The sense of violation that this story entails is almost palpable, and "Our Father" certainly conveys that. If only the filmmakers had trusted the audience enough to present it in a more unadorned manner.

The kill count generally provides the requisite thrills, but everything else seems stitched together from genre clichés.

Tom Holland's kinetic performance is impressive, but it's in the service of an uneven film that too self-consciously works at mirroring the form of a novel.

A self-conscious effort to build a spy franchise around Gal Gadot, Heart of Stone plays like a poor woman’s “Mission: Impossible,” mostly thwarting even its star’s Wonder-ful charisma. Despite solid action moments scattered over its two hours, this Netflix movie plays like an inoffensive but lifeless addition to the “You might like” feature that, alas, you probably won’t.

The near-four-year gap between movies does help in one respect, allowing people to largely forget what left them unimpressed about the original.

Fun in places, this World War I era story was designed to expand the franchise but appears just as likely to end it.

Ricky Stanicky might be imaginary and doesn’t measure up to its promise, but in terms of that basket within the wrestler-turned-actor’s filmography, it at least fits Cena like a glove.

Ultimately, Next Goal Wins derives most of its modest charm from the film’s sheer unpretentiousness, which also makes it light enough to feel fairly disposable, despite being equipped with likable characters and scenic locales.

Mortal Kombat is within its rights taking the material semi-seriously, but does so by taking itself a little too seriously, given the rote nature of translating the game -- whatever its ongoing popularity in that form -- to the screen.

Vin Diesel doesn't drive that fast, but he's plenty furious in "Bloodshot," and with good reason. Adapted from a comic book, the movie casts the heavily muscled star as a zombie killing machine, in what amounts to a superhero origin story with more twists than expected, but ultimately a simple-minded excuse for lots and lots of action.

For anyone wondering why "The Princess" is premiering on Hulu in the US, not sister service Disney+, the movie answers that in the first five minutes, when the title character brutally dispatches a pair of guards sent into the tower where she's being held. While the timing seems right for a princess who rescues herself, there's precious little substance to this violent fantasy, featuring Joey King figuratively letting down her hair.

What “One Love” doesn’t do, ultimately, is provide enough material to distinguish the movie from the contours of an authorized biography or documentary. In that sense, the film pays tribute to Marley’s work but winds up hampered by a love for its subject that works against its ability to deliver major insights or rock-star-level drama.

Antebellum is built around a provocative twist, and it's a good one -- as well as one that definitely shouldn't be spoiled even a little. Once that revelation is absorbed, however, the movie becomes less distinctive and inspired, reflecting an attempt to tap into the zeitgeist that made "Get Out" a breakthrough, without the same ability to pay off the premise.

That doesn't translate into magic, but in terms of improving on the original, giving the stars some reasonably good material to play and delivering action within its PG parameters, Mistress of Evil pretty much threads the needle.

Even setting the expectations bar at a modest height, though, the movie doesn’t quite clear it – another case, in rom-com terms, where the idea of them, as a marquee matchup, proves superior to the execution.

Newman’s direction maintains the mystery through the gasps and sneers from the gallery during the trial sequences, leading to the eventual determination of Kya’s fate. It’s a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t overplay its hand.

Set in Berlin, the Speed-like conceit possesses a crisp and efficient stupidity before, predictably, running out of gas.

Thin as biopics go, the power of Abela’s portrayal elevates the film, providing a poignance and strength that’s the clearest motivation to go, go, go.

Simon Kinberg has worked on scripts for three previous X-Men films, and with his promotion here to writer and director, approaches the material with considerable conviction, as well as plenty of callbacks to the earlier movies. What he can't do, at least consistently, is make this story pop, or prevent the inevitable showdown -- with multiple parties engaged in a massive battle -- fully engaging, as opposed to devolving into a sort-of chaotic mess.

As much as the movie appears to yearn to jump-start the franchise, it seems to have forgotten to bother with a coherent script, leaving one to wonder how a film with this much action somehow manages to be so boring.

Proves just clever enough to come out on the right side of a split decision.

Yet even with the occasional dollop of dog-related humor, The Art of Racing in the Rain feels as ponderous as its title. While there have been plenty of movies that touch the heart through the relationship with our four-footed friends, if this one doesn't completely hit the skids, nor is it close to being the pick of the litter.

