Tasha Robinson

Regardless of what mode filmmakers lean into for a shark movie, they need to bring something worthwhile to that mode. Under Paris gets about halfway there on every front — drama, thrills, terror, character conflict, humanity-versus-nature messaging — and not much further than that.

Arcadian does a few things remarkably well for a sci-fi/horror movie, but it needed a lot more to really spark: more commitment to its vaguely realized setting, more energy between the two very different brothers at its center, and above all, more Nicolas Cage — either version of him.

Miller’s Girl is a luxuriant meal for [Ortega], a chance to play a variety of facets of the same girl while finding the connections between them. For everyone else, though, it’s short rations, and more than a little underbaked.

The movie is a tepid botch on pretty much every level.

Thunder Force is only occasionally insightful, and almost never surprising. It’s arriving in a world where people generally expect more from its genre than light, enjoyable performances and a handful of overstretched gags, and that’s all it has to offer.

The first two movies are packed with “I can’t believe that just happened!” moments. The third one instead chains together a series of “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before” scenes.

Even as a low-key Netflix time-waster, Fearless isn’t that much fun, except for people who really, really like the idea of super-babies.

The film feels clumsy, hurried, and above all, like an admission of creative defeat.

In the early going, though, Waititi manages to keep the tone light and the humor surreal enough to avoid too much association with the real world. But as his story devolves into melodrama, the comedy curdles.

Over the course of two hours, the mania becomes exhausting and numbing.

The book is a charmingly quaint, deeply eerie supernatural mystery about grief, necromancy, and the apocalypse. The movie version is a shrieking CGI carnival full of poop jokes and barfing pumpkins.

It’s a pretty take on the story, but it’s also a frustratingly safe and squishy one. It’s infinitely well-intentioned, full of warm self-affirmation and positivity, and absolutely nothing about it feels emotionally authentic enough to drive those messages home.

Just as trying to keep up with every geopolitical crisis on the planet all at once can be overwhelming, trying to track Geostorm’s name-checked concerns and its barely present characters is likely to tax viewers’ attention spans. Horror movies help people process some of our worst fears, but there’s a reason most movies don’t try to address every human fear at the same time.

The Dark Tower, helmed by Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, is so simplified in places that it seems outright generic.

Given that The Mummy only barely works as a movie on its own account, the question becomes whether it works as a franchise-starter. And the answer is that while its franchise elements are foregrounded, they still aren’t terribly compelling.

Virtually none of The Circle has any emotional or narrative impact.

For a mainstream supernatural-fantasy war film, Spectral is curiously devoted to rhapsodizing about science, and considering the moral implications of scientific discovery. It’s also appealingly certain that science is the answer to all problems, including what appears to be a supernatural attack.

Burton's adaptation of Ransom Riggs' 2011 bestseller is a manic but emotionally inert movie that packs on the quirks without finding any personality underneath them.

While it's admirable that Guest is enthusiastically rooting for his characters, there's nothing particularly funny about it.

Cianfrance pushes too hard for his audience's emotional response, with little nuance and strange selectivity.

The film never comes up with a mission statement or a message that might tie together its wandering scenes, or explain its vague melancholy.

The film doesn't go far enough in setting its own course. Ayer works to establish those villains as gleeful fantasies of unfettered freedom, then fetters them with maudlin backstories that make them all sad, soulful, misused, and misunderstood.

Eventually, even perpetual pursuit gets dull, and Jason Bourne finds that point early, then just keeps charging monotonously forward.

Café Society is an incredibly pretty movie, and a generally unobjectionable one. But like so many Allen films, it feels like it was made primarily for his therapist, and letting the rest of the world in to see it and make their own diagnoses is an afterthought.

There are a few scary seconds here and there, but for the most part, this is a version of Dahl with the claws clipped, and it feels not just safe, but downright sleepy.

Not all superhero action films need the MCU's banter or Deadpool's smarm. But you can't play a symphony with a single note. With Apocalypse, Singer never gets around to varying his single, gloomy, dreary tune.

The film doesn't lack nerve-racking sequences or well-tuned jump scares. But it stitches them all together with a profound lack of character consistency.

The place the story ends doesn't necessarily fit with where it began, which leaves Hologram feeling like a fractured and uncertain oddity. But at least by the end, it's a beautifully melancholy oddity. It's inconsistent in its intentions, but at least some of those intentions are good ones.

It's a little unfair to any sequel to use its predecessor as a yardstick rather than considering it on its own merit, but in this case, it's impossible to put the original movie aside. Not just because of the title, but because Sword Of Destiny mimics its predecessor in so many clear and frustrating ways.

