The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.

The Crow is not a waste of talent or resources; worse, it just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

It feels as if Guiraudie had two separate ideas for a contemporary urban comedy but couldn’t figure out how to develop either of them, so he stuck them in one script and hoped for the best.

While the film fumbles through a stripped down script and stumbles towards a surrealist attempt at reframing the threats of tourism, Waikiki still offers a voice from a Native Hawaiian about his homeland.

As they bond and converse, their conversations take on a closed aspect, never inviting us in to their increasingly close relationship. We remain watchers, appreciative of but never truly understanding the magic of Jane Birkin.

The script is half-baked and rushed, too much of a collage of other, better movies, and too coy to embrace its trashiness or ever go beyond PG-13 levels of horror.

It’s a shame that telling the Gibbons’ true story is a task too difficult for The Silent Twins, because there are real signs of promise.

Smallfoot really flounders with its obligatory message-mongering: a hodgepodge of didacticism about the importance of celebrating differences, asking questions, never fearing the unknown, or judging someone because they look different. Plenty of sound lessons in there, to be sure, but without a singular focus, they all blend into one.

Mr. Jones is stymied by the clarity of its hero’s crusade. Exasperatingly scattershot for most of its long running time, this restless and misshapen film suggests its director’s nagging discomfort with a straightforward history lesson.

Meredith Danluck’s State Like Sleep doesn’t really go anywhere, but it lulls you into enough of a stupor to enjoy the time it takes to get there.

For a film that chronicles the rise of a creator obsessed with reanimating the dead, Mary Shelley is utterly lifeless. It contains a sparkling and startlingly raw performance by Elle Fanning, but Haifaa Al-Mansour’s disappointing followup to her remarkable “Wadjda” doesn’t push beyond paint-by-numbers biopic posturing

Here is a tanned hide of a movie about the violence that results from conflicting ideas of what this country should be, and while the writer/director of “The Family Stone” lacks the chops to tell this story with the suspense it demands (or the hard-nosed focus required to mine something new from the myth it deconstructs), he fully understands the symbolic power of seeing these actors lose something they can never get back.

Even without the editing problems, it’s not clear that the narrative bones of Plainclothes were ever strong enough for the movie to work. The entire film often resembles a jumble of queer cinema archetypes executed better on many other occasions.

For all its stodgy touches, the film itself is like a cast-in-amber relic of the not-so-distant past.

It’s tough to watch a movie whose rootbound nostalgia keeps it from making good on the promise those stories made to show us something we’ve never seen before.

Shows none of the edgy storytelling looniness present in Stiller's finest work. Instead, every element seems calculated to service an easygoing commercial product that plays up the sentimentality of the scenario while rendering it inoffensively bland.

The funniest thing about Ricky Stanicky might be how recently its director was holding an Oscar on the stage of the Dolby Theater.

It’s about nice kids embracing their nerdiest passions, but Magic Camp can’t conjure up enough zing to put on the kind of show they deserve, something weird, something different, something even a little bit magical.

While the moral comes through loud and clear, that’s largely because the film’s bland depiction of slumberland isn’t a fraction as well-realized — or even as fun! — as its portrayal of the middle-class disillusionment that sends its young heroes scrambling into their subconscious’ every night.

There are some real missed opportunities here.

The director’s palliative need for drama often snuffs out the very truths that Peaceful vows to restore to the process of dying. Where is the tedium of sickness? The discomfort of suffering? The banality of waiting for it to be over?

At least there’s Slate, who gamely approaches her character with sensitivity and care (the actress also produced the project) and keeps Frances grounded even as The Sunlit Night sputters around her.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be.

We simply couldn’t get invested in this film, despite our very best efforts.

There’s an element of finding yourself, of course, because that’s what you do when you’re coming of age in a summer set film on screen, but the script feels underdeveloped still — a work in progress like Annie, herself.

This veritable “Eat, Pray, Hike” leaves no trace of originality or dramatic consequence. The advantages it has over the likes of “We Wish You a Married Christmas” and “Royally Ever After” are twofold: A likable cast, and dignified source material.

Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife hits the reboot button once more, this time carrying a familial cinematic legacy. Yet with all the nostalgia packed into the picture, its own refurbished identity is slightly compromised, functioning as a mimeograph of what came before it.

Perhaps suffering from the same kind of identity crisis as its heroine, Burger’s soggy mishmash of an adaptation struggles to thread the needle between pulpy fun and a probing character study.

Your Fat Friend succeeds in offering a nuanced portrayal of a writer and the views that made her beloved. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the film actively infantilizes the very demographic that it wants to elevate.

It’s a breathless ending, but the juice hardly feels worth the squeeze by the dying minutes of a noble failure that trims all of the trappings off of the slasher genre until there’s nothing left but a monster, an old mask, and — in Nash — a seriously promising talent who could use a little bit more to work with next time.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

The movie's uneven tone and ridiculous twists never quite gel, but Knock, Knock is so eager to please that it's hard not roll with the absurd depravity on display — which has been the essence of Roth's appeal from the outset.

Hooper's approach comes across as the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a stage play while the entire cast leans forward and blares each song into your eardrums.

There’s nowhere for the movie to go once it establishes that the safety love offers can also be the source of its undoing.

The film’s paradoxical obsession with preserving the humanity of warfare is compelling enough to keep things moving even when everything around it feels bland and gray, and the po-faced goofiness of the whole endeavor — emboldened by Mikael Håfström’s (“Escape Plan”) resourceful direction — is consistent in a way that makes you want to focus on the movie’s pulpy extrapolation of Asimovian concepts instead of how it beats them into the ground.

Page and Wood navigate this difficult, often half-formed material with great tenderness and surgical precision — together, through thick and thin, they convey a feeling of great personal growth, revealing new wrinkles to their roles long after Rozema’s camera has stopped looking for them.

Wittrock and Chao are both enormously likeable in their roles, even if Basilone’s derivative script often dilutes the organic chemistry between them in order to maintain the integrity of its plot.

Its low-key religious underpinnings — truly, no one even hauls out a Bible during the entire film — likely won’t rankle the secular set, even as Christian kids will be happy to see their worldview reflected by way of a mild crowd-pleaser. It’s hammy, it’s predictable, it’s a little silly, but what YA musical isn’t?

The premise begs to provoke contentious debate around privacy laws in an age of boundless innovation, but it can’t seem to find steady footing in that dialogue, in part because it lacks a substantial means of asking the right questions.

A well-intentioned and resolutely minor period drama, "Big Eyes" isn't exactly a catastrophe, but its bland depiction of a fascinating story perhaps better served by the documentary treatment shows no evidence of the visionary creator behind the camera.

See How They Run packs a lot of characters into a thin story that leaves little room for the considerable talent to stand out. It may be inspired by the greatest mystery writer of all time, but it’s an uninspired copy at best.

Friend Request packs some fun scares and twists, but it’s a film best saved for a late-night Netflix binge when nothing better is on.

Welcome to the world of white people problems, ground zero for the strain of American comedies that Apatow does best. But does he really?

Cave’s work here is weighed down by a tensionless Andrew Sodorski-penned script that lacks intrigue and takes about an hour and a half to get going. Then, the movie is over.

Just like there’s something cruel about the way Dangerous Animals treats women, there’s also something thoughtless about the way it deploys its undersea threats. Sure, they’re not ultimately the bad guys, but haven’t they suffered enough bad press over the years?

Woodshock offers a whole lot to look at, but not all that much to see.

It’s hard to imagine a subject better-suited to some gooey schmaltz that might wet a few cheeks and inspire people to do something positive for a change. And yet, Dana Nachman’s “Dear Santa” does everything in its power to complicate what should’ve been the easiest slam dunk in documentary history.

On the Basis of Sex plays like a sunny fantasy from a more optimistic age.

In some ways, Dream Team feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. By leaning into its low effort, too-cool-to-care aesthetic, it subliminally tells audiences that anyone offering substantial criticisms is just a square who didn’t get it.

A tale of romance and revenge that culminates in a shootout, The Dead Don’t Hurt is not a total misfire. There are moments of excitement, and the film’s semi-nonlinearity allows for a few midpoint surprises about characters we thought we knew.

The movie stumbles through its shaggy comedy aesthetic with mixed results.

