Perhaps paradoxically, it’s when the film is at its most quiet that it’s also most persuasive.

While the filmmakers certainly have their heart in the right place, aside from maybe a plea for more compassionate medical professionals, nothing about Peaceful is very original or even entertaining.

It feels like a film that has already gone through the remake process, casting all the stuff that made it interesting in the first place aside and leaving only the glossy surfaces.

Ultimately, “Eenie Meanie” is a collection of clichés in search of an actual movie. Too often, Shawn Simmons mistakes profanity for toughness and violent outbursts for plot, trapping us with what is mostly a bunch of loathsome idiots for 94 minutes without the craft of a Tarantino or the visual acumen of a Wright to make it worth the captivity.

The overabundance of CGI is one of the bigger problems with Midway because, far too often, it feels like you’re watching a video game or an F/X highlight reel.

The particularly outstanding cinematography is by Dante Spinotti, the craftsman who also shot the likes of “Heat” and “L.A. Confidential.”

Senior Year takes two high-concept premises—the going-back-to-high-school movie and the waking-up-from-a-coma movie—and slams them together in an intermittently amusing but mostly obvious comedy.

While no one is going to mistake The Hitman’s Bodyguard for high art, it will please those in the mood for late-summer fun.

There are a few decent performances, a nice riff on the technology fears that drove the original movie, and a centerpiece of horror that works, but never once do you get the feeling that the people behind this remake are here because of artistic passion or creative drive.

It's charming. It's funny. The case they investigate has a legitimate twist to it, there's a lot of French intrigue, there's much that is totally implausible, but the film lives or dies on the dynamic of the two main guys. It lives.

Watching Hercules, you can feel your intelligence being insulted in almost every frame.

What I enjoyed most about the film is how it illustrates the ways in which we view life through the prism of art in order to reach a deeper understanding of it.

Unfortunately, The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

There’s nothing inherently bad in the Pastors’ film. It’s competently made with the general sheen you expect from a bigger budget. You are, however, left scratching your head about what another sequel could bring that this one clearly couldn’t. No one in this cast is as dynamic as Bullock, nor is anything as tightly conceived as in the prior film. If seeing is believing, Bird Box Barcelona doesn’t have much to show.

The film is fun to watch and occasionally illuminating, but is over-packed and barely touches on the problems of scammers, the murky world of “influencers,” copycats who engage in dangerous or harmful behavior, or the infinite regression of people filming their reactions or their friends’ or children’s reactions to what they are watching.

Music can bypass your defenses. Music can imagine a better world, but it can also mourn the world or a love you've lost. Sometimes music does both at the same time. The Indigo Girls are like that. "Glitter & Doom" understands this dynamic, but the architecture of the film is so rickety there's nothing to hold onto. Just sit back and ride the waves of the music.

Instead of building upon the welcome openness of that potentially healing father-son encounter, Max stumbles through some iffy crime-thriller territory and ends up pushing its PG rating to its limit.

But still! Even if Irresistible were released a year ago, when its face-down-on-the-bar, abandon-all-hope vibe would've made more sense, it would still be entering a pop culture landscape in which "Sorry to Bother You" and "The Death of Stalin" existed, and it would seem imaginatively as well as politically bereft in comparison.

The makers of “Boy Kills World” don’t trust their audience enough to let us just feel a feeling, nor do they encourage their enthusiastic cast members enough to deliver fully-developed performances.

A well-made, confident piece of entertainment that lacks the poetry and nuance of the first film and gets less interesting as its narrative thinness is revealed but never feels like something that’s being phoned in to make a quick buck.

If smart dumb comedies hold a place in your heart, you'll like Masterminds. The main characters are masterminds only in their own heads, and the thoughts that tumble out of their mouths are as nonsensical as they are sincere.

Shock and Awe reminds us all of this, and of the American media’s shameful complicity in fomenting an unjustified and vastly destructive war.

It’s enough to make H.G. Wells roll his eyes as he rolls in his grave.

Corner Office is a sometimes-funny satire stuffed with capitalist ennui, but it bites with dull teeth, failing to provide enough support for its sentiment to stick.

Diane Kruger is as inscrutable to us as she is to her fellow Mossad agents and the asset she seduces in The Operative, a solidly crafted if forgettable espionage thriller.

It is over-plotted, with three different storylines mixing comedy and adventure.

Wirkola stages a few excellent set pieces and Rapace is fantastic, but the general lack of entertainment value has to be considered disappointing given the potential of the entire piece.

The movie, directed by Robin Pront from a script by Pront and Jeroen Perceval (who’s also one of the film’s lead actors), is well-crafted up to a point. But the end to which it is crafted is utterly useless.

There's an overall lack of thoughtfulness in The Nun II regarding scares, and Chaves is vehemently loyal to oversaturated tropes. The movie starkly neglects creativity and, in turn, lacks effective fear.

