Daughter of the Wolf could’ve used a jaw-dropping set-piece or two (or three or four), but Hackl does at least embrace the challenge of shooting outside in the cold, and the movie’s moderately better for it.

Project X strains credibility. Too often it seems an overreaching variation on "WarGames."

The setting and the characters are fairly unique. But they’re put to fairly mundane use, in service of a blah coming-of-age tale.

Most of the first half of director Ellie Callahan’s supernatural thriller Head Count feel like a waste of time, made all the more frustrating once the movie starts to improve.

In the end, the most disturbing thing about The 16th Episode is how good it might’ve been if Cohen-Olivar had figured out how to fill the whole picture with the personality at its center.

Heightened but airless, this “Castle” is like a checklist of the novel’s peculiarities, rather than its singular soul brought to life.

The movie, which comes off strangely wide-eyed about such “outré” things as marijuana and same-sex attraction, evokes some 1970s-era George Segal vehicle as it struggles to pair hip defiance with come-to-Jesus-style pathos, the latter of which provides a few of the film’s more compelling moments.

There’s nothing particularly awful about the film (title aside), but it never develops into the “Shaun of the Dead”-like social satire it strains to be.

The actors all look like they had a wonderful time making Supervized, but the material they were given to play is pretty dopey, and way too basic. It’s an insult to superhero fans and senior citizens alike.

There’s nothing especially original about “Assimilate.” But director John Murlowski and a talented young cast — including Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy and Andi Matichak as the plucky high schoolers trying to save their town — do at least keep the action lively and unpretentious.

As the true purpose of the quest becomes clearer, Huang raises the film’s stakes, aiming for a profundity that he can’t quite hit — though he takes a solid shot.

The mystery plot isn’t surprising enough — and it takes at least a few good jolts to create the cinematic equivalent of a page-turner.

A sluggish drama about aging and holding onto your dreams.

Meant to feel either lived-in or spontaneously passionate, these poorly written relationships don’t project the effervescence of living in the moment nor the fickleness of what’s to come.

The movie too often plays like a regional theater production of “Goodfellas,” marred by some hammy dark comedy and off-the-rack tough-guy dialogue. The passion of the people behind this project is evident, and appreciated.

Cold Blood is well-made but hard to warm to — although it might satisfy nostalgic Reno fans, eager to see him playing a silent, hulking assassin yet again.

It lives on its action and dies on its gab. It also would have been better without all those songs about catching the thunder and grabbing the lightning and going for the glory. They sound like a rejected ad campaign for Old Milwaukee. In movies like this, action is often enough--but here, it's just not radical.

The strong sensibility and the unabashed sensationalism overcome some (but not all) the movie’s amateurism. The raggedness is part of the charm, making “Killer Unicorn” feel like the filmmakers’ deeply personal craft project.

Just like the first Iron Sky, the sequel is frustratingly unfocused as a commentary on the modern world — and even more so as a story. It has the seeds of several nifty ideas, scattered loosely, left untended.

Into the Mirror is deliberately opaque, for better or worse, more concerned with images and mood than concrete details.

It’s a workable fantasy setup that’s undermined by a seemingly deliberate lack of detail about the characters, the Club and the world at large. Midway, the story takes a potentially intriguing turn but becomes more muddled than masterly.

Rifkin’s crafty determination to embellish production value constraints with campy transitions and an eerie use of colored light is commendably spirited. Ultimately, however, its aesthetic ambitions trample the substance that occasionally shines through.

Romance and comedy are dumped in favor of carnage: a self-sabotaging decision for what might have been a cute, enjoyable movie.

Funny Farm --a weak-fish-out-of-water comedy about a New York City couple who see their rural paradise turned into a rustic hell--is a movie with a doubly deceptive title. This movie isn't about a farm, and it isn't very funny, either.

