It is a relentlessly brutal movie, one that too quickly becomes monotonous in its cruelty, numbing instead of thrilling viewers.

On a basic level, the film is entertaining enough, but anyone hoping for a particularly fresh or innovative take on the show or its creator is probably going to come away feeling a bit let down.

It’s an uneven mix of cartoonish slapstick, poorly choreographed fight scenes, and some last-minute lessons about the importance of unity, encouragement, and the need to change obsolete rules. It has too much violence for younger children and is unlikely to hold the attention of anyone old enough to read the subtitles.

There’s strong emotion in “Holy Days,” but it results entirely from the talented cast. The story’s structure is so phony and over-determined that there is no real suspense, and, even more deadly, the tone is artificially “comedic.” True moments of unfettered humor are nowhere to be seen.

It’s a sporadically fun movie with obvious influences, but it also lacks in stakes and personality, getting repetitive long before it ends.

While “The Gates” itself isn’t a total smash, it’s a more than sturdy final effort from a beloved actor.

Dolly sets viewers up for an experience that it can’t quite deliver, mostly due to small acts of self-sabotage.

In a strange way, War Machine kicks off when it proverbially jumps the shark, introducing something so ridiculous as a big killer robot to jolt the movie awake from its ho-hum military recruiting motions. It’s not a movie built to withstand big questions, but for a high-octane action thriller, it’s a lot more fun when it goes off the rails.

A morality play wrapped up in gothic horror tropes, “The Dreadful” is definitely committed to the bit, and its darkly medieval setting is a refreshing change of pace. I just wish it were a medieval tapestry that worked as a whole, rather than just in fits and starts.

On paper, this sounds like a potentially fascinating combination but the film emerging from it proves to be anything but that. Instead, it proves to be such an overly ponderous exercise that, by the time it finally comes to an end, you may feel so sapped of energy that find yourself struggling to get up out of your seat.

There is a good movie lurking within writer/director Cinqué Lee’s survivalist coming-of-age thriller “Last Ride.” It’s just suspended between two half-told stories.

How to Make a Killing makes a half-hearted effort to surprise and maybe disturb us with some late developments, but by that point we’ve been numbed by the film committing the unforgivable crime of being dull.

What’s mostly lacking is a matter of character-enhancing detail, the kind that would better integrate the movie’s high-concept thrills with its heartstring-tugging melodrama. Soapy’s not bad, but “This is Not a Test” lacks the sensationalism or sensitivity to make it more than a wan misfire.

The worst thing about “Scare Out” isn’t that it’s boring and ultimately trite, but that there’s so little of Zhang’s usual sensuousness in it.

It’s hard to feel freely when you are constantly and loudly reminded by every aspect of the movie that you are supposed to feel things.

Jimpa is a story that feels like it’s arrived about a decade too late for its intended audience: Queer people want more from their rep than being anthropologically observed from the sidelines, and straight people have watched enough “Drag Race” to already be familiar with the concepts this film treats as novel.

Besson doesn’t build up the romantic emotion he apparently aspires to with his efforts, but “Dracula” gets by on the power of his (and Landry’s) conviction.

Unfortunately, “Back to the Past” doesn’t really stand on its own, and its creators don’t know how to offer viewers anything new.

While it looks beautiful, and Thomas Newman’s score does a lot of heavy lifting given the lack of dialogue, there needed to be more actual storytelling beyond a few key beats of new life and tragic death.

By the halfway mark of the screen-popping and kinetic but ultimately tiresome and borderline dopey AI thriller “Mercy,” I found myself yearning for a wireless mouse so I could log off.

That “Deepfaking Sam Altman” is earnest and curious and full of fun thought prompts ultimately makes it more frustrating than a flat-out bad movie would have been.

The film clearly has a lot on its mind. But by the end, you still might not know what it was, even though the hurtling camerawork, jagged edits, brutal physical confrontations, and bone-rattling sound design will send you home feeling like you’ve had an experience.

A by-the-numbers sequel that mostly ignores the stuff that made its predecessor stand out in exchange for formulaic would-be thrills.

Unfortunately, more bland than broad humor otherwise stands in for Polsky and Herzog’s personalities.

Andersen’s film, in its attempt to present various perspectives in this story, shifts the viewer’s attention from one character to another, diluting its emotional impact.

