Jordan Mintzer

Dark Glasses is never all that scary, and some of it is just plain silly, but if you take it at face value it can be enjoyable enough to sit through — more of a reminder of what Argento used to do best than an example in its own right.

Black and White never panders too easily to sentiments, creating characters who are riddled with flaws but likeable all the same.

It’s a lot to handle and also a bit silly, but Besson often pulls it off — thanks in no small part to a commanding performance by the chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who manages to be touching and slightly terrifying at the same time.

The structure feels fairly novel for such a B-grade fright-fest — call it Last Year at Amityville — but it’s soon outdone by the litany of torturous scenes that the director piles on one after the other.

Cheese and kitsch, with smatterings of blood and decapitated heads, are all on the menu in Dracula, which is a watchable if totally ludicrous version of the Stoker story. At best, the movie is another showcase for the always-interesting-to-watch Caleb Landry Jones.

A schmaltzy, mildly satisfying Anglo take on the BFFs-to-bedfellows subgenre that’s been seen recently in romantic comedies.

There’s definitely some gas in its tank in the opening sections, which are somewhat promising, but then the story takes a predictable route that fails to deliver enough suspense or interest to go the full distance.

An airy, lazy, though rather likable overseas rom-com served with a dose of melancholia and several large portions of cinematic nostalgia.

The first rule of a good werewolf flick, or any horror flick for that matter, is to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, whereas Farrell mostly keeps us guessing.

While De Angelis knows how to create visceral action and moments of intensity, he’s incapable of the slightest hint of subtlety.

A slick, occasionally hilarious but ultimately uneven appraisal of France’s favorite extramarital pastime.

Generic and, at its best, straining to be heartfelt.

This well-intentioned if somewhat heavy-handed historical affair is anchored by Coogan’s solid lead turn, with support from Andrea Riseborough as a hard-hitting state prosecutor and promising newcomer Garion Dowds as an executioner who could wind up facing the gallows.

It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters, asking how a few people meant to ensure the pedagogy of hundreds of children could flunk out so badly.

Like a beltway surrounding its hero’s bloviating ego trips and massive libido, the film keeps turning in circles around a subject that’s only truly interesting if you’re Philip himself.

This $50 million Ridley Scott production does benefit from strong performances and a few worthy scenes that director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House) pulls off with an effective amount of grit. Yet the movie doesn’t really captivate the way it should, and as the manhunt stretches on it actually diminishes in suspense, ultimately overstaying its two-plus-hour running time.

While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.

Bonnin, who adapted the script with Dimitri Lucas from her César award-winning short, offers up a boilperlate coming-home scenario bolstered by a few keen observations and a fair amount of charm.

Once it’s evident that there’s hardly a point to all the random mischief — or that the point is precisely that there isn’t one — the idea of watching a pair of grown men inflect violence upon innocent bystanders feels awfully tedious

Euro-financed production throws large chunks of change at a corporate espionage saga spanning several continents, yet most of the money seems to have landed in locations, with too little allocated to the script and stunt departments.

By doubling down on a movie that yearns to be both introspective and bone-crunchingly cool, Wild Card overplays its hand.

This plot-heavy suspense flick loses some of the book’s originality in translation while failing to channel its sense of Midwestern malaise. But it keeps the guessing game going long enough to compensate for some otherwise shallow characterizations, while Theron offers up an earnest and downbeat turn that says a lot with little dialogue

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Whenever the camera settles down to record a simple conversation between two characters, things suddenly feel stilted, as if the filmmakers cannot build the drama without flinging a hundred different things in front of the lens at the same time.

This low budget effort from director John Erick Dowdle and writer-producer-brother Drew Dowdle provides a few late scares after plenty of eye-rolling setup, with said scares due more to the heavy sound design than the action itself.

Taking the inspirational sports movie template, then infusing it with so much weed and foul language that it deserves its own MPAA rating, The Underdoggs is a good example of what happens when Snoop Dogg steps into an otherwise familiar tween-age comedy to wreak havoc.

Jacquot has a hard time turning all of this into palpable drama, and Eva slides off the rails during a denouement that goes full on B-movie without much credibility.

It’s all a little zany and overcooked and childish, which is perhaps why the series has been so popular with French tykes and is probably better fitted for 22-minute episodes than feature-length treatment.