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.

Lacking even a line of dialogue and using hand-drawn images, The Red Turtle is more about feel and look than narrative. The story is a means to convey illustrations and emotions.

Although A United Kingdom has a social agenda, it is first and foremost a love story. Like "Loving," it’s about how the affection between a man and a woman of different races affects not only their immediate social circles but has ripples that wash over the entire world and impact history.

This is “more of the same” but, at least in this case, that’s a good thing.

This is a bad film - at times it’s nigh unwatchable - but that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Tonally, it’s closer to the Adam West television program than to any of the subsequent incarnations, although (if possible) The Lego Batman Movie takes itself even less seriously.

The Space between Us is what it looks like when a promising premise is betrayed by a dumbed-down, hackneyed screenplay.

Taken as a whole, this is compulsive viewing and offers plenty of material for post-viewing discussions.

Despite its uneven tone, the film is compelling and, perhaps more importantly, relevant even though the actual historical events occurred two decades ago.

A shift in tone to something like "Kingsman" might have made this a more entertaining experience.