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]