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?