The film’s politics are not exactly sophisticated, motivated more by the convenience of the moment than any cohesive worldview.

Return of Living Dead 3 isn't bad for what it is but it's the genre itself that needs reanimation.

Tyrel is a lab experiment with no insight into feelings of otherness beyond the blinding light directed at its wigged-out subject.

Psycho III--better in most respects than II--lets you down with the same swampy thud at the end. It's not a catastrophe. It has some good writing, and some better-than-good acting (Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey), directing (Perkins again) and camera work (Bruce Surtees). But it fails any sequel's acid test: It feeds off the original without deepening it.

The film makers haven't been able to improve on the original story. It's still Kong vs. Civilization, with a lot of high-firepower action and wackily implausible plot twists thrown in to keep the Big Guy busy. [22 Dec 1986, p.10]

The movie’s too slow at the start and somewhat befuddling at the end, but for the most part it’s a haunting, poignant portrait of one woman’s Kafkaesque nightmare.

Those looking for sheer gore for its own sake probably won't be disappointed by Hellraiser III, but those expecting the quality of the first film in the series most likely will be. [14 Sep 1992, p.F8]

Sadly, Laika’s new feature, Missing Link, fails to match the striking visuals and compelling characters in its Oscar-nominated 2016 film Kubo and the Two Strings.

Unfortunately, style needs a little substance to keep it from careening around looking empty, and the story of Blue Steel is lofty, implausible twaddle that sinks whatever ideas Bigelow hoped to investigate.

This dark and dreary monster movie is indeed horrific, but it’s also undoubtedly a downer, for more reasons than likely intended.

It’s a reasonably grabby tale despite its familiarity and trying too hard to make its milieu menacing.

Palmer is a firecracker as the heroine, a young woman who has to prove she’s as hard — and consequently, as misogynist — as any man.

The movie is pretty lightweight — disemboweling aside — but has a fair amount of punch, and it could appeal to connoisseurs of self-conscious pulp.

Mostly, this is a whirlwind trip through the origins of a phenomenon, with an eye toward explaining how America could find these ladies at once sexy and wholesome. The answer? Hey man, it was the ‘70s.

Liz and the Blue Bird may appeal to fans of “Sound Euphonium,” but many recent Japanese features have dealt with teen friendships and angst in more interesting ways.

Bier plunges herself into mainstream horror filmmaking with a gusto that doesn’t always offset her lack of precision. For visceral intensity, she never tops the early scenes of mayhem and mass panic; slow-building, artfully modulated tension in close quarters seems beyond the movie’s interest or purview.

There’s a potentially smart and sexy lesbian dramedy at the heart of “Anchor and Hope” that gets lost amid idiosyncratic filmmaking and a lack of narrative discipline.

Director Xiaozhi Rao’s facility with behavioral extremes that disguise the hardships of life in modern China is a scattershot mix of the Tarantino-esque and melodramatic, with bursting pop songs and visual tricks filling in any perceived gaps in logic or attention.

Individual moments work, but there’s little to tie them together in a cohesive narrative.

A stellar cast and a breezy tone partially compensate for the movie’s shortcomings.

The story...never comes together as a satisfying whole, even if it all proves relatively painless viewing.

Credibility and even simple logic seem to have gotten short shrift in its transposition to the screen from a highly praised first novel by Terry Davis. The result is a film of some lovely and funny moments, with some appealing people, that finally disappoints.

Neither terrible nor outstanding, it's the kind of middle-of-the-road picture that's hard to remember a week after seeing it. [8 Feb 1985, p.C2]

For all the ways Dumplin’ does its best to avoid some clichés (no mean-girl antagonists) while embracing others (drag queens as coaches), it’s still a regrettably undercooked meal, even with those songs and the breezy magnetism of “Patti Cakes” star Macdonald.

Unfortunately the film, directed by Leon Marr (script by Marr and Sherry Soules) needs more pep in its step, could use some judicious trimming and, save for the chatty, wheelchair-using Charlie (Louis Del Grande), features an unmemorable, under-drawn group of resident seniors, a missed opportunity to help flesh out — and lighten up — this slender, tender tale.

