Peter Sobczynski

While the results inevitably pale in comparison to "The French Connection" — which could be said about virtually every other film currently in release — they do make for an above-average work that offers viewers a new perspective on a familiar story.

On paper, Wild Canaries sounds like it has all the ingredients for a reasonably diverting comedy, but they just never quite pull together into a cohesive or entertaining whole.

It isn’t bad, per se, but I just never felt the emotional impact it's clearly hoping to achieve.

As a Neil Young fan who has cheerfully followed him throughout all the highways and byways of his singular career, I have always found him to be one of the most vital and fascinating voices in contemporary music, even at his weirdest. Sadly, the only thing that “Coastal” manages to accomplish is something that I would have usually thought impossible—it makes him come across as a bore.

A film that has some promising elements and which often seems as if it is on the verge of evolving into something wonderful but never quite manages to turn that particular corner.

It's impressively staged, especially considering the low budget, and contains a number of action beats that put their high-priced Hollywood competition to shame.

The film as a whole just never quite overcomes the inherent familiarity of its premise to become its own unique thing. Those looking for a story equal to Cranston’s contributions to it are liable to come away from it feeling slightly disappointed.

As the saying goes, I may not know art, but I know what I like. I like this movie.

Lazenby himself takes center stage to tell his story and explain his actions at last but the end result is a sometimes frustrating work that takes a potentially fascinating tale and renders it mostly inert thanks in large part to its questionable approach to the material.

Whether or not Blanco is able to save his factory, Bardem is able to navigate the narrative missteps surrounding him and ultimately make "The Good Boss" worth a look.

In “Stopmotion,” the debut feature from Robert Morgan, the medium—the painstaking and time-consuming process of stop-motion animation—may be unusual but the resulting film, an undeniably grisly but ultimately tedious tiptoe through the genre tropes, certainly is. This is all the more frustrating because in the middle of it all is a performance by Aisling Fransciosi that is so strong and committed that viewers will wish that the rest of the film had made the same kind of effort that she clearly did.

Those willing to give No Future a chance will find it to be a fairly smart and realistic depiction of two people consumed by grief, guilt, and loss and the misguided ways by which they attempt to come to terms with those feelings.

Alas, it also contains many of the same inherent flaws as most movies of this type, and not even the genuinely good and powerful aspects on display are quite able to overcome the more troublesome elements.

Aan odd fusion of an earnest socially conscious drama and a B-movie mystery programmer that never quite comes together despite a strong performance from Adele Haenel at its center.

This is an interesting concept in theory and for a while, it is undeniably compelling to watch, aided in no small part by a couple of strong performances at its center.

It doesn't take long to realize that writer-director David Ayer has spent more time adding flesh to his battlefield sequence than he has in fleshing out the screenplay. The end result, while technically impressive, is a dramatically bloodless affair, despite the gallons of gore on display.

Body Brokers was clearly made with good intentions, but while it might still fill you with anger towards the predatory aspects of the rehabilitation industry, you'll also be upset that the script is not nearly as great as it could have been.

Ultimately, Greenland never comes together into a truly satisfying package, but it deserves a little credit for trying to do something unique within such a familiar framework.

This decidedly dark and super-violent South Korean crime drama from Kim Sung-su tells a tale so jam-packed with betrayals, double-crosses and alleged authority figures that even the most dedicated of genre buffs may find it too unrelentingly grim and cynical for their tastes.

Instead of leaving viewers with a better or more informed idea of what makes her tick as a person and as an artist, "Halftime" feels more like a ruthlessly efficient election ad for a political campaign that was decided a long time ago.

The end result is a film that may not rise to the level of “Don’t Look Back” or “Truth or Dare” but still manages to create a sense of intimacy and revelation, even as we sense that there is really no such thing as an unguarded moment for Lady Gaga.

On the one hand, it never quite works in a conventionally satisfying manner—it is wildly uneven, occasionally obtuse and it never quite seems to have a solid grasp on what it is trying to say. On the other hand, it still manages to register in a number of unusual ways thanks to its haunting visual style, offbeat tone, and its intriguing method to put us into the disintegrating mindset of its central character.

