Wirkola, who’s best known for his two “Dead Snow” zombie movies, struggles to tackle a more serious-minded tone this time around.

When The Lovers and the Despot finally crawls to a close, you’re left with one thought above all others: This could make for a really great movie, some day.

These days, it’s almost refreshing to see a big dumb garbage sequel that doesn’t have any other agend4.

Despite the film’s gripping final chapter, its heroic Czechoslovakian characters are completely disconnected from the rest of the country, much like their struggle has been omitted from the cinematic legacy of the war they helped to win.

Sure, the jump-scares are wild; the beatings are bananas; and at a certain point, you have to laugh. But Ben deserved better than a cage so primitive and a better owner might’ve really let him run free.

In a film where several of the major story beats fall somewhere between far-fetched and Tolkien-level fantasy, it’s impossible not to appreciate the raw human texture that Haddish brings to her under-written role.

"One Love” plods through an inert, and-then-this-happened structure that neglects to illuminate or entertain. It’s watchable only because of performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch, who admirably attempt to imbue Bob and Rita Marley, respectively, with genuine life absent from the rest of the film.

Part road-film, part-gambling excursion, and part-bromance, the film does show the influence of its talented directors. But falters when it comes down the story itself.

By all rights, it should be a heartwarming comedy with a few more tender moments. Instead, Hearts Beat Loud operates like a sad drama with a few moments that might make you smile. We knew punk was dead, but the comedy doesn’t have to be.

Even as the film’s scenes begin stacking into an unstable Jenga tower of contrivances, the turbulent father-son dynamic continues to hold strong.

Dornan and Mackie are adrift through most of this movie, but the heartfelt thrum of their final scene together is a testament to the intrinsic humanity of their performances — and to the grace of a visionary filmmaking team that’s capable of creating the most beautiful moments, even if they often lose sight of the most effective way of reaching them.

This trite Irish trifle about a girls trip to Lourdes is so chalky and underbaked that its all-star cast (Laura Linney! Kathy Bates! Stephen Rea!) is left no choice but to chew on the scenery.

The movie casts a wide net, but doesn't explore its themes long enough to make any substantial points. Despite its authentic setting, Ten Thousand Saints never gets around to providing a gratifying story to accompany it.

Writer-director David Ayer’s brash, assaultive Brad Pitt drama manages some evocative imagery and achieves visceral impact by enacting a hellacious atmosphere that never lets up — but Ayer takes the mission too literally, and winds up literally lost in the fog of war.

Berman and Pulcini’s movie feels as if it’s more haunted by unrealized potential than anything else.

Gigi is an invaluable role model to young trans people in her ferocious courage and undeniable fabulousness, but the film is little more than a celebration of that.

Gates only pokes fun at how America casts itself until she gets distracted by a cinematic fantasy of her own.

Unforgettable treats this central struggle over the heart of a family in the same way that a recent Ken Watanabe character does, by surveying the battlefield and coming to a simple, definitive conclusion: “Let them fight.”

Though salvaged in parts by Lindon’s impassioned performance and a few perceptive asides that hint at a better version of the events, At War is mostly a redundant portrait of working-class struggles that does more to belittle the efforts of its subjects than position them in galvanizing terms.

It’s an unabashed freewheeling mess of CGI explosions, fast-talking strategies and shiny metal monstrosities clashing in epic battles. And it’s actually kind of fun, in an infuriating sort of way, to watch the most ridiculous Hollywood movie of the year do its thing.

The Gift to Stalin could have benefited from a less complex approach, something that would've actually hit the notes the filmmaker had aimed for. Unfortunately, he needed to try it all. Little of it succeeds, which can be rather draining at times, and not in the way he intended it to be.

The innumerable change-ups in The Perfect Host only pretend to take the plot in new directions. In reality, each new twist is perfectly derivative, which leads to a host of problems.

Yes, Waititi’s sugary fantasy unearths an endearing quality in the most unlikely places. But in the process, it buries the awful truth.

For all of the garishly shiny lens flairs that gleam off our heroes’ metallic heads, Transformers One feels rusted over, offering a predictable, formulaic product as generic as its “working title that never got dropped” name.

The film is peppered with comedic delight. Coogan’s deadpan gravitas leads the way in a cast that mostly delivers.

