Sara Stewart

Fanning has little to do beyond grasping her prosthetic stomach, but James is a decent foil for Gere, who gives form to the highly topical subject of how pain meds destroy lives.

Jeremy Allen White (“Shameless”) and Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) shine in this dramedy.

Though deeply well-intentioned, director Kasi Lemmons’ film never really breaks free of conventional biopic mode.

Superfly escapes superficiality thanks largely to strong performances from Jackson; Jason Mitchell as Priest’s workmanlike partner, Eddie, and Michael Kenneth Williams as Priest’s mentor, Scatter.

It’s a sprawling plot that consistently teeters on the edge of unwieldiness, but Affleck’s assured directing, gorgeous cinematography by Robert Richardson and a who’s-who of Hollywood’s best character actors keep it mostly on track.

It’s basically a narrative spin on Alex Gibney’s 2013 documentary “The Armstrong Lie,” only with less cycling footage. This is a plus for those of us easily bored by such things (so many interchangeable mountain passes and neon jerseys!), but there isn’t a ton of new material here.

Jenkins is a master of cinematic portraiture, but he’s so captivated by the magic of a moment — even a single image, like cigarette smoke swirling around one of Fonny’s carved-wood sculptures — that he sometimes forgets he’s got an audience expecting a plot.

Even with a cast this lovable, The Dead Don’t Die falls short of the killer zom-com it could have been.

It's sort of like last year's "Blue Valentine" on Prozac -- the giddy highs and the despairing lows are muted, and a well-known side effect of that antidepressant pops up, too: Palpable lust is all but nonexistent.

As an addiction memoir, it works well enough; there are a handful of deeply felt moments.

The facts (including Protess’ eventual resignation) still make this a worthwhile examination of a narrative that actually may have been too good to be true.

The best thing about the film – which is true of most of his roles – is Rockwell.

The dark side of pregnancy and motherhood has long been fertile filmmaking terrain; this queasy, quiet horror film tips its hat, inevitably, to the genre’s standard-bearer, “Rosemary’s Baby,” but comes up a bit short.

Chastain and Wasikowska take center stage while Hiddleston flutters around like one of Allerdale’s huge black moths. Watching the women square off within del Toro’s eye-popping, painterly palette is a feast for the eyes, if not particularly substantial fare for the mind.

Ultimately, I found the story surrounding Equity — that it is a movie about women on Wall Street, financed largely by actual women on Wall Street — more interesting than the movie itself, but it does contain its share of memorable moments.

Farrell feels like a weak link here, never quite as masterfully manipulative or brutish as the role calls for.

As About Alex moves toward its conclusion, it devolves into some plot resolutions that were a lot less predictable back in the ’80s.

A trove of home videos, vintage commercial and propaganda footage and black-and-white animation dress up this energetic if somewhat unfocused look at the birth of skateboarding in the German Democratic Republic.

Finally, someone took the source material at its terribly written word and stopped treating the whole affair so seriously.

The journey to this foregone conclusion features several dance-offs mashing up contemporary and classical styles, which director Michael Damian (“Love By Design”) shoots with gusto. Sure, this is all a familiar tune — but it’s still catchy.

Still, the proceedings move so quietly and thoughtfully as to be occasionally somnolent, though they’re punctuated with spasms of the violence that marked the Troubles.

“It’s a little self-congratulatory and light on story,” says one student of another’s film project in Dear White People, which feels like director Justin Simien getting out ahead of inevitable (and accurate) criticism.

Seth Rogen’s raunchy Sausage Party contains occasional flashes of satirical brilliance. But in true stoner form, it also thinks a lot of stuff is funnier than it actually is.

Scored by Bruce Hornsby, Lee’s film veers all over the place tonally, juxtaposing scenes of spurting gore with soothing jazz. Hess’ WASP-y mansion, with its huge photo portraits of African warriors, is an interesting study in mashing up race and class stereotypes, though the film’s rambling plot may leave your brain feeling a little mashed, too.

Unfortunately, you could probably improve Split by editing out everything around McAvoy and making it an experimental one-man show.

There are a lot of parallels with “Breaking Bad” here: the Southwestern setting, the dorky husband turned criminal, the blond wife and the scene in the carwash. But if you can avoid dwelling on its derivative qualities, After the Fall has its own case to make about how far the middle class has fallen — and continues to slide.

