Though born of an inventive idea, Camera Obscura comes out underdeveloped.

Sweet Girl is dumb in all the ways you expect, and yet with Isabella Merced things feel understandable. It’s just frustrating that the twist undermines her, outside of being utterly weird. That being said, if they wanted to greenlight a “Sweet Girl 2” and give Merced her due, I’ll be waiting.

Eubank’s talent for creating impressive worlds with few resources is the movie's strongest aspect, but the concept feels like a never-ending exposition of technique without sufficient depth.

Not only is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny an almost complete waste of time, it’s also a belabored reminder that some relics are better left where and when they belong. If only any previous entries in this series had taken great pains to point that out.

The more bizarre The Man Who Sold His Skin becomes, the less original it gets.

Despite appearances, The Independent isn’t much interested in the implications of a three-horse race for the Oval Office, or the viability of a down-to-earth superman uniting the country with promises that appeal to both sides of the aisle. No, that stuff is just a pretext for a tense but ultimately toothless polemic about the value of truth and the need for an independent press

Dower, like so many of the obsessives he interviews here, grows too enthralled by the “who” of it all to stay on mission and meaningfully explore why it still resonates.

[A] frustratingly glib biopic.

Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

While it still dilutes Tolkien’s memory by molding his life to the narrow dimensions of a middle-brow feature that’s too safe for the arthouse and too small for the multiplex, at least it does so in a sincere attempt to trace the etymology of Tolkien’s work, and to emphasize that where stories come from can be as meaningful as where they take us.

The Family Plan resembles the first Dan more than the second, too predictable and formulaic to excite, without the juice to become a family favorite.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and this scattershot crowd-pleaser renders them both in such broad strokes that it seems as if Branagh can only imagine the Belfast of his youth as a brogue-accented blend of other movies like it.

It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.

The ultimate sin of Wrath of Man is that it doesn’t realize it’s really a story about pride.

The many logic-defying developments in “Missing” make it difficult to hold one’s attention, especially considering that the film gives viewers plenty of time to think about the countless ways it doesn’t make sense.

The action scenes are so inexplicably painful — and the character work in “Snake Eyes” is so unexpectedly strong — that your heart sinks whenever the swords come out.

An honest but insistently scattershot true-life tearjerker ... Most of the fault lies with the fragmented, nonlinear structure “The Friend” uses to approximate the flowing nature of the Esquire piece.

In Reitman’s hands — which are confident and clumsy in equal measure — these hefty matters play out as a mordant political comedy that tries to split the difference between “Veep” and “All the President’s Men.” That’s a tough needle to thread, and it doesn’t take long before “The Front Runner” throws in the towel on that idea.

The fatal flaw of Freaks is that Lipovsky and Stein’s tantalizing approach gives way to mundane results, as the questions raised by their screenplay are considerably more interesting than any of the answers that follow.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

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.