Michael Ordoña

Vivo takes off with a cute kinkajou, some good music and some interesting visuals, but ultimately doesn’t stick the landing.

If you're interested in this movie, it's because you love either seeing zombies explode (check), the video games (major character included, check) or Jovovich kicking undead butt in every conceivable way (check and mate).

If you can hang with the slow gestation of the first hour or so of Malignant, the final third may grow on you.

No moment on this anything-but-love boat has the impact of, say, the seasickness sequence of “Triangle of Sadness,” but slaughter stans will get their butchery bellyfuls.

The plot chugs along with no surprises, but that’s beside the point. While it’s not exactly a laugh riot, the film’s humor tends to land.

It’s refreshing to come at the spy genre from a different angle and rewarding to be introduced to these extraordinary women. Just don’t expect a pulse-pounder or even a particularly atmospheric, experiential film.

The film’s bright colors and blaring happy music may not be enough for viewers to overcome the rather unfunny themes of neglect (“Back up the abuse caboose”) routinely excused in more engaging fare.

The gags are often better in theory than practice.

Fascinatingly muddled.

Die My Love is not plot-driven, with events that don’t necessarily follow one another in cause and effect. Rather, it’s a slow-burn psychological drama populated by imperfect people struggling with painful realities. Instead of a dramatic arc, it’s a dramatic decline.

There’s much to like about the road-trip comedy Half Brothers. It’s funny, smart, topical and even touching at times. But it’s hard to overcome the inescapable rot at its center.

Unfortunately, the movie’s thriller elements amount to pale reflections of many other works.

Ron’s Gone Wrong dots its primer on friendship with chase scenes and warnings about Big Tech, with only mixed success.

The narrative is hamstrung by cliché attempts to build McKay’s backstory, shamelessly changing key facts. McConaughey’s performance is just fine, as is Ferrera’s, but the personal stuff feels like a distraction.

Dosed works best as a purely anecdotal, personal chronicle of a friend’s struggle with addiction therapies. It is not recommended as a substitute for scientific conclusions.

Mosley feels well-intentioned, though its lessons are unclear, especially considering its ending. And more humor and more fully developed characters could have enlivened the familiar hero’s journey template.

Fathom presumably gets its name from both the watery depths and the attempt to understand these mysterious aquatic mammals, but it doesn’t delve deeply enough into either the science or the scientists.

Interesting and timely, The Red Sea Diving Resort highlights the plight of refugees and casts those helping them in a heroic light, but it doesn’t quite deliver dramatically.

The film lacks slam-bang, signature action sequences that would make it more memorable.

The film fails to coalesce largely because viewers are left to wonder what joins the couple in the first place.

The picture’s too rosy to feel real. Its elements of posthumous, loving advice and inevitable tragedy make for good bones. But this portrait is too clean, too unquestioning, too accepting, to get to the marrow.

“All the Streets” feels niche to a fault.

The action is violent and improbable but not staged with particular pizazz.

Odom, surely one of the busiest actors working today, gives a committed performance but lacks chemistry with either of his onscreen wives. A sense of lightness, of fun, of the alchemy between two people is missing, though it would seem crucial to drive the story.

Brown-Easley’s story is interesting and the film’s acting is committed. Unfortunately, as a cinematic experience, Breaking fails to compel.

The film is well-intentioned and rooted in harrowing real-life stories. Unfortunately, it’s made in the style of British television, with cinematic clichés that telegraph outcomes. The heavy-handed use of music, in particular, is intrusive.

Perhaps the slickly made documentary overstates the cultural impact of a little-seen and widely disliked film. However, it earns points for scraping at the surface of something rarely discussed in film fandom — homosexuality in horror.

At its best, “Erupcja” feels truthful, even insightful. At its worst, it’s an off-putting selfie of the chronically self-absorbed, like a big-screen “Girls.” It does offer an interesting perspective on its case of apparent synchronicity late in the film, but leaves plenty for viewers to ponder on their own.

Ultimately, “The Long Walk” is a heartfelt metaphorical drama about people bonding under duress. Instead of focusing on the darker side of human nature one might expect from the average dystopian film, it finds power in small acts of connection.

What results is an emotional appeal that highlights a grave problem but doesn’t give the viewer the scientific, factual foundation to be completely convinced. The film also doesn’t offer solutions.