Personal Shopper doesn’t have much of a plot, but if you can tune into its languid frequency, it will get under your skin.

At best, it’s a fairly enjoyable hate-watch of a farewell to DDL, charting the course of a twisted love affair between a real pill of a guy and a woman who inexplicably adores him.

For a bad movie, this one is an awful lot of fun.

The mellow Laue... makes a likable enough subject, if sometimes low-key to the point of dull. Watching other people watch him play, though, is definitely not.

Sometimes, it’s enough to walk out of a film with your heart warmed — even if your brain’s still craving a little something more.

Only the Brave is at its best at two extremes: in the middle of the action, as the firefighters do things like improbably light fires to contain bigger fires; and at home in the midst of banter between Eric and his wife Amanda.

Hard to say what percentage of Haynes’ adult audience will dig this one. I found it lovely to look at and emotionally underwhelming.

Overall, Gibney does a fine job documenting the timeless nature of Armstrong’s fall from grace. It’s undeniably satisfying to see the man himself lay it out: “It’s very hard to control the truth forever,” he says, awkwardly. “This has been my downfall.”

Poehler isn’t quite cynical enough to pull off a comedy in which, to paraphrase “Seinfeld,” there’s no hugging and learning, but Wine Country could have been improved by keeping its emotional scenes more in reserve — like a high-end cabernet.

Director Daniel Algrant chose well with Badgley, who transcends the rather made-for-TV vibe with a decent rendition of Buckley’s haunting falsetto.

Mirai is somewhat mired in outdated gender roles, with Cho’s character hopelessly clumsy as caregiver while his wife goes back to work. But the biggest pitfall I found with Mirai, which may be more of a selling point to new parents and children struggling with sibling rivalry, is that Kun spends half the film in tears, shrieking or whining.

The audio design of Little Joe is meant to be unsettling, but it may be for naught if audiences can hardly bear to sit through it.

If you can handle the glacial pacing and lack of dialogue, there is a certain squirmy satisfaction to watching this well-worn story of love, cruelty and madness play out minus the long-winded speeches and romantic catharsis.

The addition of Glover and Danny DeVito keeps Jumanji: The Next Level afloat, even with barely the whisper of a plot.

Like most of Eastwood’s work (with the exception of last year’s disastrous “The 15:17 to Paris”), it’s a tightly paced feature, with strong performances all around. It’s also one of the season’s most politically polarized films.

Director Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”) is masterful with arresting imagery set in a dystopian spin on the ’70s; less so with a compelling narrative.

If only director James Mangold had taken the route the Wachowskis did with “Speed Racer,” which had psychedelic colors to spice things up.

Being a lesbian period piece, the film’s earned inevitable comparisons to last year’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” Sure, it’s similar, minus the chemistry, humor and joy. There are definitely corsets in both.

Wilson doesn’t have the emotional heft, or the narrative arc, of Johnson’s last film, but it does remind you how much fun it is to watch Harrelson. In real life, Wilson would just be a straight-up a - - hole.

Ultimately, this is a film from a group of terrific talents that never quite comes together the way you'd hope. It's just too fluid to wholly take shape.

Though both Tierney and Bomer’s characters also veer into stereotype — her uptight disapproval, his sassiness — writer-director Timothy McNeil still crafts a fairly moving tribute to the notion, as Lin-Manuel Miranda once put it, that “love is love is love.”

In a movie season - and a month - filled with so much gunfire, bloodshed and human despair, it's refreshing to sit back and bask in the sheer joy with which these brightly costumed, stunningly agile performers navigate fire, water and air.

Jane's friendship with Sadie is the one thing that cuts through the numbness - though the film's so low-key, even emotional revelations feel pretty muted.

The element that really makes it work — when it does, which is not always — is Edward James Olmos, playing to perfection a weary retired police detective.

It may fall into some conventional paces as a triumph-over-adversity story, but Desert Dancer does manage to movingly convey the chilling, ultimately triumphant experience of Ghaffarian’s struggle for creative expression under a regime that tried to crush it.

Charmingly profane, with a buzzing riot-grrrl soundtrack, “Izzy” is a stylish twist on an ’80s trope: Here it’s the woman as pathetic supplicant, trying to win back someone who’s moved on.

This is a Disney adaptation, beautiful but frequently treacly.