Granted, Scoob! appears more into recycling than reinvention -- it's more a snack than a meal -- but it does endeavor to make an old concept fresh and cool again in children's eyes. That might answer the question why the movie exists, but based on the results, nothing here merits an exclamation point.

Burr’s fans will doubtless find plenty to like in “Old Dads,” even if the movie sandpapers down his rough edges and causes him to question his cave-man mentality.

Far from a passion project, this Netflix film distinctly feels – as one of its writers says in the production notes – like a punchline in search of a movie, built on a soggy parade of sugary cameos that doesn’t provide much snap, crackle and pop.

Thanks to Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway it's mildly watchable, but mostly an artifact that might look better after a few years in the Covid time capsule.

A simple-minded strain of giant-robot combat. Much in need of a script tune-up, it’s a less-than-meets-the-eye summer-movie machine, and not a particularly well-oiled one.

Director James Wan again fills the screen with spectacle, some of it unevenly rendered, though even eye-popping digital effects couldn’t compensate for the frequent flatness of the dialogue and situations.

Simply put, Neeson has been in a bit of a rut, one that Ice Road exemplifies almost literally, since at several points in the movie the challenge involves extricating big trucks from slushy situations.

The main problem is there's a whole lot of scary out there this time of year, and Books of Blood winds up in a sort-of creative no-man's land. Even for undemanding souls, this is a pretty skeletal construct.

If the previous movie conjured a bit of excitement by eradicating everything that had transpired after the original, that sense of novelty has quickly worn off.

6 Underground proves so uneven in its tone and unrelenting in its volume that it's hard to imagine a hole deep enough in which to bury its silliness.

Black Adam features a protagonist of almost unlimited power, which only makes its puny script more conspicuous. Dwayne Johnson is saddled by a very limited range of expression as the ancient mystical being featured in DC’s latest superhero epic, a film that isn’t nearly as cool as its poster, while highlighting the inherent challenge of building stories around antiheroes.

It's possible to allow that Cinderella has its heart in the right place without concluding that the movie works. Credit where it's due for trying to squeeze the material into some new clothes, but hoping isn't enough to make the shoe fit.

The tragedy associated with such stories could provide fertile territory, theoretically, for a good drama about what went wrong and who's ultimately responsible. That movie might get made someday, but Crisis isn't it.

Whatever the intricacies in Clancy's book, they're largely abandoned in a violent revenge tale that a few decades ago might have starred someone like Steven Seagal.

While some might find it possible to have fun by surrendering to the silliness, this bad moon doesn't quite rise even to the level of a guilty pleasure.

Although streaming provides a logical venue for this small-scale film, it's hard to think of a time or platform where this adaptation from British director Joe Wright ("Darkest Hour," "Atonement") would have felt satisfying, with an ill-considered, twisty finish that's a sizable letdown from the already so-so material preceding it.

A sort-of psychological, semi-erotic drama that, despite its literary pretensions, possesses roughly the intellectual heft of a perfume ad.

As thin star showcases go, it's an occasionally effective bit of comfort food, arriving as theaters reopen and served with a generous side of schmaltz.

A small-scale movie with a throwback drive-in feel that loses nothing in an at-home setting, and based on its minimal merit, has little to lose in any event.

A private eye who's "a sex machine to all the chicks," as the song went back in 1971, isn't exactly tailor-made to 2019. The new "Shaft" plays with that tension but yields mixed results, in an action comedy that's neither consistently funny nor especially exciting, despite Samuel L. Jackson's second stab at the part.

65 represents such an uninspired effort as to look like a fossil even before the credits roll.

The Goldfinch has a painting at its center, but despite a classy palette of ingredients conjures a lifeless, disjointed picture. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the movie represents a transparent bid to bring the book's prestige to the screen, but it's another case of literary underpinnings being lost in translation.

The film goes from Shark Week to shark weak – from playfully amusing to just plain stupid, eliciting enough laughs in the wrong places to make an advance screening virtually interactive.

Showcasing a thrown-together international team of female spies, "The 355" mostly feels like the pilot for a TV series, just with an inordinately good cast. Any movie in this genre that name-checks James Bond can't be all bad, but in terms of justifying a trip to the theater, nor is it good enough.

At its best this White Men Can’t Jump conveys the fragility of hoop dreams, while tackling what former players do with their lives once the promise of signing bonuses and sponsorship deals appears to have fizzled. (NBA star Blake Griffin, incidentally, is among the producers, joining several of his contemporaries in establishing a Hollywood toehold while still suiting up.)... On that level, at least, the movie works reasonably well. It’s the hitches in the rest of its game that prevent it, even as a streaming proposition, from being anything close to a slam dunk.

