though Muschietti occasionally finds lovely filmic ways to transition from one to the next, the stories don't get to resonate with each other in a meaningful or emotional way — as they might in a series of well crafted hour-long episodes.

Co-directors Brent Hodge and Derik Murray go exclusively to interviewees who lived or worked with the oversized, overenergized man, all of whom clearly loved him, and if the tone of their remarks (affectionate, amazed at his charisma) is totally predictable, the specifics have enough color to hold the interest of a casual fan.

The film exudes empathy, as you'd expect, but struggles to find a compelling point of view.

While some will embrace the shards as a Shane Carruth-like brain-teaser, the movie is ultimately too reflective of its genetically-engineered subjects — soulless under an entrancing veneer.

Mystery-wise, the film teases viewers pretty effectively, with plenty of jolts that suggest the boys are on the right track balanced by other signs they're making something out of nothing.... But with a couple of small exceptions, attempts to flesh out the teen characters don't work very well.

The determined, gently cantankerous oldster's personality is the main attraction here, in a doc that takes viewers' interest for granted.

Cassie Jaye's The Red Pill is clumsy and frustrating in many ways. But it demonstrates enough sincerity and openness to challenging ideas — letting representatives of this problematic movement make their case clearly and convincingly — that one wishes it were able to look at multiple sides of this debate at the same time.

Alan Rickman's lead performance highlights a sincere but insubstantial rock pic.

Kelly spends so long establishing these two relationships, looking at the gifts and the internet fame and the inevitable possessiveness, that he has little time for the developments that might've turned a better paced version of this story into a true-crime nailbiter.

The film's failure to raise the temperature gradually leaves viewers less involved than we should be.

Diehard fashionistas will likely want to see it, but few others will take notice.

The film's title promises a story told with the tidy structure of the blues. (Either that, or it's a bad joke about Clapton's long struggle with alcoholism.) But Life proves weirdly assembled, with counterintuitive emphases.

A likably low-rent, low-ambition entry into a genre whose standard-bearer, Meatballs, doesn't set the bar very high, Mike Stasko's Boys Vs. Girls goes to summer camp for its promised battle of the sexes.

Though it starts uneventfully, the doc perks up in its second half, highlighting the kind of practical headaches nearly no other artist in the world has to contend with.

Unfocused, overly long documentary raises provocative questions.

While the supernatural side of the film suffers a flaw or two — continued references to The Doors are superfluous and sometimes chuckle-inducing — its central conflict works.

Despite ample access to its subject and testimonials from both Jett's contemporaries and the younger stars she inspired, the film is a disappointment, and has limited value for viewers hoping to experience (or relive) the years in which Jett proved a woman could rock as hard as the boys.

Viewers who can take it at face value may find a chill or two here, but ultimately Old can’t escape the goofiness of its premise long enough to put its more poetic possibilities across successfully.

First-time directors Bob Fisher and Rob Greenberg start off with a movie so dull it threatens to vanish from the viewer's memory before it's even finished. Things get better midway through, with the directors' screenplay finally playing to the talents of at least one of its stars, Derbez.

You ought to have to be an unusually interesting person, or at least be capable of presenting your commonplace tribulations in an interesting light, before you can ask moviegoers to spend fifteen bucks to watch you onscreen. Nina Davenport's First Comes Love doesn't buy into this rule.

The leads all take this as seriously as possible, and Lennon goes the extra mile by investing scenes with Edgar's parents with believable emotional baggage.

Good-looking but not very effective adaptation of the seedy classic by "Grifters" author Jim Thompson.

An intriguing but iffy look at alternative therapies that ignores some questions about its subjects.

The scene-setting works better than the storytelling in this sincere but clumsy picture, whose script (by first-timer Tony DuShane, author of the book it was based on) makes a bit of a muddle of the interactions between its teen and adult Jehovah's Witnesses (and the occasional troublemaking nonbeliever).

A sometimes amusing, sometimes draggy and overstuffed affair that always relies on its talent-rich cast to carry the day.

Not as committed to its spacey perceptuo-metaphysical premise as it seems at the start, the film seems more interested in whether one woman can convince another to buy into a project she doesn't understand.