While there are a few truly moving detours along the way . . . Uncle Frank fumbles through its fairy-tale finale so fast that it sours everything that came before.

Unfortunately, in its valiant effort to avoid cliches, the story falls flat. By focusing on what not to do, there’s just not a lot there.

Whereas "The Apostle" was a passionate effort for Duvall that he spent years pulling together, Wild Horses feels more like a vanity project that eschews polished storytelling for half-baked conceits.

Maïwenn's evidently tight control over her performances once again shows its strength within the context of individual scenes, where the characters' attitudes often convincingly shift from blithe to furious in a matter of minutes. But the overall arc of their developing relationship fails to convince.

In not knowing whether it wants to be a heartfelt, chilling or activist story, Irada ends up being none, suggesting that perhaps good intentions aren’t always enough.

If not for Newton and Sprouse’s performances, “Lisa Frankenstein” would be fully embalmed well before Lisa realizes that she’s totally, butt-crazy in love with the shambling corpse she hides in her bedroom.

The romantic scenes are cute, but they feel at odds with the drama. The laughs land like chuckles, the love registers as mere fondness, and the salient observation that countries recast themselves during wartime is reduced to a fleeting detail.

Not only is it the only movie she hasn’t written from scratch, and the only movie she hasn’t centered on a woman, it’s also the only movie Holofcener hasn’t been able to make into something more than the sum of its parts.

Whenever things seem really dire, Martin saunters in with attitude to spare, and puts everything in perspective. With talent that big, the rest of the movie seems little by comparison.

The work of everyone involved — from the sleepy performances to the crew doing an okay but never exemplary job — suggests a first draft, a sense of wanting to get the thing out and move on. At every minute of “Mercy,” you can practically hear the filmmakers saying: “Eh, it’s January. Good enough."

Simply put, Cox is the saving grace of his latest feature, Prisoner’s Daughter, a predictable family drama that has heart thanks to grounding performances by Cox, Ernie Hudson, and breakout child star Christopher Convery. The rest, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

There’s some fun to be had in the Brando-like flickers of Cage’s performance, but Polsky’s film is too practical and logic-driven to indulge them.

It turns a major tragedy into a minor disaster movie.

Where “Bajrangi” effectively harnessed the actor’s mega-star persona into a simple character that still — in true Salman tradition — had a significant moral undertone, Tubelight struggles to strike that balance, too often veering into naivety and exaggeration both in terms of performance and narrative.

If there’s any interiority to Fields, Toller isn’t interested in finding it; Danny Says would much rather provide the umpteenth account of Andy Warhol’s social circle (to mention but one of the movie’s many asides) than dig beneath the dirt in an attempt to learn more about one of the key figures who helped shape that scene.

A well-intentioned but wearisome jolt of prefab holiday cheer.

This may be a forgettable movie about the forgotten man — a blue-collar morality play disguised as a very contrived hostage crisis — but at least it’s shlock with something on its mind.

The result is a movie that registers as slight by its end, despite the talent found within its confines. What is nonetheless evident, however, is that Bemba and Gohourou are worth watching as they go forward in their careers.

Despite a strong start, Bertino’s grim and gruesome The Dark and the Wicked never coalesces into anything more than a collection of chilling images and a paper-thin logic.

Next Goal Wins is largely a misfire, one that’s too unwilling to stop kidding around for even the most important of moments.

This is irrefutably Kinnaman’s movie, but Connolly fatally undervalues him. He doesn’t trust his actor to walk the emotional tightrope his film stretches taut before him, to sell us on the idea of a father digging himself deeper into a hole of his own design.

The Fabulous Four might feel like a series of math problems that don’t quite add up, but it’s still an enjoyable time at the movies — especially if you choose to gobble down gummies at the same rate as the “geriatric” cast of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s raucous comedy.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of day-old champagne: the taste is almost there, but the bubbles disappeared long ago.

This is a bizarre movie that disappears up its own empty gastrointestinal tract.

Margherita's failure to elaborate on her grief is mirrored in Moretti's failure to construct a coherent film where the spectator can find a way into its meaning, rather than being caught in a confused web of suggestions, half-baked ideas and circular exposition.