Without a humanizing element like Blunt’s character, this whole grim affair is just a race to the bottom in which everyone loses.

First-time feature director Clare Niederpruem gives it her very earnest all, but falls short both on continuity issues (a smoldering curling iron, for example, is dropped to the floor and immediately forgotten) and on making her gradually aging cast match up.

Overall, the insubstantial Lucky Stiff feels like community theater with an extravagant budget.

Director Suri Krishnamma capably depicts the darkness in Jim’s head with his shadowy surroundings, misanthropic inner monologue and increasingly frequent hallucinations, and Griffith’s vulnerable performance is a standout. But the film’s final third seems needlessly graphic.

What begins as a clever action-comedy a la “Pineapple Express” or Eisenberg’s earlier “Zombieland” devolves into a standard shoot-’em-up, with gore splashed around to distract us from the dearth of wit.

Despite the generally talented cast of Anesthesia, its linked-lives format, which we’ve seen so many times before, is frustrating: Too much adds up to not quite enough.

This pastiche of sitcomy episodes never gels into a plot.

Director-writer Abe Forsythe (“Down Under”) nails a handful of funny juxtapositions, but too often leans into mean-spirited and tired yuks. As far as red flags for lameness go, fat-kid and pooping your pants jokes are, well, dead giveaways.

Sure, violence in movies isn't violence in real life. And when you combine it with intelligent dialogue and pointed social commentary (a la "Django Unchained"), it can be cathartic. But The Last Stand, absent either of these things, just seems to want to gin up a lot of high-fiving for a lot of shooting, and right now is the least palatable time I can think of for that.

Writer/director Andrew Levitas needlessly pads this captivating theme with over-used tropes.

Squanders its big ideas in record time.

This well-intentioned drama — writer/director Paul Dalio has spoken publicly about his own struggles — veers into a common pitfall of films that portray mental illness: Romanticizing it.

Son of a Gun, from first-time feature director Julius Avery, begins with an enticingly dark first act in jail, but descends steadily downward into a mass of clichés.

Andy Goddard’s feature debut is shot stylishly in black and white, but deals in themes that feel equally retro.

The Maze Runner isn’t based on a video game, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In it, our hero must lead his comrades through a dingy gray concrete maze while dodging cyborg monsters, and it all looks like every gaming trailer you’ve ever seen.

Small Time has its heart in the right place, but its screenplay’s in serious need of a tuneup.

Jane Wants a Boyfriend loses momentum careening between Dushku’s Bianca and Krause’s Jane — the latter of whom is far more interesting.

McCarthy shines when loosely riffing, but the plot tightens around her like a vise.

In my favorite scene, Hobbs leads his tween daughter’s soccer team in a haka (Maori war dance) to intimidate their rivals. Can’t wait for “Fast and Furious 11: No Boys Allowed.”

Some things, like ouzo and flaming cheese, are best left at single servings.

Too Late is a good-looking gimmick of a movie, one that will only be shown in theaters on 35mm film. Old-school advocate Quentin Tarantino would be proud — as he should be, since this noir starring John Hawkes feels like a big old valentine to him.

Would it have been tacky to visually play up the connection between Tolkien’s harrowing experiences on the WWI battlefield and his depiction of Mordor in the books? Perhaps. Beyond the briefest of allusions, Karukoski tastefully leaves that to the imagination. But this — like much of the film — is a tastefulness that induces sleepiness. Tolkien’s estate was not supportive of this film, understandably: The legendary author’s work is memorial enough.

It’s a blatantly terrible idea with potential for comedy, but DuVall’s sometimes amusing screenplay has trouble finding its footing as an ensemble portrait of struggling relationships.

Hate to say it, but this film ain’t half the satire it could have been.

For piquing kids’ interest in history and nature, you could do worse than this goofy Ben Stiller franchise. But its third installment is more meh than manic, too reliant on wide shots of the ragtag Museum of Natural History cohorts striding down corridors. You get the feeling returning director Shawn Levy is ready to hang it up.

Thaddeus Bradley, narrating in tedious metaphors about how “there’s always more than what’s on the surface.” That’s one claim this shallow sequel simply can’t back up.

Ultimately, all signs point to Going in Style having been overcooked by too many chefs: You know you’re in trouble when multiple scenes in the trailer never show up in the final product.