American Dharma is a frustratingly hollow look at Bannon that is ultimately so benign in its portrayal of the man that it comes closer to an example of fan service than a full takedown.

This is not a film for everyone by a long shot. Still, those willing to take a chance and embrace it on its own very distinct and occasionally deranged terms are likely to find themselves agreeing with the ultimate assessment of Mirren, who once described it as “an irresistible mix of art and genitals.”

This is funny to a point, but the problem with “Stress Positions” is that said point arrives about halfway through. The runtime that remains gets overloaded with too many plot threads, characters, and repeated punchlines, Hammel essentially turning the proceedings into a failed exercise in Blake Edwards-style farce.

The major problem with That Summer is the inescapable fact that it only barely qualifies as a movie.

It's an intriguing idea for a film, I suppose, but it proves to be pretty much all setup with precious little follow-through. Not even the good performances from the two leads can make the whole thing work.

Whatever "Breaking Bread" lacks in artistic ambition, it makes up for with its good heart, sincere intentions, and, most importantly, all of those luscious images of food.

A wildly ambitious and frequently fascinating film that moviegoers of all ages should find both entertaining and provocative in equal measure.

The film is blessed with a fairly strong cast and while it isn’t nearly enough to make it succeed as a whole, whatever degree that certain scenes do work are almost entirely due to their efforts.

America is like the cinematic equivalent of one of those forwarded e-mails of mostly discredited "facts" that you receive from an uncle and at least those sometimes include family photos or a meat loaf recipe that can be of some value.

While it does have a few things of interest going for it, this low-budget effort ends up arriving at its necessarily predictable conclusion in too many unnecessarily predictable ways.

This lavish period piece contains enough thrills, spills and moments of cinematic grace that not only manage to push it through the rough spots but allow it to put most American action films of recent vintage to shame.

It sounds fun in theory, I guess, and there are some entertaining moments of rude irreverence here and there but the giddiness gets a bit tedious after a while.

A saccharine stab at a new holiday perennial that tries to fuse the classic Yuletide yarn with a “Shakespeare In Love”-style literary origin story and manages to let both of them down, not to mention a performance by Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge that deserves a much better showcase than the one provided here.

On paper, this sounds like a potentially fascinating combination but the film emerging from it proves to be anything but that. Instead, it proves to be such an overly ponderous exercise that, by the time it finally comes to an end, you may feel so sapped of energy that find yourself struggling to get up out of your seat.

While it may not quite be the modern-day “Casablanca,” it is nevertheless a grandly entertaining stab at old-fashioned storytelling...buoyed by smart and stylish filmmaking, a good performance by Brad Pitt and an even better one from Marion Cotillard.

It isn’t a bad movie as much as a dead one, never managing to click in the way all involved presumably hoped it would.

Are you consumed by an overwhelming desire to fork over the price of a movie ticket in order to see the kind of meagerly funded nonsense that the SyFy network provides for the price of a basic cable package? If the answer is yes, then Bounty Killer is right up your alley.

Although their work is ultimately not enough to make “See for Me” anything more than a gimmick movie that never quite pays off, Davenport almost makes it worth watching and will leave you wondering about what they could accomplish with stronger material.

The one major problem with Into the Forest, the one that keeps it from making that final leap of good movie to a potentially great one, is that the final third is just not quite as strong as the stuff that precedes it.

In its attempt to cram too many narratives and subjects into too short of a running time, it ends up coming across as both overstuffed and oddly undernourished.

The Pact starts off on an intriguing note and has some moments when it does work (especially the ones involving Grete), but while it's theoretically filled with dark psychological underpinnings, it seems oddly reticent to deal with them in any significant way.

The end result is itself not especially intriguing.

It isn’t necessarily bad, per se, and it contains just enough in the way of intriguing elements to more or less hold one’s interest for its running time. However, Next Exit never shifts into a higher dramatic gear at any point, and it concludes on a note that is more than a bit unsatisfying.

