Sara Stewart

It’s the first R-rated, woman-directed comedy in years! — here’s the rub: The funniest thing about it is the men.

Unfortunately, the cast of characters you’ll find here is a pale imitation of her Hogwarts heroes.

Dinklage is a terrific actor who’s always engaging to watch, and he elevates this screenplay’s plot holes and lame dialogue.

For parents of very young children looking for a weekend distraction, “Color City” is passable fare — and will at least inspire kiddies to finish what they start, coloring-wise.

Like the rest of Dear Mr. Watterson, it’s a good-hearted gesture. But unlike Calvin’s alter ego Spaceman Spiff, this film never manages to achieve liftoff.

Tonally, the film swings between whispery romance and ominous horror as it explores the dark side of love and lust, including an amusingly gory meditation on the notion that the person you think is your beloved might just rip your heart out.

Given the scarcity of movies about lust from the female point of view, this is kind of a bummer.

Portman is always consummately watchable, and she tries her best to telegraph the utter existential confusion engulfing Lucy at work and in love. But the film around her is simply not up to her level.

Half dark, deliciously topical political satire and half somber portrait of a flailing counterinsurgency effort. The two don’t mesh well, and given the number of modern war movies already out there, it should have stuck with the former.

Lee may not want to let anyone in, but it’s hard to engage fully with a film that doesn’t seem to want to, either.

It’s refreshing to see a nonwhite lead, and the husky-voiced pop singer is likable as a brave-hearted kid searching for her mother. But man, is there a lot of Rihanna in this movie: She also provides what seems like the entirety of the film’s soundtrack, making it feel like a vanity project (is “vanimation” a thing?).

Teen house-arrest thriller Dark Summer gets out ahead of any ripping-off-“Disturbia” talk with an early Shia LaBeouf joke. But its sleepy, hallucinogenic aesthetic is an entirely different — and rather less engaging — style, anyway.

Watching this yoga documentary mirrored how I feel about taking weekly classes: The ancient Eastern tradition is demonstrably beneficial for both mind and body, but its execution can be so boring and its teachers so painfully earnest.

Gregg, who previously directed the very dark comedy “Choke,” never quite settles on a tone; from the opening scenes, in which Molly Shannon plays a neurotic stage mom and Allison Janney a chilly casting agent, it seems he’s going that way again, but a dramatic twist sends the film into less plausible territory.

An inoffensive but bland ode to the talky high school movies of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe.

More perplexing than any of the supposed mysteries of Terminal is what Mike Myers, of all people, is doing here, playing a train-station janitor with a creepy “Danny Boy” whistle.

Alas, the film’s relevance — and ultimately sane upshot — is buried beneath a meandering and oftimplausible plot.

Too bad the film around Brody is fairly by-the-numbers, with a mean-spirited kicker that doesn’t imbue much originality to its imperiled-female plotline.

Sweet and funny — largely thanks to James Corden in the lead role — it’s never particularly surprising.

This is hardly reinventing the wheel, but it is serviceable, if you're looking for a few shivery communal scares.

It’s all headed for a showdown, of course, and duly delivers, though Crudup and Taylor are the only ones who really seem to have a handle on the New Yawk accent.

If you have two X chromosomes, or know and like someone who does, Blade Runner 2049 may not be the movie for you.

A so-so heist movie whose dirty-cop character’s personality must have been described in the screenplay as “Nicolas Cage-esque.” Fortunately, Cage was available.

So why isn’t They Came Together more uniformly hilarious? Perhaps it’s that elusive problem of trying to explain why a thing is funny in the first place: Spelling it out deflates the joke.

Not surprisingly in this tale of desperate men, the only women are top-heavy cartoon characters — literally, animated sequences illustrate Frank’s stories — or live-action betrayers, like Dakota Fanning’s Annie, Frank’s ex-girlfriend. I found the cartoons more interesting.

Tremblay is charming as an eccentric kid marching to his own tune, but the film’s attention wanders like a goat separated from its herd.

Witherspoon’s charge, Sofía Vergara as a recalcitrant witness in need of police protection, is an adept slapstick comic likewise hamstrung by director Anne Fletcher’s sluggish pacing, which reliably stays with a scene for three beats beyond the punch line.

This is a single story that feels like a handful of sketches in need of more connection.

A well worn trope that’s tough to elevate beyond eye-roll level.

Aloft is less like a story than a dream, populated with gorgeous people and symbolism you can interpret any way you like.

A forgettable — and occasionally borderline offensive — animated tale of turkeys trying to take back Thanksgiving.

First-time feature director Jeff Preiss has a top-notch duo in John Hawkes, as the affable but troubled Joe, and Elle Fanning as his teen daughter, Amy, but neither can really get out from under the film’s heavy-handed tone, a one-note trip down a bleak memory lane.

Note to Greek chorus of execs: Turning a space psychodrama into a “He went to Jared” commercial is pretty low, even for you.

It’s too bad there’s already a movie out this week called “The Shallows”; it would work so perfectly for the new film from Nicholas Winding Refn (“Drive”).

None of these seemingly plot-rich questions are explored; instead, we’re stuck with a greasy-haired Mark Ruffalo, as his detective character flounders along in their wake, muttering that he doesn’t have time for this magic crap.

