Good intentions aside, this sluggish film never soars beyond its innate contrivances and frequently flat, knee-jerk humor.

More of a recognition reel for a fan convention than a movie, it signals a career that’s traveled far from its first evocation of a raw seriocomic intelligence about small-to-bursting lives. Now, it’s a closed loop only for die-hards.

Tottering unsteadily between mining Wain’s vast repertoire of eccentricities for comedy and slathering them in pathos, the movie winds up so busily whimsical it forgets to actually be about anything. If you don’t know who Louis Wain was before you see it, you’ll only be fractionally more illuminated, and possibly a good deal more irritated, after.

It may seem churlish to knock a film that works so hard to present everyday, well-meaning folks facing unspeakable, real-life pain. But between the picture’s uncertain tone, quirky-for-quirk’s-sake elements and such self-conscious dialogue as “What color is the sky in your world, kemo sabe?” it’s tough to be all that supportive.

Clean is so lean, it’s as if the story itself was sacrificed for atmosphere. Clean brings the cold, moody vibes and extreme violence, but narratively, it’s a mess.

For a film so grounded in the real-life issue, the movie doesn’t work to make its characters feel human or its world feel real, blunting the emotional impact it could have had.

The premise still feels too thin and juvenile to grab audiences of any age. So what algorithm decided this movie would be a lucrative endeavor?

Don’t Worry Darling, for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie.

While The Forgiven isn’t concerned with making David a better person — rather to get him to fully grasp his guilt — McDonagh’s methods can’t distinguish the film from the long list of stories about white folks learning lessons at the expense of brown people. There may have been higher ideals in mind, but “The Forgiven” fails to gracefully reach them.

The thin stereotypes in Silent Night are weirdly uninteresting to observe in this ultimate pressure situation.

Even if the vivid Whale/Karloff version had never been made, this treatment of the Shelley novel would be a loud and tacky disappointment.

A silly trifle about three housewives (Susan Saint James, Jessica Lange and Jane Curtin) who'd rather plan a shopping mall robbery to ease their dire financial straits than try to get a job. [04 May 1986, p.6]

It wants to be a high-toned nail-biter, an important history lesson and a roiling friendship drama. But because Schwochow and screenwriter Ben Powers would rather jam the components together than braid them into a cohesive whole, the movie fails at all three, straining logic (especially the poorly handled spycraft) and flattening out the emotion at every turn.

Although Shattered is a relatively short movie, it takes too long for Prieto and Loughery to put all these pieces into play — at which point the story belatedly does develop some tension.

Ghosts of the Ozarks is an often fascinating puzzle, but once the explanations for what’s really plaguing Norfork start rolling in, any remaining narrative tension dissipates quickly. Even before then, the lack of scares and action proves detrimental.

The biggest disappointment of Williams’ film then is not the ordinariness of its style and narrative mechanisms or even its safe and easy politics in search of a similarly broad audience, but its unwillingness to disrupt, with full and heavy weight, the exact things that it critiques.

The jokes are stale, the energy is stilted, and the whole thing feels like a misbegotten vanity exercise cooked up in the pandemic to keep them occupied.

When it’s a cautionary tale about an unusual family who’ll never know a moment’s peace because of their past choices, Firestarter is worthy of its source material. When in its last half-hour it turns into chapter one of a potential new superhero franchise, it joins the long list of Stephen King movies that are all gimmick, no guts.

The film as a whole, though, never hits as hard as it should. The characters are too stock — generic enough that their personalities won’t distract from the looming apocalyptic trouble.

Levi plays Scott as somewhat smarmy and disingenuous — it’s hard to feel for this guy when he seems absolutely clueless about his own kids. Fahy carries the film in her supporting role, an acting imbalance that seems weirdly apt for this story: the supportive, capable wife sidelined in favor of showcasing the inept husband getting himself together and presenting it as meaningful or poignant.

While it does put an interesting spin on the phrase from which it takes its title, the family drama with crime elements The Devil You Know stumbles.