The film ultimately suffers from an overfamiliarity in not just construction but content; the “WeWork” documentary paints a broad portrait of what happened without expanding on (or even including) details that made previous exposés so juicy.

The resulting 119-minute pileup of showdowns and one-liners is an undeniably tighter, more engaging experience. It’s also a tired, conventional attempt to play by the rules, with “hold for laughs” moments shoehorned between rapid-fire action — a begrudging concession that the Marvel formula works, and a shameless attempt to replicate it.

Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, American Underdog is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships.

While this film probably needed more time in the storytelling doghouse, Landry Jones’ performance is a lovely watch.

One way or the other, the biggest issue with “The Story of Fire Saga” is that most of it is just too limp and anodyne to register.

The suspense builds creepily enough, with a classic fake-out in a strong first act. But when the movie turns into full-blown horror, which it eventually sort of does, the pacing of the violence is all out of whack.

Taut and well-acted as this queasy little thriller can be, its unflinching tale of corporate authoritarianism is much too streamlined to reflect the emotional truth of watching totalitarianism in motion. The result is a hollow synecdoche of today’s America that seems timely and ridiculous in equal measure.

There’s decent fun to be had in this crafty and contained Aussie skin-crawler (a low-budget affair that doesn’t scrimp when it comes to its WETA-created monster), but Sting is a bit too small for its massive alien spider to maneuver itself in unexpected ways, and the tender human story that Roache-Turner weaves around her lacks the bite it needs to melt your heart or liquify any of your other organs.

Attempts to ride the film through its own uncomfortable wavelength do offer some treats, even if they all come with caveats.

There’s no denying the purity of Fleming’s intentions (the movie’s end credits even play over a montage of same-sex parents), but Ideal Home is too cartoonish to meaningfully celebrate the beauty of the families we choose, and too casual to accomplish much else.

On some level you can only give a remake so much blame for making the same mistakes as its predecessor, but this one certainly doesn’t get credit for fixing them either.

The younger Mann goes through the motions of a gritty murder mystery with plenty of technical proficiency but only a modicum of soul. The Mann touch is not only in the DNA of the director but in her movie, which inadvertently makes the case that atmosphere is more hereditary than innovation.

Anaconda constricts its premise a little tighter as it moves along (if only because the absurdity ratchets up in a way that forces the film to adopt a clearer sense of itself), and there are some undeniably amusing bits of stupidity along the way.

The film, adapted by Ryan Swanson and Platte F. Clark & Darin McDaniel from Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel of the same name, is much more interested in providing spiritual lessons than narrative excitement.

Though it is not an unpleasant experience, it is a limp one.

Those with buy-in might find themselves won over, as, on its own terms, Marcello Mio offers a heartfelt and even occasionally moving show of artistic trust and collaboration, playing as an unambiguous love note from a filmmaker to his favorite star.

Even at its most entertaining, “Imaginary” has about as much staying power as the figments of imagination that give it its name. Just like your childhood imaginary friend, you’ll probably forget about it pretty quickly.

In a better world, Aquaman would excel at delivering an ecological message to the masses. But all the fish in the sea can’t salvage a movie that refuses to go more than surface deep.

When Landon moves away from the darker parts of the film, opting to play up the campier elements of a mostly silly story, Happy Death Day is the kind of dizzy fun as slasher horror can possibly be. Too bad then that all that goodwill has to reset every night, pushing everything back to square one just as it was getting good, murderously so.

There is precious little here that hasn’t already been more cogently unpacked somewhere else.

The actor's pathos and deadpan skills are buried in the material, which also suffers from a continuous lack of inspiration. It's high-minded entertainment with low ambition.

A lazily plotted and largely generic thriller.

Some movies suffer because of bad timing. Shell wouldn’t be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it fares especially poorly against Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a better and more outrageous film that deals in very similar subject matter.

Despite promising a welcome throwback to the sort of down-and-out milieu that authors like Graham Greene once put on the map, this Lawrence Osborne adaptation winds up feeling like nothing so much as a quintessential Netflix movie: Easy to watch and impossible to care about.