While Bridges is a capital stylist, "Bright Lights" needed a great deal more than style. (Real emotion, for one thing. Believability might also have been nice.) And while Fox is puppyish and charming, his character, Jamie, has to go through a real epiphany during the film's weeklong time frame and Mr. Fox is hard-pressed to suggest a two-Excedrin headache.

After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another.

While the story’s nothing special, the world of Desolate is memorable, with its tribal rivalries and sleazy black markets. It’s a vision of the end-times that disturbingly resembles the dying small towns of America in 2019.

Like its predecessor, “The Boy II” is a fairly corny and stodgy spook-show, with a few good jolts and one genuinely creepy killer toy.

An unconvincing, late-breaking tragic turn; several dubious, go-nowhere supporting characters; and a blurrily provocative ending don’t help.

The three principal actors are all pros, with plenty of TV and movie credits; and they’re charismatic enough to be good company. But the story around them keeps changing every 20 minutes and lacks payoffs. It’s like a series of uncompleted writing prompts.

Directed by Sean Mullin, this is 83 minutes of marketing for mega-brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, but it’s made with enough skill that it might bring some former fans back to the fold.

As this latest gets under way, Thor has recovered his enviable god-bod but still has little sense of purpose. The problem with “Love and Thunder” is that it seems to reflect this identity crisis while pretending to solve it.

The time-traveling investigation is indeed optimistic, but in reality and execution, it’s just magical thinking wrapped up in a fussy, overly convoluted plot.

The movie surely isn’t meant to be mean. But there’s an underlying sourness that makes Sextuplets much less fun than the pictures it’s imitating.

Unconvincing and annoying, a miscalculation on numerous fronts, it is finally sugary enough to make the sentimental Priscilla play like a model of icy restraint.

Stewart is enough of a force to give Seberg’s darkest moments their due, but it’s too little, too late for the superficial soup that is the movie that bears her name.

While the tone of One Last Night is appropriately breezy — and while newcomer Schank makes a wonderful first impression — in a “strangers spend a long evening talking” story, the characters should be more witty and wise, and not as vaguely defined as this pair.

This follow-up to 2016’s “High Strung” has its visual dazzle and performance highs but the story and characters are just too fake, chaste and grit-free to take seriously.

Halloween Ends has the feeling of dour obligation, and it’s clear that no one’s heart is really in this anymore, the limits of narrative possibility in Haddonfield stretched beyond their max.

It would be tempting to say that inside “Slamdance” is a remarkable movie struggling to free itself from conventional trappings. But the opposite is true. The trappings are what dazzle you; the interior of “Slamdance” is exactly what isn’t remarkable.

South Central Love tries to deal with heavy issues with grace, but its clumsiness undercuts its message.

Wicked Witches is almost like a segment from an old British horror anthology. It’s simple, direct, rich in local color and dripping with irony. But it’s been stretched to about triple its ideal length.

The reactionary empty-headedness of this R-rated movie gets to you, spoiling whatever comic-strip enjoyment it might have had. In the “Rambo” movies, you’d have to be almost as much of a lunkhead as Rambo to take their “politics” seriously. But “Navy SEALS,” directed by Lewis Teague, isn’t scaled to be a cartoon; it’s more like a hypercharged military training film.

Being able to kick people in the head, at least while they’re standing up, is no negligible talent--though Lionheart is a pretty negligible movie. It has that grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many post-'80s action movies.

A killer concept falls frustratingly short of the finish line in Empathy, Inc., a dark morality tale that ambitiously casts contemporary technology in a throwback visual setting.

Those looking for inspiration will find it without looking too hard, but those who don’t attend church regularly will be as bored as they would be by a sermon.

The idea of this boat as a last-ditch play to save a marriage is fine as an inciting incident, but it ends up steering the story way too much. Oldman and Mortimer play the drama in “Mary” well. Too bad they don’t get much chance to play the horror.