The Poison Rose doesn’t aspire to transcend any clichés, and judging from the flagging energy level of the actors, everyone involved knows it.

If you’re into seeing Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson play truly despicable government officials, have I got a movie for you!

While Caplan works well in theory as an antiromantic-comedy heroine, director and co-screenwriter Michael Mohan just doesn't give her enough to do.

Antarctic Edge will make good viewing for science classes of all levels, and ideally inspire a new generation to continue this hardy mission.

Adapting the author’s cornball formula for a second time around is once-ambitious director Lasse Hallström (“Dear John”), who delivers a cinematic valentine you’ll be reasonably content to watch on a flight in a year or so.

Yes, there are the requisite jump-in-your-seat scares, many of them false alarms, and it all plays out basically exactly like any other horror movie, but Lawrence does elevate the proceedings.

As much fun as it is, this all-star tribute is awfully one-note, never questioning Gordon’s seemingly casual habit of befriending only the ultra-famous.

Twi-hards, Beliebers and Whovians have nothing on the cult of Jane Austen, whose beribboned ranks are ripe for satire. Unfortunately, this scattershot comedy only occasionally hits the mark.

Like a cubic zirconia knockoff of a priceless diamond necklace, this female “Ocean’s” update looks the part but just ain’t got that sparkle.

As apocalypse scenarios go, this one feels both retro and commendably topical: Nuclear bombs, remember those? (Also: Edward Furlong, remember him?)

Like the artificially sweetened junk food it is, this all goes down pretty easily.

This Disney sequel to 2013’s “Planes” is a lot like flying coach: serviceable, but not trying that hard.

Perhaps faithful to the spirit of the man, but frustrating if you’re actually curious about the facts.

Despite a sympathetic lead performance from Steve Carell, the fictionalized version bogs down in extensive animated doll sequences, so similar they grow increasingly tiresome.

A surprisingly tone-deaf combination of two wildly different stories that simply don’t work in concert.

Annabelle Comes Home is so low stakes it’s barely a movie — more like a very special “Brady Bunch” episode in hell.

Patton Oswalt makes an amusing cameo as a Klingon-speaking cop, and Toni Collette is her usual graceful self as Wendy’s harried counselor, but in all this is a half-baked effort at humanizing autism — at its best when Wendy’s at her computer channeling the Vulcan voice of Mr. Spock, that intergalactic hero who was always so puzzled by human emotions.

To be fair, Ferrell is almost always at least mildly funny, even when doing something as lame as skateboarding into a power line, but Wahlberg’s cowboy shtick just seems half-hearted.

The third and weakest book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy should never have been split into two films, but since that’s become money-grubbing standard practice for young-adult adaptations (“Twilight,” “Divergent”), here we are.

The trope of horror-suffused female friendships is a fertile one, but despite a screenwriting credit from the very capable Nicole Holofcener (director of “Enough Said,” among others), Every Secret Thing comes up short.

The Pretty One does find a handful of genuinely sweet moments in which Basel and Laurel bond on letting their respective freak flags fly. Like the film itself, Kazan is at her best when she’s not trying so hard to be cute.

None of this is particularly innovative, although Garcia and the elder Farmiga develop a nice spark and a gentle humor in their characters’ stolen day together.

It has no real reason to exist, other than to be a passable option for parents whose children are too young to handle PG-13 fare and feels like it.

Heck, between this and “Cats,” maybe Universal is now just specializing in confounding talking-animal movies. At least this one leaves you feeling kindly toward other species, rather than freaked out by them.

Concert sequences are engaging, though I was disappointed not to see any animated flourishes.

Hugh Jackman, as a (fictional) former American jumper named Bronson Peary, enlivens things a little.

Kelly & Cal is at its best when focused on Lewis and Weston.

Despite the film’s wispiness, though, there is always something compelling about Waterston, who is usually the best part of any film she’s in (see also: “Inherent Vice,” “Alien: Covenant”).

Like Cam, Tracers is fun to look at, if not too bright, and even includes a line I can only assume is a winking reference to Lautner’s claim to fame: “There can only be one alpha in every pack.”

Despite the dramatic dystopia, performances here are uniformly low-affect, which isn’t helpful given the exposition-heavy dialogue and unremarkable set (though Nick’s extraterrestrial visions have a pleasantly kitschy look). Also puzzling is the fact that the pivotal song is not actually performed by Morissette.

