Atmosphere will only take you so far, and it soon becomes apparent that Starve Acre is 10 liters of helium in a 20-liter balloon. The result is limp and never fully takes flight.

Despite some exemplary action sequences, including an impressive chase scene through the streets of Paris and into the subterranean tubes, The 355 fails to shed the tropes of male gaze and the kickass female fetishes of Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels, and every film Luc Besson has made with a female lead.

The intersection of Hollywood and Pandemic provided ample lessons in how NOT to respond to terrible real-world happening. To wit: Don’t make a quick, inexpensive, exploitative “inspired by true events” movie just to capitalize on tragedy.

Night Swim is another title to add to the increasingly unreliable canon of films from Jason Blum and James Wan. Not every new project has to be greenlit, gentlemen.

If you have trepidation about the juxtaposition of “Holocaust orphans” against “mime,” be assured they’re justified. Venezuelan writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s wartime thriller is so ambitiously misjudged, it holds a bizarre fascination.

It’s a tricky premise, and maybe a bit too much for first time writer/director Tom Edmunds Not even the reassuring presence of Tom Wilkinson, who makes everything he’s in better, can right this particular ship.

Black Water is an entertaining enough film, although one based on an overused premise that’s been done better.

It’s not so much whether The Jesus Rolls fails. It does, but how much it fails depends on how amped up your expectations are going into the movie.

While it may be almost impossible to hate the well-meaning, audience-pleasing charm-fest that is Champions, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Even a heart-warming story can leave you cold if it’s poorly told.

Pain Hustlers waits until very late in the game to really drive home some of the horrors behind the opioid epidemic. For too long we’re complicit with its characters. And maybe that’s what it’s going for; but if so, it left me with a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. Not quite what the doctor ordered.

As the movie flips through familiar Bourne/Bond tropes, the dialogue by David Benioff, Billy Ray, and Darren Lemke, feels clichéd to the point of parody, with lines like “It’s like The Hindenburg crashed into The Titanic!” Or, “I think I know why he’s as good as you. He is you!” Only, let’s be honest, not as good.

I’m not sure why director Ricky Tollman would take a real story that practically writes itself and write something else. It’s hard to follow what he’s trying to say with Run This Town, but it’s said awkwardly, without much regard to reality. The cast are all engaging and terrifically talented. But the story they’re given is a narrative straitjacket that even the best actors couldn’t save.

If Five Nights at Freddy’s has anything to offer in the way of entertainment, scares, and authentic memorabilia, it was buried beneath the determined pandering to those addicted to being on the inside of the joke.

The film has a lot of promise, but in the end, it simply just doesn’t deliver.

Trap is simply M. Night Shyamalan’s silliest movie since The Happening.

On the plus side, production design is superb, and the sets look like they were built from NASA blueprints. I’ve spent some virtual time in the I.S.S. (thank you IMAX and VR headsets) and it does look a treat. But that’s still not enough to tether this problematic product.

Ultimately, what sinks the story is a combination of miscasting and bad writing, regardless of its language. Braff tries too hard to be likeable, sometimes coming off as almost creepy. Hudgens leans the other way.

Call it Meh in Black. The pun is, I will admit, unoriginal. But then so is Men in Black: International.

Reagan the man may have been known as The Great Communicator, but Reagan the movie delivers its message stridently and with little nuance or room for debate.

The good news is that the whole shebang lasts just 83 minutes, stem to stern. The bad news is that you can only coast along on your love of Quan’s natural charm and screen presence for 60- or 65-minutes tops.

The film settles for soft-peddling rehashed themes of belonging, where misunderstood mutants struggle once again to be accepted. We've been here before, and it was better the first time.

Equal Standard means well, doesn’t stereotype black or white characters unduly, and offers hope instead of rage. The trouble is the movie is just poorly executed.

Director Michael Mohan, who also directed Sweeney in 2021’s The Voyeurs, creates a wildly uneven tone here, with a film that starts out promising to be a supernatural horror before segueing into something far more prosaic.

Suffice to say, this is all getting explained when scary things could actually be happening. My “FUN-tasy” throughout was that the credits would roll.

In sum, we have a silly Hollywood-style action movie with a Robin Hood theme, serving the ideology of an elitist authoritarian regime. In other words, a real misfit.

Forced and contrived, it makes one miss the ‘90s.

A dull piece of off-season horror flotsam, Underwater suffers from two kinds of genetic drift. It is the umpteenth movie about messing with the ocean bottom (DeepStar Six, Leviathan, The Meg, etc.), where, apparently, there be dragons rather than blind albino shrimp...It is also the latest, and most blatant, of God-knows-how-many Alien rip-offs that have taken up space in the multiplex in one critic’s lifetime.

Apart from the relief of seeing a conclusion to a long story, there’s scant pleasure to be found in the long-winded and jumbled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.