Narcopolis starts off intriguingly and ends solidly. It's everything else in between that isn't particularly compelling.

The soundtrack is fantastic and Samuel eminently watchable, but "Asthma" suffers from near-lethal doses of self-satisfied hipness.

Writer-director Jonas Carpignano glosses over much of the sociopolitical context in his depictions of the chain of events.

Roberts is a compelling figure.... But the movie itself is ragged and routine.

Honestly, The Funhouse Massacre isn't quite enough of either.

If The Man Who Knew Infinity had been more concerned with the soul of a raw talent instead of the learn-and-earn ethos of so much accomplishment cinema, it might have produced something soulful rather than something institutional.

The ideas are not deep enough and the dramatic tension isn't real enough to sustain this feature.

Tristan's creaky, often episodic script attempts to tackle some big topics — art, love, loss, family bonds, mortality — but does so in such a forced, talky way that it's hard to buy into the tale's earnest emotional core.

It pulls off the impressive feat of feeling both hyperactive and lazy. This is hardly the first time a major Hollywood franchise has succumbed to narrative flabbiness, or invested in grand, elaborate world building with the kind of devotion that far outstrips the viewer’s interest.

Through a first-person narration, Bialis makes much of the film about herself. Her account certainly turns the daily travails of living in Sderot into something tangible for viewers. But at the same time, her life-experience narrative proves a distraction and a disservice to the promise of the film's title.

Snatched may represent a failure of sensitivity, but it’s an even greater failure of nerve.

The action sequences are strong, with spectacular crashes and explosions, dynamic camera moves and tight cuts that at times give the film an appealing breathlessness. But the cast takes a too-lax approach to this material.

The movie feels disjointed and made up of parts that Dolan couldn’t bring together as it shuffles between three story strands.

While the early going might bring to mind the Dogme 95 school of stripped-down filmmaking...the result, with its collective of uniformly unsympathetic characters, ultimately overdoses on all the unscripted bad vibes.

With the mixing of the sprawling family tree with geopolitical imbroglios already proving daunting for viewers, the filmmaker exacerbates the confusion by eschewing a linear chronology.

While Mollner elicits some strong performances — especially from Francesca Eastwood as a vengeful farmer’s daughter — Outlaws and Angels can’t overcome its distractingly showy camera moves or its tendency toward scenes that drag on interminably.

"Riviera" suffers from a weak story with an obvious ending.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is somehow both hectic and leaden, a thing of exhausting, pummeling mediocrity. It offers up dazzling feats of sorcery and realms of wonderment (early 20th-century London and Paris among them) and manages to conjure the very opposite of magic.

While individual sequences are genuinely entertaining, Monster Hunt remains considerably less than the sum of its many parts.

Somehow hectic and lumbering, diverting and dispiriting all at once, this mud-toned medieval pulp largely cleaves to the spirit of Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” series, reducing a fabled figure of British lore to two hours of tough-guy swagger and head-pounding digital thwackery.

Writer-director Ken Kwek means for the proceedings to be farcical, but seldom are they actually funny. A former journalist, he's quite observant of the clashes among the classes and cultures in this diverse society.

Elvis & Nixon meanders its way into the big encounter with a tone too wacky and cutesy to whet our appetite for strangeness.

With loving shots of booming, towering ships so dominant, and decades squeezed into what feels like a week of action, there's barely enough time to develop De Ruyter as a character in his own movie, or even successfully explain his war strategies.

Term Life is cleanly plotted and tautly paced, but it’s never as fun as it should be.

JeruZalem is just a wobble-a-thon with incessant screaming and a predictable trajectory for its leading ladies, even if the final, arresting image of a malevolently transformed skyline makes one wish a more enticing, original road had led there.

The Fundamentals of Caring is a strained, overly familiar tale of catharsis and redemption. Stars Paul Rudd and Craig Roberts work hard but are torpedoed by writer-director Rob Burnett’s wanting script (adapted from the novel by Jonathan Evison), thudding stabs at buoyancy and sluggish pacing.

Old stereotypes are trotted out for humor's sake, and it's not a question of offensiveness, just that the jokes feel 10 years old.

The payoff is sporadically rewarding at best.

Ava's Possessions is powered by an amusing conceit that configures demonic possession as a metaphor for addiction. But the metaphor alone is not enough to sustain this minor effort, which wears thin over the course of a feature length.

By turns earnest and profane, the story of three twentysomethings' Sin City sortie contains flashes of wit.... But this road is lined with clichés and blunt dialogue, the emotional shifts all too neatly underlined by Death Cab for Cutie tracks.