The film conveys the sense of hanging out with a band despite the fact that we almost never see them talking to us; a mood of creative ferment overrides any detailed narrative, and although its time period includes a massive tour for the group's latest album, this is definitely not a concert film.

The essence of what made the man inspiring to so many — it's not the winning, but the effort that's important — comes through with gonglike clarity in Dexter Fletcher's film, a straight-down-the-ramp sports tale that plays to the average man's dreams of momentary greatness.

Set in the tense hours between a calamity and the societal breakdown it'll almost certainly cause, Ben McPherson's Radioflash begins as a visually rich, calmly serious take on apocalypse drama.

A pervy premise and top-flight cast yield a mixed-bag spy flick.

Remains mostly fascinating even in an amateur storyteller's hands.

The deeper the script gets into how its version of witchcraft works, the less convincing it becomes. Uniformly solid performances and artful camera/sound work make the movie hard to dismiss out of hand, but the script doesn't sell its hokum as effectively as more mainstream supernatural soap operas.

If Ainsworth is ever turned off, you won't know it: She and DP Ben Ainsworth make everything look interesting, if not necessarily appetizing.

Arguably, the film's hard turn into Scaresville taints what has made it appealing up to this point — and certainly, a tease in its final shot is a cheap gesture toward a possible sequel. But what comes before benefits from the cast's solid familial chemistry and an unhurried approach to the question: Should we want to talk to loved ones who've died, or leave them (and ourselves) in peace?

Crude production values are a stumbling block for bare-bones tale.

Amusing but not as funny or suspenseful as it could be.

Oddly, everyone from boat-tour guides to shot-bar patrons find time to ask our hero solicitous personal questions. If only he, or the film, had more interesting answers.

Ultimately, none of the storylines offers a surprise or tells us anything we don't already know, this many years into America's opioid ordeal. And arriving at a moment when Crisis could refer to so many other calamities, its failure to illuminate anything makes it feel like a distraction.

Night School has a lot to learn about how to live up to its potential, but it squeaks out a passing grade in the end.

Formulaic and often hard to swallow, the picture offers little beyond the familiar pleasures of Duvall's old-coot mode.

An amiable if hardly unusual buddy pic.

Mild fish-out-of-water humor and an element of mystery may satisfy fans of Novak’s work on the again-popular The Office, but fall short of proving he has much potential as a big-screen auteur.

Has clear appeal for heartland Christians who are more concerned with uncomplicated edification than with storytelling. It would be more at home in the rec rooms of churches than in movie theaters.

With so many discussions to drop in on, each with its own stuff to show off...each sequence can only hint at what's fascinating about its field.

Though it may be amusing to watch Holly sneak around and expose others' lies, it would be much more fun if her own story rang true.

A pedestrian thriller whose personal-tech gimmick is even more thinly imagined than one might guess, it's a jumble of cheap jump scares made watchable by likable leads Elizabeth Lail and Jordan Calloway.

The film does develop the chemistry between the titular alien and the human he’s forced to inhabit while inside Earth’s atmosphere. But the distinctiveness of this buddy-movie bond is often drowned out by giant set pieces of CG mayhem that feel exactly like those found in the good guys’ movies.

The film presupposes a bit more interest in the pair's friendship and personal lives than many viewers will have.

Earthlings is rather scattered in both its portrait of Van Tassel as a man and its explanation of his cultural impact.

Though the story itself contains enough to intrigue a skeptic, Bagans' tendency to tart things up with horror-movie techniques makes this a movie to scare true believers, not win new ones over.

Despite an appealing cast, though, neither comedy nor suspense really takes flight until very near the end, largely due to a script that isn't equal to the filmmakers' enthusiasm.

More polished docs like "Restrepo" have covered similar ground in less scattered fashion, usually giving more coherent pictures of military operations while they're at it.

The Grand Guignol factor climbs throughout the final third, but while climactic battles are violent, they never really thrill.

Bad Match clearly only aspires to be a thriller with a surprise or two up its sleeve. On that front, it's adequate.

It looks better than many of its peers, with only one or two lapses of taste in production design, FX and costumes. (The cutesy CG sidekick of our main hero is the biggest sore thumb.) Diverting but hardly novel enough to win over Stateside viewers outside the circle of hardcore Asian film buffs.