There's also a refreshing lack of wrapping everything up in a neat, happy bow at the end.

Are Some Girl(s) like this? Yes. But I left this movie with no additional insight on why.

This unambitious Michael Bay-produced version doesn’t seem interested in cleverness, cravenly settling for the usual generic CGI shtick.

Good-looking but tonally dubious feature debut from Elizabeth Wood.

Sunk by too much schmaltz (even for the Lower East Side).

Feels both deeply rote and way overpacked with characters.

“Gatsby” meets “Gossip Girl” in this outsider-among-the-wealthy story set, like Fitzgerald’s novel, on Long Island.

Thrillers can be a valid Hollywood escape, but this one made me as uncomfortable as its hero is with small talk.

Overall, everyone’s working far too hard at hitting their marks in this march toward a conclusion that’s both predictable and laughable.

Despite a terrific cast and a sexy noir look to rival the two “Blade Runner” films, Jones (son of David Bowie) delivers a bit of a letdown.

It is admirably unsparing and gloomily atmospheric. And I looked at my watch a bunch of times.

Director Peter Chelsom (“Hannah Montana: The Movie”) and screenwriter Allan Loeb (“Collateral Beauty”) squander countless opportunities to make this fish-out-of-water story intellectually curious or even much fun.

A warm-hearted and ambitiously honest look at the pros and cons of monogamy, but it tends to be understated to the point of underwhelming.

Even an 11th-hour cameo from the late Dick Gregory as Ella’s long-ago boyfriend can’t keep The Leisure Seeker from being, well, forgettable.

Despite all its problems, The Last Days on Mars serves up a deliciously shivery hypothetical: Wouldn’t we all secretly love it if the Mars rover sent back footage of a “walker” or two?

The intriguing story behind Seberg and the always-interesting Kristen Stewart promised greatness. But this biopic squanders both; it’s a bland period piece with an irritating lack of focus.

The film strains credulity as it hurtles toward its conclusion.

Salma Hayek, as their vengeful ex-boss Eva Torres, is fun to watch as she plots to outwit them time and again, but ultimately, there’s no one here to really care about.

A rather unremarkable, if endearing, entry in the quirky rom-com genre.

The tone and focus of David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn careens around so much it’s hard not to end up as irritable as its title character.

The romance between Winslet and Schoenaerts — billed as the film’s centerpiece — is, regrettably, never really allowed to bloom.

More frustratingly, Brooks jumps back and forth in time between the couple’s past relationship and the current day, with nary a physical or emotive change evident in either party. It becomes a task just to figure out which timeline you’re in, and then convince yourself why you should care.

A horror movie with an anti-globalist bent that’s more interesting than its halfhearted scares.

Whether you dig this aggressively campy horror-comedy is, to some extent, dependent on your squeamishness.

Movie adaptations shouldn’t require that you know their source material. But in the case of The Glass Castle, it’s impossible not to just say it: You’re better off reading the book.

[JK Simmons] provides a little comic relief, and sums up my feelings on this whole outing: “Goddamn time-travelin’ robots!”

For a company that purports to be all about sparking creativity, asking a kid to follow Ikea-evocative directions to assemble an X-wing fighter seems at odds with the mission.

Mostly, though, it’s the same old story: Bad mutants versus good mutants, with the fate of us humans — mostly off-screen, disturbingly expendable — hanging in the balance.

Heavy on quirk and light on wit, first-time director Gillian Greene’s comedy leans too heavily on the badly wigged Kranz.

The birth of the titular infant — what the whole movie’s leading up to — is just an anticlimactic mess.

On the whole, the film would probably be more at home on cable and at a reduced running time. I’d like to see a competition series of the same name, in which rival engineers compete to see who can endure having the hard-driving Cameron for a boss.

I know this is a teen-boy fantasy — it was produced by Michael Bay, after all — but the female characters in Project Almanac are lamely retro, little more than props in short shorts.

As a distinctly not-insider, though, I would have benefited more from a broader portrait of the woman herself, and how she became such a legend.

The idea of combining creature-feature invisibility with domestic-abuse gaslighting — playing with someone’s reality to make them think they’re going insane — is inspired. This middling horror film, regrettably, is not.

Too often content to smile beatifically instead of delivering the necessary thrills.

