Flying Swords of Dragon Gate isn't as much fun as the director's previous film – the wondrous "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame."

Even if it doesn’t manage to be quite the "Hunger Games"-level hit its producers would clearly desire, it’s the best of the wannabes we’ve seen so far.

Because of the episodic nature of the material, Klown Forever feels more like a series of events rather than a cohesive whole. That’s fine with me, as I enjoy spending time with these bumbling, emasculated males grappling with their ultimate insignificance in the world.

Sporadically, the deliberately organic, semi-improvised tone doesn't quite gel, and there are momentary longueurs that could derail the story. But Myrick's decision to keep the narrative simple, and instead concentrate on the characters, means there's always a thick strand of sympathy and tragedy at play.

Despite its high tech sheen and overstuffed cast of characters, played by some of the best actors in the land, this mega-mecha melee manages to give short shrift to both the airborne action set-pieces that define Iron Man's zoomy panache and incoming supervillain Whiplash, aka Ivan Vanko (Rourke).

Aside from Segel’s grounding performance, the pleasures of Our Friend lie in some of its observational specifics about human behavior.

One of the more intelligent comedies out there this summer -- it's not Brooks' best.

Director and writer Charles Dorfman’s debut feature is a corker of a good time to watch and rife with some juicy subtext regarding class, British colonialism, and toxic (read: douchebag) masculinity.

Cars 2 makes for a decent play date but is not an especially good movie.

Provides tepid but fun entertainment.

Both the yuks and the yucks are plentiful, but by the time the film reaches a montage sequence of these two boneheads (well, one bonehead, one dope) laying waste to Los Angeles gang members and other wastrels in an attempt to satiate Bart's thirst for the red stuff, you're more than likely wishing you were watching Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in something else entirely. The similarities between the two horror comedy pairings are just too obvious to be ruled out as coincidence.

No other film in recent memory has featured such a terrifically retro maniac or revisited the heyday of Eighties gore films with such gleeful, moist abandon.

This is frightening stuff, ably helmed (by writer/director Gorak, art director on the nerve janglers Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), viciously acted, and altogether horrific in ways George A. Romero could imagine only through the lens of the darkest sort of fantasy.

It's not the greatest movie about baseball ever made (and I'll keep my mouth shut on that one if I know what's good for me), but it's not the worst, either. Like the game itself, it's pretty darn fun.

Cold Pursuit very nearly brings Neeson full circle, imbued as it is with a lower-rent version of the patented Raimi gallows humor.

So it comes as no small shock that The House With a Clock in Its Walls may very well be one of the best spooky movies to ever operate under a PG rating. The man known for taking things too far also appears to know exactly where to stop.

Fans of the show will rejoice and a few newbies will become converts. In this heightened reality, there are no rules except to get the laugh. And they do, incessantly.

But most damningly, Shut Up Little Man! fails to convey what was so hypnotic about the original tapes, and Bate's decision to re-enact the transcripts with actors seems weirdly contrary to the spirit of the thing.

It’s the sort of cat-and-mouse game that recalls certain elements of such disparate films as John Boorman’s "Hell in the Pacific," Larry Cohen’s screenplay for "Phone Booth," and, one key line in Dan O’Bannon’s "Return of the Living Dead," believe it or not.

Truthfully, it's hard to imagine a better screen adaptation of this queer household. Addams would have been proud.

It's not that First Knight is a terrible, embarrassing piece of junk; it's just a film of stunning averageness and not really good or bad enough to make any kind of a lasting impression which, depending on your point of view, may be even worse than a total failure.

At its strongest, Charlie Says remembers that true justice is never easy, nor should it ever be. Its importance is in Harron asking those very questions, putting the audience in the uncomfortable position of contemplating at what point punishment is enough, and that gives Charlie Says true worth.

Actually, this souped-up sled is a perfect vehicle for TV star/comedian Tim Allen and, despite its formulaic chassis, he takes us through a few interesting twists and turns.

A charming surprise, the kind of neat little low-budget movie that seems more like a collaboration among friends than it does a corporate investment.

