Peter Sobczynski

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.

House of Hummingbird deserves a place alongside the likes of “The Virgin Suicides,” “The Ocean of Helena Lee” and “Eighth Grade” as one of the most knowing and intelligent cinematic takes on the pains and occasional pleasures of female adolescence of recent years.

While the results will obviously not come close to resonating with the public in the manner of “Walk the Line,” My Darling Vivian does an admirable job of recounting the story of a woman who was ultimately far more than just a footnote in someone else’s life.

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.

So yes, Fantasy Island is a terrible movie — this probably won’t come as a shock to most people — but more than that, it seems to have been made with absolutely no one in mind.

In reality, this is the kind of low-key gem that horror fans are always looking for but so rarely find — one that is smartly conceived, visually stylish and genuinely creepy at times.

The addition of Cage to the already heady cinematic brew definitively puts it over the top, making it the kind of cult movie nirvana that was its apparent destiny from the moment the cameras started rolling.

Sitting through it is like watching someone else playing a video game for two solid hours, and not an especially compelling one at that.

As a whole, The Good Liar is not quite good enough to deserve the comparisons to the works of Alfred Hitchcock it's clearly aiming for, though it is just good enough to suggest what Hitchcock himself might have done with it on a second pass.

Unless you are a L.S. Lowry fan of the highest order, the only reason to sit through Mrs. Lowry & Son is to watch actors as strong as Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave going toe-to-toe for 90 minutes.

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.

Countdown pretty much fails on every level that a horror film possibly can — the characters are uninteresting dullards, the story is idiotic, and the scares are nonexistent.

For fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mountaintop is pretty much a must-see—it gives them a chance to see their heroes at work in a raw and unfiltered manner, and the fact that the Colorado album is Young’s strongest collection of new songs since Psychedelic Pill is certainly a sweetener to the deal. Those who cannot stand their sound, on the other hand, are not likely to be won over.

The title is perhaps the cleverest thing about it.

Because it is the first film to be released by Higher Ground, the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama that signed a highly publicized deal with Netflix, American Factory will no doubt find an audience far larger than the typical documentary focusing on the contemporary labor movement.

Not even the most devoted of Mandy Moore fans would mistake 47 Meters Down for a good movie by any means.

The problem is not that it tells a story that's been done many times before, but that it never finds a new or interesting way of approaching the familiar material.

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.

Anna was written and directed by Besson himself and it still feels like a misfired rehash of his greatest hits.

While the end result is certainly no masterpiece, it is still better than the average action potboiler and contains a couple of exhilarating set pieces that offer further proof—not that any is needed at this point—that De Palma remains one of the unquestioned masters of creating and executing moments of pure cinema.

The results are uneven — how could they not be? — but the sheer weirdness of the whole enterprise has a charm to it and it certainly is never boring. Bewildering, maybe, but never boring.

There are moments of unexpected humor that blindside you.

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

The result is a listlessly soapy melodrama, save for a little bit of modern-day nudity and bloodshed, could have been churned out 60-70 years ago and then gone largely forgotten in the ensuing decades.

Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

To be honest, the film does not exactly make a convincing case for the idea of Berlin as a hub of passion, or really for its existence as a movie.

A gross, stupid and relentlessly ugly film from start to finish, this may not be the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Netflix Originals but nothing else worthy of that title immediately springs to mind.

So excruciatingly awful that you have to wonder what it was, other than their paychecks, that could have possessed the cast and crew to keep coming back each day, when it must have been obvious from the first day of shooting that the project was the most hopeless of cases imaginable.