Zoey Deutch is fine in a non-demanding role as the requisite starry-eyed female student, and Danny Huston (“Wonder Woman”) gives us a softer side as Richard’s weepy best friend. But this is, at its core, a one-man show, and given the uncertain future of Depp’s career (being axed from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, for example), it might also have been titled “Johnny Says Goodbye.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a pretty silly idea. So why on Earth is this movie, based on the satirical book by Seth Grahame-Smith, not having more fun?

From time to time, it works.

Men are pigs! Women are psychos! One-percenters have it coming! Pick your moral in this nasty, single-setting thriller that’s ultimately quite tame by the standards of torture-porn director Eli Roth (“The Green Inferno”).

At the risk of sounding 100, I think it’s regrettable this film had to be shot in digital 3-D. Both those formats actually do a frustrating disservice to the depiction of the action, making them look choppier, more flickery and occasionally blurrier than they would otherwise.

As an exploration of post-traumatic stress disorder in US war veterans, the psychological thriller Jacob’s Ladder was ripe for an update. As a piece of enjoyable ’90s shock schlock, it maybe should have just stayed where it was.

Despite James Wan’s capable direction and very game cast, the whole thing goes increasingly wobbly like a bad axle, until it’s just a tangle of metal and bullets and yelling.

Well-intentioned, if ultimately underwhelming, ode to the ongoing fight for a cure.

Like its synthetic heroine (Scarlett Johansson), the live-action Ghost in the Shell is a feast for the eyes. With its killer-robot geishas, Godzilla-size hologram ads and nearly nude fighting gear, it’s a cyberpunk wonderland — but there isn’t much ghost left in this smokin’ hot shell.

Nancy Meyers is known for her obsession with kitchens — sun-drenched, timelessly chic architectural marvels that provide a safe haven for all the director’s characters. The Intern puts a new spin on this trope: Robert De Niro is the kitchen.

There’s little sense of urgency, or — oddly, given the film’s title — of scale. You never really think that the 47 are truly outnumbered, and the large action scenes are often just incomprehensible.

It’s well-executed but familiar territory, with a dearth of jarring moments. Those of us who aren’t friends and family of the crew could use a little wake-up shove here and there.

Director Tom Harper (“War Book”) defaults too often to gotcha scares, which is disappointing.

Director Niki Caro, whose 2005 film “North Country” gave creative life to another true story, doesn’t allow this one enough narrative twists; it starts off at point A and heads straight for point B, much like one of its many racing scenes.

While absolutely nothing in Grand Piano makes the least bit of sense, it is admittedly gorgeous to look at and listen to. Give Mira a decent script, and he might be a director to be reckoned with.

No personal revelations surface in “This Is Us.” Also, no narrative, no conflict — no differentiation between band members, even, besides the designation of dark-eyed Zayn as “the mysterious one” (he likes to paint).

For a movie called Sparkle, the absolutely least interesting or central thing about it is Sparkle (and Sparks), although the "Idol" singer does bust out one impressive performance.

Bad Samaritan plays like an unambitious episode of “Black Mirror,” low on techno-savvy but enhanced by the always-compelling David Tennant and Robert Sheehan, an Irish actor best known for his role on the British series “Misfits.”

Compared to another recent teen weepie, “The Fault in Our Stars,” this one comes up wanting. That film’s strong point was the delight its heroine took in detonating romantic clichés; If I Stay seems determined to keep them on life support.

Director Christian Charles gets some comic mileage from the inimitable Walsh and Rae, but it’s ultimately hard to care too much about a caddish protagonist like Norman — or, for that matter, about the clichéd “women are crazy!” sentiment that hums nastily under the antics of Dori’s unorthodox family gathering.

As for the magical-realist horns, they make a nice bad-boy look for Radcliffe and a handy plot device, but are never really explained in a satisfactory way. They have the side effect of making anyone who sees them immediately forget them — which I suspect may be the case with this movie as well.

For a movie called Breathe, Andy Serkis’ directorial debut is curiously airless — or maybe just quintessentially British, all stiff upper lip and light on emoting.

Teen Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin) is trapped in a kind of undead, unfunny “Groundhog Day,” living one particular 24 hours with her family over and over.

I cracked up here and there watching this broad heist comedy, but it wasn’t laughter I felt great about. Director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) has always gone for geeks and oddballs, but this film mostly punches down at characters for being poor, unfashionable and stupid.

