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.

There’s zero chemistry or feeling to this sweeping, predictable endeavor, only the scent of what might have been.

A few memorable shots don’t offer enough justification to watch a film that’s not scary, rarely exciting and never as engrossing a puzzle as it means to be.

Instead of a grand lark of fast fists and derring-do, we get a lumbering, choppy voyage of minimal excitement.

Ultimately, this film has a memorable villain and a stunning location, and not much else.

Keeping up with the betrayals and shifting allegiances is more tedious than fun, while the simplistic moralizing about callous corporate greed, and the detours into tragedy, fall flat.

Slick and silly, Sword Master rarely reaches the thrilling heights of the many kinetic twirl-and-slice epics directed by its producer, the legendary Tsui Hark.

It’s hard to recommend Blood Brothers, which is mostly unpleasant and shrill. But it is unusual enough to suggest that Prendes’ next film might be better.

With its saturated colors, swirling camerawork and aggressive techno beats, Sins of Our Youth is rarely dull, but it lacks the emotional resonance that one expects from a film with the death of a child at its heart.

This well-intentioned, sumptuously shot tale of love and war, directed by Joseph Ruben, lacks the emotional depth and romantic grandeur to fulfill its epic ambitions.

With its cast of veteran child actors and its baked-in holiday warmth, Let It Snow has some baseline appeal. But like the formulaic Christmas movies that fill the Hallmark Channel this time of year, this film isn’t exactly a timeless classic. It’s more like something to put on in the background, while making cookies or wrapping presents.

The Axe Murders of Villisca never really comes to much, perhaps because its focus is too diffuse. The scares are low, and the plot under-baked.

It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s really not anything.

It earns points for not being overly pious, but there’s little depth in its exploration of one man’s spiritual evolution.

It’s almost afraid to invite true messiness or insightful belly laughs, and remains content to cruise on a wispy likability.

The friendship lessons are sweet enough, but such a low-stakes story strains one’s patience for such affected cinematic style.

Murphy’s quietly precise performance ultimately can’t overcome the film’s chilly gravity and unsatisfying finale.

Though a thoughtful reflection is occasionally allowed — sometimes humanity finds its way out — this indulgent, stylized slog is straight out of a well-worn aren’t-people-weird-and-awful playbook.

The flashy battle sequences will delight “Yu-Gi-Oh” fans. Viewers not familiar with the game will themselves be hopelessly lost.

Directed by Ido Fluk from a screenplay he wrote with Sharon Mashihi, the film is sensitively observed, its performances convincingly understated. But it rapidly devolves into a standard, and increasingly unfocused, story of materialism and greed.

James Cullen Bressack’s Bethany is polished, well-acted and filled with memorably disgusting images, but its portrait of a frazzled adult survivor of child abuse is ultimately formulaic and a little sleazy.

Unfortunately, this overlong picture rarely feels particularly authentic.

Because of its look, some fine period music including the Mills Brothers version of "Coney Island Washboard," and actors giving it their best effort, Wonder Wheel is not as completely forgettable as it would otherwise be.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Bright is that it squeezes nudity, profanity and blood into the kind of dopey adventure that should be aimed more at adolescents — right down to its simplistic lessons about tolerance.

Despite the Falling Snow is ostensibly a love story set against a Cold War thriller backdrop, but it features no heat and little tension.

Logan Sandler’s Live Cargo is stuffed with arty close-ups and stunning backdrops, but the emotions to connect them are missing.

Directed with flat, joyless competence by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”), “Venom” brings with it a laborious, decades-spanning development history. A movie this long in the works should arrive on-screen feeling like more than just an afterthought.

For anyone unfamiliar with physics or averse to a while-you-watch cram course, this film might prove a mind-numbing slog.

In filtering a ripped-from-the-headlines story through the prism of satire, Suburbicon winds up squandering much of its power. For all that the movie borrows from history, it conveys little in the way of truth.

For anyone over 5, it’s best as mild, inoffensive background noise, but no more thrilling or satisfying than that. It turns out to be nothing more than a merchandising opportunity after all.

Lady Bloodfight would be knocked out immediately if matched against classics in the genre.

The Black Room is unabashedly trashy — with scene after scene of nudity and gore — but doesn’t offer much beyond sensation.

