Thriller falls back on the old horror formula of bland, often mean-spirited young folks, getting slaughtered one by one … and without near enough flair.

The problems may lie in Todd’s novel, but regardless, characters act illogically, as though written by someone who napped through most of Intro to Psych and skipped English 101 altogether. Character motivations go either unwritten or left on the cutting room floor.

A Land Imagined never congeals into anything intriguing or compelling enough to earn our required patience.

From the casting of Centineo to the climax at a school dance, The Perfect Date feels engineered by Netflix algorithms. The resulting film, directed by Chris Nelson, feels as inauthentic and unsure of its identity as its hero.

The movie’s overlong and the humor’s too broad, but given that this would-be cult film is aimed at audiences who want something silly and trashy, it’s hard to fault Skiba for just mindlessly mashing those two buttons, over and over.

A Dark Place is earnest enough, but it comes across as phony. It’s hard to do a “local color” drama when everyone’s from out of town.

Despite how good-natured this movie is, it just doesn’t stand on its own. It has the right kind of soul, but a shapeless body.

Whatever the film has to say about the sketchiness of modern financial wheeling and dealing remains frustratingly non-specific. The characters all feel like they’ve been copied and pasted from hundreds of other movies that end with armed standoffs in some featureless field or warehouse.

There are moments when it feels aimless, incorporating new story lines about the current administration and deportation deep into the running time. But in simply observing this courtroom and the affect it has on lives, the film is deeply moving and quietly revolutionary.

In Disney’s hands, William eschews freak show theatrics for something much weightier.

Despite the juicy details and fascinating topic, it’s disappointing that the stilted tone makes it so difficult to connect emotionally with this important story.

Writer-director Max Minghella’s U.K.-set fairy tale Teen Spirit — which takes Elle Fanning’s lonely immigrant adolescent from karaoke dreams to singing contest heights — is somewhere between feeling abbreviated and wearing out its welcome.

At its best, when we can live Dogman through Marcello’s eyes, the movie keeps reminding you of that opening, of people and animals, menace and kindness, and the cages we sometimes don’t realize we’ve made for ourselves.

Master Z: Ip Man Legacy, like any old-school popular entertainment, contains sentimental moments and broad comedy as well as all that action. If you don’t already have the Ip Man habit, it’s a fine place to start.

This disjointed, though consistently tense retelling dives full force into ostentatious pathos more often than it opts for narrative prudence.

With considerable grace and beguiling modesty, the movie frames its subject as one of Christ’s most discerning followers and a crucial witness to his ministry, death and resurrection.

Working Woman is more than a feature that makes compelling drama out of workplace sexual harassment; it’s an excellent work by any standard, a subtle and insightful character-driven drama that will compel anyone who cares about the interplay of personalities on-screen.

There are several uniquely impressive elements to the adventure drama Mia and the White Lion, but they’re undermined by a choppy, at times contrived and implausible script by Prune de Maistre (wife of director Gilles de Maistre) and William Davies.

Sadly, Laika’s new feature, Missing Link, fails to match the striking visuals and compelling characters in its Oscar-nominated 2016 film Kubo and the Two Strings.

This Hellboy can be something to see. It can also be a giant bore.

Although this cleverly shot and edited picture (it began as a short, grew into a digital miniseries and was then expanded into a feature) doesn’t shy away from its eccentric side, it remains a convincing, relatable look at one woman’s inner workings and the vicissitudes of love and friendship.

Sex Trip tries to tell its audience that what’s inside is what matters, but this comedy is rotten at its core and sure to offend most people unlucky enough to watch it.

The problem is that for all the ways this story is entertaining as a magazine article or Dateline segment, it’s an awkwardly bloated bore when Love makes the affable, naïve Hyden not just his key interviewee but also his reenactment star.

With its solid production values, Unplanned has all the appearances of being a real film, but viewers in favor of abortion rights will find it to be pure propaganda. Writer-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon spend more time making their talking points than developing their characters, who exist merely to make their arguments.

The material is breezy and amusing with a few piercing moments of emotional truth, but the tone never quite feels right for the issue at hand. There’s a tendency to rely on incredibly hacky material, like extended bits about the complexities of sperm collection and well-trodden jokes about alternative healers.

With its good use of a single location and just three characters, Long Lost almost works, though its fun twist would have felt fresher a decade ago.

And so while Gilliam has undoubtedly made better films and certainly greater films than The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, there is something about the ridiculous effort and mixed results that make this arguably the most Gilliam-esque. For anyone struggling with whether to give up, concerned that the result will not match the effort, Gilliam seems to be planting a flag — or more accurately charging a windmill — to say the effort is the reward.