Somehow The Boy in Blue, amiable enough, always feels like an "afternoon" movie -- a throwaway, not good enough to plan an evening around. [03 May 1986, p.9]

The Gray Man was directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, though it’s such a synthetic, soulless bundle of goods that it barely feels touched by human hands. Full of smirking one-liners, blink-and-you-miss-’em international locations and acts of gratuitously unpleasant (if more implied than seen) violence, it’s basically Netflix Winding Refn; it’s globe-trotting comic nihilism for the whole streaming-loving family.

Iñárritu, rather than answering them or leaving them provocatively unanswered (either one would be fine), does what he seems to do with most of his stories and ideas nowadays: He flings them around, roughs them up and rearranges them into an imposing, finally insufferable monument to his own awesomeness.

If the goal is to relay what a miasma of suspicion and despair the water crisis created, “Flint” certainly suggests that, if regrettably by being its own well-intentioned if messy, unilluminating chronicle.

The depiction of teenage acute depression settles for shallow character development and self-indulgent tropes that distract from a strong Hugh Jackman performance.

But the magic has deserted him with She's the One, which turns out to be one of those remixes that creates nostalgia for the original.

While Beauty doesn’t really work, it does fail in interesting ways.

The disappointing western-mystery hybrid Murder at Yellowstone City strands an excellent cast in a slow-paced story with a muted tone, too far removed from its pulpy inspirations.

Zemeckis’ Pinocchio prompts one to wish upon a star that Disney would stop diluting the legacy of its beloved animated features with these soulless knockoffs.

A silly action-adventure written and directed by the master of movie disasters, Irwin Allen. It stars a stiff Walter Pidgeon as the admiral of a U.S. nuclear submarine whose mission is to save the Earth from the Van Allen radiation belt that has caught on fire. [24 Jul 2002, p.2]

It’s too facile to connect deeply. Everything in Natalie’s life is depicted on a surface level: motherhood, work, romance, friendship and even her passion for drawing. The differences between her two selves never seem too wide because both are barely rooted in reality.

Joyride is a jalopy of a film. This Irish-set story of a brand-new single mother and a precocious 13-year-old boy who end up on the road together is so scattershot and far-fetched it overwhelms its better intentions — of which there are many.

The forced hybrid of a preposterous potboiler plot with genuine questions of medical ethics, Extreme Measures is weakened, not strengthened, by its strange bedfellows shenanigans. And the fact that director Michael Apted is able to put considerable realism and skill into his filmmaking merely emphasizes how out to lunch this picture’s story is.

The Immaculate Room tests the audience’s patience as much as it does the characters’.

Take a ridiculous premise, marry it to a situation that is bound to resolve itself in the most obvious way, and keep the whole thing rolling with juvenile gags. What do you have? Television. Or “If Lucy Fell,” whose writer-director, Eric Schaeffer, certainly knows television. Or knew it.

Except for a couple of bright patches of dialogue by screenwriter William Goldman and a sharp performance by Peter MacNicol, this new Reynolds vehicle never builds up heat--or momentum. It’s just another bumpy, tedious ride through the seamy Vegas streets, which serve as home court for a bitter, lonely guy’s battle with an oafish gang of high-rolling thugs.

Ruben’s stylistic devices, his high angle shots and his black-and-white recountings of courtroom testimony, become just so much cinematic corpse-rouging.

Canvas has some aesthetic appeal, but beneath its surface there’s not much of a narrative foundation.

But whenever a film has hysteria as its subject, as this one does, the danger exists that it will become hysterical itself, and “The Crucible,” all its promise notwithstanding, falls into that trap with a demoralizing thud. Rife with screaming fits and wild-eyed rantings, this film is too frantic to be involving, too much an outpost of bedlam to be believable.

Meet Cute falls into a rut fairly quickly, because it lacks the breadth of imagination that makes the best time-loop stories work.

Even with the Gen Z-friendly touches — and Dever delivering a winning performance — Rosaline still feels frustratingly stale.

While Colman peels back Hilary’s layers of grief and rage with all the ferocity and subtlety you’d expect from an actor of her caliber, even she can’t sell the joyfully beaming pivot required of her in an interminable sequence in which Empire of Light essentially becomes the ’80s equivalent of Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial.

The film is a case study in why critics say “show, don’t tell.” It’s 90 minutes of people talking about routine gangster stuff, peppered with occasional gunfire.