You don't go to this film for Sorkinesque repartee; you go for the world's longest chainsaw, or equal-opportunity genital mutilations, or very, very long bludgeonings. And here they are, in buckets.

You want to see Eddie Murphy surrounded by some Christmas-themed silliness. And on that score, it’s fine enough, but destined for regifting.

Beautiful Something Left Behind, which won the documentary award at last year’s South by Southwest Film Festival when the film was called “An Elephant in the Room,” serves as a snapshot of kids in emotional crises, but sadly, little more.

Kraven the Hunter will sate fans with Taylor-Johnson’s action bona fides and its fine cast. But those same fans may be less-than enthusiastic about the idea that, with no Spider-Man and no franchise to move forward, this one essentially has nowhere to go.

The Informer isn’t bad. It’s just nothing special. It relies too much on familiar elements. It’s the same throbbing score, the same expected betrayals and the same smiling, sadistic bad guys.

While the movie is hit and miss, under the rookie’s direction, several veteran actors still turn in solid work.

Encounter has its moments, but it suffers from multiple storytelling approaches that don’t mesh.

Don’t expect surprises or something to ideologically critique. This is kooky carnage. You came for Dave Bautista stomping a motorcycle into submission, and damn it, that’s what you’re gonna get.

Bana is, as always, a very watchable screen presence; the film is not bad. But there’s a spark missing that could make the story burn, and the film’s abrupt ending will leave viewers high and “Dry.”

Little attention is paid to the vernacular or physicality of the period. The depths of emotions aren’t plumbed.

While it gets mileage out of its two fine lead performances and the story has deep emotional roots for the filmmakers, its journey fails to capture the imagination.

Is Faith Based the answer to the prayers of comedy-starved movie buffs? Not entirely, but it’s no plague of locusts, either.

The cast is game. Unfortunately, what should be gut punches feel like glancing blows.

Perhaps, despite its lack of structure, the film will inspire a new generation to investigate this funny lady who could sing the lights out.

Without a more probing look into her artistry, it’s hard to think of Olympia as a definitive Dukakis profile — though it’s certainly an unusual celebrity documentary.

The Marksman is more drama than thriller, but really more old-fashioned western than anything else — and a familiar one at that.

The Eight Hundred fetishizes martyrdom, but for those seeking big-screen, epic violence, it’s pretty much the only game in town.

It almost works as food porn when we spend some time in Chico’s kitchen, but we never linger long enough for the experience to marinate.

The scenery’s gorgeous, Redgrave and Bergin are pros, Tom Everett Scott is fittingly gross as the selfish stage dad and Goodacre has some charm. But the film forgot to graft a personality onto its protagonist and seems so determined to be PG-clean that sparks between the leads are … hard to “find.”

It’s one of those pseudo-thrillers with car chases and shootouts in which it’s hard to invest yourself because its rules seem fungible.

If scares are the movie’s raison d’etre, though, it’s hard to imagine Spell will frighten anyone but those vulnerable to a few bits of graphic gore.

The dialogue is often stiff, the action and plotting unlikely, making the romance hard to swallow. The appealing Uddin and Raymonde do generate enough chemistry in their fleeting time together to keep the proposition afloat.

While it does put an interesting spin on the phrase from which it takes its title, the family drama with crime elements The Devil You Know stumbles.

One suspects Inside the Rain is a labor of love. One wishes its makers would have let us in enough to love it as well.

Only 97 minutes but feels much longer. It suffers from a marked lack of energy, a condition not cured by its many, many pop-music-scored montages.

In a pandemic, some might call the film a beacon of hope; others might prefer science to prayer for salvation. As a piece of cinema, though, Fatima is unlikely to be canonized.

Running Against the Wind is purportedly based on real events, and it’s sloppy and sort of random enough to be true.

In such troubled times, one supposes there’s comfort to be found in the lack of adventurousness of Holidate, but it’s like opening the same present again and again.

Whatever its goals, the filmmaking is uninspired. It’s heavily reliant on clichés, especially in its use of score, the lone-wolf cop and familiar devices to build tension.

It’s so detached from the supervillain narrative that it’s almost meta. But as the musical numbers become lengthy detours rather than lending further insight into Arthur, the sequel doesn’t sing as a character study. And it sure ain’t a thriller.

