Stephanie Merry

It’s hard to imagine this tale of tradition and miracles leading skeptics to contemplation, much less faith.

With the exception of one heartbreaking and well-acted scene towards the end of the movie, the atmosphere is oppressive and the characters act as if their personalities have been shot with novocaine.

The whole thing is so inconsistent, with intermittent slow motion and curious motivations, that you have to finally just accept things like a disappearing narrator as par for the course.

A new sport doesn’t equate to new ground, but there is pleasure to be had in a formula that works.

Front Cover is weighed down by heavy-handed dialogue and a melodramatic score.

Hunter proves to be an engaging if low-key narrator, whose greatest asset is his refusal to take himself too seriously.

In the Name of My Daughter has good intentions of taking a sensationalistic riddle and turning it into a human story. But the pendulum ultimately swings too far, leaving an explosive tale behind in favor of one that fizzles out.

Some of the portrayals are over-the-top in their villainy, and the dialogue, acting and music all tend to be melodramatic. But all of the overt heartstring-pulling doesn’t add much. Given the awful calamity, the truth would have been enough to amp up the emotions.

It seems like a waste of talent, but worse still, Cesar Chavez squanders an opportunity to revisit a story worth retelling.

A Night in Old Mexico succeeds when it comes to suspense, and the ever-evolving plot will keep viewers guessing. But the movie doesn’t have the same kind of emotional depth that Duvall and Wittliff managed to pull off decades ago. Worse, the dialogue often sounds stilted.

The plot is so similar to “The Big Chill” that it almost could be called a remake, except that it isn’t nearly as funny, it follows millennials instead of baby boomers and the characters tweet.

It’s a story that promises major suspense, which only materializes occasionally.

A simple retelling of these stories would have been more dramatic, more effective and more powerful.

If Beatty was not trying to make a movie about Hughes, he utterly failed, because the love story of Frank and Marla is more like a framing device — a gateway drug to get the audience into the theater so that Beatty can chew some scenery. Even so, he chews it quite well.

The tone is all over the map, switching from fantastical one moment to naturalistic the next... It all gives God Help the Girl a disconnected, haphazard feel.

It’s occasionally funny and sometimes suspenseful, but it isn’t particularly imaginative. Then again, neither are Stine’s popular novellas.

The movie, which marks the feature debut of writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland, has the low-key appeal of “Once,” with its extended scenes of music and drama-free romantic subplot. But the characters in Song One are stubbornly bland, despite their quirks.

The movie’s great strength is the way it captures these dancers, sometimes in slow motion, as they contort their bodies in ways that don’t seem possible. When it comes to the narrative, though, the movie struggles a bit.

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

The Bye Bye Man had a relatively modest budget, and it shows in the special effects, which tend to be more funny than scary.

The film is artfully shot with eye candy galore: sumptuous dresses, beautiful people and scenes from Pierre and Yves’s time in Morocco. But for all its visual stimulation, the story does little to awaken emotions.

The story takes a couple of sharp turns, ultimately revealing that it isn’t a romantic comedy after all, but a shambling drama with a few mildly amusing pratfalls.

The romantic drama is painfully contrived and insistently predictable.

Along the way there’s a sprinkling of humanizing moments.

Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.

While some of the stories are interesting, the film is much longer than it needs to be. For his part, Salerno tries to get creative with solutions for the lack of visual stimuli, but most attempts fail.

Like an elaborately decorated wedding cake, the kid-friendly Walking With Dinosaurs 3D may leave you wondering how something so stunning could end up being so bland.