Moderately informative but almost as disappointing as his Hey Bartender, the doc may ride the coattails of its subject's surging popularity, but will leave most thirsts unquenched.

For all the surface wildness of Lawrence’s Slumberland, it’s about as rule-following a family pic as you can find.

The pic relies almost entirely on the subtle comic gifts of its two leads, finding little in the way of plot to kick its characters into laugh-generating action.

Informative and lively if low on cinematic value, the documentary will play well on the small screen.

Though not without its moments, the film offers too little of interest for its leading ladies to do, and feels throughout like an adaptation of a comic book that was written for the sole purpose of being sold to an IP-hungry film studio.

The first-time filmmaker (a Cuban who moved to the U.K. for film school) is deeply committed to the seriousness of his tale, but seems to feel a leaden pace is the only way to do it justice. The result is a movie much easier to respect than to enjoy.

Full of legitimate, even urgent concerns but so garish in tone it encourages viewers to view it as propaganda, Peter Navarro's Death By China does a disservice to its message.

A passably silly but lowbrow buddy comedy.

Given the public's undying curiosity about the literary star who rejected fame, it's surprising he hasn't been the subject of more films. Rebel in the Rye shows how hard it is to satisfyingly pull that enigmatic man out of his hiding place.

Rapu's film is still somewhat scattered; its Earth Day release date only serves as a reminder of the many superior eco-docs one has seen about remote paradises threatened or destroyed by encroaching forces.

The film spreads itself too thin to offer a thorough political portrait.

Kids with healthy attention spans may warm to its (literally) colorful characters and outside-the-frame action, but most will find it as lifeless as their parents do.

Costner and Harrelson both give fine performances, but when it's time for each to have his one allotted dramatic monologue, you can practically hear the movie clearing its throat: Shut up and listen while the man is speaking, folks.

A chin-scratching B picture that fares best when it sticks with stars Donald Sutherland and Vincent Kartheiser, it gets less convincing the farther it strays from the two-hander at its core.

If it uses romance and hijinks as a way of suggesting to teens that the unthinkable might not really kill them, that's a worthy goal. (Insert your own remarks about surviving 2020 here.) But adding fewer spoonfuls of sugar to this kind of medicine might be good for everyone.

[A] semi-convincing yet enjoyable tale, relying on familiar names in a cast that acquits itself well given the demands of the unusual plot.

A dispiriting horror cheapie whose monsters-in-the-projects premise plays out like an anti-welfare parable.

Never really deciding if it hopes to be a black comedy or a sincere dive into violence and self-delusion, the movie stops abruptly at a couple of points so Wakefield can give his costars chances to act.

A film that flirts and flirts with explanations for its action without ever delivering.

Cartoonish hyperbole aside, the investigation does have its high points.

While the movie itself may prove nearly as unmemorable as its hero ostensibly wants to be, it’s anything but inconspicuous.

A very sympathetic turn by Colm Meaney both lends box-office appeal and helps Byrne pull back from the saccharine possibilities inherent in the premise.

A look at how a post-industrial ghost town became home to one of the world's largest contemporary-art venues, Museum Town also exemplifies a problematic category of documentary: the project whose makers are close enough to the subject to deliver an attention-worthy film, but too close to make a comprehensive one.

Despite a premise with broad appeal and a script boasting plenty of laughs among its misfires, the high school fable falters.

In the end, the whole clean-up project is as shrug-worthy as most of the "Unrated Director's Cut!" edits that go the other direction on home video, promising more nudity and gore but changing little of consequence.

The mental issues plaguing Hazel (Bella Thorne) aren't the only disabilities on offer in a film that sometimes heaps a little too much onto the fire, but Grau and his cast are sincere in their attempt to capture her struggle with empathy and dignity.

Boys State inevitably feels more and more like reality TV programming, which is both appropriate for our times and depressing.

Like a frumpy version of "Knocked Up" playing out in a sadder, stranger world, Barry Munday offers two icky humans and hopes that, by the tale's end, we'll be happy they're procreating.

Anne Frank's story has always been a moving way of personalizing the horrors of this war, and that remains the case here; but Fouce's dry doc is best suited for screening rooms in history museums.

