Christina Ricci does most, if not all, of the emotional lifting in the lightweight horror drama Monstrous, a period piece about a single mom and her son who, in 1955, run away from home and re-settle in an isolated lakeside house.

My Old Lady is pretty compelling viewing, mostly thanks to Kline, who gives a career-high performance here.

Del Toro always brings it, and this is actually one of his more intriguing performances in a long time, but one consistently wishes that it was in a movie that knew what to do with it.

Refusing to explain Ted Bundy is the strongest possible choice Berlinger could have made because it destabilizes reality. The film itself gaslights us, and this is where Berlinger and Zac Efron — an inspired choice—are powerful co-creators.

Outlaw Posse doesn’t quite work in the end but there are enough moments of note scattered throughout it to let you forget that from time to time.

Happy Gilmore makes par through the strength of its sheer stupid energy and the game efforts of Sandler and his 50 or so co-stars.

These are important stories that should be seen, but audiences need more than scripts that are primarily acting exercises, with very little insight beyond everyone blaming everyone else and reminders that bad choices by addicts and those around them lead to bad outcomes.

With “The 4:30 Movie,” a lightly likable coming-of-age story and romantic-comedy, writer/director Kevin Smith (“Clerks III,” “Jay and Silent Reboot”) offers low-stakes nostalgia and very little else.

Made in collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent, “Parthenope” is nothing if not a sumptuous feast for the senses.

If truth in advertising applied to movies, they would have titled this one "Reheated Cultural Leftovers."

Co-directors Sam and Andy Zuchero also wrote the script, and while there are a lot of vibrant ideas at play, there are about ten ideas too many. The film ponders existential questions but keeps them at a remove.

Slick and sometimes goofy as it is, Blackhat is an odd, fascinating movie: a high-tech action thriller about the human condition. I can think of no better current illustration of the notion that, to quote this site's founder, it's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it.

It features career-best work by Long and Rossum, both eagerly devouring Esmail’s witty script. Yes, some of it is overwritten and a bit too clever for its own good, but more often it’s an engaging character piece.

Elba’s skills as a helmer are not yet as refined as his considerable acting chops, but his firsthand knowledge of London’s Hackney borough gives the film a lived-in feeling, a sense of intimacy that registers onscreen in both quiet and violent moments.

The fact that director Ben Berman is making a documentary would make this concept quite unsavory, that is, if the entire enterprise weren’t so damn dull.

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.

For better and worse, Gone in the Night feels like the directorial debut of a podcaster, somebody who knows the value of storytelling novelty and has a gift for narrative economy, but also suggests more by the grace of good casting than their own singular talents.

But for as much writer/director Biancheri pumps copious ideas into this concept, the solemn tone and lack of thematic focus renders the overwrought outing underwhelming.

Little Boxes doesn’t manage to summon as much unique insight into prejudice as screenwriter Annie Howell and director Ron Meyer probably expected to achieve. But what keeps their movie watchable is that Lynskey, Ellis and Jackson are completely believable as a loving family unit.

It’s A Wonderful Knife has plenty of attributes—charm, blood, and angst—that should fit right in at any family holiday gathering.

There’s a slack nature to the film that almost feels like it has to be an intentional experiment from a filmmaker who has been so precise and intricate with his work in the past. It’s as if Kim is testing himself to see if he could make a self-indulgent, unsubstantial lark of a comedy. He can. Sorta. Now let’s get back to the good stuff.

Coming 2 America is like attending your high school reunion: You’ll enjoy seeing the familiar faces of those with whom you once shared such fond experiences, but then you’ll realize that the nostalgia of that past is far more fulfilling than the harsher realities of the present.

Despite the fact that you’ve heard these songs countless times in a variety of settings, these inspired incarnations will make you feel like you’re experiencing them for the first time, just as Moby Doc as a whole breathes thrilling new life into a safe and conventional genre.

It wants to scare the hell out of you, and it does that quite effectively with several serious jumps. About a half-dozen times, I’d say, Whannell creates moments that are legitimately surprising and frightening because he uses silence so well in contrast.

It is just plain fun to observe Frost as Bruce while he happily shimmies and shakes his way to regaining his once-renown "feet of flames."

Nowhere in the film is its subject, Cenk Uygur, the founder and main mouthpiece of a YouTube show titled The Young Turks (TYT), called a journalist, but he does function as such, even if his game is commenting on the news rather than doing reportorial spadework.

A coming-of-age drama that's also Southern Gothic ghost story, is an unusual, ambitious failure, mostly because the film's hyper-naturalistic style is meant to evoke a supernatural mood.

What The Seed lacks in profundity or consistent atmosphere it very nearly makes up for in its application of nasty effects and striking makeup.

The Lodgers needs to be better than a great mood in need of a decent story and stronger characters.

I’m all for a juicy, action-packed Gerard Butler movie. A Gerard Butler movie that wants to have its geopolitics taken seriously is a different matter. And honestly, it’s an even more different matter when the movie is not particularly juicy or, you know, action-packed.

