Mark Olsen

The new Poltergeist is a pleasant enough diversion, better as a low-simmer suspense story than a full-blown effects extravaganza.

The movie is visually inventive and with enough good moments and smart moves to never be entirely dismissible, while not strong enough to overcome its essential thinness.

There may be an audience out there for any movie about gospel music, regardless of how bad it is, but as filmmaking or as drama, it's hard to imagine anyone singing the praises of this one.

Chai's structure and pacing are disconcertingly slack. Missing the loose ends and ambiguities of actual conversation, the dialogue makes characters sound like they're delivering speeches rather than interacting.

The movie is all over the place and there is no attempt to weave it into a coherent whole — which is regrettable as scene for scene it often works.

It’s a tantalizing idea - a little rom-com sugar to help the Big Pharma exposé pill go down -but Slattery-Moschkau is simply not a writer of the caliber necessary to pull off that delicate balancing act.

With its chatty, overstuffed patter, Hoodwinked strains at the seams to look with it, like one of those dressed-alike Beverly Hills mother-daughter combos. Having said all that, the songs (yes, there are songs, too), mostly written by Todd Edwards, provide an unexpected bright spot.

While there is something to be said for a movie that aims to grapple with some of the “big questions” about the very nature of existence and reality, Down the Rabbit Hole makes teen sex comedies, action-chick sci-fi and the other usual multiplex chum seem like high-minded discourse.

Frankly, the story behind Manna From Heaven is a truckload more interesting than the movie itself.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is not a missing masterpiece; rather it is a small, tightly coiled spellbinder.

The film’s politics are not exactly sophisticated, motivated more by the convenience of the moment than any cohesive worldview.

There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days.

Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.

For a film that purports to be about the process of maturity and growth, it is woefully un-evolved, lacking in understanding and insight.

There is a journeyman’s proficiency to “Chapter 1” but little in the way of real spark.

By the time a not terribly surprising tragedy hits and these crazy kids get theirs, the movie doesn't so much end as finally keel over.

As the cop who finds himself in way over his head, kickboxer-turned-actor Conrad Pla turns in a performance of such staggering ineptitude that it almost (key word: almost) reaches a so-bad-it's-good, Plan 9 From Outer Space brilliance.

It all misses the mark emotionally, hindered by one-dimensional characters and telegraphed developments.

Breaking the Girls isn't exactly a throwaway, but more an extended act of teasing foreplay, a movie that is fine for what it is but also never really shifts into something more.

In its best moments, it's a sly exposé of the frailties of the contemporary male self-image and in its lesser moments a simplistic slapstick. This being a Will Ferrell comedy, sometimes those moments are one and the same.

The Marked Ones is refreshingly uncynical and straightforward in its desire to simply be a movie that makes the audience jump and be scared. It's a fun fright film and wants to be nothing more.

A messy brew that is a bit too slack to get all the way to actually being good.

Turns out Lost River is indeed a mess, but it's the best mess possible, an evocative grab-bag of images and moods with a heartfelt sincerity and conflicting impulses of romantic melancholy and hardscrabble hopefulness.

Endings, Beginnings has some genuinely engaging moments somewhere in between its beginning and its ending, but too much gets lost in a saggy, shaggy middle.

The film works better as social satire than straight horror, as the murder plot that drives it along always feels unconvincing.

After a strong start the movie steadily declines, one set piece after another, and there are many moments where the mind wanders and then asks: “Is this still going on?”

The highlight of the movie by far is the relaxed, easy chemistry between McCarthy and Cannavale.

Machete Kills winds up a slightly camp, tinny parody of bad action movies, playing out with the same sense of tedium as a genuine bad action movie.