Soren Andersen

There’s such a thing as something being too personal. James White is that thing.

In the matter of searching for work in a difficult economy, Get a Job traffics in fairy tales that come complete with happily-ever-after endings.

This “Naked Gun” tries hard, but the magic simply isn’t there.

With all of Shults’ dark-night-of-the-soul mood manipulations, the film promises more than it delivers. Its buildups are impressive, but in the end its frights are mild.

Freighted with symbolism and beautifully mounted, Youth is dreamlike and at the same time stultifying.

This is a picture whose subject, loudly and frequently proclaimed, is magic. But there is precious little of the genuine article to be found in it.

There’s a lot going on here, which leads to a whole lot of gassy exposition to explain it all.... Think of it as torture by blah-blah.

Action scenes are so chaotically edited it’s often difficult to figure out who’s bashing and crashing into whom.

Yep, we’re in Tarantino territory for sure: way too self-indulgently long, and way, way overboard with that N-word.

So yes: Wow! Gasp! There are some really pretty pictures here. But wow! Gasp! The story is really pretty … stupid.

For his live-action debut, Knight slips into Bay boomboom mode.

Cruise and company wanted to make American Made a fun and often funny ride, but there’s something oddly joyless about the whole enterprise. Its overweening cynicism leaves a curdled aftertaste.

The uneasy marriage of clunky psychodrama and overwrought special effects along with the fact that none of these characters are particularly likable make Strange World a chore to sit through.

In the midst of all the mayhem it’s sometimes hard to stay awake.

You know, there was a time when “Guardians of the Galaxy” was fun. That time was 2014, when the first picture came out... Now here’s “Vol. III.” And it’s no fun at all.

The emphasis here is on the splashy spectacle with those insider-knowledge elements jammed together in a frenetic hodgepodge.

The picture is essentially a brief for Wise’s case. And as such, it’s as dry and uncinematic as a dusty legal document.

Hughes’ handling of the material is unfailingly serious but the picture’s tendency to stray into the ridiculous robs it of the majesty the director so clearly hoped to achieve.

Its take-no-prisoners pacing [takes] it up a notch from the average low-budget shoot ’em up.

By the time the big reveal comes along, it’s almost beside the point. The audience, so numbed by the gore, is likely to barely care who indeed did it.

Good fun, and all that, but its flawed central performance ultimately makes “Solo” a distinct disappointment.

In the central role, Miles Teller is impressively bulked up, but there’s a flatness in his performance. It’s a dogged, rather than an inspired, portrayal. The best work is done by Aaron Eckhart, who plays Vinnie’s trainer, Kevin Rooney.

There’s nothing special about any of this, but as a generic thrill machine, Plane certainly delivers the goods.

For most of its length, Stillwater goes along as a meticulous examination of its central characters. And then suddenly near the end it jumps the tracks.

Beatty directed and wrote the script, but from a man who made the weighty epic “Reds” and the corrosively funny “Bulworth,” Rules Don’t Apply feels curiously weightless and as forgettable as its title.

Rather than using the extended running time to dig deep into these characters, director Andy Muschietti, who also directed the original, piles on the frights in a manner that builds to an ending drenched in hysteria.

The Wedding Guest is a thriller without thrills.

Strange movie. And despite the presence of Tina Fey playing its lead character, a cable-TV reporter named Kim Baker, it’s not a funny one.