Williams and director Dito Montiel are in tune with a pervading sense of tenderness, as the movie distinctly ruminates on connection, not love.

Trap too often lacks the craftsmanship it needs to crackle with energy and tension. Despite these missteps, Josh Hartnett almost makes “Trap” worth seeing, imbuing his character with a playfulness that can be captivating. It’s just a shame his great work sometimes feels trapped in a movie that doesn’t know what to do with it.

The glittering cast of Death on the Nile is all dressed up but, alas, they have nowhere to go.

It has the narrative bones of late director Curtis Hanson’s 1992 thriller, focused on the escalating conflict between a furtive mother and the unstable nanny she’s hired–but it’s cloaked in anxieties that make it feel achingly modern. Even if you don’t take your horror elevated, there’s plenty on the surface that makes this a story worth re-haunting you.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

The mythology here is both dense and frequently silly, with the movie grinding to a halt around the one-hour mark for an extensive information dump. By the end, you may still be unclear as to what’s going on, but you also may not care.

47 Meters Down, despite a few things going for it, is an easily skippable work that will, ironically, probably wind up playing better on television and home video, where viewers might be more willing to overlook its failings

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so misguided that it's hard to know where to start griping about it. It wallows in cruelty, misery, and degradation without providing insight into the historical personages who are so thoughtfully depicted by its cast.

G20 is an entertaining and gripping action vehicle with a deft sense of tension that is sometimes undone by its on-the-nose dialogue.

While much of this Black Beauty strays from the original, the spirit of empathy and combatting animal cruelty remain intact.

Maggie” is Schwarzenegger’s “Cop Land,” that is, a feature designed to highlight and showcase that which an action movie hero could only hint at in glancing moments between explosions.

I didn't see what was funny about the shallow wackiness of VHYes.

It doesn't know what it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell.

As all movies about this stage of life must, among obvious jokes about aches, pains, and Viagra—apparently it is okay to sexually objectify someone if you're old—Queen Bees touches gently and sympathetically on the inescapable challenges of aging, loss of loved ones, loss of independence, cancer, strokes, and dementia.

Branagh, the actor, comes through unscathed. Branagh, the director, not so much.

Run Rabbit Run is a solid, spooky tale without anything too flashy like a Babadook to haunt our dreams and memes but chilling enough to make us sit up in our chairs and scan the screen for the next sign of danger.

While “Eleanor the Great” never quite recovers from the moral issue at its center, Squibb’s lively performance makes it memorable.

Of course, the clothes are great: racks of shimmery, sequined knockouts and rows of fierce pumps. And it wouldn’t be a “Charlie’s Angels” adventure without a variety of wild costumes for the ladies to don for their undercover assignments as well as an assortment of high-tech gadgets.

First Date feels like a throwback caper to something you'd find on cable, funny yet full of action with a generous helping of a timeless romance for good measure. It’s the kind of movie you come across and have to see how it ends.

The Amateur skims the surface of what has worked in spy thrillers of the past, never finding its own rhythm, identity, or personality.

Greed is never the sum of its best parts since other actors — especially Jamie Blackley, who, playing young McCreadie in a series of flashbacks, is fine but relatively disappointing — can’t pull off the movie’s delicate balance of broad humor and po-faced drama.

SuperFly is visually flat, relying too much on oft-repeated motifs of rap videos rather than the ingenuity I expected. By the fourth time someone “made it rain” around strippers or executed a gory shoot-out, I gave up on potentially seeing something new.

Plemons brings such a fascinating energy to his character that he really holds the film together.

Anyone But You, from director Will Gluck and co-writer Ilana Wolpert, has the charm, wit, swoony romance, and, most importantly, star chemistry that has been solely missing from recent lackluster entries in the genre.

Full of dazzling images that suggest a rich, profound narrative the film is never able to achieve.

Most of all, Magic Mike's Last Dance is about fit, graceful bodies moving through space.

The best thing about this movie is that you believe in the relationship. Hart and Johnson are a classic comedy duo in the tradition of Abbott & Costello, Bob Hope & Bing Crosby and Gene Wilder & Richard Pryor.

It’s the quasi-gothic scenario that’s amusing here, and it’s as fraught as it is straight-forward. That and a perverse sense of humor puts “Amelia’s Children” over the top, though it’s never quite ha-ha hard enough to be satirical, nor sincere enough to be campy.

The Lonely Island brand of humor might at first seem like an awkward fit for horror, but there’s an art to the timing of a well-done splatter flick that shares filmmaking DNA with comedy.

Writer/director Camille Griffin’s feature filmmaking debut is an ambitious but muddled mix of Christmas comedy and apocalyptic drama.

An often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

The leads are so lovely and the city is so shimmery that it’s hard not to get caught up in its spell — for a while, at least, until its corny coda destroys whatever goodwill the film has generated.

Finally, a woman — Sophie Barthes — has directed and co-written a film version of Madame Bovary, but strangely, that doesn’t result in any more richness or enlightenment.

The acting starts off capable even if it reflects the same lifelessness of the film itself, but as the story continues the performances only magnify script issues that become unbearable.