If the idea was to tell the story from Liz’s perspective, the movie botches that perspective badly: Abandoning any sense of narrative rigor, it can’t keep hunky, charming Ted from becoming the protagonist of his own hideous story.

Despite its large scale, it plays like a formula TV movie. [14 Feb 1986, p.C4]

There’s a sense of dread as the film wraps up, knowing where the real-life story ended, and it’s increasingly out of step with the rosy picture painted by Tsikurishvili. Is he compelled to update the film or leave us with an image of Bergling in his freest moment? Ultimately, it feels like only part of the story, and therefore not entirely true.

Elephants almost works, but it self-destructs with as much frequency as its damaged characters.

It’s an atmosphere piece first and foremost, and an effective one. But the characters, particularly the teens, feel primarily like micro-vignette archetypes of scattershot resonance rather than flesh-and-blood figures forming a tapestry in a taut tale.

It flirts with politics but is content to settle, in the end, for a parlor trick.

A fitfully engaging, well-intentioned but disappointing original biographical drama.

Despite some honest and poignant emotions and a compelling lead turn by Cybill Shepherd, Being Rose unfolds in an awkwardly constructed, herky-jerky manner that shortchanges its many characters and themes. Let’s just say the spirit is willing but the filmmaking is weak.

The characters and premise of Pledge are over-the-top, but the movie understands that — whether comedy or horror — all these stories are really about a desperate yearning for belonging.

Twists and turns abound, but they're all smoke and mirrors that ultimately don't add up to anything.

Director Marius A. Markevicius and screenwriter Ben York Jones fail to find much of a fresh angle on genocide and widespread cruelty.

Nable’s script isn’t always clear on its characters’ motivations, and it drags on even at a brief 92 minutes. However, Outlaws should largely satisfy audiences who like their action movies savage and bleak.

The Brawler isn’t terrible, but those with any interest at all in Chuck Wepner should start with one of the many better options.

Written, directed and produced by Vicky Jewson, Close works well when it sticks to the distinctive personal details of this kind of job; but it too often defaults to a run-of-the-mill international thriller.

An exceedingly mild affair, The Last Laugh relies mightily on Dreyfuss’ warm charm to keep the journey rolling.

The generically titled Beyond the Night spins out a twisty mystery that becomes more engrossing as it unfolds. But writer-director Jason Noto’s drama too often proves a drearily one-note look at small-town crime, corruption and narrow-mindedness.

Like a lot of low-budget horror, writer-director Matty Castano’s Alone in the Dead of Night is more a case study in shrewd resource-management than it is a movie.

One thing you can say for Pink Flamingos, it has a frat party chumminess, even at its most repulsive. In the late '60s and through the '70s, Waters used the same gang of pals for his ensemble, and that created a kind of "let's get down and dirty together" camaraderie.

No Holds Barred gets no points for originality. It's written with the subtlety of a body-slam and directed with the finesse of a hammerlock. But the movie never takes itself seriously and director Tom Wright has fun with the wrestling montages.

Unfortunately, for all the admirable respect director Franc Roddam and writer Lloyd Fonvielle (who co-wrote Roddam's "The Lords of Discipline") bring to their extensive reworking of the legend of Frankenstein and his bride, they're over their heads -- waaaaayyy over. The result is a film that commands affection for its ambition and civilized sensibility, but nonetheless provokes unintended laughter. [16 Aug 1985, p.C18]

In Nightbreed neither the coyly horrible killers nor the horribly coy monsters register strongly enough. It's a dark beast with a flabby hide.

Hernández ultimately fails to inject sufficient empathy into his moody character, while all those alternating flashbacks and episodes of delirium take a toll on the film’s ability to maintain a firm grip of its own on viewer engagement.

While this movie is pretty incomprehensible, it’s at least memorable.

Rather than a fresh breeze, it's the stale air of gilded calculation, the uncomfortable feeling that things are excessively just so, that overhangs much that is genuinely appealing about this film.

The film is unapologetically “low art” … yet fun, in its own way.

Krzykowski’s pacing and tone is off as he tries to meld his comic book instincts – visually atmospheric if susceptible to arch cheesiness — with the requirements of a small-scale drama.

