It’s only when River Runs Red gets to about the hour mark that a story begins to cohere. Up until that point, it had taken the most perfunctory of stabs at being a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about police shootings.

Some of the visual compositions are impressive to look at, but the overall self-consciousness of the enterprise, paltry attempts at wit such as describing Bacon as “a screaming queen who painted the screaming Pope,” and basic thinness of this wistfully wish-fulfilment material make it hard for a viewer to stay involved.

The filmmakers believe they have better emotional beats at the end than what that hack Dr. Seuss came up with—and in the process make the Grinch pathetic and practically groveling.

Trading “Dueling Banjos” and gut-wrenching tension for haphazard plotting and an impromptu group singalong of an original folk tune, the results are disappointing on a number of levels.

Although the film hits all the time-marks of cinematic storytelling, the characters are broad, the music intrusive, and the dialogue made-for-TV-movie-esque. Just because the plot is swift does not mean the story compels.

Anyone happening to come across Silencio should just as well move on: There’s nothing to see here.

The first-time filmmakers have little idea of pace, or imagery. Flatly lit, squarely staged, the scenes just plod on.

There are no surprises, and the addition of a supposedly mysterious killer fails to add any mystery.

The level of internal anger in this flick obliterates all semblance of tone. Its wafting from giddy to gritty and back is unnerving, when not downright annoying.

Why is she attracted to him? For that matter, why are we watching?

The direction by Ruben Fleischer (Zomebieland, Gangster Squad) is oddly slapdash, and hardly does justice to the skills of his cast or his own chops as a comedic filmmaker. Hardy squeezes some baffled comedy out of his schizoid shtick, but there just isn’t much here for him to work with.

It is a tremendous disappointment to find such estimable folk meandering in an only intermittently amusing story of no clear point or theme.

From the get-go, Levinson makes every wrongheaded directorial decision imaginable in an apparent effort to make one loathe Assassination Nation—and his success in that regard proves this teensploitation schlock’s lone triumph.

Should there not be enough travail or unhappiness in your life, this dud’s for you.

Peppermint is a bloody crowd-pleaser, but it’s fundamentally forgettable, the kind of movie whose details begin to disappear the moment the credits roll.

The Nun resorts to makeup effects to put a frightening face on its supposedly scary sisters.

The bottom line is that Reprisal is an extremely silly movie doing its damnedest to look tough and gritty and clever, none of which it is. In fact, it’s both tediously formulaic and weirdly puzzling.

Slim movies like this live or die based on their personal charm, and the sour Destination Wedding soon wheezes its way into the ICU.

the film, set in 2009, misses its comic target by a mile, resulting in a dumbfounding collision of unsympathetic characters always choosing the most moronic thing to do in any given situation.

If you expect the humor to be any smarter or more original than “Hey, look, this puppet has pubes!,” you’re going to walk out disappointed.

In the end, Skate Kitchen is a frustrating film that’s supposed to elicit a heady sense of freedom, girl power and a rush of sisterhood. It doesn’t. Instead, one is left feeling vaguely hollow.

The Darkest Minds isn’t atrocious so much as it’s just plain dull, which is a worse kind of bad to be.

Searching is so smart about how we interact with computers that it's surprising how lame it is about moviemaking basics like characters and plot.

Unfriended: Dark Web doesn’t deserve your faves or your retweets. Instead, it’s a regrettably stupid horror sequel that was better left in the drafts folder.

Director Matthew Ross does the near-impossible in Siberia: He turns a Keanu Reeves vehicle about sex, diamonds and the Russian mob into a dreary, endless slog.

a plodding film with ill-placed, klutzy exposition and credibility-defying and/or colorless characters that are spokespersons for various predictable viewpoints.

Spiral is a classic example of diffuse, all-over-the-map storytelling that avoids addressing its fraught subject in any fresh way; indeed, the core topic often disappears from the narrative altogether.

The King tries to reclaim Presley by untangling the myths surrounding him. But with its dubious assertions and utter lack of empathy for its subject and his milieu, all The King ends up doing is further cloud our understanding of the musician.