Katie Rife

The overall look of the film has the shiny, empty appearance of a newly rehabbed condo, and the quips about women’s love of cheese and gigantic closets have a similarly hollow sassy-greeting-card feel. But the outfits in those closets, it must be said, are fabulous.

Ava is a napping-on-the-couch movie through and through, with recognizable names and a sexy premise but no distinct personality.

The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.

For all its promises of an inside look into the Dalís’ lifestyle, the film never does much more than document it.

Director Gail Mancuso, a TV comedy veteran, gets the desired effect — as manipulative as it may be — out of both the funny scenes and the sad ones, leading up to a finale that can only be described as weapons-grade tearjerker material.

Unfortunately, the decade that passed between the two films was long enough for the approach to grow tiresome.

The only really surprising—and, therefore, the most disappointing—thing about Morbius is the fact that it’s an honest-to-goodness horror film. But only for a few seconds.

Didactic in its approach to the material—which, to be clear, is absolutely horrifying and very real—Madres has some good ideas, but it fails to see the structural forest for the sumptuously photographed trees.

The essential question here, of course, is how kickass those action scenes are, since no one’s watching an xXx movie for the plot. (That particular assumption may explain how loose the continuity remains throughout.) The answer is variable.

The script is so lazy and outdated in its humor, it condescends to the same audience it purports to empower.

For all these films’ paeans to grime and sleaze, they’re controlled imitations rather than the uninhibited real thing.

Dolly sets viewers up for an experience that it can’t quite deliver, mostly due to small acts of self-sabotage.

At least, maybe The Boy can lead some novices to better, more original horror movies.

Sure, the cast is full of exciting names, but all of Jarmusch’s absurdist thematic flourishes—the Romero tributes, the meta commentary, the political humor—are half-baked and inconsistently applied.

Donoso does put an effort into maintaining visual interest throughout this micro-budgeted character study, alternating between professionally shot, full-frame tableaux and intimate, grainy camcorder footage, accentuated with light touches of Brakhage-style experimental montage. However, it remains an undeniable—and inconvenient—fact that the most interesting aspects of If They Soak Me are all offscreen.

Flavorless and unexciting, thanks to an execution as formulaic as a well-worn copy of "The Joy Of Cooking."

The way the script pulls its punches is less offensive than simply toothless, giving Overboard the feel of a film written by a focus group, or maybe a script-writing robot programmed with the latest demographic trends.

As filmmakers try to figure out how to lasso the internet and tame it for the screen, Cat Person is mostly useful as a lesson in what not to do.

It’s campy, it’s gory, it’s a little bit titillating, and it features one of those novelty performances from famous actors that tend to bring a lot of press to otherwise under-the-radar productions.

As it is, The Good Mother starts with a gunshot and ends with a whimper.

Some movies suffer because of bad timing. Shell wouldn’t be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it fares especially poorly against Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a better and more outrageous film that deals in very similar subject matter.

As it is, it’s another jarring mismatch in a film full of them. The core issue seems to be indecision over whether this is all supposed to be camp or not.

Structurally, Hillsong: Let Hope Rise is hopelessly confused, jumping back and forth in time and space documenting the buildup to a big Hillsong United show at The Forum in Los Angeles, where the band will debut its new album.

Although Holland takes place in a unique setting full of kitschy Midwestern details, even Nicole Kidman in frustrated-housewife mode can’t sustain the sloppily plotted thriller.

Overstuffed and wearisome, pulpy action comedy Boy Kills World proves that there can be too much of a good thing.

This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.

Although it has some delightfully grotesque monsters, Mr. Crocket is a kids’-show horror spoof that isn’t ready for primetime.

As writer Shannon Bradley-Colleary and director Martha Stephens embark on a love story so subtle, it isn’t really a love story at all. In some hands, that would be intriguing. Here, however, it’s just lukewarm.