What it isn’t is especially insightful or memorable. Just because evil is banal doesn’t mean a movie has to be.

Garcia holds back too much, perhaps trying to avoid any phony epiphanies. As a result, his two main characters are too preoccupied with re-litigating old grudges to do or say anything notable.

Hill, who brings considerably less humor to his film than Kurosawa did his, unfortunately hasn't anything new to add that makes it worth sitting through his blood baths, as skillfully staged as they are. [20 Sep 1996, p.F10]

The actors all ham it up to a degree suited to a project so flat, cheap and derivative, which helps keep Mindcage at least watchable, if never exceptional.

There’s something wrong with the children, all right. The filmmakers can’t figure out what to do with them.

The cast is fine, but there’s a dispiriting dourness to the film. Nevertheless, after a slow start, Kitamura does offer up some impressive splatter scenes — peaking at the end, with a wild climax that partly justifies the movie’s existence.

One of the film’s biggest weaknesses is that Smith and Cook withhold key information so they can spring a big twist. When the threat the characters are facing remains so vague for so long, it robs the story of tension.

Ambush has the structure of an old-fashioned two-fisted combat picture, but with too little actual combat.

The Holdovers is a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one.

This downbeat drama is as overwrought as Killian’s muscles — it’s a steroidal portrait of a man in distress.

Deadliest of all, Fear is just not scary. The jump scares don’t land, the fears themselves are all a bit silly and it feels like Taylor is holding back for the majority of the run time.

The elements of a good, “Winter’s Bone”-like depiction of the rural social order are here. But they only really coalesce — and combust — when Thornton’s on the screen.

The movie’s handful of action sequences are good, but they’re too sparsely deployed and overwhelmed by lots of slow-paced scenes of characters stewing in self-pity.

It may have benefited from a quickened pace, or touches of humor, or heightened stakes because — at least in this film — watching Nazis get theirs is a vein of amusement that runs dry.

Boutella often has an otherworldly screen presence that makes her perfectly suited for this kind of material, but the fussiness of all that is happening around Kora means that the character and performance never get a chance to breathe and blossom, or to fully come to life.

The execution struggles from the outset to find a sustainable comedic pitch.

While ideas concerning the awakening of the dead are rife with transformational potential, in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster the means used to materialize them leave much to be desired.

While there are a few chuckles to be had here, mostly courtesy of Wilson’s gee-willikers delivery, the rest of the cast fares worse, including Haddish, whose bumbling clairvoyant is stuck cracking moldy jokes about PayPal and CVS.

Despite some nice mood-setting, too much of Wolf Garden is spent talking around the story rather than just telling it.

If nothing else, this movie is an effective demonstration of the directors’ ability to lull the audience into a relaxed state before knocking them around.

The cat-and-mouse action is uninspired and slackly paced; and any pizazz that Wilson, Lundgren and Fehr bring gets lost once they stop talking and start shooting.

Last Sentinel is more geared toward delivering a message about humanity’s bent toward paranoia and self-destruction than in producing any tension or thrills. It’s a very heavy film — really too heavy to move.

Despite all the familiar faces, Simulant still feels too bare-bones. It asks some pretty remedial questions about freedom and humanity; and it is ultimately too tasteful and earnest to get pulses pounding and minds racing.

The idea behind this film is to celebrate James’ first and best teammates. In the real world, what they achieved as a basketball team was remarkable. But dramatized? On the screen? It’s stubbornly undramatic.

There are really two movies happening here: one, a cat-and-mouse game between two manipulative schemers; and another that skewers self-involved, “anything for a click” influencers. Both have their merits; but they don’t mesh well.

George C. Scott plays a gentle wacko who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes. He's being treated by a psychiatrist (Joanne Woodward) named Dr. Watson. If you think that's funny, then this movie is for you. The point of all this is that losers can be winners. The cast labors valiantly in a lost cause. [24 Apr 1987, p.19]

Nothing in the story really sticks, or stings. The ace cast makes the movie better. But they deserved a better movie.