Lights Out has been made with a certain degree of style—enough to make you want to see what Sandberg might be capable of with a better screenplay—and it does contain one great moment that pays sly homage to the most famous moment from the classic thriller “Wait Until Dark.”

For the most part, it is a solid film that bolsters its innately compelling narrative with effectively low-key performances, some genuinely thrilling sequences and only a few moments here and there that lean towards hokeyness.

While originality may not exactly be in great supply here, these familiar elements have been mixed with enough wit and style to make for some sleazy, insanely violent, and reasonably entertaining B-movie trash.

Although Pet Sematary is a largely dreadful film, it is slightly better and never as offensively bad as the first version.

While it's unlikely that this film will take up too much time in any future Lifetime Achievement Award clip reels, Dreamland is a testament to the importance of sheer star power to help carry even haphazard material along, at least up to a point.

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

While I like the laid-back attitude the filmmakers apply to the theoretically devastating situation, it quickly becomes apparent that attitude is the only thing the film really has to offer to viewers. Although there are a few amusing moments here and there, the comedic situations are too droll for their own good and too often seem to waste potentially interesting ideas.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels is too vapid to work as a psychological drama, too silly to work as a passionate romance, and too tepid to work as a sexy guilty pleasure.

Even those who admired the “Raid” films for their style and heedlessness might find this to be little more than an accumulation of action movie cliches that they have seen enacted to much greater effect in other and certainly better films.

The young ones that this film is being aimed at are of the age when the movies can genuinely be magical, and the best ones can form memories that will last a lifetime. “Migration” may pass the time, but my guess is that those kids will retain more lasting memories of whatever their parents got for them at the concession stand than anything up there on the screen.

Hyena is such a nasty and brutish item that even the hardiest of moviegoers may find themselves repulsed by some of the sights that Johnson has in store.

Unlike a lot of comedians working these days, Iglesias is not particularly aggressive or vulgar--at least not as seen here--and the material that he covers is not particularly edgy or radical.

Incarnate is such a pointless bit of hackwork that it almost makes the recent horror dud “Shut In” seem focused by comparison.

What could have been a powerful, timely, and potentially funny meditation on the grieving process is instead a work that's about as thin and flavorless as a gum wrapper.

You always get the sense that you are watching a screenplay’s first draft that never got the fleshing-out that it clearly needed to make it stand out, either from a dramatic or emotional standpoint.

A largely tedious cinematic lump of coal that unsuccessfully tries to stretch its one-joke premise out to 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic.

The Tiger’s Apprentice is not an awful movie per se—some of the animation is striking and there are a couple of funny moments—but it is one of those frustrating exercises that seems to have assembled all the elements for a genuinely innovative film and then fails to make much of them.

Blood delivers plenty of the titular substance but not much else of note other than a couple of decent scenes here and there; a central performance from Michelle Monaghan is ultimately more interesting than the film surrounding it.

Brian De Palma is one of the great seducers of the cinema, and he proves it with Passion, a spellbinding thriller.

Its biggest crime is that the whole thing, in the end, is just kind of pointless, and doesn’t offer viewers anything that they haven’t already seen before and it's never as amusing or thought-provoking as it would like to be.

The film is a little too scattershot for its own good, which becomes especially frustrating when some of these detours actually come across as potentially being far more interesting than the central narrative thread.

Most of the rest of the film surrounding it is a conceptually weak and dramatically muddled mess that has acquired a game and good cast and then given them precious little to do.

The problem with “Deep Water” is not that it is a bad movie (which it is), but it’s a gratingly familiar one that doesn’t have a single point of interest to call its own. Instead, it prefers to spend two hours rehashing elements that even newbies to shark-based cinema will find devoid of any real inspiration.

Those not on the Deadpool bandwagon already will probably not be converted by this version and those who are fans may find it to be a vaguely interesting curio they'll watch once.

The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

The Quarry may be a slow burn from a dramatic standpoint but it is only when Shannon is around that it flickers, however briefly, to life.