Prolific actor-comedian-musician Tim Heidecker may have a sizable cult following but it’s doubtful he’ll find many new fans with his latest effort, the tedious and laugh-free mockumentary Mister America.

The plot for Revenge, based on Jim Harrison’s 1978 novella, seems ideal for a great galvanizing pulp thriller, but the movie bogs down in melodramatic murk.

As with even the worst of Allen’s films, there is just enough to satiate fans and make the whole thing seem maybe, possibly worth the effort.

The flatly visualized characters and tinny, stiff English-language voice performances are busts, often creating the paradoxical vibe of a cartoon with an uncanny-valley problem, as if you were watching the rough specs for an animatronic theme-park installation.

They’ve made a sometimes funny, mostly media-referential movie without much real life; a high-tech, high-pro job that has a glamor-robot feel.

It is sad, truly sad, to have to report that Color of Night is a disappointment in almost every respect.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael isn't truly terrible, it's truly confused. It's as though director Jim Abrahams wanted to do heartfelt comedy-drama but couldn't quite shake off the wicked edge of his alma mater, ZAZ: Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the dementos behind "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun."

It has an intriguingly radical and gung-ho core concept, but shallow implementation.

Even with an old pro like Shaye behind the camera, Ambition is too slight.

This version not only doesn’t surpass or match Brook’s, it makes the material look bad.

As pop culture narratives go, “Scandalous” wants to be as colorful and fun as a flip through of the rag itself at the supermarket. But in these truth-challenged times, the jovial tone of “Scandalous” all too often outweighs the judgmental.

Veering between sentimental and salty, philosophical and goofy, writer/director Gilles Lellouche’s Gallic stab at a “Full Monty”-style uplifter is too waterlogged with the genre’s well-worn staples (training comedy, bite-sized humiliations) and too uninterested in story/character details (turning paunchy mopers into athletic competitors) to offer anything truly refreshing about the solution to middle-aged dejection.

Class of 1999 swiftly short-circuits on unspeakable, incessant brutality and bloodshed.

After a strong start the movie steadily declines, one set piece after another, and there are many moments where the mind wanders and then asks: “Is this still going on?”

Sadly in need of renovation. [28 Aug 1987, p.8]

That raw looseness is too often just sloppy filmmaking, and the gangster clichés ultimately win out over even Rezaj’s roiling, ripped-from-the-streets vitality.

A mostly hackneyed lesson on racial biases desperately stumbling to appear provocative. It does, however, occasionally raise inquiries worthy of pensive consideration.

Corny to its core but with enough charisma to avert total insufferableness, it’s a bubbly counteraction of a movie boasting a progressive conclusion.

Given how visually inventive and unusual the film’s first five minutes are, it’s disappointing that, by its last half hour, it essentially turns into one undistinguished chase scene after another. A heroine as strong as Reese deserves a more consistently exciting plot.

The film's tone wobbles between straight-arrow action and curdled camp. [12 Nov 1993, p.F1]

Melodrama and an overstuffed plot often overshadow the genuine feeling here.

In Mob Town, the cast’s definitely got the goods, but the writing and direction consistently fail to seal the deal.

It's one more example of minuscule ideas inflated to preposterous proportions: An Attack of the 50-Foot Marketing Hook. [17 Jul 1992, p.F10]

The storytelling’s smart, but the style’s tediously reverential and somber.

This picture is just one upsetting scene after another, which then only belatedly coalesce into a story — too late really to pay off any investment in those remarkable early moments.

Even by sequel standards, a minimal amount of creativity has gone into Sister Act 2, and not even the talents of its cast, including several likable young people, can compensate for this thrown-together feeling.

Hickox, the son of Douglas (Theatre of Blood) Hickox, shows a derivative, choppy, jagged style in his feature debut. He makes an uneasy stew of this mix of hip, flip teen-slasher gore and movie-buff aestheticism, of callous black humor and smarmy sentimentality. There’s a big problem here: too much waxy buildup.