Writer-director Matthew Berkowitz’s crime drama A Violent Man has all the pungent cynicism of a classic film noir but lacks the urgency. A slower-than-necessary pace drags on a movie that’s otherwise well-written and well-acted, and which makes good use of its setting in the world of mixed martial arts.

The Spanish spook show Ánimas is so powerfully atmospheric that it barely matters when the rest of the picture turns out to be a bit sparse.

It’s all quite amusing up to a point, but unfortunately that point arrives early on in this practically two-hour-long take on a one-gag premise.

What Tolkien offers instead is a picturesque, amber-soaked balm for armchair Anglophiles: the manners and mores, the crisp witticisms and stirring, stiff-upper-lip sentiments. These pleasures aren’t negligible. But neither are they a substitute for a genuinely cinematic window into a genius’ mind.

In too many scenes Freundlich prefers the arch heaviness of pained expressions in posh surroundings when what you’re waiting for is the messiness of humans letting fly after their careful worlds have been upended.

There’s much to explore and dissect about the intriguing world that directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher spotlight in their documentary The Gospel of Eureka, but the film, strangely flabby at just 73 minutes, leaves us wanting.

A run-of-the-mill home invasion thriller, and while Farrands is a solid genre craftsman — as evidenced by his similarly creepy true-crime film from earlier this year, The Amityville Murders — his taste remains suspect.

Stray falters in the narrative department but looks good and holds interest.

The film has the eerie atmosphere and outstanding makeup effects of a good fantasy thriller. But it’s way too choppy to build any tension.

The material is breezy and amusing with a few piercing moments of emotional truth, but the tone never quite feels right for the issue at hand. There’s a tendency to rely on incredibly hacky material, like extended bits about the complexities of sperm collection and well-trodden jokes about alternative healers.

It's pure soap opera, but the race sequences are pretty impressive. [19 Sep 2007, p.E6]

Though it never rises above the level of “interesting experiment,” the dystopian thriller The Bellwether teems with so many ideas that even the bad ones don’t weigh it down too much.

The movie hits all the right plot points but never connects them to a story with any kind of momentum or tension.

The problem is that, even though a romance develops, Buddy himself changes almost not at all, which means the film leaves a sour aftertaste. [15 June 1986, p.SUN-6]

A biography may have been impossible, but in spotlighting a writer who leaves no emotion or thought unexamined, this documentary won’t satisfy devotees hoping for a dive as deep as those their beloved author can produce.

Contemporary viewers are more likely to find Fritz the Cat a mildly amusing period piece, as dated as a Nehru jacket.

That diffuse focus — and a whimsical tone, bordering on the silly — work against the film. Perhaps the government intervened in this case yet again, making sure Finding Steve McQueen would be too muddled and goofy to be entertaining.

Over-written dialogue and some stiff acting weigh Devil’s Path down, especially in the early going. But the action sequences are quite good, deriving nervous energy from the inherent risk of any illicit sexual encounter: that being in the wrong place with the wrong person could prove fatal.

This film deserves attention for tackling an aspect of the transgender experience that is not often seen on screen, and though it laudably casts a transgender actress, the story is framed through the perspective of a straight cis-woman, Alyssa. Something tells me it would have been much more interesting, and less narratively tortured, as seen through the eyes of Eve.

Trainer was MASS MoCA’s founding director of development. Which means that in many ways she’s essentially telling a story about her friends — and often, with friends, it’s easier to avoid uncomfortable questions.

Olympic Dreams is a wispy, quasi-romantic dramedy whose affecting moments are eclipsed by its overly random, sometimes awkwardly played and constructed narrative.

Less would have been considerably more in the case of Tread, a needlessly overstuffed documentary chronicling the path that led to a disgruntled muffler repair shop owner going on a remarkable 2004 rampage in a heavily armored bulldozer through the streets of Granby, Colo.

Rezo Gabriadze comes across as a genial, unpretentious man. But the viewer sees too little of the internationally respected artist and leaves feeling shortchanged.

The major failing of Division 19 that is that it’s just too busy, bouncing between corporate boardrooms, jail cells and insurgent camps, as though Halewood were trying to squeeze an entire season of a SyFy original TV series into 90 minutes.