We’re left with something handsome but safe, a film that tries to bridge the gap between children’s characters and adult concerns without ever anchoring itself to either side.

While McCarthy and Spencer do their damndest to make the family-friendly feature work — McCarthy in particular brings real texture to her charming slacker with a heart of gold, a role she’s played so many times before — Thunder Force isn’t clever enough to break new ground in the superhero milieu, nor is it silly enough to mine its material for the kind of jokes that would make it distinctive.

I’m not quite sure how this group of actors came together or how any of the ideas coalesce into something that a) makes sense or b) is meant to make us feel anything. It’s impenetrable with no intellect: a true curio in the worst way.

A clever but unformed hunk of speculative science-fiction.

Stars Alexander Skarsgärd and Mia Goth deliver terrifically unhinged performances as a failing novelist and a mysterious tour guide, and Cronenberg has absolutely no shortage of original ideas, but the whole thing feels bloodless, cold and clammy as a speculum.

The movie is like one thin satiric lark inexplicably slowed down to the point of lethargy.

Murder Mystery 2 is the perfect background noise that Netflix has built an empire out of.

While there are some riches to be found under the surface for anyone who feels like watching this with a flow chart, Zhang is so clearly seduced by the spell of his own movie magic that everything else feels like an inadvertent side effect. He’s on his side, and he’ll forge whatever strategic alliances he needs to in order to stay there.

There’s no question there is much to admire about both Vieira de Mello and Moura’s soaring portrayal of him, but it’s all buried under the weight of a biopic too afraid to really show the truth about a flawed world, and a flawed man who loved it.

Bad Hair has plenty to say — about the plight of black women in particular and blackness in popular culture in general — but his movie can’t settle on laughing off the conflict or regarding it with dread. Instead, it settles on lingering in the knotted chaos, hoping that the message still burns.

Despite building their adaptation around the cyclical predictability of American capitalism, Gore and Kulash can’t help but twist history’s biggest toy craze into a hollow and half-invented corporate fantasy about three women who bought low, sold high, and reinvested all the profits in themselves. If only it were that easy.

A predictably terrific Sarah Snook goes full-blown feral in the Australian horror movie Run Rabbit Run, but its final-act destination isn’t enough to justify the journey.

The “aw shucks” small town vibe of it all, complete with Hamm being seen as the most eligible bachelor around, eventually codes Maggie Moore(s) as more of a rom-com than a murder mystery. But weighed down with a cliched script and tired acting, the film doesn’t fully land either genre seamlessly.

Tucked into the melodrama of Regretting You, there is a sweet story about a mother and daughter trying to figure things out, but the reliance on their outside romances often detracts from it. That’s a shame.

Voyeur is framed as the story of one observer trying to clarify another, but Kane and Koury lose sight of their own film, which is really a story about two men so desperate to hear the sound of their own voices that they deluded themselves into thinking they had something to say. Voyeur falls right into their trap.

Truth to Power is a promotional film, not a work of journalism.

At their worst, Affleck’s roles are stern and lifeless without soul, pretty sculptures with nothing inside. It was only a matter of time before he made a movie that embodied that lesser side of his career.

There are flashes of subtle resentment to Williams’ performance that register as some of her best work in ages, so it’s unfortunate that the movie’s calculated assemblage of sentimental beats dominate the show.

Terrible green screen, globs of digital blood, and record-scratch sound effects in place of actual jokes are only potholes along the road for a summer movie that knows what it is, and is slightly less afraid to embrace that than its previous iteration was.

Braff hasn't made another generational statement, but rather a regurgitation of tropes that got old a long time ago.

In a movie world crowded with everyone eager to make their own special superhero stand out, this one doesn’t pack much of a punch.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism isn’t funny enough to get away with so few genuine scares, and it isn’t scary enough to save most of its biggest laughs for the final act.

The film’s tone is less cheeky and more serious, especially in the first half, but Vaughn and co-screenwriter Karl Gajdusek have their cake and eat it too by doling out standard “Kingsman”-esque thrills in between heady conversations about non-violence, colonialism, and the horrors of war.

The well-intentioned and wincingly naive work of a white filmmaker who recognizes the need for change but fails to comprehend the full extent of the problem, “Women in Blue” is most valuable as yet another reminder that defunding the police isn’t a radical position so much as it’s the only feasible way forward; it’s the difference between moving deck chairs around the Titanic and building a safer boat.