That Bagiński’s Knights of the Zodiac amounts to a well-intended disappointment doesn’t mean it has zero merit as a work of entertainment, but it will neither satisfy the fandom’s demands for a true-to-the-bone homage to their childhood favorite, nor will it transmit to outsiders why this tale of blind courage in the face of insurmountable odds has inspired such decades-long devotion.

More often, the weirdness and affectations seem gratuitous. Even for a movie meant to be offbeat, the rhythm is jarringly askew.

No situation or character really gets a chance to breathe or grow here. Even the best casts can flail when the vibe is more antic than comic.

Peter Nicks’ documentary Anthem is a broad-strokes film about a nuanced topic: the promises and failures of the American experiment.

The effects look cheap, the Louisiana accents are broad and the characters are one-dimensional, but veteran B-picture stars Nicky Whelan (as a tough sheriff), Casper Van Dien (as a notorious criminal) and Louis Mandylor (as the raiders’ leader) all throw themselves into the film’s cheesy spirit.

The film’s chaotic structure and panting sensibility leaves Veil feeling more like the star of a fast-moving timeline than someone we get to know.

Saltburn is shocking only in its puerility. No sophomore effort should feel this sophomoric.

Despite its cult status, Hollywood Knights is pretty much a guy flick with its share of bare-breasted females, cheerleaders without undies and crass jokes.

Jones, never winking at the rampant absurdity, gives the proceedings a little grounding. But Besson wants off the leash and his instincts lead him astray.

Apart from mistaking energy for exhilaration, the movie is a mostly flavorless puree of dark humor, comic-book sentimentality and ultra-bloody combat. But it’s the relentless and banal video-game aesthetic that may get you involuntarily reaching for a controller in hopes of finding a pause button.

Knox Goes Away should be noirishly enjoyable hokum. But instead, screenwriter Gregory Poirier’s tribute to an earlier era’s taciturn machismo is more muddled and ludicrous than fleet and clever.

So why does it all feel so laborious and overworked, so frantically self-regarding? It has something to do with the insipid quality of the songs, none of which threaten to lodge themselves in your brain the way the first movie’s lines so effortlessly do.

Like a comedy sketch that overstays its welcome, “Society” undermines both its caustic intent and its romantic-comedy subplot.

The movie strikes that wild, so-bad-it’s-entertaining chord vigorously. I can’t recommend Miller’s Girl but I also can’t recommend it enough.

There is a journeyman’s proficiency to “Chapter 1” but little in the way of real spark.

It’s so detached from the supervillain narrative that it’s almost meta. But as the musical numbers become lengthy detours rather than lending further insight into Arthur, the sequel doesn’t sing as a character study. And it sure ain’t a thriller.

Regrettably, the movie itself feels trapped by its airless gallery of carefully crafted images, familiar to the high-toned end of the horror genre: elegantly mood-thick surroundings, deliberately half-seen creatures, actors positioned as if in a still life.

Standard grisly rampaging killer fare that marks a no-more-than-competent feature debut for director Armand Mastroianni, billed by MGM as an American cousin of the great Marcello. [17 Jan 1988, p.3]

Director Charles Martin Smith and the four credited writers go for all-out zaniness, naturally, but it comes off like lowest-level Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-Proft -- less Jay Ward than failed Mad magazine. [17 Apr 1992, p.F28]

There are funny sight gags strewn throughout, but because so many scenes and confrontations are repeated from the original, there’s a staleness and sense of melancholy to the whole affair.

Despite a few chuckles, some capable voice work and plenty of splashy color, it proves a largely empty and exhausting ride.

This fearsome foursome may be appealing, but the film is beyond formulaic, and far from fabulous.

Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.

Power Ballad nods toward a dozen interesting themes, none of which it bothers to explore.

A masterful performance by Warren Oates in the title role, but the film emerges as trite and hollow anyway. [19 Aug 1990, p.4]

The intended message is that B.J. must stop chasing the spotlight to let his son be the star. But his character can’t do it and neither can he. In fairness, the title is a clue that technically the focus was never Korean music. The story was always about Pops learning to be a dad.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell and Captain Kronos -- Vampire Hunter, were made during the studio's waning years and neither is on par with Hammer's best films produced in the late '50s and early '60s. [29 Oct 2003, p.E5]