The film's last act grows more enjoyable by the minute, observing as the teacher stands up not just to his tormentor but to everyone else who might want to demean him.

The plot leans toward conventional horror violence as it progresses, but Cresciman has Hogan and Crampton remain largely affectless, their blank-slate characters doing little to make us respond to the action.

What begins as an examination of middle-class-mom exasperation — in which demanding some marital equality makes one not just a figurative "bitch" but a literal one — turns into a more commonplace bad-dad parable in Marianna Palka's off-kilter, largely off-target satire Bitch.

The easiest (but incomplete) answer is that the George W. Bush era needed a Borat, and the Trump years make him painfully redundant.

The film's apparent desire to channel heartland morality is weirdly undercut by a glib (and unsatisfying) vigilante move at the end, but only the least critical viewers will make it far enough into the pic to add moral confusion to their list of complaints.

Russell pulled off some outrageous moments in I Heart Huckabees, the feature he made before this film, but the evidence here suggests Nailed had issues even before the money ran out.

First-time feature helmer Romanowsky has a hard time distinguishing between the things that draw her to Elliott's story and the things that make him pathetic.

An amusing premise yields few yuks.

Familiar faces in supporting roles don't do much for the commercial prospects of this modest film, which feels like a made-for-TV version of the prototypical Sundance-aspiring quest for identity.

The emotional and logistical struggles of our heroine, played with sweaty determination by Anne Hathaway, are the film's clearest through-line; but after the intimate clarity of her debut, Pariah, and the wrenching Delta drama Mudbound, this is a pedigreed misfire.

The ingredients for an engagingly ridiculous action pic are here, but the pacing's all wrong.

Director David Mackenzie's film about two rival band members handcuffed to each other takes too long to find its footing.

Though clumsily enacted, the eventual revelation at least avoids the sick-punchline feel afflicting some dramas sharing this theme.

Aiming for Hitchcockian suspense but coming closer to daytime drama, the film offers only occasional tension.

Obvious parallels to "Thelma & Louise" do little to raise the dramatic stakes here.

Where it might have been an old-fashioned melodrama with credible historical appeal, instead it suggests an old-school celluloid epic whose print has lost a reel or two.

In their awkward attempt to shoehorn these kids into the first pic's formula, Stoller and his writing collaborators care far less about creating believable characters than getting to the next laugh.

He (De Palma) has rarely been guilty of dullness, as he is with Domino, a counterterrorism thriller offering just slightly more excitement than the average TV police procedural.

In F9’s would-be showstoppers, the thrills are mostly AWOL or the feats are simply too idiotic to embrace, even guiltily.

Writer-director Boaz Yakin, who has directed everything from veteran movie stars to canine thesps in his career, has a harder time with child actors, eliciting performances that are uneven enough to attract attention to the script's weaker aspects.

The movie not only fails to represent the peak of the young Blumhouse shingle's output (Get Out is not their only inventive film), but gets silly in ways that we've seen on screen for decades.

Though not quite as devoid of personality as those names and its boilerplate dialogue, the film nevertheless plays like a flowchart in search of a pulse, a drama whose "Traffic"-like ambitions aren't matched by narrative inspiration.

Few genre fans will fail to guess the direction in which this is heading. All viewers, though, will scratch their heads at a final plot point, an unnecessary gesture at odds with any conceivable motivation.

If Fraud presented its fabrication, then followed up with whatever bits of unmanipulated footage might explain itself, some moviegoers would find the exercise worthwhile. But nothing in the film itself acknowledges the source or the actual nature of these scenes.

While Leather Bar will surely make some viewers itchy, its most compelling subject isn't whether straight guys can stand to watch one man pleasuring another. More interesting is the question of what would make this project art as opposed to porn.

An underwhelming attempt to turn a tight little thriller into a sequel-spawning franchise, Adam Robitel’s Escape Room: Tournament of Champions lacks many of the original’s strengths while failing to improve on its more underdeveloped aspects.

Wes Tooke offers stiff dialogue and sometimes oddly structured action, leaving much dramatic potential unexploited. Yes, Emmerich stages plenty of aerial battles in which fighter pilots plunge through hailstorms of sizzling projectiles. But those hoping to get a thrill would be better served by revisiting his Earth-vs-aliens war flick Independence Day.

