Director Marvin Kren delivers a lot of cheap scares, but the film doesn’t approach the dread-soaked suspense of the 1982 version of “The Thing.”

A buddy comedy that reeks like stale underpants.

If you were wondering what “12 Years a Slave” might have been like as a two-part episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” you might want to check out this unsatisfying but not uninteresting oddity. It renders another historical story about race with exquisite taste but not much in the way of passion.

Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly overload their too-long film with subplots. Yet the actors — including a terrific Aiden Gillen (“Game of Thrones”) as Casper’s no-good father — perform as though unaware that any of this is a cliché.

The Amazing Spider-Man is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.

A captivating Tom Hardy is in the driver’s seat for the one-man show Locke, but like many experimental films, this one suffers from its self-imposed constraints.

Not many surprises are in store, but the film’s affection for the dramatist is pleasing.

Dystopia’s supposed to be worse than what’s in the papers, fellas. Try to keep up.

Veteran screenwriter John Pogue, in his second directorial outing, tries repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully to jolt his audience by amping up the abundant sound effects to ear-shattering levels.

As reactions to budding sexuality go, it’s a little extreme. And it’s also contrived; Isabelle’s decision never makes any emotional, let alone logical, sense.

Sparse of dialogue, terrifically ominous and full of low-key, high-quality performances, Blue Ruin is a vigilante tale even haters like me can get behind.

Playing like a script that’s been moldering since Diane Keaton turned it down in 1983, The Other Woman is a weak adultery rom-com in which the most authentic performance comes from a non-housebroken Great Dane.

Walking with the Enemy may not be another “Schindler’s List” (Ben Kingsley has a small but important role as Hungary’s deposed regent) but it’s handsomely photographed (A-list vet Dean Cundey) in Romania and a compelling addition to the Shoah canon.

Small Time has its heart in the right place, but its screenplay’s in serious need of a tuneup.

Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.

Carl Kranz, as a possibly autistic boy enamored of Natalia, offers his scenes some heart. But Soft in the Head is drab, ramshackle stuff — up in everyone’s face, and finding very little there.

The horror flick 13 Sins is passable enough when it comes to dialing up the suspense, but the “Saw” formula of a mysterious voice guiding our hero through a series of depravities has gone a bit stale.

This is one of those nature documentaries that’s pretty much solely interested in being entertaining, and so is cleverly edited to look like the linear story of a mother (dubbed Sky) and her newborns (Scout and Amber).

With Fading Gigolo, writer-director-star John Turturro does a passable imitation of a mediocre Woody Allen sex comedy, and guess who tags along for this would-be romp?

The dancing’s fine here, but there’s little else to distinguish Make Your Move, an entirely generic drama.

Lethargic direction, bland visuals, credulity-straining plotting and tin-eared dialogue turn even pros like Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman into sleepwalking bores.

A fine cast headed by the underrated Greg Kinnear lifts this year’s third major religious movie, the fact-inspired Heaven Is for Real, somewhat beyond its Hallmark Channel-caliber script and visuals.

Draft Day is lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so dumb it should have been called “Dummyball.”

A rather unremarkable, if endearing, entry in the quirky rom-com genre.

I think I’d rather have the waterboarding than the movie’s bromides about how we’re all victims and hate must end.

Legendary hipster filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s wryly funny exercise in genre bending hits so many grace notes it ends up being his most satisfying film in years.

Like the similar, and slightly superior, "The Conjuring" last summer, Oculus eschews the buckets of gore common to R-rated horror movies and takes a relatively subtle, psychological approach — even if the somewhat disappointing ending leaves the door open for a sequel (or three).

It’s a swift, vivid movie, but 10 years past the scandal, not much is new.