Tornado is an undeniable success as a slow-burn, blood-soaked historical tragedy, both mournful and amoral, but it’s also a quietly fascinating exploration of identity and reinvention.

Ambitious, brutish, ruthlessly unromantic – has the right idea casting its heroine as a Joan of Arc-type crusader and its evil queen a dissertation (albeit first draft) on beauty as the most direct path to power for the disenfranchised female.

Sapochnik has delved into bleak futures before, with his 2010 brutal forced-organ-donation capitalist satire Repo Men, but Finch is much closer to last year’s The Midnight Sky, in which George Clooney stared at his own incoming invisible apocalypse.

The script is really the heart of the problem.

The occasionally contrived music-video slicky edge, and the fact that there's no way on God's green earth that what takes place in Assisted Living happens in one day, it's a noble effort.

For all the wincing indie-film humor, for all the celebs packed in for socially distanced scenes, the film succeeds most in the simplicity of Liza and her younger self as they navigate the tension of finding balance and acceptance of the entire self.

Any SNL fan, and I am one, is still going to get a kick out of the close access and cavalcade of stars like Tina Fey, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, and Paul Simon giving testimony. By dint of that access, Lorne is by definition revealing. Revelatory? Not as much.

Teenthrob Efron will be missed in future episodes by both adolescent girls and their moms who are only too happy to accompany their daughters to the theatre, but he's a handsome talent who's graduated to bigger projects.

While The People Under the Stairs may leave some horror fans unsatisfied and other horror detractors repulsed, it ought to satisfy those viewers who appreciate a thoughtful and visceral movie entertainment.

The quartet of actors are all high-caliber pros, and the performances are marvelous, especially Linney, whose Claire hides depths of self-deception.

Overall, the movie stresses the more painful and awkward moments; moments that might be classified as "heartwarming" are rare. This results in a very cynical tone and I suspect that was not the desired effect.

The film veers toward sheer silliness at times, losing the sweetness that defines its strongest moments.

With A Walk Among the Tombstones, the names have been changed but the story’s all too familiar. Speaking of which, "Taken 3" is on its way.

Morning Glory had the capacity to be a smarter, tarter picture, though it's not bad as is: well-acted and ingratiating, with at least one howlingly funny sequence.

It's a bit unnerving to realize that an entire life can be summed up so well in 20 minutes and that four generations can be fit into a mere 96 minutes without feeling cramped, but that's what's so beautiful about stories like this, too.

Green wisely gives his actors lots of room to work, all the while putting the emphasis on the characters and their relationships instead of the blurry hokum of the narrative threads.

Iranian-American director Keshavarz utilizes the always reliable Sarandon to fine effect, but the final takeaway is less than riveting.

Thanks to Haggis and the cast, who are convincing, often bitingly so, in their willingness to dive into the dark and unknowable depths of the modern American romantic relationship, The Last Kiss mirrors reality with remarkable faithfulness.

Is it just me or is Mick Jagger turning into John Hurt?

A charmingly mounted, period romantic drama that benefits from the performances of a fine ensemble cast and the lovely location settings of Florence and Tuscany.

Insert Coin doesn’t tell gamers anything they didn’t already know, and non-gamers won’t care – so unless you're a hardcore fan, maybe just save your quarters.

Writer/director Emmanuel Finkiel tries very hard to adapt Duras’ modernist storytelling tactics to Memoir of War and, at times, even succeeds in translating the author’s opaque blurring of the objective and the subjective.

The film's glorification of the America's Cup as an exclusive prize in The Wealthy WASP World of Sports can be a tad bit alienating. Nevertheless, Wind manages, for the most part, to be harmless entertainment -- a sort of elitist cotton candy floating in the sea breeze.

Wrath of Man may soon occupy the same rarified air as Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, another film anchored by an aging action star that promised revenge and delivered something more.