This movie ultimately lacks the characters and imagination to make it anything more than a passable entertainment.

Mell never quite knows how to mine this conceit to best effect. The result: a tonal mishmash involving silly demon-trapping bits, supernatural speculation and lots of yakking that derails the film’s potential tension and credibility.

Alex Strangelove is a deeply annoying failed experiment at melding a sensitive LGBTQ love story with the ethos of raunchy teen sex comedies.

Directed by Ernest Dickerson, the film looks fine, as one might expect, but isn't particularly funny and often makes no sense.

Though deeply personal and heartfelt, the overwrought film falls prey to too much melodrama and not enough realism or humor.

Flights of fancy are peppered in throughout but can’t make up for this concoction’s missing ingredient: romantic chemistry.

Amid all the clunky lines, the derivative plot turns and the surprisingly indifferent production values, you can sense this movie striving for something more sensitive and intimate than the usual blockbuster blowout.

The irony is that Bohemian Rhapsody, a song that triumphantly bucked convention, should now serve as the title of a movie that embraces every cliché in the days-of-our-lives biopic handbook.

Despite a strong lead cast and good intentions, Aardvark is a drag. Writer-director Brian Shoaf may have much to say about family dysfunction and its emotional effects but never finds a persuasive enough way to mine this oft-tread territory.

Camera Obscura lurches between gory thriller sequences and dreary character development, and never develops any momentum. The movie gets in its own way — burdened with meaning.

The kind of curiously inconsequential homage that neither stokes your interest in cinema/Godard nor illuminates a turbulent love story between artists.

In Captive State aliens have taken over the world (as they will), but it’s the viewers stuck watching this messy, lugubrious sci-fi thriller who may feel like the ones being held captive.

No matter how many non-sequitur jolts they manage to squeeze into these jumpy proceedings, the ability to sustain a sense of dread, to create tension that lasts beyond the immediate moment, seems dispiritingly beyond their grasp.

Laura E. Davis and Jessica Kaye, who co-wrote and directed, compress a lifetime’s worth of familial puzzle pieces into a few choppy days of angst and dubious behavior that never quite gels, despite being occasionally intriguing.

While it’s a cute love letter to a certain strip of L.A., and Annenberg brings a winsomeness to her role, the story is thin and clichéd, relying on tired gags and stereotypes for humor.

Instead of engaging what we get is a plodding, unfocused effort with few genuine thrills to speak of, the kind of movie that would play best on an airplane when you are eager to kill time.

It’s a movie that already seems like a dust-gathered statue, rather than something vividly, imaginatively crafted to reflect the burning intensity of so passionate and forward-minded an artist.

Top Gun is a male bonding adventure movie that's both exciting and disturbing, mind-boggling and vacuous...Measuring this movie against its model -- Hawks' air films -- you can see the difference between a great director making his movies breathe, and a superproduction that depends on action and hardware. Top Gun is an empty-headed technological marvel. The actors -- especially Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan -- are good, but they only connect as archetypes. The emotion heats up only when the planes are flying. [16 May 1986, p.C1]

Although awesome in its fantasy splendor, Legend has even less substance than Scott's last film, "Blade Runner." And whereas that detective thriller of the future offered a truly original vision, the look of Legend, as gorgeous as it is, seems a distillation of all the illustrations for all the fairy tales ever read to a child. [18 Apr 1986, p.C4]

Though there are some cool moments, the film lacks the connective tissue to make an audience invest in Xia Tian’s efforts.

Every scene in this cautionary tale about science running amok has spectacular views, unusual camera angles and moves, or dazzlingly outre computer effects. And every scene, story-wise, gets mushier and more outlandish or perfunctory--until the movie seems disengaged from itself.

Maximum Overdrive offers a variation on what has become a hopelessly hackneyed theme -- technology as monster. As long as King is tinkering with his crazed machines, the film sustains a certain amount of ominous tension, but as soon as the author turns his attention to his actors, the movie's slender storyline goes limp. It's dreary to the max.

Creepshow 2 is a cut-rate sequel from those two popular masters of horror, Stephen King and George Romero, that plays like leftovers. Fans of both deserve better. The second--and the only one of the three stories that King has published--is the best. This vignette is effective because it's simple and suspenseful, but it's not enough to carry the whole movie.