If there’s much about her debut that left me wishing the apple had fallen a little further from the tree, there’s also no denying that the “Unbreakable” filmmaker’s daughter has the skill to follow in her father’s footsteps, which she does here even when the material is begging her to blaze her own trail.

There are sparks of chemistry between Ryan and Duchovny that feel reminiscent of better rom-coms, although none quite matching the films that Ryan is most known for.

Materna has some good ideas, but the surrounding landscape feels generic.

Bogged down by flashbacks and flash forwards, The Bastards pointlessly mixes up its ingredients, creating a distancing effect from the tangible sadness at its core. The result is the rare case of a movie that confirms its maker's skill while wasting it on useless ambition.

It’s colorful and madcap and zany, and while that might not make it suitable for all audiences, it will delight the very one it is made for. That’s fine for now, but if this franchise wants to survive, the next entry will have to take on a much tougher mission: stay silly, but get a whole lot smarter.

Another End knows that we’ll never stop trying to cheat death (or at least to deny it for as long as we can), but Messina’s film is so entranced by the dull flame of that desire that it fails to consider what it might illuminate about the darkness that surrounds it.

Maybe this is exactly the biopic that Kenney would want, silly and bittersweet and laced with regret. Unfortunately, the film is just good enough to convince us that he deserved better.

When all the dust settles, we’re left right where we started, and with nothing to show for it but a fleeting reminder that peace is impossible without negotiation. It’s a lesson that history has failed to teach us, filtered through a movie that doesn’t understand why.

The movie struggles to translate its noble aims to compelling drama, with any audience investment merely being a byproduct of the inherently high stakes.

The best thing you can say about Stockholm is that it’s good enough to prove that a much better film could be made from this story.

[Dolan's] crafted the semblance of a substantial movie that never quite gets where it was supposed to go.

At the very least, it seems safe to assume that Doda wouldn’t mind how this documentary casts her as a quasi-deliberate revolutionary, but McKenzie and Parker lack the intel to see any deeper into Doda’s bimbo savviness, just as they lack the ambition to explore whether intentionality even matters when it comes to changing the world.

In practice, mincing up the miniseries’ plot without losing any of its main ingredients — and even adding several new ones to the mix, including a whopper of a third act twist that turns Ruth into a martyr and all but completely erodes the movie’s emotional core — results in an undercooked stew that isn’t given the time it needs to find any real flavor of its own.

Even as it makes the facile Palin-for-president case, fence-sitters will find themselves non-plussed and existing Palin haters won't budge.

Aside from the thrill of its lavish sets and costumes, there isn’t much new to offer in this Beauty and the Beast.

While there’s nothing egregiously cynical about the film’s nature or design, its forensic tone belies the familiarity of its evidence, and its subject has already been too well-excavated for the sincerity of Monroe’s efforts to shake off that signature true-crime stink (the pungent stench of a once-proud medium that’s been left to rot on streaming).

Hot Milk dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known.

The middling but enjoyable Voyagers is meant to be a timeless parable about the primitive essence of human nature; if its space-age shenanigans are broadly identical to the beats of a book William Golding wrote about a group of preadolescent boys who crash on a deserted island during World War II, that’s more of a feature than it is a bug.

Capernaum is a movie that wants its audience to empathize with its protagonist so intensely that you agree he should never have been born. It’s a fascinating (if obviously counterintuitive) approach, but one that’s frustrated by the literalness with which Labaki unpacks it.

The first part of the problem is that Donowho’s competent but uncompelling oater doesn’t have enough fresh meat on its bones to fill out its Western cosplay.

Ultimately Holder argues that — despite gentrification — this place is still magical, except we never see any of the magic of which she speaks. We see a fantasy land, but that’s not the same thing as the true magic the city can offer.

The original Planet of the Apes is a hard act to follow, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes isn’t really up to the challenge.

Even Allen himself, appearing in front of the camera for his first role since 2005's "Scoop," looks a little lost in the mess.

The film that exists may fill in some temporary vacuum in a season without capacity-level crowds on Saturday nights and evenings. But those who want something more may have to wait a little longer.