Where the first film was content with straight-faced silliness, Zoolander 2 tries to blow the same silliness out to epic, world-spanning proportions, and it just winds up feeling overstretched. Like Stiller with his ridiculous characters and stylized performances, it's consistently trying way too hard.

[Bay's] tremendous sentimentality is a major issue, bogging down his efforts at realism in flag-waving, tear-jerking scenes that try to make every heartfelt emotion land with mortar-fire force.

Howard shows his viewers what happened to these sailors, but he rarely offers any sense of who they were, or what it felt like to face their situation.

Tonally, Miss You Already is a slapdash mess of achingly sincere moments and tasteless jokes.

It’s "Ishtar" with the passion and sincerity replaced with a surface-level shrug.

It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.

Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.

At least "Elegy" has some passion. Learning To Drive has harmless sweetness, many revealing speeches about life, and a Kingsley performance that shades strongly into a “Robin Williams as a straight-faced foreigner” routine.

San Andreas doesn’t have much interest in the lives lost during its sequence of catastrophes, but it does dole out plenty of the large-scale spectacle that matters in disaster films of this type.

Tomorrowland comes across as a grinning rictus of a movie, a desperate door-to-door evangelist trying to force its foot into the door and push its salvation by any means possible.

Haley and co-writer Marc Basch have their hearts in the right place.... But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist.

As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.

Director Simon Curtis and first-time screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell constantly push too hard and too forcefully, laying on schmaltz where none is needed.

It never winds up with anything particularly interesting or effective to say about life, intelligence, religion, the nature of consciousness, or any of the other big themes it deliberately evokes. It does, however, blow up a lot of stuff.

Choosing to ignore any conventional sense of drama, progression, or resolution is, in its way, a memorable choice. But while Fifty Shades Of Grey is a memorable and society-shifting cultural event, it’s in no way a memorable movie.

It’s amiable goofiness, delivered at an emphatic, feverish pitch. Inevitably, what works fine in 11-minute episodes becomes strained over 90 minutes on the big screen, especially during a grating musical number about teamwork.

Garrett’s performance lacks any nuance or fire. When he’s playing, he’s a powerhouse. When he’s talking, he’s a half-presence with a vaguely Tommy Wiseau-esque accent, and sleepy eyes to match.

Like Ghibli’s features, Kingdom is a friendly, elegiac, approachable movie. But it lacks the studio’s well-polished sense of energy and commitment.

Unbroken just piles on the misery without tonal shift, any sense of rise and fall, or any interest in Zamperini’s inner life, beyond his catchphrase, “If you can take it, you can make it.”

Reichert and Zaman don’t editorialize, which keeps Remote Area Medical from being preachy, forceful, or didactic, but also leaves it feeling shapeless.

Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

Its attempts to force comedy, tragedy, farce, action, and melodrama into the same story never quite fit.

By establishing some of the Glade’s castes, rituals, and personalities, the writers make an incredibly contrived scenario seem a little more tangible. But once that high gear is engaged, the IQ and ambition drop precipitously.

It isn’t just that Gilliam’s ragged, wild style is easily recognizable after nearly four decades of feature films, it’s a sense that Zero Theorem recycles its tone, visual design, and plot points directly from his past work.

As clumsy as Quale is with the sequences of people shouting exposition back and forth, or delivering teary Blair Witch-style goodbyes into a camera that would have died long before its operators, he handles the CGI action with breathless intensity.

Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.

Between the high-gloss, desaturated prestige-picture look of the film and the visibly fakey soundstage sets of the Jersey boys’ hometown, Jersey Boys feels plastic and artificial throughout. There’s no sense of authentic urgency or intensity to any of it.

Maleficent is out of balance in all sorts of ways. The effective silent sequences conflict with the frustratingly talky ones. The new material fits poorly with moments that directly quote the classic.

Cuban Fury feels overpadded and distracted, with no time to establish its leads, let alone the bare connection between them that might give viewers a rooting interest in their future.

The film respects its cartoon roots, but never its audience.

Fantastic Fear leaps all over the place narratively and conceptually, servicing the comedy of every individual scene without considering or linking the others. Some of those individual scenes are marvelous, though.

While it’s nothing new and lacks individualistic touches, it’s still solid trashy fun as an overwrought superhero origin story.

The cast is too big, the setting too obviously stagey, the issues too diffuse, the personalities too simple.

It’s hard to fight the feeling that The Hobbit simply isn’t an epic story, and the efforts to expand it into one leave it feeling like an anvil crammed into a sock: The sock is taking on some weird shapes, and it’s being stretched awfully thin.

While Black Nativity often lacks polish and restraint, at least it never lacks for soul.

The Book Thief crams story after story into such a small space that it can’t realize any of them in depth.