The problem with Thinner, which went unscreened for critics, is that it's medium-level King. It lacks the gravity of "Shawshank" and the crazed obsession of "Misery." It's more like "Needful Things," another good film of a lightweight story, with a few more servings of gore and gross-out humor to hold us over until the next big thing.

There’s not enough story here but every time David pops up on the soundtrack to spout dime-novel clichés like, “Fear the hanged man, because he’s dead already,” this movie takes on the quality of classic storybook, not straight-to-video schlock.

The story is spread too thin, or perhaps there just wasn’t that much substance to begin with.

Most of the movie is like the ice on which Bombay's limousine rests: cold and shaky. The only time it really comes alive is in the obvious scene, the fast, furious championship, with every Duck having his day.

You can fret at Heartburn's flimsiness, may even find it insufferably smug in its portrait of our set, but you probably won't be bored by it. And it is peopled with adults, these days enough to make you whimper in gratitude. If only these talents were in the service of something.

Unfortunately, with its on-the-nose dialogue, abrupt turns and overuse of fades and dissolves, the film can feel more like a checklist of scenes than a fully plumbed and cohesive work.

An unfortunate melding of style and subject matter, too intent on turning the Little Tramp into an icon to be regarded with stately awe to do justice to the disturbing energy of his life.

I feel just rotten about this, but I'm afraid I've outgrown James.

No matter how many (presumably non-computer-generated) tears Smith sheds, he and Lee never transform this baby hit man into a plausible science-fiction conceit, let alone invest him with a soul.

Writer-director Daniel Y-Li Grove impresses with his sleek, inventive style and effective pacing but falls short on depth and substance.

This raunchy, female-driven comedy should be able to rely on the strength of its cast, but even the collective talents of Katie Aselton, Toni Collette, Molly Shannon and Bridget Everett aren’t enough to make the movie worth a babysitter’s hourly rate.

Though there’s never any real doubt that the rules of rom-com (even the platonic kind) and the sanctity of Catholicism will be given a once-over, what’s annoying in this otherwise well-meaning movie is how the barbs become a kind of armor against real feeling, and the bland direction offers nothing.

Let's hope Romero is not tempted to go for a quartet, for at this point sheer gruesomeness overwhelms his ideas and even his dynamic visuals. He would, in fact, have been better off not having tried for a third installment. [04 Oct 1985, p.4]

The Temple has competent visuals with a few particularly nice shots that establish mood. However, its script is poorly structured and opaque, offering little insight into what is terrorizing the tourists and why.

While Henner and Begley bring a seasoned ease to their secondary roles, their presence, and that of a lively Zach McGowan as Cassidy’s drug-dealing ex, can’t compensate for wobbly dramatic stakes and glib main characters who don’t lend themselves to audience empathy.

There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham.

The imagination of the opening is a hint of what the movie might have been: a view of our world that made kids consider it from another angle--as well as a spoof of the superhero. But what are all the pleasant duck effects in the face of any of this numbing waste?

What makes 12 Strong objectionable — and what will also make it appealing to some — is its attempt to induce a kind of amnesia in the audience, to ask that we forget about the subsequent moral and strategic failures of America’s “war on terror” or the limits of military retaliation when it comes to the pursuit of justice.

The stars are as imprisoned as their characters’ respective frailties.

Certainly you expect a good time from Bateman and McAdams, who give their banter just the right sly, sportive rhythm even when the lines and situations themselves come up short.

Mark Gill’s debut feature, England Is Mine, tackles the early life of Moz, but unsatisfyingly stops just short of the Smiths, telling a rather disjointed origin story.

The result is a chronically “meh” coming-of-age meets dysfunctional-family tale, with a particularly unsatisfying ending.

At every turn, the Chinese globe-trotting heist flick The Adventurers, with Andy Lau as international master thief Zhang and Jean Reno as his Javert, calls to mind better, craftier precursors.

Fletch Lives is the ultimate comedy of condescension, a movie with a hero whose every other line of dialogue is a snide wisecrack directed at a fool. In this meager sequel, as in its popular predecessor, Chevy Chase demolishes every easy target in sight with a quip of the tongue. Some of the lines are funny, but after a while you just want to smack him.