The feature debut of music video director Ninian Doff is probably best viewed late at night under the influence of a mind-altering, preferably hallucinatory, substance.

Writer-director Mark Murphy has made the fun-house version of beloved big-screen Britcoms, with a particular nod to the classic Four Weddings and a Funeral, but none of the grace. His script, written with Sabrina Lepage, is the cinematic equivalent of lad lit, and it lacks the depth of the genre’s best from authors like Nick Hornby.

Unfortunately, it’s an anticlimactic conclusion at best, full of tacked-on thriller shenanigans that, once they’ve petered out, make you wonder exactly why this story drew the filmmakers’ attention to begin with. The answer to that, happily, can be found in Portman’s every glimmer of nuance.

Veteran performer Schull, perhaps best known as Fay on TV’s “Wings,” gives a towering, fearless turn; the other main actors are fine as well. Still, one must yield to the film’s flat shooting style, lengthy monologues, dangling questions and awkwardly rendered, dubiously earned ending.

The problem is that for all the ways this story is entertaining as a magazine article or Dateline segment, it’s an awkwardly bloated bore when Love makes the affable, naïve Hyden not just his key interviewee but also his reenactment star.

You can share Jarmusch’s despair — I certainly do — and still find its expression here too tired, bloodless and self-satisfied by half.

As a debut feature it’s a big swing, and a miss, but there’s also just enough to suggest that Wakefield may connect in the future.

It’s a heavy lift that, to do her efforts justice, required a more dimensional, broadly contextual and, for a movie about art, visually adept depiction than first-time filmmaker Rynecki has managed.

Chance is a well-intended but heavy-handed denunciation of the barbaric blood sport of dog fighting.

A Dark Place is earnest enough, but it comes across as phony. It’s hard to do a “local color” drama when everyone’s from out of town.

Whatever the film has to say about the sketchiness of modern financial wheeling and dealing remains frustratingly non-specific. The characters all feel like they’ve been copied and pasted from hundreds of other movies that end with armed standoffs in some featureless field or warehouse.

Unfortunately, and through no fault of Meryl Streep, there doesn't seem to be enough electricity generated out there in Africa to power a love story 2 1/2 hours long.

Lobo overdoes the sudden shifts between the real and the surreal in the last act, refusing to answer any questions definitively until he has to. But the first-time filmmaker shows an impressive amount of confidence in his methods. He knows how to make audiences uncomfortable — first with tedium, then with terror.

Krauss digs into the murky, uneasy morality of wartime, but The Kill Team doesn’t quite convey the brutality of these crimes with the same power that news accounts or even Krauss’ own documentary have.

Despite its penetrating handheld camerawork (by Arnau Valls Colomer) and mind-altering sound design, Lost Transmissions never quite manages to tune out the lingering element of self-indulgence.

While Just Say Goodbye reveals the filmmakers’ inexperience, with a bit of finesse, Walting could be a promising new voice.

Though well shot by Justin and Ian McAleece, the narrative is a disjointed mess that ends in an eye-rolling conclusion. Its spiritual insights feel like a mishmash of appropriated sentiments from a variety of philosophies.

It’s an old-fashioned injustice barn burner with narrative and emotional beats so sturdy you can practically see the rivets. But on the big screen, it’s just not convulsive enough to stir us and instead feels trapped in a limbo of not quite awards-prestigious, but not exactly indie-fired.

While the mocking tone mostly undermines any trenchant commentary, the strongest impression Ready or Not leaves, thanks to Weaving’s eye-rolling, primal-screaming, evil-giggling performance, is of the cathartic, transformative female rage at the center of it all.

The vibrant visuals contrast with a muddled narrative, leaving the audience less satisfied than the characters.

It ultimately seems as if there was a more economical, propulsive and entertaining way for a master such as Bellocchio to recount this explosive and pivotal chapter of Mafia history.

The film never really delves beyond the level of observation and the simplistic explanations it does offer are not very satisfying; cloaking possible mental illness in religious zealotry simply clouds whatever the directors meant to convey.

Crawl is action-packed, with impressive special effects and some jaw-dropping images of mayhem and destruction. But a movie like this demands more storytelling discipline and logistical control than these filmmakers can manage.