The dreary postmortem drama Five Nights in Maine is barely kept afloat by the gravitas of dueling leads David Oyelowo and Dianne Wiest.

The cinematography, by David J. Myrick, is lovely and luminous, but the story itself lacks insight or deep emotion.

The temporal puzzle is enough to distract from the artless direction, visibly cheap set designs and tacky special effects. But if the expository scenes are any indication, his writing could benefit from some refinement.

Hologram for the King is a baffling film, cinema without weight or heft. The problem is not that anything on screen is troubling, it's that nothing there, not even star Tom Hanks, is capable of holding our interest or attention for very long.

A paint-by-numbers indie that barely uses its most vivid hues.

While McLean and company admirably aim for some relevance by tying the Taylors’ haunting to their personal demons, ultimately The Darkness is just the same old show: things that go bump in the night, and the tasteful decor they defile.

Directors Jean-François Pouliot and François Brisson fail to organize the material into a coherent story or strike a consistent emotional tone.

Characters and situations are painted in such simple, broad strokes, we’re asked to take much at face value.

There's a poignant, powerful story lurking at the edges of Jack of the Red Hearts but, as is, the film proves a strained, implausible family drama.

A slapdash tribute too humdrum to ever whip up a truly inspirational froth.

Though built to divert, Road Games mostly feels untethered to any memorably crafty storytelling.

While the film is well-acted and appealingly slick, the end result lacks novelty.

If anything, it uses its gifted veterans to disguise how tired, implausible and overly sentimental the proceedings turn out to be.

From time to time its mix of foul-mouthed bro camaraderie and in-your-face violence nods in the direction of modest entertainment value, but the net effect is a whiplash-inducing muddle. The movie is full of noise and energy but devoid of real wit, coherence or impact.

There are a few stirring moments, but it never seems authentic or real, just a bizarrely staged re-creation.

In its final moments, Boo! A Madea Halloween delivers a moral with after-school-special levels of subtlety. A jolting switch from oft-mean-spirited humor to a message movie, this comedy is unlikely to win over any new fans, but the devoted will find comfort in the familiarity.

Insistently distancing if aesthetically pleasing.

The film mostly feels perfunctory and awkward — like calling home at Christmas.

The film is well-made — the direction is strong, the cinematography by Barry Markowitz compelling and the script by two first-time writers is confident. The biggest problem with the film is Charlie himself.

It's unfortunate that Brown and company were unable to bring stronger narrative and filmmaking skills to this vital subject.

The emotions about the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters are spot on, and there’s no shortage of star power. But there’s an insistently dour fog over the proceedings, and the film feels subdued and sedated without the levity to brighten up things.

Directors Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein put the focus on the standard reality-TV repertoire like "Making the Band." Their repeated disregard for Hioki's pleas to go off the record smacks of opportunism and exploitation rather than revelation.

Daddy is the strained, at times cringe-worthy film adaptation of Dan Via's stage play, which ran off-Broadway in 2010 and the next year in Los Angeles. Based on the show's largely good reviews, something was clearly lost in translation.

Under the workmanlike direction of Jon Cassar (“Forsaken”), “Bough” breaks little new or inspired ground as it spins out its mildly effective, occasionally silly cautionary tale.

There are good lessons to be learned from the Market Basket saga. "We the People" doesn't trust the audience to figure them out for themselves.

Its principal ambition — basically, to make movies like “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Starsky & Hutch” look like rigorous masterworks of screen-to-screen adaptation by comparison — may be as shallow as the gutter. But from time to time, the movie does throw off its own crazy, moronic verve.

While it has a sharp hook — and is reasonably diverting — it never rises above the routine.

Earnest and well-meaning, The Congressman devolves into predictable schmaltz.

The challah may be extra special, but the humor found in John Goldschmidt's direction and the conventional script by Yehudah Jez Freedman and Jonathan Benson is disappointingly stale.

The story is an intriguing twist on the western genre, but in piling on other subgenres and story elements, including a dangerous and charismatic cult, it dilutes the essential nature of what could have been a potent revenge tale.

King worked on the script for Cell, which isn’t that surprising given that many of the worst adaptations of his work have his name on them. It only proves how hard a job it is to adapt King. Even the author himself can’t ace it.

At 107 minutes, Tulip Fever has been trimmed of every ounce of fat. But connective tissue, muscle and even the heart are gone too, leaving a lifeless frame.

Bits and pieces of the gay-themed drama Beautiful Something feel real and essential. But this slow-going film often suffers from a forced, navel-gazing quality that can prove exasperating.

