There’s some fun to be had in watching Echo Valley shift into a battle of wits between Moore and Gleeson, as both actors mine devious nuance from the thin gruel of a paperback thriller.

While its bleak assessment of American intelligence operatives imbues the story with some modicum of topicality, the specifics never keep pace. The movie becomes a bland action-drama lacking the sophistication to deal with its weightier themes. As a promising endeavor hacked to pieces, the movie's fate mirrors its anti-hero's own failed ambition.

When Lindon isn’t at the mercy of her but-I’m-a-teenager ruse, Spring Blossom and its filmmaker get a chance to show off some real creative sparks, including a trio of musical numbers that offer cinematic style and emotional flair.

Twohy seems to have long ago lost the thread of what Bubble & Squeak was really trying to say and the inventive ways he might say it.

The action is hardly dull, but the sheer disconnect between the wowee zowee immediacy of the race footage and the mezzo mezzo excitement it inspires suggests that tuning out the noise isn’t as easy as Sonny Hayes might seem to think.

It’s a lot for one film, and Project Power never revs up enough gusto to power through its biggest, best ideas and deliver on their promise. Perhaps the (inevitable) sequel can pack more juice.

While Carrillo-Gailey’s book was flinty and fresh, A Nice Girl Like You is more predictable than wild, more staid than sexy, but at least Hale injects some refreshing fun into the outing.

Having laid out the scenario, Brandt drags it through the motions of a tired procedural.

My Policeman isn’t not arresting, and that’s thanks to the work of David Dawson and Emma Corrin, and not the film’s top biller, who was never the lead at all.

While The Trip to Italy offers all the pleasures of a posh holiday accompanied by two of the most inventive comedians today, the improvisation here lacks the total unexpectedness that the first enjoyed.

Akin ultimately fails to make the material work, especially in the second half of the film, when it develops into a disappointing adventure story.

The Lodge seems more content to hover in the disquieting mood than make anything substantial out of it. ... As it continues along an aimless trajectory, The Lodge proves that even horrible events can be a deadly bore.

Told with no frills, less personality, and just enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), Howard’s serviceable “Thirteen Lives” is a far cry from the kind of souped-up spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries might create out of this material. And yet, its let the story speak for itself approach feels misjudged in the aftermath of a documentary so rich with big personalities, knotted with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

It’s always been clear that Ayer is a sensitive guy, and you can tell that he delights in forcing Statham to embrace his vulnerable side.

[An] unevenly written but good-looking directorial debut that gradually runs out of steam.

We can appreciate the righteous good of putting something like “Rustin” into the world at the same time as we lament how sorely the film lacks its namesake’s inspirational flair for defying convention.

Small edits could have propelled the film into a dark drama instead of something resembling a PSA.

Body at Brighton Rock is the happy work of someone who misses when scrappy genre fare could have low stakes and still feel slightly dangerous; when filmmakers were empowered by the knowledge that a VHS of their schlock took up just as much real estate on video store shelves as a tape of the biggest Hollywood blockbuster.

The more engaging question is where Bernadette disappeared to for the two decades before the movie begins. It may not be much of a mystery, but where Bernadette went is far more believable and broadly real a story than where she ends up. It’s a story that’s too complicated for Linklater to tell here.

Firebrand pays frequent lip service to the courage it surely required for Katherine to do her royal duties with a straight face at the same time as she cultivated such radical ideas in secret, but little about the film itself reflects the courage of her convictions.

While platitudes about how this is really just about love — not money or industry or good old-fashioned greed — are far too simplistic, at least the movie attempts to make its issues feel personal enough to make people care. Sure, it’s cheesy idea, but that doesn’t mean that the bedrock truth isn’t real. The same logic applies to the film.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

There’s a fine line between resilience and false hope, and All Day and a Night walks it with purpose even when it’s tripping over itself.

While too muddled and morose to hold together as a psychosexual thriller, Wash Westmoreland’s Earthquake Bird can be compelling for how it both explores and subverts the idea that everyone gets a little bit lost in translation.

The film’s bent towards revisionist superhero history is certainly compelling, but stuck in the confines of the horror genre, it flames out far more than it flies.