With dreary visuals and a lack of real twists or scares, there isn’t much here for a general audience to hold onto. Die-hard fans will be satisfied, however, and for young newcomers to horror, it might just be a perfect scarefest and jumping-off point into the genre.

Sisto's direction is a victory of glacial tone over actual content, and John and the Hole's frustrations outweigh its insight into the forces that can spawn a monster.

This is fussy filmmaking, overly made-up (the costume mandate seems to include the buzzwords "coffee filters," "croquembouche," and "Day-Glo paint") and bereft of wit.

Refreshingly, there’s nary a cheap scare manifested in this Conjuring, although the unspoken corollary to that is that The Conjuring 2 just isn’t very scary, or even unnerving.

The Mauritanian wants to be a fusion of Papillon and A Few Good Men, but it cannot work out whether it wants to make a purely emotive argument, or engage in a brutal cross-examination of the legal system.

The film is a hoot and goes by quickly, but there's nothing here you haven't seen before.

Summertime’s boisterous enthusiasm sometimes finds an endearing spark, but it never erupts like the fireworks that scatter across the L.A. skyline at the film’s end. It’s a mess and it’s exhausting, with its heart always on the brink of exploding from its exhilarating optimistic nature.

As suspicion shifts from passenger to passenger, the film starts to resemble a parlor-room whodunit, while logic becomes its first fatality. Fasten your seat belts before takeoff, because Non-Stop is a bumpy ride.

As always, there's the combustible band of mismatched survivors.

Time may ultimately be kind to Cooper’s first foray into the horror genre, but the present holds nothing but darkness.

The sidekicks Jean-Bob, the dandy French frog (Cleese), and Speedy, the true-blue turtle (Wright), are mildly amusing, but knowing the talent behind the voices, you can't help but wish that they'd had a hand in the writing as well. Still, the picture has a certain sweetness about it that melds nicely with its old-fashioned look (the cels are all hand-drawn and hand-colored) and the characters are not totally without charm. What it boils down to is that The Swan Princess just doesn't have that old bibbity bobbity boo.

Episodically eventful but utterly unsuspenseful, the film is a diversion that requires little attention and satisfies the film-going needs of a wide variety of viewers.

The central conceit in 3 Days to Kill – the family man moonlighting as a gun-for-hire – is hardly a fresh one. It worked in films released 10 or 20 years ago (see True Lies or Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but here it feels played out, clichéd.

In a word, it’s soulless.

Hell, even Heston's performance elicited cheers back in the day. Franco, in a totally, tonally different role, but still the prime human here, is a pale shadow of the ruined future to come.

Maybe America will prove me wrong by voting, but I felt like you were holding back until the end.

It’s an impossible standard, maybe, but in 42 minutes, TV’s "Friday Night Lights" delivered all-star-level emotional complexity and action. When the Game Stands Tall is strictly JV squad.

There's none of Spielberg's verbal wit or the astonishing shot composition that helped the rest of the films flourish so far above their gutsy, 1930s action serial roots. Dial of Destiny feels like a less skilled hand tracing over the work of his favorite artists: The lines may be their own, but you'll always see the superior work underneath, overshadowing it and making you wish you could see the original instead.

Guilty of the most mortal of all movie sins: It's dull.

Blends into so much white noise, until all that's left is the lingering sense that the tragic and promising story of Doug and Richard won't be sticking with you past the closing credits.

Pompeii delivers the goods – well, at least during its final 20 minutes.

Viewed as a war film, it's strictly standard run 'n' gun fare.

When she's (Dunst) off the screen, Elizabethtown goes dark and broody, stranding us with the morose Bloom during a third-act road trip that goes everywhere and nowhere at once.

So bereft of hope... that it's a chore to withstand.

Two-and-a-half hour slice of unmitigated depression.

Rich Hill attempts to lay bare these kids’ lives, striving for gentle intimacy, but the result feels more like arthouse pandering.

The Judge gives the sense of resting on its casting laurels.

It’s still a hellish glimpse into one of climbing’s worst days ever, and there’s no way to resolve the unresolvable, but as it is The Summit, like K2 itself, remains an icily beautiful and altogether deadly mystery.

By fashioning itself a thriller above all else, Foe obstinately opts for the no-man’s land in between both tracks, in the process wasting its tiny, mighty cast, and the opportunity to say anything impactful.

Paul Kirby's production design stands outs for its opulent re-creation of the golden glitz and ostentatious trappings of the Iraqi palace, but otherwise The Devil's Double belongs to filmdom's hoi polloi.

An unpredictably bizarre and tonally askew Hong Kong freak show.

It’s a worthy effort, and Webb’s story is important. Nevertheless, Kill the Messenger feels extremely dated: In these cynical times, it’s too little, too late, which is too bad.

Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot

A Frankensteinian combination of "Flatliners," "Carrie," and just about any possession flick that comes to mind.

A confused, unfunny film with a few guns and some decent tunes. As CB4 (the CB stands for Cell Block), Saturday Night Live's Chris Rock and company are the hottest rap group in the world, an NWA gangsta rap rip-off oozing the prerequisite amounts of street tough sass, misogyny, and devil-may-care, screw-the-police attitude.

It's all well and good to run a scroll of corporate evil-doers at the end of the film as in Dick and Jane, but if these robber barons were skewered properly along the way, such heavy-handed, last-minute tactics wouldn't be necessary.

The dual bromances at the heart of his new film, however, are as unconvincing as the life-and-death action plot that propels the film.

It’s hard to blame the actors for not grasping the tone when it seems to elude the filmmakers.

At no point does Beast hide what it wants to accomplish. They made a movie that stars an actor everyone loves and pits him against a big-ass enraged lion. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Idris Elba punching lions?

Comes across as a particularly unspecial "Very Special Episode" of a television series that never made it past the pilot stage.

The film switches timelines every fifteen minutes, jumping between six months before and present day with an absolute disregard for storytelling, and this is merely the most obvious problem, not its worst.

The film itself is a muddle, all rapid-fire step-edits and grainy, blue-filtered hokum. What is good is Stallone.

Everything Reeves has done since always has the whiff of "Ted" about it. Party on, dudes.

Granted, the lavish set pieces are beautiful, and there really is quite a bit of amusingly acrobatic coupling going on, but in the end, it's extremely hard to fight down the giggles you'll find swelling inside you. It's all so relentlessly goofy, it makes you long for the early Eighties antics of Traci Lords, or The Dark Bros.

As an unsparing portrait of disaffection among the small-paycheck, faux-creative class, The Future is rather astute … which isn't to say it isn't also bang-your-head-on-the-wall annoying.

Best yet is Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, big as a Russian bear and as ice-cool as the country’s signature 80-proof spirit. Is it unpatriotic to wish this was his movie, not the twitchy American guy’s?

Memory is better than some Neeson action flicks, worse than others, but, predictable as it is to say, you'll have trouble remembering it much longer than its run time.

The appearance of Richard Gere as a new guest whom everybody assumes is a plant from the multinational hotel chain that Muriel and Sonny have been wooing is straight out of the “Hotel Inspectors” episode of Fawlty Towers. Where’s John Cleese when you really need him?

The chickiest flick you're likely to see this season. Depending on your taste in romantic fare, you'll either find it toe-curlingly dreamy or ploddingly predictable.

Maybe Stonewall will have more value to younger viewers for whom the riots and gay marginalization in general are distant history and might be vivified by watching the film. Yet even though the film’s heart seems genuine, its structure is buttressed by falsies.

Though pretty to look at (with camerawork by Phedon Papamichael) and inspiring to contemplate, this story of human triumph needs a lot more of the human for an audience to actually experience the triumph.

uUltimately Better Luck Tomorrow feels nearly as hollow and unknowable as its characters’ hearts.

You could say it’s toothless most of the time.

Van Helsing is simply far too much of a good thing, and although Hensley's Frankenstein Monster comes off better than anyone else, the film suffers from some truly inane dialogue and pacing that will likely cause tachycardia in members of the audience old enough to recall who Dwight Frye was.

I'm certainly not asking for car chases and explosions here, but this is a suspense film that's too "adult" for its own good, despite the fact that Redford, Dafoe, and Mirren (in particular) have rarely been more mature in their performances.

Strives to be an inspirational depth charge, but its power is consistently waylaid by some genuinely hokey dialogue and situations.

So slow-moving, the narrative takes forever to gain momentum, and when it finally does, it deliberately undercuts it. This either is the most contemplative and sensual kind of pleasure or a well-meaning, finely executed misfire that ultimately drags instead of soars.

Neither a badly miscast Cage nor an oddly dispassionate Cruz remotely suggest the ardor of love's passion.

Toei Animation has done their usual bang-up job on the 2-D animation, filling nearly the entire running time with skirmishes, melees, and battles royal beyond compare.

Onward is neither terrible nor great; it simply is.

Without sizzle or thrills, The Tourist becomes as sluggish and rank as the Venice waterways.

It’s a tale full of sound and fury, signifying something that’s nothing less than appalling.

As an ensemble comedy that at best is only firing on four cylinders at any given moment, Mr. Jealousy is a slight contrivance, one that dawdles around in your head for a brief while before vacating the area to make room for more pressing issues.

It’s a fittingly mediocre end to a franchise that has always been OK with being average.

Midway through, a character remarks as he leaves the scene of a takedown of Ronnie, "I thought this was going to be funny, but it's just kind of sad." The same thing is true about the movie as a whole.

There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.