With its offbeat-dramedy-meets-sci-fi concept, Jules feels pulled right out of the world of indie cinema from 10 years ago. It’s in communion with the likes of Safety Not Guaranteed or Seeking A Friend for the End of the World: movies that revel in a superficial attempt at charm that’s undermined by a shallow understanding of their own characters, instead choosing to live and die by a determined sense of quirk wrapped up within their supposedly refreshing sense of genre-bending.

Last Chance Harvey is so much an "actors' film" that the hand of the director seems hidden until it bursts into view with something clunky.

Boasting a terrific cast, the movie is unable to parlay its abundance of comic talent into an abundance of original comedy.

Haunting and extremely atmospheric, Mama is a horror film imbued with an unsettling and affecting power.

This chase film combines elements of the thriller and newspaper procedural to create a contemporary saga about political idealism, stone-cold realities, and the repercussions of past deeds on future innocents.

On the plus side, Costanzo is an appealing and likable young actor who carries the film easily; he gives the impression that he is thinking deeply and mildly amused.

Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I've seen Morrissey videos that are more life-changing than this well-intentioned but ultimately yawn-inducing barrage of factoids.

While never screaming its message, the script by first-time feature directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage still finds a way to damn the sin more than the sinner.

Ultimately, Dark Blue feels roughly a decade too late with its back story of the Los Angeles riots. Gates’ department had its share of dirty blues, to be sure, but that hasn’t been notable since the smoke cleared back in 1992.

Henderson's warm and toasty little gem of a film, slight though it may be, reminds you that the Greatest Generation, full of vim, vigor, and – most important – an indefatigable sense of purpose, grew up on both sides of the Big Pond.

It would be easy to pigeonhole this as "Norma Rae" en L.A., and Padilla is at least as ingratiating and as much of a guy magnet as Sally Field was in that movie.

Maybe he was a sucker, but it was his belief in the fundamental decency of American institutions that made his struggle for redemption so winning, much more so than the movie that was made to honor it.

This first dramatic feature by documentarian Evans is an important film but not necessarily a successful one.

Meyers has a good feel for contemporary comedy; it’s reality, however, that slips through her grasp.

Even when plausibility fails, I Origins is elegantly cosseted by its dreamy camerawork (courtesy of Markus Förderer) and pretty people.

The gifted veterans, Redgrave and Stamp, manage to imbue their characters with personalities and physical bearings that transcend the stereotypical. But there’s little else that separates a film like this from the sing-your-heart-out self-actualizations of a teen show like "Glee."

Hallström's latest is fine but unambitious, content with what it is – an arthouse trifle for the masses.

Whenever War Dogs plods, close your eyes and count the seconds. Hill’s next deranged little giggle will be along shortly to pick you up.

Washington is always superb when playing characters with a surface calm, but a boiling-over interior. Here, as the protagonist, he steers a vivid course through a seamy world.

Branagh might as well have opened a can and dumped it on a plate, the ridges of a factory-line production still perfectly hatched on a gelatinous cylinder of crud.

Here's hoping that younger members of the audience will seek out Conan Doyle's original stories to further explore Holmes' official amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, whose brilliant case studies regarding his friend, roommate, and fellow rationalist are the stuff dreams are made of.

It’s deranged, but also at times curiously defanged. At least it’s still a fun, bloody watch, even if it frustrates along the way.

Despite an overlong running time and a punishing amount of violence and gore, it's a deeply ambitious picture, one of the most expensive and original to come out of France in many years.

If this movie does anything to rally crowds against cinema's mass distribution of mediocrity then it has served a noble purse.

White Christmas endures – despite not being a very good movie.

Ghosts of Mississippi isn’t a bad film by any means; it’s just not a very good film.

We have pretty much all the information we need within the first half-hour, which undercuts the supposedly climactic reveal of the contents of Maruge's letter and renders the torturous flashbacks unnecessary for narrative purposes. And not a little bit sadomasochistic, too – an ill fit for a PG-13 family film.

It's almost dreamlike in its weird little tone, a Manischewitz hangover of a nightmare that's giddy enough to usher chuckles and is thoroughly unique.