It’s clear that the irrepressibly charming Sedgwick and Bacon love to share the screen, and it is an absolute joy to watch their effortless chemistry. I just wish it were in a better picture.

It’s an inspired idea, even though a lot of the industry inside jokes may go over most moviegoers’ heads. The playfulness of this self-referential structure gives the movie a zany energy off the top that it ultimately can’t sustain.

It ends up being little more than a rambling, undisciplined clip show that misfires as both history and entertainment.

Resurrection is ravishing in its command of shadow and light, but it studiously hollows out any sense of soul beneath the surface.

Inspired but overwrought, “Scarlet,” an anime adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, begins with stunning style before falling off a major cliff.

The whole film feels like a production of calling in favors, as the relatively hotshot cast it drew seems incongruent with its content: a clichéd story of a disordered family over the holidays.

One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty.

While “Oh. What. Fun” has an excellent director, Michael Showalter, who also co-scripted, some nice music, and top performers, including Danielle Brooks as a delivery driver Claire meets on the road, and the exquisitely lovely Havana Rose Liu, very appealing as Jeanne’s daughter, it keeps undermining our sympathy with off-kilter stakes and inert efforts at humor.

Unlike its predecessor, “Troll 2” doesn’t have enough canned dramatic or comedic incidents to make it seem particularly eventful.

While Keeper is not short on visual style or atmospheric tension, ultimately, it’s a tedious genre exercise undone by an undercooked narrative and its allergy to mystery.

All of it is done capably but without much panache; worst of all, the boxing sequences feel rudimentary, lacking both artistry and savagery.

While Powell’s film is highly bloody and invested with psychological realism, it lacks a pulse and curiosity that doesn’t befit the excitement promised in the title.

The Astronaut isn’t terrible, I suppose—the performance by Mara is solid, and Varley’s work on the directing front shows that she knows how to take familiar genre elements and present them with style and efficiency. However, these efforts are undone by a screenplay that kind of goes off the rails for a while, leading to a conclusion that fails to inspire the overwhelming emotional impact it was clearly intended to evoke in viewers.

Truth & Treason is a staid drama whose observations about Helmuth could easily be summed up in a quick encyclopedic blurb.

While casting Glover as a reluctant everyman takes admirable chutzpah, there’s not much to “Mr. K” beyond its second-hand surrealism and strained counter-mythmaking.

It’s as if Bertino the director knows that Bertino the writer hasn’t done quite enough to engender audience interest in Polly’s plight so he seeks to pummel the audience into terror instead of drawing them in.

Take an ordinary family in the Hollywood Hills and throw both a wildfire and a menacing pack of killing machines at them and you have “Coyotes,” a movie that frustrates more than it thrills, never quite finding the right tone for the most harrowing night in the lives of its characters.

Shelby Oaks is a film that plays like a checklist of clichés, a movie that so aggressively employs techniques we’ve seen work better elsewhere that it becomes almost numbing. Horror fans don’t mind familiarity, but not if it feels like the echo is all there is to listen to.

At a time when it seems like women’s representation seems to be regressing, the intention of the film feels more timely now than when the film ends in 2019, before the pandemic, and the fondness for dating apps starts to wear off. But it was the user experience of the film—where its simplistic narrative design leaves no surprises and plenty of shallow characters—that felt unsatisfying.

Judging by this documentary’s easygoing approach, Altrogge wants to use his film as a full-spread story on Clemente. The decision pushes Clemente the man into being a mere memory.

Everything about “The History of Sound” is restrained to a fault—until it’s about the music. And then it bursts with passion and pure emotion.

It’s a character-driven drama populated by sketchy characters who are mostly compelling thanks to the movie’s strong ensemble cast and Haugerud’s typically sensitive direction. So unfortunately, the suggestive power of Johanne’s journey fades as the movie slowly heads to its inconclusive finale.

Ultimately, “Roofman” is a slick but incurious film that is so preoccupied with showing the what of Manchester’s story that it doesn’t bother to examine the why.

Watching these two performers grapple with a text as rich as Mosley’s only leads one back to wishing the film around them trusted them enough to take more risks and to really go somewhere other than the first floor.

The Threesome ends up kind of a mixed bag, cute but a bit disjointed.