The ending that seems meant to be wistful, even magical, reads instead as appalling, lamentable, gloomy, however you want to say “the opposite of wondrous and happy.”

The new Margot Robbie vehicle Dreamland seems to be about legends, the price of escape, maybe unreliable narrators — but ends up not saying much about any of them.

It’s full of missed opportunities and lacking in telling details.

It may have benefited from a quickened pace, or touches of humor, or heightened stakes because — at least in this film — watching Nazis get theirs is a vein of amusement that runs dry.

The new David Bowie biopic Stardust could be marketed as “Bowie as you’ve never seen him,” but it feels like “Bowie as no one ever saw him.”

The film drifts from grown-up to kid problems with mostly anecdotal evidence but very little science to back it up. It tries to cover too much ground in 71 minutes without going deeply into any of the areas it lightly explores.

With its human relations a bit dicey, the movie lives or dies by the cuteness of its CG animals. Fortunately, it probably will never stop hitting the cute button inside us simply to see rabbits scurry-hopping with earnest little faces. The cinematic technology’s growth is remarkable.

The filmmakers cast several comic performers — Adam Pally as the dad, Tichina Arnold as the grandmother, Ken Marino as the bad guy — but there aren’t really opportunities for them to shine. Arnold seems to have the most fun with it. The Main Event, sadly, never gets off the mat.

If it’s an Ip Man adventure you’re looking for in which he’s a full-on superhero, this one exists. Just know you’re getting the B Team.

We get slivers of moments and feelings described rather than experienced.

If tension was the filmmakers’ aim, they decisively miss — especially if it was meant to come from the puzzlingly casual sniper situation. Any possibility of buying into the story’s reality is defused by the soldiers being so dang gabby, and loudly so.

The filmmaking lacks the style to pull off its willful blending of fact and fantasy. At least there are the songs to enjoy.

There is an enjoyable fight scene and the production design and cinematography of “Funhouse” do what they can with limited resources. One wishes the script hadn’t been the most limited resource of all.

To very young kids who like cartoon dogs driving shiny vehicles, PAW Patrol: The Movie may be awesome. To grown-ups, it may be an aggressively under-written, 88-minute toy commercial.

The new Cheaper by the Dozen feels less like a feature than a lengthy sitcom pilot. It’s an assembly-line product scrubbed clean of personality.

The film is sanitized to the point of sterility.

Breaking News in Yuba County lacks both the form and substance to cash in on its acting assets.

The “pranks” just aren’t funny. The whole premise isn’t funny.

Apparently, at least 400 women fought as men during the Civil War, but the perplexing Union is not the exploration they deserve.

It means to be about a struggling family saved by a brave dog. What most viewers will agree on is that it needed more dog.

The enjoyment one wants from GIs fighting these creatures is stunted by the film’s lack of energy and imagination.

It’s billed as another horror comedy, but when tidbits of humor manifest, it feels forced. There are few notable moments.

Opportunities for comedy are missed by miles. Davidson gets gonzo gags, Palmer is 007 with a heart, Murphy and Longoria try to exist in reality. That halfhearted miasma of genres results in tonal confusion. Murphy throws in what seem like ad libs to spice up a moribund script, but it’s not enough to add flavor to a bland stew.

Scream 7 is anything but cutting edge.

The Unholy Trinity is a passable, 95-minute diversion, but an unremarkable one.

The movie doesn’t just suffer by comparison to “High and Low” (itself adapted from Evan Hunter’s novel “King’s Ransom”); taken by itself, its pace drags, its tone staggers and its ideas are muddled.

All that said, this movie is likely review-proof. The franchise is doing just fine without critical approval. This one is less of a slog, but there is precious little interesting or new in Jurassic World Rebirth. It’ll likely earn a billion dollars anyway.

You forgive much due to obvious budgetary constraints. But the excruciatingly slow, soapy storytelling stifles emotional energy. It’s not easy to follow, hampered by severe logical lapses. Character threads abruptly drop. How anyone feels about anyone is unclear at any given moment.

Chain Letter is a nonsensical, bloody mess that, well, is missing a few links.

For most, there will be no adrenaline rush from fear or thrill, or vicarious release from seeing tormentors tormented; one leaves feeling sad. Sad that this is what "entertainment" has come to. Come on, filmmakers. Can't you do better?