By trying to be about so little, telling a simple fragile romantic story, Dogfight is about so much -- war and peace, love and romance, sex roles and cultural myths. What it understands is that to be really anti-war, rather than glitzy moralizing, a film should just be full of life, its characters so richly nuanced and detailed that they resonate with energy.

Ultimately, the slow boil bleakness of the script, with its subtle ruminations of what it is to go on in a time of hopelessness, is what marks Settlers apart, even as it looks and feels like so many of the post-apocalyptic drought-plagued SF dramas of the last few years.

If the jingoism that permeates the latter half of The Kingdom does not sufficiently sour the experience of watching it, then the film's closing sentiments about the eternality of vengeance will surely do the trick.

The premise is ripe for potent melodrama, but director Jacquot (who gets co-screenwriting credit) ultimately doesn’t finesse the situation.

Hideously directed with all the comic subtlety of Oliver Stone on speed, A Very Brady Sequel misses almost every single mark it sets for itself, from the disastrously ill-conceived animation that marks Roy's hallucinogenic mushroom trip at the family dinner table to the persistent background hiss on the film's soundtrack. Even Sherwood Schwartz would've hated this dog.

Mufasa is a small triumph for Jenkins and a small tragedy for Miranda, which means it’s a fine movie in an ocean of fine movies.

Minions: The Rise of Gru might not be sophisticated storytelling, but not all animated films have to be. Sometimes they can just be about joy.

You’ve heard of guerrilla warfare? Buffalo Soldiers is all about guerilla capitalism.

But for a film like this to succeed it must be full of humanity, overflowing with characters. This one is but they are all two-dimensional: the exhibitionist manipulative performance artist girlfriend, the insensitive and driven husband. The correct moral course is always clear, ambiguities are not entertained. In all its choices the film offers no real options. This tone piled upon the overwhelming coincidences that are supposed to drive the plot, drown whatever charm the central characters manage to generate.

The imagery by cinematographer Michal Englert is stupendous, but the dialogue and plot by actor-turned-screenwriter Joshua Rollins, who also has a small role in the film, are a bit too minimal. Infinite Storm always shows the perils we face but never explains them.

Tykwer's camera can assault the audience with the rankest of imagery, but not even once does it come close to distilling the actual aroma of the abattoir that was 18th-century France. And for that, I suppose, we should all be thankful.

The current media discussion over whether or not this is a racist film misses how much this is a classic hard-boiled detective novel, the Japanese functioning as an almost faceless evil.

The Commuter is exactly the kind of post-"Taken" aging-action-star part that Neeson could do in his sleep, and while he’s not exactly dozing through the script, it lacks his normal grizzled fire and drive.

The lengthiest foot chase in film history.

The performances are uniformly good and Kelly’s effort to tell an unbiased story is admirable, but I Am Michael ultimately delivers more in the way of talking points than drama.

Though Foley is adept at handling the action, the film is a grim washout peppered with too many earnest, good-cop/bad-cop conundrums and not enough solid police work.

Just doesn't have it.

With 7 Chinese Brothers, Austin-based filmmaker Bob Byington has made his most accessible film yet. The humor is less arch than in his previous comedies (among them Somebody up There Likes Me, Harmony and Me, and RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), and it’s plentiful and less diffuse than in his earlier works.

The film is more of an old-school wartime yarn, crackling with the expected camaraderie among the hardscrabble volunteers.

Though Take Me to the River also offers up some civil rights history lessons between recordings, it feels like a mishmash effort overall, more a home movie than a theatrical release. That’s fine. If you approach it on those terms, you can’t help but feel the love, too.

Where Scream 3 triumphs is in its wacky, take-no-prisoners, I am a Juggernaut of Terror, Hee, Hee attitude, which wisely makes room for some downright surreal moments amongst the carnage.

However, despite having all the tried-and-true elements set firmly in place, Ah-nold's latest doesn't quite measure up to the action star's finest work, even if it should prove to be a mildly pleasing diversion for fans.