The film has merit as a sprawling and effective work that combines the expected action beats with quieter, character-driven moments, and elements of pure weirdness to surprisingly strong effect. Even when it doesn’t quite work, and it's undeniably uneven at times, it at least has the good taste to offer up flaws borne of ambition instead of laziness.

Outlaw Posse doesn’t quite work in the end but there are enough moments of note scattered throughout it to let you forget that from time to time.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

47 Meters Down, despite a few things going for it, is an easily skippable work that will, ironically, probably wind up playing better on television and home video, where viewers might be more willing to overlook its failings

An often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

What should have been a solid B-movie thriller with a premise torn from today’s headlines is instead as arid and desolate as the land between the United States and Mexico in which it is set.

Most of this is interesting enough, although a little too self-congratulatory at times, but A LEGO Brickumentary never really goes much deeper than that.

Most viewers will find themselves wishing that writer/director Patrick Ridremont had come up with a few variations on this standard theme in order to liven up this competently executed but painfully familiar genre exercise.

The film bizarrely takes what could have been a touching and powerful drama about the traumatic family ties that bind (and occasionally choke) and attempts to refit it as a straightforward, if mostly low-key horror exercise chock-full of scenes involving various things popping up out of the darkness with numbing regularity.

While the film does subvert basic audience expectations, it doesn’t really do anything beyond that as it stumbles through a choppy and meandering narrative that not even an admittedly committed lead performance by Danielle Deadwyler can help save.

The film isn’t necessarily terrible, but it proves to be deeply unmemorable by offering viewers little more than a rehash of things they have presumably seen before and then taking an unconscionable amount of time to do so.

This is a bleak nugget of a film that is trying so hard to take the typical sports movie narrative and unleash its darker and more nightmarish side that it runs out of steam long before arriving at its frustratingly oblique conclusion.

Even the most easily satisfied fans of Washington will be unlikely to find much of anything in this sadistic, stupid and sloppy sequel.

The latest film to attempt to find the lighter side of bloodsuckers and it even adds a reasonably inspired idea into the mix. Alas, the result is a thoroughly mediocre movie that is never as amusing as it should be.

In extending itself to reach a conventional feature length, however, it becomes a below-average programmer in which brief moments of interest are interrupted by long stretches of boredom.

The lo-fi horror film "Night's End" tries to combine old-fashioned haunted house chills with more contemporary technological terrors, but never quite figures out how to do that.

The best family films capture the imaginations of younger viewers and teach them the power of storytelling in ways that can affect them for their entire lives, possibly inspiring them to create their own stories as well. By comparison, “Sing 2” serves no other purpose than to waste a couple of hours.

It ends up being little more than a rambling, undisciplined clip show that misfires as both history and entertainment.

Despite the occasional rough patches, there are still some things about Krampus that I did like quite a bit. Although the humor is not always successful, I liked the fact that Dougherty played the material in a relatively straight manner and resisted the urge to go for a more campy approach throughout.

Jane Got a Gun has its good points and less demanding fans of the Western genre may find some value in it, especially considering how few films of its type actually get made these days.

And yet, while it does not really work — at least not enough to warrant a full recommendation — it is one of those films where some of the stuff that did work was good enough to inspire me to hold out hope practically right up to the closing moments that it would all somehow all pay off in the end.

The film is constantly undercutting its own ability to generate any real suspense because whenever one of the stories begins to generate any real head of steam, viewers are jerked into another one and the whole process starts over again.

A depressingly rote piece of corporate product that has so little on its mind other than presumably making hundreds of millions of dollars that you half expect the ticket sellers to hand out copies of Comcast’s latest earnings report along with the 3-D glasses.

Like most films of its type, “The Final Chapter” is utterly ridiculous in every possible way but unlike a lot of them (I am looking at you, “Underworld”), it at least has a healthy sense of its own absurd nature that comes as a blessed relief. And a couple of the action bits are gloriously goofy to behold.

A by-the-numbers sequel that mostly ignores the stuff that made its predecessor stand out in exchange for formulaic would-be thrills.

As an action movie and as a historical document, it is a bombastic and wholly inauthentic mess that displays precious little interest in the men whose actions and sacrifices it purports to honor.