The protagonists here aren't as insufferable as those in the first Unfriended, but Susco's plot gets harder to buy by the minute; as a first-time director, he doesn't get much out of his cast; and boy, does this Screenlife gimmick grow thin quickly.

The picture rarely makes that business much to look at, providing some kind of energy to offset the actor's appropriate reserve. It feels rather plodding as a result, failing to turn the boxer's conflicting loyalties into the stuff of crime-flick high drama.

Respectably crafted but short on invention and serious scares.

An amiable but wholly unnecessary movie that plays like a feature-length version of those reels one watches while eating rubber chicken at a banquet honoring a much-loved artist.

Hawke delivers a workmanlike performance, but can't redeem the third act's macho baloney; sadly, Rutger Hauer (introduced in the opening and then wasted) doesn't come save him.

A cookie-cutter thriller that takes its time getting to the (sorta) good stuff, it's for die-hards only.

Another deep disappointment for fans of the raw, exciting "Ong Bak."

While the team-up still fails to become more than the sum of its parts, at least we can appreciate Hayek’s enthusiasm for the over-the-top role.

A few flashes of amused chemistry between the two actors represent all the human interest in this unimaginative sci-fi actioner, but that doesn't mean the pic's relentless focus on giant-monster battles won't please the director's fans.

A muddled psychological horror film about a young man coping with the death of his father, Jack Goes Home is a puzzle few viewers will care to piece together.

Despite the assistance reality continues to give it, making an annual rite of government-sanctioned racial violence seem less far-fetched by the day (or by the tweet), Gerard McMurray's The First Purge still fails to establish a persuasive connection to our own moment in time — its occasional winks to current events serving as limp zingers instead of stinging commentary.

Of interest to Police fans but hardly a rock-doc for the ages.

More casual fans are advised to wait a movie or two and see if Begos can do anything new with the idiom he knows so well.

While Zabielski and his cowriters never shortchange their stars in terms of screen time, their imaginations fail them when it comes to giving Crews and Method Man interesting things to do and say. In the case of Method Man, though, the rapper/actor's attitude alone carries him past the script's deficiencies.

Almost without fail, Larney's dramatic beats dispense with any build-up before arriving at their intended level of intensity, and the movie overall projects grandiosity without taking the time to make us care about the world being saved.

While it may resonate for some young viewers, anyone whose reality really resembles that of the film’s protagonist should probably look elsewhere.

A deeply frustrating doc that only rarely engages with its ostensible subject, Alan Govenar's The Myth of a Colorblind France intends to examine the country's reputation as a haven for Black Americans, but more often plays as travelogue, checklist of Francophile artists and meandering collective memoir.

Even those who know Mirza Sahiba may have a hard time reconciling the way this decorous present-tense melodrama is juxtaposed with pompous period flashbacks to that story.

An amiable misfire that (for better or worse) isn't quite as nutty as it sounds, Seth Henrikson's Pottersville pairs Yuletide cheer with the deviance of the Furry scene and an out-of-control hoax involving an ersatz Bigfoot.

As the narrative limps along from one encounter to the next, a suspicion grows: Father Figures doesn't need to exist; but if it's going to exist, perhaps some sharper comedic talents could have developed it as a limited-run Netflix show, with each encounter developed as a half-hour episode.

The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of "Oblivion," not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in making familiar surroundings threatening.

The documentary plays like a home movie that snowballed, causing its maker to overestimate her subject's relevance to the outside world. Though parts of it will certainly resonate within the deaf community (assuming it is made available with closed captioning), the film has little of the philosophical appeal of other documentaries on this topic, and sometimes seems willfully solipsistic.

A fantastic cast doing fine work can't make this feel-good hokum believable.

Promising but inert genre pic.

Lacking the personalities and attitude that have led some other unassuming productions to commercial success, the film has little to boast about beyond some fine dance sequences — none of them more transporting than what can be found easily on small screens.

Babbit's flat direction has none of the lurid appeal or humor that (along with a much more appealing cast) sustained John McNaughton's notionally similar "Wild Things" through crazy plot contrivances.

