Tom Russo

The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.

Instead of all-seeing, it’s more like seen it all before.

Kim doesn't sweat interweaving his story threads in any tightly controlled way. Just when the need-for-speed stuff really starts to gain traction, he'll shift for a surprisingly lengthy stretch to comic relief with the deputies and local wacko Johnny Knoxville.

Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander's dark-comic expansion on his cult Internet shorts, in which he crafts a back story for Santa that's as black as stocking coal.

Aquaman’s first glimpse of Atlantis is meant to convey wonder, but mostly there’s a sense of digitally over-busy déjà vu, as we’re reminded of more inventively designed fantasyscapes in “Thor,” “Avatar” and so on.

It’s a brutal bit of screen poetry that’s matched too infrequently by the aching human stories director Fedor Bondarchuk is so anxious to tell.

Elle Fanning is impeccably cast as Jesse, a quiet, sweet-natured ingénue shuttling between sketchy photo shoots and her clichéd newcomer’s digs in a seedy Pasadena motel.

It makes for a structurally glitchy inspirational exercise whose climax carries all the goosebump-making drama of a Pats preseason game.

Returning director Wilson Yip commits to this tone too late, getting lost in tangential conflict and stunt casting — in this corner, Mike Tyson! — at the expense of the drama and even the action.

Stabs at the dramatic don't amount to anything that makes us care, even for Bell, who has been solid on AMC's "The Walking Dead'' and in the chairlift chiller "Frozen.'' But genre fans who have been thirsting for gore via acupuncture needles or a LASIK machine should get their giddy fill.

The movie’s best bits come when Tong’s script eases up on banter and clunky Indy homages and instead simply indulges in random zaniness.

The film feels as if it’s drawing its characterizations far more from the appeal of its stars than from any prose.

For all Kendrick's stolidity, he delivers a couple of wrenchingly tender scenes.

Angelo Pizzo knows inspirational sports drama. As the writer of “Hoosiers” and “Rudy,” Pizzo has made a career out of mining the genre and its themes of underdog determination and locker-room brotherhood. But he’s overmatched in his directing debut, the well-intentioned football biopic My All American.

Funny thing, though: The sunnier that Barrymore gets in her scenes with Sandler, the more the iffy elements and leaden bits seem to just melt away.

The actors also acquit themselves well singing the film's numerous tunes. Breslin's voice is pleasantly melodic, while Nivola sounds like someone who's been grinding it out on tour for years.

There are echoes of Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” in all of this that are impossible to miss.

As he did with his "Everest" cast, Kormákur draws a strong, pathos-rich performance from Woodley, filled with moments of her character confronting her own mortality and looking back on safe choices not made. It’s solid drama, but also very slow going.

The problem with this adaptation of Lawrence Block’s detective yarn isn’t that it casts Neeson in a role we’re seeing him play again and again. It’s that no one else in the movie makes a character feel nearly as broken-in and fully inhabited as he does.

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.

Some of this vigilante-fantasy misbehavior is wickedly funny.

Hand it to Amanda Seyfried - she seems to have a knack for underplaying unstable characters in a way that lets their nuttiness creep right up on you.

The copious violence, as always, is an assault - even aurally, as every thudding knife strike is made to sound like a boulder dropping on the theater.

Where we hoped for a narrative rebound, we get instead another pedestrian, overlong post-apocalyptic entry that fails to capitalize on some decent character dynamics.

The film is quite the showcase for Zoey Deutch (“Before I Fall”), giving her loose-scripted freedom to play brazen, breezy, even soulfully vulnerable. Still, her selectively promiscuous hellion is so off-putting so much of the time — as are most of those around her, and their lurid plots and predicaments — it’s hard to see the point of it all.

Entertainment so generically gentle, it doesn’t compare to last year’s similarly themed, tonally looser “Trolls.”

A story that builds toward Po training an army of his panda brethren fails to deliver exponentially greater fun.

The result is a scattershot comedy that only intermittently nails either tone, finally just bogging down in flatly choreographed mayhem in the late going.