Just because a Japanese animated film is screening at the Museum of Fine Arts doesn't mean that you can count on Miyazaki-caliber artistry.

Those looking for further enlightenment might want to pass on the feel-good cinematic hagiography known as Awake: The Life of Yogananda.

Disappointing for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's silly. For another, it's not always silly enough to be diverting.

Including the high expectations set up by the film’s early going, Eubank had a thoughtful thriller in the works but along the way he got his signals crossed.

In pace, sensibility, and big, beating heart, this is a child's first indie film, and it's the better for it.

At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."

What we’re left with, then, is yet another “Terminator” far easier to appreciate for isolated bits of inspiration than for any stroke of genius it manages overall.

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

Director Sam Mendes tries his hand at writing an original screenplay solo, and the results are far from magical. Instead, Empire of Light strands its poorly defined characters in a nostalgia piece filtered through the director’s love of the movies. (For a better film on the same theme, watch “The Fabelmans.”)

The young cast comes through with appealing, naturalistic performances. But Weber’s programmatic, preachy story and emotional manipulation is so blatant that it verges on the fatuous.

Considering the sunny, relatively pleasurable romantic business that precedes it, the elderly stuff seems dark, morbid, and forced upon us.

As a credible love story, though, the film never leaves the runway. If you're a fan of these actors, you may want to look up Jet Lag when it comes out on video, or catch it on an Air France flight while flirting with the passenger in the next seat.

It's the old-fashioned verities of documentary filmmaking that serve Thomason and Perry best.

If you are a devotee of sleaze, you'll salivate at the prospect of Mau Mau Sex Sex, a fond and fawning look back at exploitation, or grindhouse, movies from the 1930s through the 1960s.

'Trainspotting'' Lite.

You have an overstuffed story line, sloppy filmmaking, a general thinness of conception (if you've seen "Sister Act," you've pretty much seen The Fighting Temptations), and a lead performance that starts out obnoxious and becomes actively grating.

Silent Night wants to be the new action movie associated with Christmas. But don’t worry, fans of “Die Hard”; that movie’s place is still secure.

In lieu of suspense, Rosenthal relies on a mood of free-floating anxiety, enhanced by West Virginia (actually British Columbia) landscapes where the sun never shines. As one-note as the title suggests, A Single Shot misfires.

And again things go bump and eventually yarrrragghhh in the night.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.

It's everything it ought to be: right-minded, well-intentioned, compassionate. But it doesn't rise above made-for-cable public service announcement, either.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.

Tight close-ups, jittery hand-held camera — lots and lots of jittery hand-held camera. The idea, presumably, is to impart urgency, immediacy, dynamism. Instead it causes visual exhaustion.

So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.

Director Ayer, whose career took off when he wrote 2001′s “Training Day,” has frequently attempted to create Action Movies That Matter (the stressful 2014 World War II picture “Fury,” for one); this is absolutely not one of those. He tackles this assignment without much self-seriousness but doesn’t seem keen to embrace its silliness quotient, either.