Overlong, willfully obscure and scatologically extreme, the film will elicit a variety of negative responses despite offering some individual elements that, on their own, would surely impress any of Barney's admirers. The work simultaneously is more fully realized and less creatively inspired than the Cremaster cycle.

If the way Davis wraps things up is neither surprising nor remotely satisfying, it does at least hold a lesson for white-collar tyrants who haven't seen 9 to 5 or the dozens of workplace-revenge fantasies that followed it: "The assistant controls everything."

Ersatz local color aside, suffice to say that Song to Song is not designed to win back onetime admirers who felt Malick's To the Wonder and Knight of Cups drowned in their own navels. Though offering the occasional radiant moment (usually involving scenery), it is of a piece with those films.

This far into the pandemic, with most Americans choosing to act as if it no longer exists, there may simply be no audience left for a gimmicky experimental narrative about people failing so completely to connect with those around them.

The wholly amateurish doc offers much that has been explored more effectively elsewhere; though it makes a few fresh points as it gets into its second half.

The story gets a bit more involving as it goes, though some elements that might've been memorable (a musical number from a dog played by Janelle Monáe, for instance) fall flat.

Given its focus, viewers might forgive Mia for its clumsy direction of actors, its contrived plot or its on-the-nose dialogue. But training impressionable kids to identify with a girl who sneaks into lions' cages is a cinematic flaw that could have heartbreaking real-world consequences.

Though it's better than its "dump this thing" theatrical release would suggest, Cell is far from excellent.

A near-miss that should find some appreciative viewers, it feels like a stage play in need of a little polishing, whose talented cast likes it enough to commit fully.

A home-captivity picture boasting all the implausibility associated with that genre and nearly none of the thrills.

Unfortunately, writer-director Scott Walker's film is a muddled and strangely inert one, generating little of the suspense or anguish its subject requires; despite its high-profile cast.

Sadly, this film's POV conceit -- in which all scenes are shot by the characters, whether they have a plausible reason to hold the camera up or not -- quickly becomes as grating as Kelly herself.

Neither a no-nonsense delight like "She Loves You" nor the White Album-style head trip its premise might suggest, it's more of a "Yellow Submarine" sort of film: crowd-pleasing and sometimes enjoyable, but pretty damned dumb when you stop to think about it.

The picture's first-person focus makes it surprisingly uninformative and occasionally annoying.

Neither Gan's screenplay nor his direction of the cast quite sells this scenario, but once he introduces some accidental violence, the picture can ride the familiar logic of crime-gone-wrong storytelling.

Why somebody would get off the couch and spend money to see it is anyone's guess.

For the most part, footage of rehearsals and competition is lackluster.

Though full of material that will move sports fans, some questions of emphasis and lack of polish make the film less galvanizing than it might've been.

Far too broad to be deep in any respect, the lightweight documentary benefits from access to plenty of top-shelf interviewees but plays like a back-patting muddle.

Self-consciously button-pushing pictures like this one usually leaven their transgressions with at least a bit of winking irony, but no humor is to be found here, from the opening frames (slo-mo shots of pro-life and pro-choice factions shouting at each other) to the last.

Colin Minihan's What Keeps You Alive sets itself up promisingly enough before succumbing to a progression of implausibilities and excesses that test even this genre's lenient standards.

The film will attract the attention of a public that's increasingly educated about gourmet matters, but leave the most serious viewers unsatisfied. Fatally for a film of this sort, it doesn't leave the viewer wanting a drink.

Judged as a fiction built on a kernel of fact, Fake Blood hardly distinguishes itself from the glut of mock-docs; it may be a refreshing break for the filmmakers, but viewers might prefer another zombie flick.

An appealing cast and well-executed mood of foreboding would seem to hold some promise commercially, but the script grows silly in the third act, letting the picture down.

Weirdly out of place here, Cruise brings little daring and less charm to the film, though to be fair to the actor, his character's a stiff.

The Story of Luke suffers all the flaws associated with disability films and more. Familiar faces in the cast may attract notice in niche bookings, but no one involved will benefit from the exposure.

This is all passably satisfying, but would be vastly better if the screenwriters weren't lazily explaining every single detail in voiceover. Grillo generally excels as a man of few words, but here his disembodied voice is a wall-to-wall shag carpet, dampening the fun we'd be having if we could just focus on the mayhem Carnahan delivers.