All you’re left with is the echo of what was better before. You watch only able to wish Weaving was given more to work with than this, or, at the very least, greater room for her iconic scream to rattle you once more.

“The most original movie of the year?” Not quite. But sometimes, if a film is this hard to sell, perhaps that’s a sign that it shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

If there’s a core flaw to Rhinegold, it’s that you walk out of it knowing a lot about its subject’s biography but almost nothing about who he truly is.

The sincerity of Without Blood can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.

Portman's screenplay shortchanges the dramatic potential of the material in favor of a by-the-numbers period piece.

Even in their most intimate scene, Mary and Charlotte and their love remain at a remove.

Halverson is too far on the deep end to provide us with digestible storytelling, and Cowperthwaite, who spends the movie jumping in nonlinear fashion from one year to the next, is in no rush to make the larger picture easier to see.

Like many (or all) of the movies Burton has made this century, Dumbo is a shallow pop spectacle that’s forced to rely on its more superficial charms; unlike many (or all) of those other movies, this one actually has superficial charms on which to rely.

Qhile the 90-year-old Pennebaker doesn't appear to deviate from the observational aesthetic that has defined his life's work, Unlocking the Cage is nevertheless an ill-fitting first for he and his partner: an issue-based film.

The series’ third outing, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, falls into precisely the same traps as its predecessor, offering up an unwieldy, mostly unsettling mash-up of adult themes and childish whimsy, made still more inscrutable by too many subplots, too many characters, and a tone that veers wildly off-course at every possible turn.

In tying its story to the saga of Daniel LaRusso, Karate Kid: Legends resorts to repeating his journey entirely, leading to a martial arts film that has limited new moves compared to what audiences have seen 40 years ago.

Alex Winter’s amusing but slight film is a wacky romp about intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse, though that’s pretty obvious from any given promotional image. As crazy as the movie purports to be, there’s never an unexpected moment. Thankfully, this turns out to be less of a problem than it should be.

Zellweger inhabits the role of the jaded, soul-searching musical icon reasonably well within a dreary and unremarkable saga that finds her grappling with her past, contending with pill-popping addictions and a broken family. It’s a familiar story that Judy struggles to freshen up, at least until Zellweger takes the mic.

Sarah's need to save her brother provides the initial raison d'être, but with the mystery is resolved early on Sarah's Key turns into a flimsy meditation on grief.

It's painful to watch Red Hook Summer stumble, because the man behind it has tried so hard to get his groove back. However, it's energizing in the fleeting moments when he does just that.

The indisputable highlight of “Jewel Thief” is watching Khan enjoy himself (if he’s not, that just makes the acting more brilliant) even when the filmmakers don’t seem to encourage it.

Fans of Soman Chainani’s popular fantasy series might feel as if a giant bone bird swooped out of the sky and carried them to streaming heaven, but not even Charlize Theron’s Mad Hatter cosplay or Michelle Yeoh’s cameo as a professor of smiling will be enough to enchant a wider audience to such a painfully overworked saga of friendship.

Too adult for kids, too childlike for adults, and too muddled for the motley lot of misfits and dreamers who just want to think different.

Aftershock has no earth-shattering revelations to make its mayhem stand out in the wreckage.

Benoît Jacquot’s The Diary of a Chambermaid is a gorgeously mounted and dramatically inert bit of fluff that drapes itself over a smoldering Léa Seydoux but never manages to catch fire.

Sandberg unquestionably has an eye for a great horror motif — and, given the frequent use of absolutely gut-churning ambient sounds and hair-raising scratching noises, an ear for it, too — and he’s assembled a strong cast to tell Heisserer’s expanded story, but even those smart decisions and clear talents can’t push Lights Out to brighter heights.

A diverting Western that’s almost worth seeing for the unsaddled performances that director Vincent D’Onofrio gets from his cast, The Kid only makes a few small adjustments to the dustiest of American genres, but these errant wrinkles — a far cry from any serious revisionism — provide much of the fun.

This goofy-ass, clumsily assembled Saturday morning cartoon of a movie might as well be called “Godzilla Minus Everything,” if only because the more accurate “Godzilla Minus Everything Plus Dan Stevens in a Hawaiian Shirt” wouldn’t fit on a marquee.