Given its obvious parallels with modern-day events, it’s a shame Felt’s ensuing story is so wanly told.

Predicated almost entirely on the repeated juxtaposition of innocent girlishness and mindless violence, Violet & Daisy could still have been campy fun — instead, it wilts for lack of wit.

Like the reanimated corpse of a teen queen, this would-be cult movie looks the part, but has little going on inside.

This female revenge thriller starts out promisingly, but squanders its girl-power capital quicker than you can say "Rihanna."

The film alternates between shoving its confusing plot forward and dropping dialogue bombs that fizzle.

Unfortunately, his machine fails en route; way more unfortunately, he comes up very short compared to Mark Watney, the red planet-stranded astronaut played with such humor and energy by Matt Damon in last year’s “The Martian.”

It was supposed to be a lark. And then, almost immediately, it went off the rails. I’m not referring to the mother-daughter vacation gone wrong in Snatched, but rather the experience of watching it.

Most of Mortal Engines is a wearying blast of CGI and genre-cribbing (most egregiously, director Christian Rivers hired composer Junkie XL to seemingly lift, wholesale, his soundtrack from “Mad Max: Fury Road”).

I’ve never seen a restaurant documentary that seemed less interested in showing the joy of food.

The dialogue is so vague, and the plot so minimal, it all feels like a rather pointless exercise.

With seemingly no understanding of how tone-deaf it might be to cast a straight, white, able-bodied blonde like Schumer as victimized by society’s judgment, the lazily written I Feel Pretty takes a talented comic and casts her in the worst possible light (and I don’t mean that literally — she looks fine).

It’s a heavy lift to find any single thing that happens here remotely plausible, and ultimately it almost seems a horror movie misinterpreted as a romance. File this one under “The Fault in Our Screenplay.”

Rockwell is incapable of being boring, so there’s some small entertainment to be found in watching his buttoned-up beta male blossom into full Sam Rockwell.

It often seems like an acting workshop: Behave as if you are the parent of a dead child.

Shooting in South Africa and Botswana, director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee never lacks for atmosphere, but his film is painfully awkward in execution, from the stiff dialogue to the time-padding slo-mo sequences and glaring CGI.

It’s macho eye-candy of the cheapest kind, endless scenes of gunfire and explosions and rugged, handsome actors running while shooting and yelling.

This is the kind of movie that gives art-house movies a bad name. Seeing as it’s about lobotomies in the 1950s, it is also ripe for “ice-pick- through-the-eye” jokes about the pain of watching it. But I would never stoop so low.

There’s a secret at play in After, which director Pieter Gaspersz communicates via many side-long glances. I won’t give it away, but it’s a fairly far-fetched twist that feels out of place in this realism-based drama.

I’ll say one thing for The Call: Its ending is actually a bit of a surprise. Just when you think it couldn’t get any stupider, pow! I’ll be damned, Hollywood, you still have the power to blindside.

You'd hope a political-insider indie reuniting "West Wing" stars Rob Lowe and Richard Schiff, and informed by the experiences of an actual former spin doctor, would be a small delight. You would be wrong.

It’s clear why this indie was shelved for so long: It’s a mess.

Ultimately, though, the lack of story and relentless suffering make Raze appealing for hard-core genre fans only.

This flaccid comedy tries to spark your interest by undressing two of its four stars down to their underwear for significant periods of time. More outrageously, neither of those people is Jon Hamm.

The bloodshed is artful, at least.

For connoisseurs of the “Grudge” series, the brief prelude of this fourth installation links it to the ones that came before. Everybody else, good luck making that connection.

Most damning of all, the dark mystery hinted at throughout is revealed so lazily it lands with zero impact. It’s long been clear that Cage has opted for quantity in his movie roles, but maybe a little quality control wouldn’t hurt.

For a story whose appeal hinges on the saving grace of getting a "purpose-driven life," this one's got remarkably little of it.

There are a lot of casualties in this stylish, unoriginal thriller, but James McAvoy’s knee was the only one that moved me.

The film tries to be clever by going meta: Once again, it’s rooted in Mr. Glass’ conviction that superheroes are real, and it repeatedly name-checks comic-book tropes that are reflected, languidly, in the movie’s own plot. But in the end, all it really reveals is a onetime visionary’s glass now half — no, let’s go with mostly — empty.

With the exception of “Tape 49” — the Simon Barrett-directed segment about the PI — the films are ridiculously shaky, their camerawork so determinedly guerrilla-style that it’s difficult not to look away, sometimes at crucial moments. Found footage is all well and good, but if it’s unwatchable, it might as well have stayed lost.

Aside from these curious role reversals, though, Alex Cross is a mess. Drawing on every conceivable '80s B-movie action cliché and treating its beleaguered female characters like pieces of meat (literally, in one scene of butchery), director Rob Cohen squanders a surprisingly recognizable cast on a half-baked plot adapted from James Patterson's series of novels.

Pineda is lovely, but I stopped believin’ in this documentary long before it was over.

Justice League is a pointless flail of expensive (yet, somehow, cheap-looking) CGI that no amount of tacked-on quips, or even Gadot’s luminescent star power, can rescue.