While there’s a lot to like about “Everything to Me” (Abigail Donaghy’s performance, in particular), Lacob’s heart-on-sleeve script and uncertain direction often leave the whole thing feeling a bit scattered.

This is a bleak nugget of a film that is trying so hard to take the typical sports movie narrative and unleash its darker and more nightmarish side that it runs out of steam long before arriving at its frustratingly oblique conclusion.

Roach is a director who can do stylish, clever compositions when it suits him, as demonstrated in his flamboyantly silly “Austin Powers” movies. But you wouldn’t know it from this film, which prizes information delivery over visual pizzazz to such a degree that it often feels more like a pilot for an HBO comedy series than something that can only be properly appreciated on a big screen.

The problem with “Vice is Broke” is it never quite gets around to answering what went wrong with Vice, content to mimic its “quirky” form of filmmaking as interview subjects recall the toxic workplace atmosphere that undeniably produced some formative journalism.

As the film trudges toward its conclusion, it’s one frustrating scene after another like that. And by the end, you’ll realize the clever opening title sequence was probably the best part of all.

There are some great ideas in “We Strangers,” particularly in how it explores the emotional labor inherent in domestic work, as well as some thoroughly committed performances by Howell-Baptiste, Dizzia, and Goldberg. However, those promising elements nevertheless settle into a sporadic, muted climax that ends up feeling more perfunctory than satisfying.

As a whole, “What We Hide” has the feeling of an old after-school special, a melodramatic lesson about a topical issue.

Lasse Hallström‘s latest film, The Map That Leads to You, has the makings of a Gen Z “Before Sunset” meets “Eat Pray Love,” but unfortunately, it also has the depth of a mediocre beach read weepy. That is to say, I enjoyed it as I watched, but it has had no lasting effect on my memory or, even worse, my heart.

The film is blessed with a fairly strong cast and while it isn’t nearly enough to make it succeed as a whole, whatever degree that certain scenes do work are almost entirely due to their efforts.

Jimmy & Stiggs is a slick wallow into a cranked-up, self-destructive headspace that frequently over-compensates for what it lacks in plot and character development with sheer vigor and volume alone.

The biggest problem with “Nobody 2” is that the surprise factor is gone, and nothing has taken its place. The wow of seeing a generally comedic actor like Bob Odenkirk go John Wick in the fun 2021 sleeper hit isn’t there anymore.

If you loved the 2003 “Freaky Friday,” you’ll probably enjoy “Freakier Friday,” for the simple reason that it’s more or less the same movie, but with new characters added to the existing cast, and more complicated plot mechanics. Way more complicated. This is “Freaky Friday” to the fourth power.

The Occupant is a strangely frustrating movie. It stays engaging through the sheer force of a committed performance that anchors every single scene of the film, but it’s also so hard to get your arms around narratively (or even thematically) that it pushes you away.

It’s a disturbing, sometimes beautiful film that, by the end, is disquieting for all the wrong reasons.

Eventually, though, the whole effort feels chaotic, crammed as it is with uninspired pop culture references and way, way too many fart jokes, even for a movie aimed at kids.

The primary struggle of Chernov’s documentary is that it leans into the impersonal in an attempt at devastation. It can’t rely on the men as the crutch of the film’s emotion.

The problem is that the sociopolitical underpinnings of “Ick” feel relatively shallow and borderline sadistic, leaving viewers with a hollow “Blob” riff with too little to hold onto regarding character, setting, or even horror.

Despite some solid low-budget make-up work and decent central performances, “Monster Island” doesn’t have enough meat on its bones, somehow feeling narratively inert even at just 83 minutes.

The Banished, about a grieving woman’s search for her missing brother, sometimes feels like a compendium of modern horror movie clichés. That doesn’t always matter, since the movie is thick enough with dread to work despite its distracting familiarity.

Goldberg acknowledges that the film’s power is in its exclusive cast sharing their personal experiences. But his film fails to realize that it, too, is a player in platforming an already undefeated beast.

These moments remind us of the mindless summertime excitement the “Jurassic” movies have long provided, albeit with diminishing returns. But that giant footprint just isn’t as imposing as it used to be.

Michael Pearce’s grim thriller “Echo Valley” is a melodramatic mess redeemed by the performances of the film’s exceptional cast.