It's the kind of film you feel like watching twice -- not because you found it that engaging to begin with, but because you didn't, and everyone else did.

Morbius does what it's supposed to, nothing more, and barely that. If only this living vampire had more of a pulse.

It is difficult to see My Darling Supermarket for the whimsical anthropological oddity it so desperately strives to be.

From Lee’s point of view, I can understand the enticing challenge of taking on a revered cult film Oldboy. But a pair of ill-conceived casting choices can jolt you out of the film, or worse, elicit the rolling of eyes and barely stifled giggle.

The movie’s length forces our suspension of disbelief for at least an hour more than is comfortable and pushes mindlessness to a dangerous longevity.

Why do I feel like a bummed-out tourist gone home with dashed hopes? “I was promised a new-millennium mindfuck, and all I got was this crummy pick-the-bodies-off horror.”

It takes great skill to make something so ponderously stultifying as this third film entry in the ongoing adaptation of C.S. Lewis' series of splendidly imagined children's books.

It’s all too bland, the smooth-crotched erotic thriller equivalent of banging a G.I. Joe and a Barbie together.

In fictionalizing the story of Austen, the filmmakers didn’t go far enough. Becoming Jane attempts to please the purists and the dreamers, but only results in disappointing both.

Long Weekend had all the tools to make a wistful, escapist romance that explores and overcomes some of the stigmas of mental health, but it flatlines.

Julia, Huston, Ricci, and Workman are all excellent in their roles (Carol Kane as Granny Addams seems little more than an afterthought), but they're unfortunately not enough to save this elongated mess. If you haven't yet seen the first film, rent that instead, or, better yet, go pick up a volume of the original Addams cartoons.

Singer has great inspirations, and the multilayered approach to edits and sound design within the hypnosis is ingenious and excellently executed. But it doesn't add up to much.

The movie has its moments but it plays like a ball of confusion. Life Stinks seems to be Brooks' bid to be taken seriously and leave the fart jokes behind. And something about that stinks.

Patinkin and King’s characters’ wrangling with spirituality is sincere, and specific. Everything else in this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink film feels like too many ideas stored up over an especially long winter.

No one can accuse Hardy of giving Venom anything less than his absolute best. He has always been a performer who loves a good affectation; here he seems to be riffing on his performance as Max Rockatansky in "Mad Max: Fury Road."

Perhaps future generations of film scholars will embrace The Quiet as a B-movie that problematizes the oppressive gaze, but for now, it's a misfire.

Let's just say if you liked the last one, you'll like this one, too. Otherwise, you'll discover that it's time for Drebin, Nordberg, Capt. Hocken, and the rest to finally retire their badges.

Although Love the Hard Way is saturated with a doomed romanticism that feels more fictitious than real, the actors lend the movie a potency that it would not have had otherwise.

Zombie continues to have a true, unflinching artist's eye for the sublimely horrific (a woodsy murder sequence is pregnant with disturbing, painterly compositions), that eye is wasted here on an unnecessarily moribund history of sociopathy as it relates to Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois.

As we find ourselves again immersed in a time of war, Trumbo's ageless story offers a useful corollary.

Tim Burton is all grown up and getting serious with this wildly scattershot tale.

This film adaptation feels like YA, with cat’s-cradle love matches, soft-focus sexuality, and a main character who never satisfactorily makes the transition from page to screen.

Ready to Wear is to filmmaking what paper dresses were to fashion -- thin, trendy, and disposable.

This is definitely one My Hero Academia adventure that should go back to the classroom.

But instead of being the hippest kid on the block, this plays like some ranty, paranoid comic thriller. It'd be more fun watching Jimmy Stewart get the beat-down from Claude Rains on the Senate floor; when Mr. Williams goes to Washington, the result is a total snooze.

And for all its artful, high-flying sorcery, Hocus Pocus cannot escape the irons of an all too pedestrian plotline.

Undone by Blanchett's dull, wooden delivery. She's the pap that kills the pulp the rest of the film is bellowing out to be.

While this is no "Clueless," to be sure, it's also, thankfully, no "Born in East L.A."

Would be a much better film had it not relied so heavily on a bombastic soundtrack (by James Newton Howard) for its emotional impact and spared itself some of the more overdone images of campus life.

A gorgeous-looking but ill-conceived mash note to the city of Paris that riffs on its better, wiser, glaringly obvious cinematic predecessors.

In the end, Dominion brings back likable characters and has the good grace to move at a fast clip. It is a testament to how low the bar has gotten that those two elements feel like enough to make it a passable summer movie.

Try as he might to capture the political complexities of their relationship and how it was sacrificed because of the needs for an heir, Scott tells rather than shows (much as Napoleon's much-harped-upon mommy issues turn out to be a narrative and thematic dead end). It's all strategy, no tactics.