Nothing in An Ordinary Man rings true; not the location, nor the performances nor the story.

The strongest point Gutnik makes with his film is that we all have a concealed story when we share common spaces in silence. But that sadly isn’t enough of a hook to carry out this scattershot effort.

The best thing about “Invader” is that it’s short. But for much of its 69-minute runtime, it is thoroughly unpleasant, which makes it feel much longer.

Sometimes, we should be made uncomfortable. And that is, in the end, what “After the Hunt” attempts and mostly succeeds in.

A numbing and soulless spectacle of 3-D, computer-generated imagery run amok, Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings presents an enduring tale by pummeling us over the head with it.

The problem is that writer J.P. Davis and director Tarik Saleh seem afraid to do anything interesting or unexpected once they have their pieces in place.

A big-budget, holiday-timed blockbuster about…racism, which may not exactly be the joyful, escapist entertainment families are looking for this time of year.

One can sit back, relax, and enjoy 80 for Brady, understanding that nothing here makes sense in terms like “might happen” or even “should happen.” Just as all fairy tales should, this movie lives in the land of “wouldn’t it be wonderful.”

A sleepy, but pleasantly surprising action-adventure, Ragnarok is the rare Spielberg clone that feels like it was made by people that not only know what they like about Spielberg's films, but are capable of evoking them.

A terrific cast can only do so much with superficial, maudlin material in the coming-of-age dramedy Wildflower.

Players, written by Whit Anderson and directed by Trish Sie, struggles with the inherent artificiality of its setup. The tropes are so front and center that real life barely has any room to breathe.

You need a blackboard full of X’s and O’s to keep track of the petty plays this movie's running.

The film commendably gives us vivid and memorable people whose personal stories strikingly illuminate their peoples’ struggles.

Despite the sincerity that’s in every scene with Rylance’s performance, the movie's good intentions remain wistful, and thoroughly frustrating.

The Christmas Chronicles keeps getting in its own way with a patched-together story, raggedy tone, thinly imagined characters, and weak humor (Santa explains that he doesn’t really say, “Ho Ho Ho” — that’s fake news).

Even when there’s a comically large moon that feels ripped from a Méliès movie undercutting whatever emotional drama Ayer wants to pull in the film’s climactic raid on a brothel, it doesn’t matter. Because if “The Meg,” “Wrath of Man” or “The Beekeeper” proved anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how outlandish or overcooked the movie is. Nothing can slow down Statham.

Director and co-writer Susanna Fogel has trouble achieving a tonal balance between the comedy and the action, which only grows increasingly glaring over the course of the film’s overlong running time.

The film's relentlessly quirky style of comedy is consequently very self-conscious. Every joke in Ping Pong Summer is a variation on a theme: 1985 was the most awkward time to be alive.

Every Day has an intriguing concept that’s hampered by problematic execution. And it raises several questions it never answers in satisfying fashion, leading to a conclusion that will elicit not just head-scratching but unintentional hilarity.

Brown's story is a good one, though, and solid performances — especially from star Cuba Gooding Jr. — elevate the film slightly above the familiar trappings of its genre.

You might think that a movie about the construction of one of the most iconic structures in the world would be carefully put together. But that is not the case with the sumptuous, often frustrating Eiffel, the story of a man whose name is as joined to the Tower emblematic of Paris as the 133-year-old beams that are still sturdily riveted (not bolted) together.

Johnson keeps it all moving at a decent clip, though, with the help of Michael Penn’s score. And she photographs Powley and her mesmerizing blue eyes so lovingly that it’s hard not to find her adorable—even when she’s being awful.

X-Men: Apocalypse is a confused, bloated mess of a film.

Despicable Me 4 won't win any prizes, but if you like this kind of thing, you'll like this thing. I laughed. The dumber and more random the jokes, the harder I laughed. The kids I saw it with laughed harder.

For a movie that’s about a character on the run, No Man’s Land meanders and takes its time in a way that feels in conflict with the narrative.

The East is essentially divided into two halves, and neither is more illuminating than the other.

Heart alone does not a good film make.

This is not your typical “bank robbery gone wrong” kind of movie, nor does it follow the familiar beats of a Bonnie and Clyde-style “lovers on the lam” story. “Marmalade” is a strange mix of its own, launching the rom com criminal premise to thrilling heights.

Lathan’s film is only a pale imitation of what came before it. But while “On the Come Up” is a major miss, here’s hoping that Lathan returns with a bigger and better directorial effort next time out.

Ultimately, “Azrael” lacks the energy or chills to terrify viewers.

If you didn’t know Beckett was a thriller, you’d think it was about two mismatched people with dry interests, mundane conversations, and zero attraction.

Director and co-writer Sarah Adina Smith offers some inspired moments and laughs here and there, but too often, running bits simply don’t pay off.

There are movies about ugly, vile people, and there are ugly, vile movies. Triple 9 is the latter.

And the matter-of-fact portrayal of a bi-racial relationship is presented just as it should be — unremarked upon.