There’s much to enjoy in the film’s first hour, which plays out a bit like an updated “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” It’s a chatty comedy populated by amiable leads and a constellation of wacky supporting stars, with an ill-fated would-be couple at its heart.

As much as Tuesday strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.

Wan seems to critique the third act failings of The Conjuring during the alarmingly superior first half.

It’s simultaneously too much and too little..., but it is a wacky bit of history that is entertaining in fits and starts. No, not all the pieces fit together, and it certainly doesn’t speed up as the game winds on (something it might have done well to emulate from the game itself), but it’s got players worth rooting for and a story that keeps leveling up. It won’t stick in your brain like the game (who doesn’t still see those little blocks floating ever-downward?), but what else possibly could?

The ideas don’t cut that deep, but like its psychic protagonist, this movie knows exactly what its audience wants.

If Over the Moon launches into orbit on the strength of its specificity, much of the film is frustratingly generic for a fable so rooted in a particular sense of place, the unique traditions that come with it, and the way they help a certain little girl learn to appreciate the enduring light of her late mother’s love.

An overlong blend of kid-friendly “Game of Thrones” warfare and standard-issue metaphors of intolerance, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds plenty of ways to build on the original premise, but few that resonate any better than the last flamboyant ride.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

It's not a terrible film, and succeeds in giving us a play by play of an alleged dynamic between two individuals, but as a whole feels like a missed opportunity.

Watching Cho, perhaps on the same search as the filmmakers — for profundity, for catharsis — is always an entertaining experience, and a reminder of her curiosity as an actor more than the sum of her stand-up parts.

Rather than developing Roman’s conundrum, Roman J. Israel, Esq. settles for a prosaic character study laid out in painfully obvious terms, with a tacked-on twist in the third act just so that the story can find some way to end.

Smothered by its lighthearted approach, The Monuments Men attempts to make a grand statement about the valiance of dying for the sake of art, but fails to create it.

The film is entertaining enough for most viewers, although some audiences might balk at a perceived lack of comedy from comedic superstar Poehler. That’s not its aim, however, and the film is charming, even without big laughs.

While the movie barrels toward some tense face-offs between the townsfolk, and more than a few convulsing moments of possessed (maybe?) hysteria, Zalava never quite takes off as a terrifying genre piece, even if Amiri’s attempt to exorcise his own demons is admirable.

If you have your heart set on watching a new release about people who have a ghost today, “We Have a Ghost” will be a tolerable experience. But for everyone else, reading the film’s highly descriptive title is about as interesting as spending 127 minutes watching it.

Predominantly a failure of tone, Horns has plenty of admirable traits and yet dooms itself from the outset. It's an admirable conceit stuffed into far less subtle material.

There’s fun to be had here, at least so long as audiences know what they’re getting — and what they’re not.

A fitfully amusing erotic thriller in which nothing is what it seems, anything could happen, and everything is at least a little ridiculous.

Fans will praise this film as yet another brave sacrifice at the altar of artistic vulnerability — because that’s what “A Man Named Scott” wants you to believe. But the authorized film lacks the artistic vision of Cudi’s musical talents, despite its best efforts.

An electric lead performance and a growing sense of self make it worth your while to see that Izzy gets where she’s going.

The hit rate gets better as the film lumbers along and the scenarios grow more extreme, but it takes a certain degree of perseverance to roll with this thing until it pays off.

Choked by overwrought trappings and suffocated by an unforgiving narrative structure, Wim Wenders’ “Submergence” is only bolstered by a pair of sterling performances from stars Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy, both of whom somehow rise above the lackluster film they’re sunk into.

The numerous belly laughs are undermined by jarring flashes of darkness that never organically sync with the plot.

Fine enough, really, but if the first film was the kind of thing that never goes out of style, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will last a season. That’s all.

For a film ostensibly about sex, Mark, Mary & Some Other People doesn’t seem to be much about actual desire; its compulsions are rooted in the pressures, expectations, and general idiocy of youth. That, at least, feels real.

More shark action would be welcome in this film about sharks. As a basic disaster flick? Thrash works, and offers up less than 90 minutes of admirably silly and occasionally chilling action, even if it could stand to take a bigger bite out of the story.

At best, it’s a suitable companion piece to the novel; at worst, it’s a lackluster feature bolstered only briefly by flashes of real human emotion.

The Painted Bird spirals between fairy tale and history lesson as if it were trying to fly with a clipped wing. Several passages create a stomach-churning sense of inertia, but only during the very last shot does the whole thing manage to get high enough off the ground to offer a valuable perspective.