Director Mario Van Peebles brings real tension and excitement to the scenes where these men are surrounded by predators, but the tone of the film is awkwardly split between the grit of modern cinema and the boisterous adventure of old Hollywood.

For a movie seemingly concerned with clarity and enlightenment, it’s woefully lacking in both.

It’s bland enough to serve as a kind of palate cleanser at the end of a long and punishing moviegoing summer.

Although this film never really makes sense, Sesma’s years of experience means that it’s at least competently shot, with locations around the world. Plus, it’s admirably gonzo. And when it comes to cheap genre fare, bizarre always beats boring.

As directed by Stuart Hazeldine, even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material’s stranger undercurrents.

While a fictionalized account of Lee’s career certainly held some sex, drugs & rock ’n’ roll potential, the blandly pedestrian film Spaceman seldom delivers despite an engagingly game lead performance by Josh Duhamel.

Begos gets the texture and atmosphere right, but there’s nothing beneath his cool ’80s fog.

The title of this strenuously crude and crotch-obsessed movie may be lazy, but it’s also pretty apt.

Italian director Roberto Andò’s film feels entirely manufactured, distancing itself from its audience and blunting its points in the process.

Too much of this project feels like it’s been coldly calculated for maximum international box office.

As it is, so much obvious care has been taken to reproduce and update the charms of the Robert Stevenson-directed original — to deliver an old-fashioned yet newfangled burst of family-friendly uplift — that Mary Poppins Returns winds up feeling both hyperactive and paralyzed. It sits there flailing on the screen, bright, gaudy and mirthless, tossing off strained bits of comic business and all but strangling itself with its own good cheer.

Like something you peer at rather than absorb, Salt and Fire is both awful and a tad fascinating.

It’s at once talky yet emotionally remote, and while posing a risky set of questions about sexual abuse, power and relationships, the experience is an unsatisfactory and draining slog.

It’s unusual to see a film like this make its nominal hero into a jerk, who learns something essential from his nemesis. True or not, the complex characterization does make for a better story.

While their last movie managed to temper the outrageousness with an underlying goofy sweetness, the biggest offense here isn’t that it’s offensive, it’s just not all that funny.

Though its obvious message may not translate well outside its intended audience, the converted will likely be entertained by the well-produced package the moving themes are delivered in.

An intriguing casting gimmick can’t mask a story — and a relationship — that’s largely unremarkable.

At its best, “Max Steel” shares elements with “Smallville” and “Teen Wolf,” using the supernatural as a metaphor for awkward adolescence. At its worst, it’s more like “Transformers” — an extended toy commercial, noisy and forgettable.

Even a talented cast can’t overcome the script from five screenwriters, whose uneven final product is surprisingly bland for all its raunchiness.

The film has all the emotional resonance of a dog-themed novelty coffee-table book. Adorable, but ultimately forgettable.

Although he effectively establishes the downtrodden milieu, Lee’s script ultimately succumbs to mounting clichés and plot contrivances.

A film that deserves scrutiny for its treatment of its young female protagonist.

Paradise and its predictable waltz of suffering, choked consciousness and monstrosity adds little to the problematic subset of camp-themed World War II movies, which feel like nostalgia for hell.

This melodrama struggles with serious post-production issues and an unnecessarily complex story, losing any of its intended impact in the process.

Loserville is somehow two different movies — a traditional teen comedy mixed with a message-driven drama about the dangers of bullying — without enough connective tissue linking characters or scenes to lend it cohesion.

A drama that plays out as an overdetermined thesis, with Genovese herself (Christina Brucato) a footnote to the darkly stylized plunge into lives of quiet desperation.

A stylish surface goes only so far to disguise the fact that we’re being sold some pretty cut-rate goods.

The “time travel” bit kicks in for real — or rather surreal. But this half-baked device proves too little, too late and fails to jump start the film’s prosaic narrative.

Much of the dialogue is too literal and undercut by its stolid earnestness, and many of the characters are left underdeveloped.

Life on the Line traffics in piled-on, predictable melodrama, with only intermittent sparks.

It’s six or so characters in search of a meaningful movie.

Although the filmmakers use the soldiers’ own words, they fail to create believable characters who can engage the audience.

Michael Mueller’s character-driven script is about the only thing that feels driven in this otherwise listless vehicle, and “The Beat Beneath My Feet” conveys all the pulse-pounding energy of a funeral procession.

Given the scope of the early-1930s atrocity, the most shocking thing about director George Mendeluk’s new dramatization is how utterly devoid of emotional impact it is.

A Billion Lives employs a variety of experts in relaying its message, but it sometimes feels like a statistic-filled, 95-minute commercial for the vaping industry rather than a feature-length documentary.