The movie's pleasures are scant, apart from its observance of Gene Siskel's Rule of Swimming Pool Adjacency, which states that when well-dressed people are near a swimming pool, they will - yeah, you got it.

Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear; perhaps the movie's air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision. There are individual moments that create sharp images (shock troops drilling through a ceiling, De Niro wrestling with the almost obscene wiring and tubing inside a wall, the movie's obsession with bizarre duct work), but there seems to be no sure hand at the controls.

I wonder who the movie was made for. Smaller kids, I'm afraid, will find it both slow and depressing, especially the parts about why God allows bad things to happen.

The surprise for me is Christina Ricci, who I think of as undernourished and nervous, but who flowers here in warm ripeness.

Despite the sometimes clever and surely deliberately anachronistic dialogue from the terrific screenwriter Beau Willimon (“The Ides of March,” the Netflix series “House of Cards”), capable direction from Josie Rourke and strong performances from Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots often comes across as stultified and stagnant.

This Carrie comes off like a Lifetime film, adding little new and nothing substantial to improve on DePalma’s classic.

Alas, the basketball scenes and the basketball talk in this basketball movie continually bounce the wrong way, and there’s no overcoming that.

Volker Schlondorff’s talky drama...is less than persuasive.

Even when Mary finally gets her due, the film badly fumbles the moment.

A conventional film for an unconventional actor.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose, it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target audience understand the joke?

There’s a memorable movie to be made about the amazing, inspiration and controversial life of Jesse Owens. This is not a bad film and it’s a decent history lesson for those that don’t know the story of Owens and the ’36 Games, but it’s a long, long way from greatness.

It will keep reminding you of better movies in the same genre.

I confess I felt involved in Unknown until it pulled one too many rabbits out of its hat. At some point, a thriller has to play fair.

Writer-director Victor Levin takes an interesting although ultimately tedious and distracting approach to nearly every scene.

The adults at the Hotchkiss reunion are played by an assortment of splendid actors.

This is the kind of movie that ends up playing on the TV set over the bar in a better movie.

The movie lacks a port of entry for young viewers -- a character they can identify with. All of the major characters are adults with adult problems like debt, romance, and running (or swimming away from) the mob.

On more than one occasion, this looks and feels like a parody.

The ghouls are a little too ridiculous to quite fulfill their function in the movie. They make all the wrong decisions, are incompetent and ill-coordinated.

A Sound of Thunder may not be a success, but it loves its audience and wants us to have a great time.

Firth and Stone, appealing as they are as actors, are so disconnected as potential romantic leads it sometimes appears as if they’re barely in the same scene together.

Not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids and hidebound, authoritatian older people. It may, however, be the most shameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience.

At times, it’s really funny. More often, it’s “shocking” for the sake of shock value, gross for the sake of being gross, and stupid-goofy without much of a payoff.

[A] disappointingly listless thriller, in which at least four of the titular seven days feel like place-holders, with everyone holding their positions and regurgitating the same concerns and regrets and debates.

For all its obvious love of movies and of the shared experience of watching movies, Empire of Light is a decidedly downbeat effort that tries to say too much and ultimately winds up saying very little.

By the ending of the film, which is unconvincingly neat, I was distracted by too many questions to care about the answers.

Seemed kind of stuffy.