At its best, this film echoes the creepiness and tension of "Alien." At its worst, it sinks into the pretentiousness that at times threatened to derail "Prometheus."

As YA romances go – and there are plenty to choose from – this is a lesser option.

With Legend of the Sword, the filmmaker isn’t remaking or adapting anything. This is his version of Arthur’s origin story and, if nothing else, it’s kinetic and attention-grabbing.

In a curious way, Snatched is a little like an Amy Schumer stand-up routine: sometimes edgy, occasionally hilarious, and lessened by the bits that fall flat.

Volume 2 can claim to be bigger and better than its predecessor, although it still suffers from some of the narrative sleight-of-hand issues that kept Guardians of Galaxy from achieving greatness.

The end result is a meandering story featuring shallow, unconvincing characters attempting to illustrate the evils of technology in its undermining of individual liberties. The Circle offers a lot of good bullet arguments but this is a movie not a Powerpoint presentation.

Free Fire isn’t a “Reservoir Dogs for the 2010s” but there are enough similarities in approach, tone, and style to warrant a comparison. The violence, the cavalcade or profanity, the testosterone & adrenaline – they’re all present and accounted for.

The ending is muddled as an unsuccessful attempt is made to provide closure to a story that, if told frankly, shouldn’t have one.

Although the narrative for Their Finest occasionally rambles (too much time is spent buffing Ambrose’s backstory, which is only tangentially germane to the main tale), it is by-and-large a stirring drama that incorporates lighter moments with scenes of deeply felt tragedy.

When it comes to war love stories, The Promise isn’t going to challenge Casablanca. The movie is stronger when presenting the political situation than the romantic one.

“Dumbing down” was coined for productions like this: big, splashy, testosterone-fueled monstrosities whose sole purpose is to give a studio box office bragging rights for a few weeks.

Director Marc Webb brings the same kind of deft craftmanship for drama and low-key humor that he exhibited in "500 Days of Summer" and the result is emotionally true and dramatically solid.

Although Going in Style’s heist represents a high point and gets props for being suitably clever, it’s swamped by bad melodrama and lame comedy.

The problem isn’t the non-fiction book by Diane Ackerman around which the narrative has been constructed, but a series of “added” scenes and subplots that seem lifted from a bad B movie and have the unintended consequence of devaluing the story as a whole.

Ghost in the Shell is visually compelling but tone deaf.

Nothing in T2 is memorable.

Just don’t expect this to be a light, escapist excursion into outer space. Even by sci-fi/horror standards, this is dark, gruesome, intense stuff.

It starts out small and reaches its crescendo 90 minutes later with an incredible sequence that generates more suspense from a series of text messages than I would have dreamed possible.

Watching The Sense of an Ending, I was struck by the realization that this should have been a good movie. Unfortunately, as is too often the case, something didn’t translate from the written page to the big screen.

It relies on gross-out scenes to earn the right to be called “disturbing” and seems more interested in delivering schlocky shocks than suffocating the viewer with suspense or dread.

A lively, workmanlike musical that only occasionally rises to the heights of its 1991 predecessor and frequently coasts on a lower plane.

As a big-budget B-grade monster movie, Kong: Skull Island is a home run. It offers all the tropes and clichés one expects from this sort of endeavor, sparing no expense when it comes to special effects. As a King Kong movie, however, Skull Island is less successful.

To be fair, there are occasional moments that succeed dramatically. These are typically the quieter, less histrionic ones.

More than any other comic book character outside of Nolan’s Batman, Wolverine has evolved. With his glimpse into what superhero movies can be, James Mangold has given us something sadly lacking in recent genre entries: hope.

The R, however, isn’t for the usual “extreme gore” of a slasher movie. Instead, it’s mainly for profanity. Get Out has only a little blood and viscera; the approach of writer/first time director Jordan Peele is to approach the more stomach-churning aspects of his production with tact.

12 year old boys will love the result. That’s not a good sign for anyone who has passed beyond their teenage years.

More galling and tedious than funny.

There’s no rule that main characters have to be likable, and DeHaan’s Lockhart isn’t, but they at least have to be interesting. He fails that litmus test.