A ho-hum horror flick.

Its run-of-the-mill standoff may appease some hardcore horror buffs, but it offers nothing to the rest of us and will likely be forgotten before the blood on the ground dries.

The execution is weak, and Crowley does himself no favors by repeatedly invoking the memory of more psychologically persuasive films like Five Easy Pieces and Deliverance.

The writing/directing debut of Minhal Baig enlists experienced actors but has little idea what to do with them, making a hash of its intended meditation on the compromises required by long-term relationships.

Justin Bull’s screenplay comes up short, failing to adequately capture the depth of its teen’s encounter with the abyss — her anorexia is the aftermath of an apocalyptic revelation — and to integrate it into the more comprehensible domestic tensions that serve as the plotless film’s only framework.

Jack's Apocalypse holds few rewards.

Just as one should be wary of tobacco-safety data produced with tobacco-industry money, skeptical audiences will have a hard time putting too much stock in a doc so strongly aligned with vape entrepreneurs.

A damning account of institutional dysfunction whose ability to stoke indignation is undercut by its filmmakers' misguided comic antics.

An airless film about childhood fantasies that comes to life only fitfully, Brenda Chapman's Come Away is aimed at children but so pickled in grown-up grief that few kids are likely to connect with it.

A Die Hard ripoff that forgets most of the lessons that action classic has to teach, Ryuhei Kitamura's The Doorman forgets first of all what a little bit — even a shred — of wit can do for a movie that otherwise relies on bullets and brawn.

While its quirky storytelling style draws viewers in, many will tire of the subplots long before it reaches the two-hour mark.

Despite its apparently sincere identification with its protagonist, Entertainment feels like a sick joke.

Pizzo finds nearly no drama in Freddie's path from high school to college ball.

However polished the doc's tech and score, it simply doesn't find drama in this familiar template.

Pretty, occasionally witty and not believable for a moment, Sophie Lellouche's Paris-Manhattan is suffused with fannish love for Woody Allen's films but hardly lives up to their legacy.

It's not just superhero fatigue that makes this feature feel generic and cheap — lively enough to keep young kids occupied, but preferably while parents are doing something more interesting in the next room.

The film's generosity toward Christina's decision-making is, however true to life, dramatically unsatisfying.

The pic's claims grow wilder by the minute, and its power to persuade is undercut by narration scripted like a YouTube conspiracy film. For this skeptical but totally willing-to-believe viewer, Fifth Kind doesn't move the needle even a smidge.

Though peppy and bright enough that it might amuse some kids should it show up on a screen in front of them somewhere, it offers no reason for their adult guardians to actually take them someplace to watch it.

As allegory, the picture requires viewers to connect most of the dots without assistance, offering a preachy bit of dialogue once or twice but failing to use action or the camera to say much about non-sanguinary addictions.

Despite some promising moments, the project never quite takes flight, partly thanks to mismatched performances that don't seem to agree on how quirky this film intends to be.

While the three leads are committed and give respectable performances (albeit ones that fail to conjure the artists who inspired the characters), NY84 has little going for it that hasn't been taken directly from much better books and movies.

It quickly spins its shaky premise off into an unconvincing study of emotional need and an even harder-to-believe revenge thriller.

Likely to inspire heated arguments about the ethics of nonfiction film, the diverting but not really satisfying pic makes weak lemonade from lemons that might have yielded something tastier.

Its low-rent cast and unappealing key art won't help at the box office, but viewers who stumble across it on cable may be pleasantly, if mildly, surprised.

While some thriller addicts may embrace the resulting misanthropic action, others may find their minds wandering — to the many real-life cases of fraternity hazing, gang-rape and run-of-the-mill antisocial behavior that inspire deeper feelings of dread than this unconvincing outing.

Only the least critical genre auds are likely to enjoy it much.

A water-treading sequel offering just enough kooky color to keep less-discerning funnybook fans occupied, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance nudges its obscure hero's mythology forward a bit without seeming to care much how it gets there.

Clearly qualified in the physique department, Crews is an actor with enough charisma and range to carry either gritty genre adventures or more cartoony showdowns; but Forbes' tonal uncertainty and a stiff script leave him stranded here, in a world that lacks the gravity to put his conscience-driven reticence in context.

