Simon Abrams

This might have been a better movie if its creators embraced their fitful bloodthirst. Instead, they seem to hope that you like these stock characters enough that you’ll gasp when their friends and enemies inevitably bite the dust. A machine to kill vague people, “Whistle” never delivers on its frightful promise.

Nothing in “Shelter” develops beyond the suggestion of an idea. A sleepy vehicle for action star Jason Statham, “Shelter” piles on cliches and expects viewers to supply enough goodwill to compensate for its shortcomings.

This new holiday chiller mostly idles when it should charge at its most unsound ideas.

Kermani deserves credit for expanding on Hill’s story, which has a great premise, but not much else going for it.

It’s hard enough to watch performers struggle to pump up thin material, even though the main cast’s members all seem capable of the physical business required of their roles. It’s harder to watch as the makers of this scrappy, low-budget production give away too much whenever they rely on effects-driven action or drama.

Only Cage’s most diehard cultists will want to go to bat for this performance, and they could easily struggle to accentuate the positive. It’s manic, confounding, and gaspingly funny, too (for a moment), but boy, howdy, so what?

It’s hard to imagine who might enjoy this deliberately slow and often punishingly slack historical drama.

Sony’s latest Spidey yarn is a charmless stinker that’s only well-polished enough to make you resent the stench.

A tepid situation comedy in indie drama drag, "The Black Sea" lacks a sense of urgency beyond a few moments of canned tension between Khalid and Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), a haughty Bulgarian fisherman.

The makers of “Boy Kills World” don’t trust their audience enough to let us just feel a feeling, nor do they encourage their enthusiastic cast members enough to deliver fully-developed performances.

More is often less in “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver,” not only when it comes to the movie’s sweaty, vein-activating performances, but also its over-exaggerated and under-choreographed action scenes.

Besson’s extra-schlocky sensibilities seem ideally suited to his star, but he never gives Jones anything worth showing off.

A couple of pedal-to-the-floor melodramatic twists suggest that “Founders Days” might’ve been a bolder or just meaner genre movie, but its toothless satire, like its timid horror drama, sadly doesn’t cut it.

“Rebel Moon” often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth.

There’s not enough cold sweat ambience here, and that makes it even harder to root for a modestly budgeted chiller whose creators clearly started their project from a place of cinephilic affection. Even sympathetic genre fans will have trouble finding something new about such old hat material.

If you’re looking for meaning, humor, or comfort, you’d best not look for it here.

Night of the Hunted might have been a productively grim exercise if it didn’t feel like Alice’s dilemma wasn’t just a pretext for more ostensibly shocking talking points.

Whatever promise the “V/H/S” horror anthology franchise started with is barely present in V/H/S/85, a low-energy potboiler that promises to transport genre fans back to the analog past for some reason.

Eventually, the lack of werewolf-related carnage is the least concerning thing about My Animal.

The Icelandic/German conspiracy thriller Operation Napoleon would be as comforting as its airport thriller plot if it weren’t also baggy, joyless, and spiritually depleting.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

There are hints of a deeper movie here, but the one on-screen sticks too closely to stories and ideas we already know.

Killing bigots is a fine enough pretext for this sort of watered-down post-grindhouse entertainment, but if you’re honestly going to go there, you can’t stop til you’re past the point of apology.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

You never have to wonder or try to understand what the characters are feeling because they never stop telling you how to feel. The answer, invariably, is sad and fearful, but From Black is neither, really.

Some high-concept set pieces rise above shoddy execution and creative mismanagement, particularly any wire stunts involving helicopters, byplanes, or rocket-powered jet packs.