Stephanie Merry

The movie doesn’t offer much more than fleeting and superficial pleasures.

Riddick can be cheesy and silly, not to mention excessively violent, but it’s also fun.

As quickly as the technical elements pull the audience in, the plot pushes us away.

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 movie feels at once too busy and too derivative. That’s no easy feat, but it’s also one sequel-makers probably shouldn’t aspire to.

Don’t overthink it, in other words. All “Showman” asks of you is that you give yourself over to the holiday-cheer machine, if you can. Like the circus, it’s an experience that’s been engineered for this precise moment in time, and not one minute longer.

It’s the actors, plus an exuberant Mary Steenburgen as quick-witted lounge singer Diana, who make the movie more than a middling copycat.

Norwegian director Roar Uthaug has had past success with nail-biting suspense, as in his well-received 2015 disaster movie “The Wave.” He can’t quite replicate that same tension here, however. Watching a tiny-but-tough woman survive one danger after another tests not only our credulity, but our patience.

Of course, action movies don’t have to be believable or poignant. They just have to get your adrenaline pumping. But the movie lacks inspiration in that department, too, owing to action sequences you’ve seen before, familiar music and dialogue so predictable you could make a game out of guessing the next line.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is as visually imaginative as its predecessor.

In the end, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. But there’s also nothing as agonizingly awkward as James’s prose.

In the world of Freedom, slaves and the people who help them are Christians, and the bad guys don’t believe in God.

Ultimately the movie feels like an empty exercise. Sure, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. But when the one figure most worthy of our sympathy is nothing more than a beautiful blonde robot, what’s the point?

The performances are fantastic across the board, with Costner acting in his trademark low-key naturalistic style and Spencer as the picture of no-nonsense maternal love. But their efforts can’t make up for overly simplified characters, not to mention melodramatic exchanges that sound exactly like written dialogue.

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.

By the Sea is dazzlingly gorgeous, as are its stars. But peeling back layer upon layer of exquisite ennui reveals nothing but emptiness, sprinkled with stilted sentiments.

Flower can’t quite nail the necessary tone, aiming for dark, but missing the comedy.

With strong performances, plenty of chemistry between the leads and pithy dialogue, the movie is fun until things get serious — which is to say, until things get unbelievable.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies delivers what its title promises: a little romance and some undead villains, plus a bit of comedy. But this overly busy riff on Austen’s winning formula doesn’t justify all the tinkering.

In the end, Davis ends up a wasted resource. She does her best to elevate the material, but the story fails to live up to her considerable talents.

As the movie wears on, the plot points become increasingly far-fetched, and what started out as a moody if by-the-book thriller becomes increasingly silly. All the while, Roberts gives her all.

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.

“Kingsman” is essentially a live-action cartoon, one that aims for an audible reaction and little else. That may not be the world’s loftiest goal, but whether it results in a gagging eww or a chuckle, it’s a plan that usually succeeds.

Dough never leaves any doubt about where it’s going or what it’s trying to say, serving up a recipe that we’ve not only had many times before, but we’ve had enough of.

The Brothers Grimsby is fitfully, sometimes outrageously, funny. But Cohen’s shtick of showing the backwardness and stupidity of unprivileged characters is starting to feel lazy, not to mention classist itself.

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