Spiral, however, doesn't chart its own course as much as simply try to have it both ways. And if the title implies a certain motion, the main direction the movie heads is essentially down the drain.

Most notable as a vehicle for Jason Momoa, this wannabe spectacle from “The Hunger Games” director Francis Lawrence serves up lots of special effects desperately in search of a story.

The nostalgia factor elevates an otherwise slow-building film that maintains an eerie creepiness before fumbling through a slightly muddled climactic act.

While the film says something that matters, for a show whose press notes proclaim it a "generation-defining Broadway phenomenon," a great deal appears to have been lost in translation.

Even taking it as a given that Disney’s animated classics will all receive live-action makeovers eventually, Pinocchio feels like an unnecessary exercise – a movie so flat that it never sparks to life, and barely feels as if it’s making the leap into a different medium.

Watching The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe serves as a reminder, to paraphrase Elton John’s musical tribute, that her candle burned out long before the exploitation of her ever did.

A movie that emphasizes its experiential and 3D qualities but lacks depth on every other front.

The movie conjures some of the goofy charms associated with the franchise, but sags in its midsection like "Endgame"-vintage Thor before nicely rallying at the finish.

As movies go, The Stand In certainly isn't a headliner. Yet like its title character, the movie and its star get about as much mileage as they can out of this opportunity.

For the most part, America: The Motion Picture seems too pleased with itself, an indulgence in silliness that feels woefully stretched at close to 100 minutes.

There’s something unfortunately symbolic about Jurassic World: Dominion, which combines old and new DNA from the near-three-decade-old franchise and generates a pretty mindless mess … an XL-sized mediocrity out of the gene pool’s shallow end.

Even grading on a curve, though, Murder Mystery is a tired, bordering on tiresome endeavor -- feeling like the pilot for a not-very-good TV show -- as well as a reminder that Netflix's content buffet caters to all kinds of tastes.

The movie, however, turns out to be the opposite of its central character -- namely, an underachiever, despite those advantages.

This animated sequel plucks enough of the right buttons to qualify as a reasonable addition to family movie time.

A nonstop sci-fi action movie that basically gets the job done with a plot that recalls Disney’s “Big Hero 6,” just with a lot more cursing.

The net effect is mildly enjoyable, creating a throwback caper film that showcases its stars doing what they do best, or rather for which they're best known.

Trigger Warning might not be packing anything unexpected in the chamber, but for those who come to it with the proper mind-set, the movie doesn’t wind up firing blanks either.

Debates over LeBron James' greatness compared to Michael Jordan on a basketball court will continue in perpetuity, but "Space Jam: A New Legacy" won't fuel much chatter about who's the better actor. Putting James in Jordan's shoes, as it were, isn't a bad idea in theory, but despite the odd moment of inspired Looney Tune-acy, this reboot shoots a very loud and thudding airball.

Home Sweet Home Alone is a very odd duck -- a movie that basically replicates the three-decades-old "Home Alone" template, but in a way that feels slightly weird and ill-conceived. Dropping on Disney+ in connection with the streaming service's two-year anniversary, it's a reminder that not all well-known intellectual property ought to be let out of the house.

Cast to the hilt, the film proves inventively twisty if a little convoluted, with the modest disclaimer that it’s not as good as the trailer makes it look.

A half-baked mob drama.

As Marvel movies go, "Morbius" is more a sip than a gulp, a relatively small-boned Jekyll-and-Hyde tale that moves another Spider-Man villain into the spotlight. Significantly better than "Venom" but still somewhat lacking in bite, this origin story perhaps inevitably grows more pallid toward the end but until then proves just tasty enough to merit the giving it a shot.

Alas, the characters and dialogue remain clunky, which shouldn’t be surprising given how derivative almost every beat of this is, down to the robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins.

Choose Love strains the storytelling to fit the gimmick, in a special that does its central character no favors by making her race through the trio of suitors suddenly in her life.

Whenever and wherever kids do see it, they're apt to enjoy it, while the theme reminds the adults in their lives that the differences and that come between families -- from politics to something as frivolous as a kid's bedroom -- finally aren't as significant as the deeper bonds that they share.

