Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t visually drab, only conceptually. As a critic who often complains about biopics diverging too radically from the facts, I’m chagrined to find myself wishing the filmmakers had taken more liberties with Turner’s brief memoir.

Pacific Rim made me marvel at the technology of movies, but never the magic of them.

The ultimate effect of this film, directed by actor Diego Luna, is curiously cold — it never transcends the hagiographic nature of its material, despite a talented cast and a compelling subject.

The unfairness of it all would be worth getting more worked up about if Adore were a better movie. It’s not. But it’s a fascinating one nevertheless — a case study in thwarted cinematic ambition and a cautionary tale of stylistic timidity.

If Cheap Thrills ultimately does carry us along, it’s due largely to Healy’s performance and presence. He’s a figure halfway between schlemiel and criminal, and the film effectively works that full range.

Even the film’s most charming character work is undone by the stale jokes that populate its script.

The dissonance between that meditative quality and a premise as goofy as Happy Gilmore’s is jarring, though it’s hard to blame Sandler for taking the time to look back, no matter the context.

Its comedy is successfully awkward and discomfiting until it’s evident Borgli isn’t interested in exploring people so much as using their mistakes as gristle to create an endless sprawl of socially awkward scenarios with all the grace and interpersonal cognizance of an edgelord. It is only through the sheer force of the actors involved that the movie is engaging and entertaining.

There’s a ravishing aliveness to the spacious imagery; at least the clichés have room to roam free.

Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.

It muddles what might have been a fascinating alternate — i.e., downbeat — take on one of Israel’s most-acclaimed military operations.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

As a director, he’s always been more about conjuring a mood than telling a story, about immersion rather than suspense. Filled with large, empty rooms, great blank stretches of barren landscape, and forlorn glimpses of the lonely vastness of space, The Midnight Sky is a movie you’re supposed to lose yourself in, at least a little bit. And on a small screen — even on a really big small screen — that’s practically impossible.

Master Gardener plays less like a thematic finale and more like the director is trying to exorcise himself of his perpetual idée fixe.

To be fair, some of it is good, very good. Jersey Boys has an easy, likable gait. It’s Eastwood’s most fluid film: He gets the swing of the music without fancy editing.

The film plays more like it was made by an AI versed in the existing movies but not quite up to spitting out something coherent itself.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

Ends with a sentimentality I didn’t buy — the Bellas don’t seem to particularly care about each other outside of a competitive setting, so why should we?

The movie Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul belongs to Regina Hall. By the end, she has seized it with both hands thanks to a performance that, especially in the film’s second half, is explosive, multi-layered and, unfortunately, much more purposeful than the film itself.

Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.

Pleasant, if inane – helped along by a likable cast that’s clearly having fun.

It’s not brash enough to measure up to the very-near-future dystopia of "The Purge" franchise; it’s also not studied enough as a character ensemble to work as a dialogue-driven bottle movie. The Oath lands in an unpleasant middle ground that is too close to reality to feel like escapism, and too antic to feel equipped at anything like incisiveness.

Mostly uninspired and insipid, but it rallies, and builds up enough comic steam by the end that you might find yourself amused.

Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."

It’s not a bad film, exactly, but it’s a jumbled, uncertain one, and it never quite makes a compelling case for itself.

More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies.

A wee Boy Scout would have done far better in the wilds. It’s tough to think "Waiting for Godot" when what you’re watching is closer to "Dumb & Dumber."

The result is an underwhelming addiction story that feels not just familiar, but more focused on the bad-boy swagger of its main character than his actual recovery.