For all its CGI showiness, the fact that Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal signed on for this splatterfest is the film’s most impressive feat.

Too much of the film is taken up by creaky plot devices and one sibling vowing to track down and talk to another one to resolve a problem.

Mines the increasingly fertile territory of aging boomer parents and chafing middle-aged siblings, but at irritatingly high volume, with the cantankerous voices of Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman nearly constantly talking over one another.

Frothy, forgettable comedy.

Unfortunately, “Arthur” is rarely at its best, bogged down in countless CGI sequences of battlefields or monsters.

The Report, true to its no-nonsense name, does the admirable work of trying to interest viewers in the way that bureaucracy can be used to hide the most terrible truths. Alas, the movie gets as buried in paper-pushing as its characters do.

Director Ben Hickernell soft-pedals the material into a blandly feel-good dramedy. As Abigail's spirited young trainees, Alexandra Metz and Meredith Apfelbaum give Backwards their all, but can't row their way clear of its clichés.

This Cinderella is all dressed up with nowhere very interesting to go.

It’s never a good sign when the real people behind a movie’s story appear in the end credits and you’re stumped as to who’s who.

Good intentions aside, it fails to resonate, though there is a certain voyeuristic intrigue to attempting to figure out how much of this toxic stuff is drawn from the real Reiners.

Those People also suffers, perhaps, from a lack of timing; Kuhn’s group of one-percenter millennials harkens back to early Whit Stillman or, more recently, “Gossip Girl.”

My All American would have done better to dig deeper in its portrayal of a man who set such a high bar for the intrinsic character of a football player. Because he’s actually the kind of example the sport could really use right now.

Pollak obviously had fun, but you get the feeling the best bits never made it in.

Just in time for Mexico’s Day of the Dead holiday comes this gloriously colorful animated musical, which almost (but not quite) makes up in visuals what it lacks in snappy dialogue.

It feels like the brainchild of middle-aged guys (James Ponsoldt directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Eggers) who still think of Facebook as cutting edge.

The movie itself seems equally divided between the sensibilities of hyperverbal writer Diablo Cody and music-centric director Jonathan Demme, and ends up falling into a muddy gap between the two.

Wiig and Adebimpe give appealing, naturalistic performances — it’s Silva’s character who grate.

Italian director Carlo Carlei has a background in TV movies, and this film, plodding and earnest, seems meant for the small screen, too.

Despite Mulligan bringing her A-game, the film falls short of its potential.

Using autism as a plot device walks a fine line between empathetic and exploitative, and The Night Clerk is wobbly in that respect.

The plot swerves around just enough to make you think something more complex is going on. Ultimately, it really isn’t — certainly not enough to make up for the clichés and sexist tropes that litter Lucas’ path toward a confrontation with the bad guys.

As actor pairings go, you couldn’t hope for better than Oscar winner Sam Rockwell and nominee Taraji P. Henson. So why is The Best of Enemies such a slog?

Director Mark L. Mann seems to be searching for the meaning in aimlessness, and in lowered expectations. But too often the narrative left me feeling the titular “um.”

Nobody does the rebellious-elder thing as well as Duvall, and whenever he’s center stage in A Night in Old Mexico, this scrappy film from Spanish director Emilio Aragon is entertaining enough.

Ultimately Unicorn Store shows little appeal beyond, perhaps, a young-adult audience with a very high tolerance for glitter.

The many silences in Hide Your Smiling Faces don’t speak quite loudly enough, and the film ultimately gets bogged down by its own ponderousness.

Here's the thing: Found footage is scary when - because - it leaves you to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. But actually watching whole families have terrible things done to them - well, hard-core horror fans may dig it, I guess. I'd call it forced voyeurism of the worst sort.

The script’s by Robert Ben Garant, also behind last year’s scary-movie spoof “Hell Baby,” and this one teeters right on the edge of laughable, with its V.C. Andrews-like series of goth twists.

Love is the weak link in this clumsily titled rom-com, which plays a bit like a hipster infomercial for Austin, Texas.

Temple and Angarano, entertaining enough, never quite sell the idea that this goodhearted couple would be so easily transformed by greed.

Fans of the cartoon should stick around for Lewis’ after-credits sequence, which introduces a dastardly rival band. It’s the movie’s best scene, setting up a sequel we’ll never see.

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.