There’s a good movie hidden somewhere inside 12 Strong, probably tucked between the many explosions and the endless exposition. Unfussily directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, this is a film that’s all business.

It should be impossible to turn this kind of raw material into such an interminable slog, and yet somehow writer and director Marc Abraham...managed to do just that.

The pleasure of good company is Robin’s occasionally winning quality.

For as well-intentioned as Jarecki may be, The King starts with a conclusion and works backward from there, and the results are more than a little tenuous.

Without Evans, this review’s grade would be significantly lower. But even with Evans, The Gray Man simply falls short of expectations. This is exactly the kind of diversion that’s such a treat when done well, and to see it done shabbily is just a massive disappointment. With better editing and a story less strewn with cliches, this could have been such good summer fun. Instead, at best it feels destined to slip from our minds, like so many other Netflix original films.

Orphan: First Kill is an almost impossible film to put your finger on, walking that incredible tightrope between chintzy direct-to-video schlock and purposeful, delightful camp. It looks like a BBC production shot for $5, but that leans even harder into its Lifetime-movie-on-crack presentation (and lets you grade its moments of visual grace on a massive curve).

According to Martin, the reason she wanted to make Little was that she so rarely saw people like herself on the screen. By that measure, the movie is a success. Fingers crossed for many more films like it in the coming years. And hopefully those movies will have an easier time being just one thing at a time, instead of trying to do everything at once and missing the mark in the way Little ultimately does.

Director Matthew Vaughn’s latest film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is an attempt at finding a balance somewhere between Austin Powers and James Bond that doesn’t quite succeed.

Through a distinct sense of style and riveting performances, Fennell’s debut is as bold as it is self-assured. Promising Young Woman eschews the familiar rape-revenge formula and injects a subversive female gaze, yet doesn’t cover any new ground that hasn’t been touched on already.

Neil Marshall’s Hellboy is a monster mash, loud and proud. Just bring a mop.

The action’s not flashy but competent, the set pieces are a bit easy to predict but deliver some reliable gags, and there are even a few meta moments that generate a chuckle or two.

Peterloo is traditional, dryly historical, and all sorts of other Merchant-Ivory slang for stuffy and challenging.

Despite the bait-and-switch of Chan’s limited presence in the film, The Foreigner is slightly better than it appears on paper. Chan and Brosnan offer believable, intense performances, and Campbell coaxes Chan’s style into an abrasive brutality with moments of occasional invention.

A passion project from the sing-talk god David Byrne, Contemporary Color is a concert film, but a finicky one, unstable and unfocused.

It’s a nasty piece of work, and one that at the very least stands as an active interruption of the escapist, family-friendly superhero fare currently dominating the industry.

Any sense of mystery or suspense quickly dissipates as the film returns again and again to repetitive and terse exchanges between Claire and Allison, whose revelations aren’t as surprising as they’re probably intended to be.

There’s a universe where Bullet Train works — lean harder into the gaudy, neon-pop anime aesthetic, ditch the too-clever character work, and add some honest-to-God jokes into the mix. Unfortunately, as it stands, Bullet Train feels like a lost spec script from the mid-2000s, given a fresh new coat of paint and a few script reworks by some Reddit teens.

Disappointing and confounding, Velvet Buzzsaw can ultimately be filed under What Could Have Been given the kind of talent involved.

Unfortunately, the reverence Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt seem to feel for the material ultimately dooms it to—if you’ll pardon the seafaring reference—float along in the doldrums, doomed to a driftless existence enlivened only by the occasional giant whale.

In holiday gift terms, it ain’t coal, and it ain’t a new car. It’s holiday socks, with a big ugly candy cane and some wavy text on it. Noelle’s cute for a minute, but you’re not going come back to this thing after January.

It’s not that funny, and feels like a ripoff of Animal House. Either way, The Wild Life is like the contractually obligated Crowe script that time forgot, his undisciplined id, playing with cheap thrills before he got a chance to express himself like a human storyteller in 1989.

This is a movie terrified to explore the interiority of its protagonist, and that approach will work just fine for the fans who just want to watch an uncomplicated ramble of a movie that plays all the hits.

The direction and editing are slick and workmanlike, letting the performers do the work without overplaying the limited setting in which most of the film takes place.

Inferno, much like its predecessors, simply can’t work its way out of the disappointing middle ground between a slick, technically competent thriller and tongue-in-cheek absurdity.

On top of trying to be a Big, Important Film, Jones is also meant to be a showcase for McConaughey’s post-Oscar relevance as a dramatic actor, and he turns in a solid but unmemorable lead performance.

It’s hard not to think of The Christmas Chronicles series as a series of wasted opportunities. Kurt Russell as Santa Claus, with Goldie Hawn his doting wife, is such an inspired casting choice that it’s a real bummer to see them do so little with it.

It’s fine if Hannah and her ragtag team just set out to make something fun. But it feels better-suited for playing on a reel-to-reel projector in someone’s basement than at the biggest film venue of SXSW.

Just don’t expect it to rewrite the genre playbook.