Tom Russo

Middling cop thriller, whose attention-grabbing city-on-lockdown premise is undercut by thin plotting and forced performances from the supporting cast.

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.

It’s a deep-thinking character study that’s provocatively if imperfectly presented — at least until the story devolves right along with its subject’s state of mind.

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.

After a point, we’re left wondering whether we’re watching a character study or caricature. Either way, the portrait gradually morphs from intriguing to tedious.

The result is a reworking that feels both unnecessary and uninspired, even if it’s too genial and visually captivating to be flat-out off-putting.

What starts as a modest, agreeable riff on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale — and, more relevantly, Tchaikovsky’s ballet — eventually veers into stultifying action, rote twists, and other badly forced contemporary tweaks.

Save for a couple of crisp standalone segments incorporated as tone-setters, Washington’s first-ever sequel is a narratively and visually muddled disappointment, one that regularly confuses numbing brutality with vicariously thrilling righteous vengeance.

Character quirks know no limits in the indie dramedy Boundaries, a multi-generational road-trip movie that gives both Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer richly drawn roles to play.

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.

Thoroughly vanilla comedy, a movie jammed with well-meaning girl power messages but surprisingly little edge.

Tucci can be so focused on Giacometti’s artistic process that he gives short shrift to the art itself.

Still, not to put too fine — or juvenile — a point on it, a bigger problem is that there’s nothing but ’bot-on-’bot mayhem until the climax, when familiar ugly heads are reared over Tokyo.

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.

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.

For all the energy that Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, and their castmates pour into their gimmicky comedy, there’s too often a feeling that they’re straining to pump up flat material.

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.

Returning director Sean Anders strings together mayhem-filled moments that just aren’t the howlers that they’re clearly scripted to be, never mind the fatherly foursome’s chemistry, or the tobacco-stained guffaws Gibson keeps busting out to sell these bits.

If the movie can’t maintain its interest in Chan, why should we? This narrative splice job simply doesn’t hold together. Call it a taut mess or a hot mess, take your pick.

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

A sharper script would have been the real ultimate weapon.

Trouble is, the movie’s dopiness isn’t in fact something you can get past. “American Assasinine” is frequently more like it.

As an orphan who dreams of joining the Paris Opera Ballet in the animated feature Leap!, Elle Fanning really hears it about the artistry and precision required to become a prima ballerina. The makers of this cheery but subpar confection probably should have been taking notes in addition to scripting them.

Not that the movie’s various shortcomings are all on Moore. British genre director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (“Storage 24”) gives her nothing but trite drama to work with in setting up the story, and an overload of distracting, reductive prattle once she hits the water.

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

Too glossy to truly immerse audiences in the horrors it depicts.

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

The movie works best when it finds a balance between flatly familiar and over-aggressively unexpected.