Odie Henderson

I liked the “Freaky Friday” remake. It had some real emotional heft to it, much of it due to the excellent performances by Curtis and Lohan. This time, all the characters are one-note, especially the teenagers.

Director Edgar Wright’s version is a more serious affair that not only has a duller hero than its predecessor, it’s also a half-hour longer.

The Woman in Black 2 might have served as an effective tribute to movies like "Curse of the Cat People." That is, if it hadn't completely squandered all this goodwill in its last third.

Director Jason Moore and writer Mark Hammer have fashioned an action movie/romantic comedy hybrid that’s too violent for comedy fans and not thrilling enough for thrill seekers. It’s not romantic at all, despite the best efforts of Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel.

Truth be told, Get on Up isn’t really interested in exploring how important Brown’s music was to any of the numerous styles it influenced. Instead, it just wants to play some of the big hits you love while ticking off a checklist of standard biopic milestones.

I enjoyed the first three adventures of the Dragon Warrior, but the best thing he can do now is to give this series a much needed skadoosh, sending it to rest in the cinematic spirit realm.

When Boston Strangler focuses on the two journalists who wrote about this case, it is quite involving.

God’s Creatures is yet another movie about a mother realizing too slowly that her son may be a dangerous sociopath. Screenwriter Shane Crowley’s thin characterizations do little to make this tired trope worth revisiting, instead opting to shroud the film in mystery regarding its central crime.

Imagine the most overdone, Philip Glass-style horror movie music playing over glossy footage of a university art class, and you have some idea what your eyes and ears are in for while attending The Time Being.

Though the visuals are often quite stunning, you’ll wish that “Wish” had a better story. Not even Magnifico is powerful enough to make you forget.

As the plot swings haphazardly between drug-induced hallucinations and reality, we lose trust in what we are seeing.

Individual parts of “The Bride!” work, but as a whole, the critic in me found it confusing and irritating.

I’m not implying that a horror movie needs to be coherent to deliver the chills — watch any J-Horror movie for proof that this concept can work. But “HIM” doesn’t even try to be scary. It’s too busy bombarding us with nonsensical, quickly flashed images that divulge nothing.

The History of Sound is even more repressed than its characters, and at over two hours, that’s far from entertaining.

The back and forth between the two actors becomes fraught with confusing allusions and muddled metaphors before ceding control to some unsuccessful supernatural elements.

The Hangover Part III plays more like a caper film — “Alan’s Eleven,” perhaps — than a comedy. While Phillips ably handles the action sequences, he and co-screenwriter Craig Mazin can’t juggle both genres in the screenplay.

The problem with gruesome true stores is that, if the outcome is known, a film needs to work well enough for you to patiently wait for it to get to the climactic re-enactment of the crime. Mope does not garner enough interest in either a storytelling or visual regard.

If only this movie weren’t as slow as a sleepwalkng turtle. The story is constructed like one big, dark joke whose punchline isn’t worth sitting through 110 minutes to hear.

The three leads do a good job creating their characters, with cinematographer Kristian Zuniga giving each of their tales a specific look and color scheme. But this also suffers from that indie fever where the camera and framing goes askew and "documentary style" for no reason except to distract you from how familiar the story is.

Couple the broad acting and cliché-ridden screenplay with the fixed-frame format, and “Here” comes off like a bad sitcom, or even worse, a school play made by a bunch of fifth-graders who decided to tackle Eugene O’Neill or “Death of a Salesman.”

Director Kenya Barris, who also co-wrote the script with Jonah Hill, intended to make an edgy, race-based cringe comedy; the result is afraid of its own shadow. This Netflix release commits an even bigger sin by wasting the considerable comedic talents of former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

I Declare War is like high school English class, rife with confusing symbolism and full of sound and fury that ultimately signifies nothing.

Viper Club is being released by YouTube Original Films, which is appropriate because it looks like it was shot and framed for the tiniest YouTube window possible. This is an ugly looking film filled with headache-inducing, shaky close-ups and questionable editing.

Black folks don’t need the classes in Racism 101 “Master” offers; life gives us PhD’s early on. It’s not for horror fans because it’s a complete failure as a horror movie.

Strays is a live-action flick about talking canines. As a movie, it is not a good boy; it is a bad dog. But if I were currently 12, I might have reacted in a more positive way.

While Mafia Mamma fails as a comedy, it succeeds in delivering the graphically violent moments one expects from a movie about the Mafia.

At 103 minutes, this film has way too much dead weight. Scenes are repeated over and over, and some of the acting would not cut it in a school play. But in the rare moments when Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween is firing on all cylinders, it displays a cleverness which hints that, with more time and a few more iterations of the script, this might have been a good movie.

Samaritan proves, to paraphrase Tina Turner, that we don’t need another superhero.