Peter Sobczynski

The Long Night wants to create a sense of encroaching fear and unease in viewers but cannot inspire much of anything other than boredom and apathy.

The worst thing about The Girl in the Spider’s Web — the element likely to enrage most fans of the franchise — is how it betrays its central character by eradicating almost every aspect that made her so initially fascinating.

One of those films that expends so much time and effort in trying to become the next big cult sensation that it never gets around to simply being a good movie.

The Western may not be entirely dead yet, but The Old Way is not exactly doing it any favors.

Here is a film so devoid of thrills, excitement, or purpose that it seems to have been custom-made to play in empty multiplexes during the traditionally dead last weeks of summer.

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

As it turns out, this literary curiosity proves to be far more interesting than the finished film, which takes an undeniably interesting premise and then fails to make good use of it.

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.

Coming across as little more than a filmed adaptation of the first two-thirds of Neil Bogart’s Wikipedia page, Spinning Gold is a mess that even those with a keen interest in the subject will find both ponderous and uninformative.

Not that anyone watching #Horror is likely to care in the slightest about who is doing the killing and who will survive.

To give Deception, the latest attempt to bring Roth to the screen, a little bit of credit, it does come closer than most to rendering his prose stylings into cinematic terms. But it does so in a film so lifeless and inert from a dramatic standpoint that few viewers are likely to notice or even care.

I could not see it as anything more than a giant bore that presents viewers with the most familiar plot devices imaginable but fails to present them in a way that makes them worth sitting through once again.

While it has some good performances and noble intentions, it doesn't really bring anything new to the conversation and ultimately fails to give viewers any compelling reason to wade through all the bleakness and misery that it has to offer.

Huppert is still there plugging away in every scene. To the extent that False Confessions does intermittently succeed, it is due almost entirely to her efforts.

This could well be the single most implausible film playing at your multiplex this weekend and bear in mind, "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" is still in release.

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

While the premise has some undeniable potential, it has been executed by writer-director Lotfy Nathan in a manner that is neither particularly frightening nor spiritually enlightening.

As a result, anyone who does bother to show up will find themselves bearing witness to unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things to each other while hoping in vain that the two guys from "Funny Games" will show up hoping to borrow a couple of eggs.

The Astronaut isn’t terrible, I suppose—the performance by Mara is solid, and Varley’s work on the directing front shows that she knows how to take familiar genre elements and present them with style and efficiency. However, these efforts are undone by a screenplay that kind of goes off the rails for a while, leading to a conclusion that fails to inspire the overwhelming emotional impact it was clearly intended to evoke in viewers.

While Smurfs: The Lost Village may not be better or more entertaining, the acknowledgment that it is aiming solely for the kiddie audience this time around at least makes it slightly more palatable than its predecessors.

In the end, the biggest problem with Slumberland is its utter innocuousness. Because it is bright, noisy, and things are constantly happening, little kids might like it as a momentary distraction—but it certainly won’t inspire them to check out McCay’s original work for themselves.

Here is a work so cloying and ham-fisted in its attempts to move you that there is a point when you find yourself thinking that the only thing that Zemeckis hasn’t thrown into the mix is a needle drop of “Our House” and then he proceeds to do just that.

The end result is a sturdy and frequently dazzling version of the material that should leave audiences swooning with delight.

The Gunman isn't the worst action film that you will see this year — you will be lucky if you even remember anything about it a couple of weeks after seeing it — it will probably go down as one of the more dispiriting ones.

Films don't get much dreggier than No Escape, a dreadful and creepily exploitative would-be thriller, low-grade trash that it is too silly and stupid to be as offensive as it frequently comes close to being throughout.

This is Allen’s 48th movie (a 49th, “Rifkin’s Festival,” premiered last month) and while he has certainly made worse films than this one during that time, rarely has he come up with something as utterly inconsequential as this collection of rehashed themes, characters, and punchlines.

A potentially interesting premise is handled so badly that what might have been a provocative drama quickly and irrevocably devolves into the technological equivalent of the old anti-dope chestnut "Reefer Madness," squandering the efforts of a strong and talented cast struggling mightily to make something of the ridiculously trite material.

The Devil Conspiracy is nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake and twice as difficult to swallow, regardless of where you reside on the theological spectrum.