Scott Tobias

At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.

None of Jack’s relationships are handled with enough conviction to make them stick, and that carries over to a religious message that’s squishy in the extreme. “Agreeable” is a good quality, but it should never be the best quality a film possesses.

As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.

Short of putting Emmanuel Lubezki through astronaut training, it’s difficult to imagine more rapturously beautiful images of the Earth from orbit than those supplied by A Beautiful Planet, the latest collaboration between Imax and NASA.

An attractive and appealing cast helps this formulaic pablum go down easy, but the genial tone buffs the edge out of every element.

The action never stops once the first car bomb is triggered, but the second half of London Has Fallen takes place mostly in the dark, where nobody can see the budget.

Were it not so committed to telling the official story in bullet points, Race might have found a more provocative angle about athletes and artists who work through and around the powers that be.

Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.

It's a powerful idea in the abstract, the culmination of three acts that cover a 25-year catastrophe with a time-lapse breathlessness. It just never leaves the abstract and becomes flesh.

Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.

At a minimum, a parody should be funnier than the film it’s sending up, but Fifty Shades of Black, a quick-and-dirty riff on last year’s S&M romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,” falls a laugh or two short of even that low standard.

Monahan isn’t required to satisfy bloodlust or to pay off conventional plot points, even if his screenplay for “The Departed” displayed an abundant talent for doing so. But he assumes too much in believing that the audience will connect in any way with a sour, prickly narcissist who’s trapped in the gilded cage of wealth and fame.

Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.

Nemes does everything he can to connect the audience to Saul's numbness, shielding us as much as possible from the cacophony of human misery that rings in his ears. The chill seeps in regardless, as it should, and Nemes doesn't try to counter it with more than a tiny, stubborn flicker of hope.

While there’s something compelling about an antihero whose obsession is poised on the razor’s edge between love and hate, The World of Kanako buries it in grinding, agitated repetition.

My Friend Victoria has a specific vibrancy as delicate and understated as Lessing's social critique. It's an accumulation of small moments: telling gazes, sour notes in the dialogue, the persistent impression of a woman who's in a room but never fully present.

There’s nothing remotely fresh about this revival, but tight pacing and an overqualified cast keep things zipping along nicely.

Adapting Alonso Cueto’s novel “La pasajera,” del Solar turns the screws on the audience expertly, but the thriller elements never distract from the moral crisis of a man — and a country — whose decades-old mistakes cling to him like a tattoo.

In broad strokes, the events that unfold are undeniably riveting.... The trouble is, The 33 only knows broad strokes. Lacking any specific angle on the ordeal, the filmmakers give the once-over-lightly treatment to every aspect of it, which ensures that none of them will be properly served.

The experience is two-thirds thrilling to one-third enervating, a winning ratio for what's essentially a tightly curated anthology film.

In trying to make sense of an android’s point-of-view, Sono has sensibly turned repetition and routine into a narrative strategy, but the unrelieved tedium of The Whispering Star takes a toll. If anything, Sono’s past work has suffered from a an overabundance of jokes, digressions, and crazed visual flourishes, but their near-total absence here becomes a problem of another kind.

Joseph winds up with an disorganized mishmash of visual gimmicks, empty exoticism, and soundbites worthy of “This is Spinal Tap.” Great music and some dynamic, up-close concert footage gives it the occasional life, but The Reflektor Tapes will appeal to Arcade Fire devotees only and even their patience might be tested.

Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood are both superb in the lead roles, but Rozema’s emphasis on the primacy of family and nature exposes a deficit of visual and narrative imagination.

Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.

While Creep has the limited scope of DIY filmmaking at its most rudimentary, that contributes to a tone that’s unusually playful and entertaining without coming off as a lark.

Hayden and Perez do their best to generate sweetness and spark, but the obstacles separating these characters are as contrived as the cliches that animate them.

Though Cartel Land isn’t interested in making fact-filled statements about the drug war, Heineman’s ingenious conceit gets at the difficulty ordinary people have in doing something about it.

More than the first Magic Mike, XXL is a loose, shambling party bus—or party organic fro-yo food truck, to be more exact—and everyone’s having a great time. These are entertainment professionals, after all, and the audience is in good hands.