“Chris Evans and Ana de Armas” is about all that’s required to make the sales pitch for “Ghosted,” a spirited if familiar action-based romantic comedy, where the sparring banter generally outshines the muscular stunts. Throw in clever cameos and this Apple TV+ movie delivers on its promise of unpretentious fun.

Call it what you will, but this Chris Farley-David Spade re-teaming might as easily be dubbed "Tommy Boy 2," with a slightly less satisfying mix of broad physical gags and bodily function humor. Riding the recent wave of stupid cinema, Paramount figures to shear off good business among undemanding teen audiences with this fitfully funny entry, seemingly crafted for people who find the new "Saturday Night Live" too intellectually challenging.

A comedic dud that's aptly titled, since it makes loud noises without really needing to be seen. The one thing unlikely to be heard during this Netflix superhero spoof is a whole lot of laughter.

An extremely clever concept that takes the "spares" in the royal equation and turns them into a superhero group. While hardly a blockbuster, this Disney+ movie occupies the upper tier of the kind of movies that have proved quite popular for Disney Channel.

Apatow serves up some clever lines, but they're mostly lost in the overall noise and manic tone. While it's not necessarily too soon for a funny Covid movie, The Bubble labors to achieve a sought-after level of zaniness right up until the ending.

Like “It,” “Five Nights” wants to milk horror out of something associated with the innocence of childhood, and on that level the quirkiness of the visuals and initial moments of wit likely provide enough of what audiences want to survive, commercially speaking. Even so, the net result is another slice of horror that at best feels a little half-baked.

An R-rated gals-night-out comedy that, thanks to the talented cast, delivers a few genuinely amusing moments, but which falls a couple of glasses of chardonnay short of being a good time.

Cats isn't quite the unmitigated disaster that some feared -- or perversely hoped -- but it's not good, delivering a mostly incoherent adaptation of the long-running musical. An eclectic roster of stars claw out a few meager moments, but as screen experiences go, this is a memory best forgotten.

A new do-over that can barely generate enough heat to qualify as a thriller.

The Secret: Dare to Dream at best feels like a tepid distraction even for those receptive to its blueprint, far from the stuff that dreams are made of.

An expanded role for Salma Hayek is the newish wrinkle here, although that's hardly cause for an encore, or even an extra apostrophe.

“Rebel Moon” might look big and splashy, even on a TV screen, but in terms of working as drama, it’s less a rebel yell than a low-key rebel grunt.

Part heist movie, part family reunion, the film draws upon the most salient characteristics of the flabby feline, but mostly as an excuse to build a story that seems to crawl further from its origins with every passing frame.

Expanding upon King’s creepy concept represents a reasonably solid October-timed diversion amid the latest gluttonous wave of movies and TV derived from his writing.

A bloody mess.

Artemis Fowl isn't an unqualified good egg, but it's perfectly adequate, and the best of the kid-friendly movies redirected to streaming by coronavirus -- a low bar, admittedly, after "Trolls World Tour" and "Scoob!"

Again rated R after softening the rougher edges the last time, the body count is certainly off-the-charts high, but the action – under the guidance of stunt coordinator-turned-director Scott Waugh (“Need for Speed”) – is about as generic as these things get.

Diana: The Musical might make for a fine night out at the theater, but viewed on Netflix, what's billed as a "special presentation" becomes another shiny bauble that ultimately doesn't feel particularly special.

A fairly limp documentary.

The aroma of "Cats" has yet to fade, but Universal follows it up with another animal-related stinker in Dolittle. Robert Downey Jr. produced and stars in the title role, but even charitably taking into account that this was designed for a younger family audience, talking to animals in this retelling is somehow a colossal bore.

Ultimately, Madame Web might have sounded like an interesting experiment, and it sort of is, but the execution feels less like a fully realized film than an extended prologue for a movie to come.

American Skin is worth seeing, for the issues Parker seeks to address, even if it only partially works in leaving a mark.

That seed of potential, however, sails away on a tide of numbing stupidity.

Me You Madness serves as a reminder that you can clearly try to be funny, and still produce something that turns out to be kind of a joke.

Long Live Rock finally feels like an ode to this tribal art form that doesn't possess much appeal, despite its intentions, to those outside the tribe.

Trevor: The Musical can't help but feel partly encumbered by the "important" label, bringing lessons about self-acceptance to Disney+, whose parent company has been a ripe target for controversy. Yet this filmed version of the off-Broadway show works as a triumph for the young cast and especially the relatable lead, powering past its lesser aspects with infectious energy and a touching message.