Kerry Lengel

The characters are clichés and the plot is assembly-line predictable.

For an R-rated romance about a young writer's affair with a sultry French siren, 5 to 7 generates all the heat of an Easy-Bake Oven. It aims to sizzle but quickly fizzles.

Yes, The Family has skills. They’re like “The Incredibles” — except they’re heroes for sadists and sociopaths only.

Seventh Son is recommended only for the most far-gone of fantasy addicts, for whom it will serve as a sort of methadone. It won't exactly satisfy, but it will tide you over until the next season of "Game of Thrones."

Representing the 78-year-old writer and director at his perfunctory worst, Magic in the Moonlight is an unfunny, unromantic comedy.

It’s a maudlin, meandering bit of moviemaking that sheds little light on the loyal opposition in the North.

How much of this is actually funny is a question of taste, but even a confirmed Perry hater might get caught laughing once or twice.

It’s a lazy, thoroughly unoriginal bit of storytelling, but it has just enough cheeky humor and bass-thumping action scenes to be a potential crowd-pleaser.

May walk like a comedy and quack like a comedy, but despite the absurd extremes to which it takes the squabbling-family formula, it inspires nary a chuckle.

Will anyone really believe in this GQ-perfect big man on campus who lacks the courage to ask her out on a date?

The result is a pious mess of a movie that falls short both as history and as storytelling.

Kartheiser brings some zip and smarm to the proceedings as the villain with a million years in his vault, but it's not nearly enough to make In Time worth your time. Or your money.

[Estevez] still hasn't progressed beyond the film-school basics, but somehow he managed to recruit an all-star cast of (presumably) like-minded activists for The Public.

Freeman is back in Reiner's latest, The Magic of Belle Isle, which has all the pathos and saccharine of "The Bucket List" but little of the humor. It's earnest, predictable and disposable.

Outdoing all of the headliners, at least when it comes to capturing voices and body language, is a new character inside the game played by Awkwafina of “Crazy Rich Asians.” It’s subtle, but there’s something more authentic about her version of the shtick. She’s just more in the moment — or maybe less desperate for a laugh.

One kudo to this lazy effort: The climax does have a real end-of-a-trilogy feel, making further sequels less likely. Silver linings, folks.

It aims to match the mythic gravitas of “The Lord of the Rings” — even throwing in a nod to the Book of Exodus for good measure — and the results fall paint-by-numbers flat.

I can give the filmmakers — director Dito Montiel and screenwriter Adam G. Simon — the benefit of the doubt on good intentions, but their approach doesn’t tug at the heartstrings so much as it pistol-whips the audience with its grandiose and (ineptly) manipulative storytelling.

Like nine out of 10 faith-based films, it lets the message crowd out the other elements of good art: character development, thematic complexity, even basics such as a compelling conflict.

You'd expect the sequel to be an improvement based on production values alone, and you would be right, but not by much.

While Below Her Mouth is no doubt some classy-looking porn, it’s a pretty lousy movie, because all that sex leaves precious little time to develop character, plot or thematic depth.

Journalists deserve to be heralded — just not in this holier-than-thou cinematic cri de coeur. So, on behalf of journalists everywhere, I have to tell Mr. Reiner thanks, but no thanks.

The Purge is one of those unimaginative horror flicks that depend on skreeky music and sudden appearances to startle, but never actually frighten, the audience. The characters are undeveloped, the twists clumsily telegraphed and unsurprising.

It’s not that overwrought violence and human depravity are unfit grist for art, but without a compelling plot and a modicum of character development, all this film has to offer is a repugnant prurience and heavy-handed atmospherics.