It’s a film that’s constantly painting in the lines. If you’re going to remake a film, especially one as recently beloved as this one, it requires something new in the tracing.

Although charming, the slight “I Don’t Understand You” struggles to sustain its spark. It’s a series of silly events that get progressively ridiculous and bloodier.

Ritual cuts a lot of corners on screen and in the story.

As it is, “The Gardener” suggests that Van Damme still doesn’t know how to both give his audience what they want and show off his range.

Barron’s Cove is a pulpy thriller awkwardly tied to a soapy story of bad dads and the wreckage they leave behind.

Problem is, this doesn’t reinvent the formula as much as follows it by rote, which makes it an enormous step down.

A kind of mash-up of “Interstellar” and “Stranger Things,” the extraterrestrial coming-of-age sci-fi flick “Watch the Skies” is a passably enjoyable story about loss.

The film’s cinematography is the best thing about it. There are solid performances, some believably purplish dime-novel dialogue, and other compensatory pleasures, but “Rust” is a saddlebag full of scenes and moments borrowed from great Westerns and embellished.

Ultimately, “The Surfer” proves to be not much more than an audience endurance test that offers up plenty of upsetting imagery and moments of emotional torment but never quite manages to make them pay off.

Director Joshua Erkman shows promise throughout “A Desert,” his first feature, but his movie’s unyielding scenario, co-written with Bossi Baker, makes it hard to want to hang around while thinly drawn characters vaguely establish the movie’s themes.

Written by Franklin, “Salvable” struggles to find its footing as both a family and crime drama, but it does one better than the other.

Magic Farm is eye-catching with its high saturation and punchy editing choices, but the seduction of bright and bold visuals is incompatible with Ulman’s unwieldy script. Her hands are full, and oftentimes clarity slips through her fingers.

Distributed by the Christianity-centered Angel Studios, and written and directed by first-timer Jang Seong-ho (a visual effects master from Korean cinema), it is less of a fully satisfying animated feature that works on its own terms than a teaching tool that is clearly intended as such.

Stewart and Erskine light up the movie with vivid, layered, authentic performances that capture our interest but throw the movie out of balance. One more screenplay draft would have been worthwhile; there are glimmers of a better version that create some optimism for Angarano’s next film.

Putting on display the day-to-day reckonings of Palestinian life under violent Israeli occupation, Nabulsi’s film touches the heart but loses grip on the mind as it journeys to juggle more subplots than its hands can handle.

For the most part, “William Tell” is stuck in multiple in-between phases, and filmmaking modes. It’s far too violent and disturbing for little kids, but feels a bit too popcorny to pass muster as a serious epic drama.

It could be funnier. It could be a lot smarter. It could look better. But it also could have been significantly worse, working as much as it does because it knows that you don’t need to be great if you’re this Goofy.

While the film does subvert basic audience expectations, it doesn’t really do anything beyond that as it stumbles through a choppy and meandering narrative that not even an admittedly committed lead performance by Danielle Deadwyler can help save.

As a gangster film, “The Alto Knights” does little more than putter along, taking in very few new or interesting sights along the way.

Ultimately, this is one of those movies where it seems okay if you like this sort of thing for a while, but after it crosses the 90-minute mark, it seems irretrievably a little much even if you like this sort of thing.

The truth is that pacing often trumps realism, and The Accountant 2 just doesn’t build enough momentum.

Ultimately, the threadbare quality of Constantin Werner’s screenplay cannot be smoothed over with gobs of CGI effects (impressive as some of these sequences look) and the star power of Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista.

The mechanics of the chase scenes are well-designed, but the overall look of the film is lackluster, the characters are thinly imagined, and the dialogue is oddly obscure in a movie intended for children, especially one that wants to stay on the fun side of scary.

Nearly four years into the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan, this story, now more than ever, needs the attention and awareness of an international audience. One only wishes for a deeper telling of it; maybe with at least one less Black Eyed Peas song.

There doesn’t seem to be a single original bone in this film’s body that gives you a parade of half-baked comedic scenes braided with a trite thriller and family mystery.

Judgmental and ungenerous, Alex’s story gives you enough answers to either tsk-tsk or nod sadly in response. The rest’s up to you, the viewer, which feels like a bit of a cop-out.