This one, written by Fellowes and directed by Simon Curtis (“My Week With Marilyn,” “Woman in Gold”) with the same workmanlike efficiency, affords its share of passing pleasures. And not just of the usual luxury-porn variety, although those who watch “Downton Abbey” for the pearls, frocks and waistcoats, the posh furnishings and elegant dinners will hardly be disappointed.

Taking Care of Business is a curious achievement: a laughless comedy starring Belushi and Grodin, two actors who are almost always funny.

It’s off-putting the way Velle bombards us with statistics and warnings and ominous music before settling in to his (mostly white) brain trust of researchers and experts expounding on population growth as the survival topic we shouldn’t be afraid to address.

It’s underwritten yet over-stuffed with songs, and the production itself feels chintzy and airless.

When Side Out gets to its “meat"--intercutting the beach with the law firm, intercutting frantic lovemaking with a tough volleyball loss, intercutting the beach with life, intercutting bikinis with more bikinis--we know we’re dealing with shameless button-pressers.

As it stretches out, it also thins, its Malick-meets-Cassavetes ambitions never rising above clichés of technique and melodrama.

It’s astonishing how little tension or even momentary menace Trevorrow is able to mine from individual action sequences, how tame even T. rex now seems in its late-franchise dotage. The mix of practical and computer-generated effects used to bring these behemoths to life has evolved by leaps and bounds, but their ability to stir and scare us — much less provoke even a moment’s thought — is a thing of the ancient past.

Running Against the Wind is purportedly based on real events, and it’s sloppy and sort of random enough to be true.

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.