Begins as a marginally fun diversion before proving to have nearly no interest in the possibilities of its premise.

A capable cast abets the director, but the film's slow pace and half-hearted perspective shifts don't generate the gravitas that's clearly intended.

Few mainstream romantic comedies are so brazen or as unconvincing in their third acts. As if the movie were embarrassed about the tidy way it wraps things up, it trots Haddish out for a silly coda that reminds us how little we saw of her during the film's final hour.

The contrast between unflappable optimism and deep grief does not play out comfortably in this world of boosted colors, restless pacing and exaggerated tween naivite.

While the two young thesps acquit themselves nicely, much around them conspires to prevent their debut from being a memorable one.

This is a lazy feature with few laughs and fewer vicarious travel thrills, despite some nice photography of craggy coastlines and ancient villages.

Viewers who push through this silliness will be rewarded with an action climax that, while just about as ludicrous, is at least enjoyable.

Though completely implausible and hardly revelatory, the screenplay's identification with multiple points of view will be comforting enough to arthouse liberals that they might not object.

It's pretty silly stuff, leaving the film to rely on more conventional car chases, woman-in-peril scenarios and mistaken identity to keep things interesting -- all seen on that laptop via security cameras and the like.

Lucy plays more like a big dumb superhero flick than sci-fi.

A technically polished but mostly unmoving example of a genre (the watch-kids-do-something-hard doc) assumed to be inherently charming.

Sporadically funny though less effective at selling its melancholy undercurrents.

A handsome period piece that plays more like a scant-clues mystery than like the psychological thriller it intends to be, Andy Goddard's A Kind of Murder turns to the work of Patricia Highsmith but finds little of what made Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley such nail-biters.

Danluck's unfocused direction makes Katherine less a grief-struck enigma than a dull somnambulist; and the film's copious flashbacks, instead of drawing us into the character's confused emotions, mostly suggest that the film can't decide how to tell its story.

A novel cultural focus, highlighting Guyanese citizens of Indian ancestry, isn't enough to sustain interest in the lifeless film, which will attract few outside the Indo-Guyanese community.

While a composited scene, in which has-been Lenny lectures his younger self about work ethic and wisdom, has an undeniable poignancy, actual tragedy remains far beyond the film's grasp -- as does any illumination beyond the unsurprising suggestion that Cooke just didn't want success as much as peers like LeBron James.

As things stand, personal perspective brings something to this rudimentary documentary, but not nearly enough to help it compete with more polished portraits of big-top razzle-dazzle.

It alternates between too simplistic and incomprehensible, spending much of its time in between those poles in the "I understand, but I don't care" zone.

Rings finds a couple of nice, if inconsequential, little chills.

The literary source is one of only a couple of real draws in what is otherwise a fairly routine present-day crime saga.

The picture fares better at finding occasional moments of warmth than at convincing us of its characters' reality.

Ray meets Helen, all right, but moviegoers expecting a sprightly golden-years romance have come to the wrong place. So have those looking for a moody but credible reflection on decades of regrets.

Lacking the charming eccentricity of a "Turbo Kid" or the compelling mood of many retro-horror successes, the picture has little to recommend it as a theatrical experience.

Though his stories suggest a pansexual curiosity, Neil himself seems only mildly engaged, and sluggish direction keeps both scenes with the nerd's dream girl and the jailbait-courting man from generating much heat.

Scodelario, of the Maze Runner films and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, is just about the only member of the cast who seems to believe she's expected to be more than a thin generic functionary or flamboyant scene-stealer.

The preposterousness of Gregg Hurwitz's screenplay isn't enough to throw star Naomi Watts off her game, and the actor's sincere performance may suffice to keep a segment of the family-film demographic on board, barely.

A throw-everything-against-the-wall collection of silly jokes that reimagines American history as a bro-tastic action flick, Matt Thompson’s animated film makes Drunk History look like a Ken Burns production.

Where Attenborough's script lent an air of dignity to the shorter film, Allen's reading of Philip LaZebnik's cutesy narration has a canned feel, and is unlikely to connect with viewers too young to appreciate cliched humor about the joys of bachelorhood versus the duties of parenting.

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.