As the heroine of the chase thriller The Courier, Olga Kurylenko brings a lot of personal magnetism and awesome athleticism — and she needs to, because her director, Zackary Adler, has stuck her in an action movie that rarely moves.

Candyman, the latest Clive Barker shocker, is his worst to date: an ambitious would-be morality play/thriller of the supernatural involving racism and mythology that seems merely pretentious and preposterous as it drowns in gallons of blood and guts. [16 Oct 1992, p.F6]

Melody Makers never becomes more than a set of disconnected sound bites and archival photos, loosely assembled. At times the film feels like outtakes from another, more cohesive documentary about Melody Maker’s legacy.

This is a rare case when a cheap B-movie isn’t improved by Cage-style clowning.

Like many other overprepared athletes, the players in Body of Evidence left their best game in the locker room. [15 Jan 1993, p.F1]

Unfortunately, as cobbled together by writer-director Patrea Patrick, those historical elements, in which grainy black-and-white archival footage is unconvincingly blended with repetitive reenactments, keep distracting from the main attraction, who is prominently featured in candid interviews conducted some years prior to his death in 2018.

Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

Director Andy Newbery — working from a script credited to four writers — makes the story look classy but can’t find its beating heart.

A sincere attempt at epic filmmaking, it has been unable to translate its aspirations into believable, non-cliched cinema. What unrolls instead is approximately three hours of violent, cartoonish posturing incongruously set in the realistically evoked milieu of East Los Angeles. [30 Apr 1993, p.F1]

The unsurprising, one-note nature of The Good Son, the fact that it’s a bump-in-the-night movie where all the bumps are visible a mile ahead, sorely constricts any possibility of excitement.

Fire in the Sky, a UFO movie, doesn't fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill. [13 Mar 1993, p.F4]

Low-key indie First Love has some interesting but fleeting moments in its story of twins in crisis, but it feels like a first draft whose script could have used more fleshing out, particularly in the characterization of its leads.

De Clercq’s clear directorial talent gives the film the illusion of respectability, but it can’t remove the sweaty sheen of smarm.

Downhill is a misfire, unable to show either of its stars to their best advantage. Neither the actors nor the film can decide how to balance humor with drama and that is the heart of the problem.

The freewheeling, DIY quality of Lost Holiday works both for and against this quasi-caper comedy.

Despite the noble ambitions of writer-director Sally Potter (“Orlando, “The Party”), The Roads Not Taken proves a morose and baffling drama; a painful, snail’s-paced 85 minutes with little payoff.

While Pearce is typically superb as the hero — a self-doubting U.S. marshal named Jim Dillon — the film itself is otherwise utterly unremarkable. The combination of stiff, overwritten dialogue and flatly functional action sequences wastes a good lead performance.

While Long gives it his trademark amiable best and Klabin and longtime collaborator Patrick Lawler cook up a heady cocktail of lively though budget-conscious visual effects, at the end of the day the Carl W. Lucas script feels more like a concept pitch than a fully-plotted proposition.

With its human relations a bit dicey, the movie lives or dies by the cuteness of its CG animals. Fortunately, it probably will never stop hitting the cute button inside us simply to see rabbits scurry-hopping with earnest little faces. The cinematic technology’s growth is remarkable.

William Friedkin's shocker is supposed to be primally terrifying, but primally silly is more like it. [27 Apr 1990, p.F4]

What might have worked in theater doesn’t translate here, particularly the repetition of words and phrases that feel true to the original medium but grate here on screen.

The filmmakers seem curiously at sea over the purpose of their assignment, possessing neither the patience to plunge headlong into the story’s familiar depths nor the radicalism to reinvent it entirely.

The ending that seems meant to be wistful, even magical, reads instead as appalling, lamentable, gloomy, however you want to say “the opposite of wondrous and happy.”

The one-sided film’s wheels come off when covering Thomas’ fraught 1991 Senate confirmation hearings.