Part of the point may be how trauma simplifies life by stripping away everything inessential, but just as there’s little satisfaction in watching Daisy pursue an unworthy goal, there’s little satisfaction in watching a specific, colorful, keenly felt portrait become such a familiar story.

It’s a brutal story and a heady high-concept idea, but it plays out through characters with no identity other than their symbolic ones, and through shouted, simplistic arguments that repeat the same points over and over.

It’s all tasteful and polished to a fault, but it feels like exactly what it is: an abbreviated version that preserves the high points, zips past the rest, and never approaches the depth of the full text.

The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.

A film that veers between caustic comedy, melodrama, and heartstring-tugging, without finding the spark of sympathy that would hold the film together around its disparate tones.

Riddick taps into a primal well of audience wish-fulfillment, but over the course of its unrelieved, monotonous length, it does its best to suck that well dry.

Austenland embraces convention, and the result is a romantic comedy in which the ending seems not just foreordained, but promised via contract from the first moment of the film.

A messy, confused, over-the-top mixture of brutality and sick comedy, puckishness and ugliness, self-awareness and tone-deafness.

It’s a pleasant enough expression of a series of familiar story beats, but apart from a few brief action-sequence moments, it could hardly be more rote or vanilla.

It’s a modest, reserved character piece that doesn’t push an agenda. The problem is that it comes across as if it lacks opinions, rather than holding them back.

The lack of plot coherence is a lingering irritant in a film that otherwise seems to be trying to improve on its cinematic-series forebears.

Despicable Me 2 has its charms, in its spritely pacing, a rapid-fire gag-delivery system that hits as often as it misses, and especially in its innovative, expansive use of 3-D space.

The Host is a step up from the endless metaphorical lectures and gaping plot holes of Niccol’s last film, In Time, but its muffled emotions, delivered with Twilight-esque blank-eyed calm, put it in the same category of a creative idea hamstrung in execution.

Many of the shorts are visibly impressive, given their scant budgets, and there’s no end of visual and thematic creativity stretched throughout the anthology; there are, after all, a million horrible, memorable ways to die.

The extra shading is nice, but it doesn’t change the degree to which Jack The Giant Slayer feels like a paint-by-numbers story.

It’s unchallenging fun for a younger crowd, but adults might feel like they’re staring down a colorful 24-piece board puzzle, trying to figure out how such a simple activity could be drawn out over 90 minutes.

Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.

For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.

The grim heroes don't have a nuance or more than a hint of emotion between them, and the same goes for the film around them.

Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.

Jack Reacher isn't much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn't the story of a man. It's mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.

While Frankenweenie is pleasant enough as a curated tour through horror's past, it doesn't add much to its present.

Theoretically, the "Bring It On" model can be applied to any remotely performative art. All it takes is a certain level of sass, some eye-catching performance showcases, and a plot where a talented outsider livens up a moribund group with some fresh ideas. Pitch Perfect slaps that stencil onto college a cappella singing groups, with a smattering of success.

Hotel Transylvania is occasionally the kind of fast-moving, gag-a-second film that relies on quantity of humor rather than quality.

At this point, the Resident Evil movie franchise has become a personal playground for husband-and-wife team Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich; every few years, they find another excuse to pit Jovovich's videogame-inspired dark superhero, Alice, against zombies and other gruesome monsters.

Francine is so minimalist that it has to rely almost entirely on Leo for solidity, and it would be a far stronger film if it supported and framed her more effectively.

Where the first two films maintained a breathless tone and found new ground in the zombie genre by linking a physical virus to demonic possession, [REC]3: Genesis runs out of ideas early, and becomes a slogging massacre spiked with callbacks and visual gags.

Unfortunately, Canet's 2010 film Little White Lies feels like "Tell No One" minus that inciting incident, and therefore minus the plot.

Delpy's work lacks Allen's wry humor and eye-rolling, philosophical acceptance of those characters and their quirks. Her stable of sniping couples and relatives are openly hateful in ways that defy comedy.

Those dance sequences are Step Up Revolution's major sticking point. No one goes to a dance movie for the plot, but the lower the expectations drop for the story, the higher they rise for the raison d'être performances.

The training montage where Lincoln learns to twirl his axe around his body like a baton for no apparent purpose is neither the movie's first laughable sequence nor its last, but it sums up the movie's aesthetic: The filmmakers mistakenly think nothing is silly if it's done with a grim enough facial expression.

There are complicated elements at work here, with threads of curdled vengeance, victim entitlement, and insanity bound together in ways it would take a much smarter film to unravel. Snow White And The Huntsman doesn't try, and the film just keeps getting dumber as it goes along.