A spectacularly foursquare “family is what you make it” redemption story. The kind of thing that film critics like to dismiss as “looking like a made-for-TV movie,” as if that comparison/analogy even holds as a dismissal anymore.

Writer/director Barnaby Clay successfully keeps viewers on our toes, even if a lot of his movie feels like a series of programmatic jabs at our complacence.

If you love the “what the hell, let’s try it” sensibility that the Legendary Pictures monster franchise has embraced thus far, you’ll still find plenty here to enjoy. But it shouldn’t have been necessary to go looking for it.

Open Windows goes from crazy to Crazy to CRAZY, but maintains enough energy and cultural currency to keep the entertainment value high.

Unfortunately, Lau just isn't charming enough to carry the utterly forgettable The Adventurers, a tepid remake of John Woo's already lame heist flick "Once a Thief."

The script tries to do way too much, but the film also moved me quite deeply a couple of times, mostly in the scenes between father and son.

Did I like The Seven Faces of Jane? I love the idea of it, I love that it exists, and I'm not sure how much I can ultimately say for or against it, considering that everything good and bad is baked into the methods that the performers and filmmakers committed to.

Common Ground is a well-meaning PSA that waters down the complex history, practices, and systems of American industrial agriculture into something palatable for audiences looking to feel good about the bleak future of this dying planet without actually having to do any hard learning, thinking, or direct action.

Unlike the recent "God’s Not Dead," which is the "Beaches" of faith-based films in that it embodies every single complaint against its genre, Heaven is for Real attempts to cast a wider audience net.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, The Giver, in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

If this film were a person, it would tell you it had a Black friend and voted for Obama twice. That’s how insultingly simplistic it is about race.

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

Beyond its message and intent, Chandler’s film is a raw and insightful portrait of the psychology fueling addiction, and how the healing of pain and depression must be tackled in a healthy way.

What’s scarier—someone yelling boo or the sound of someone, or something, whispering it in the distance? Blair Witch has plenty of yelling, but not nearly enough that gets under your skin.

[Papushado] creates a world that’s so strange, in both a visually striking sense and one that doesn't always work, that even when a performance sputters out or a line of dialogue rings false, it doesn’t tank the movie. However, that level of spectacle through eye-catching production design and visual style means that sometimes the movie’s vivid colors and bullets outshine the star-studded cast.

Some of the writing gets a bit clunky, the ending is pretty horrible, and there’s a performance at the center that kind of sucks in everything around it like a black hole, but most of that won’t matter to viewers of The Witches: They’ll be too scared to care.

It is less of a horror flick and more of a suspense thriller with sci-fi elements that possesses both brains–some sacrificed in messy fashion, of course–and a heart, as it makes a statement about an imaginary social issue that reflects those conflicts facing our country today.

There are some fun ideas and moments in Dead & Beautiful, but Verbeek seems to want to avoid offending anyone with the suggestion that the rich are vampires—which is the premise his movie is built on.

Sure, Mortal Kombat II has enough fight scenes and gore to deliver exactly what fans of the games expect from these movies. Then again, the makers of this new franchise-booster don’t seem to know how to fill the rest of their movie’s 116-minute runtime. They tie up loose ends from the last movie whenever they’re not nudging their new protagonists through the motions of another patchwork action-fantasy that’s too hip to be sincere and too hacky to be moving.

Umair Aleem’s script is so paint-by-numbers familiar that it leaves you wishing you’d watched one of the better movies it’s ripping off.

Clever-but-frustrating.

Regardless of its shortcomings, Candy Cane Lane is a frenzied family friendly film as overstuffed as a Christmas stocking, as nutty as a chestnut, and, ultimately, as warm as an open fire.

It’s schtickier and less assured than the first “Shazam!” but these leftovers still reheat well enough.

It feels like all the good ideas during the pre-production of “Until Dawn” were sanded down until the film lost almost all of its edge, wit, and actual horror. All that’s left is a depressingly repetitive exercise in hyperactive editing, overheated sound design, and forgettable characters.

So what are you looking at, really? Is the movie a bait-and-switch? Probably. The film has fun with the idea that nobody would have gotten involved were it not for the chance to work with James Franco and perhaps perform in a sex scene with James Franco (there are no sex scenes involving James Franco, if you were wondering).

The movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect.

The movie doesn't quite hold together at times, and some of the darker elements (like what it feels like to be shamed and shunned at every moment of your life) are soft-pedaled. But it has a strange charm nonetheless.

A strong cast giving their all — including Jon Hamm, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Catherine Keener and Amber Tamblyn — can’t do much with such heavy-handed, self-serious material.

In Secret is a costume drama with a gigantic accent on the drama. It's my kind of crazy, and I was quite entertained. To borrow again from Shakespeare, "'Tis Madness, but there's method to't."

The central problem with A Country Called Home is neither the performances nor even the characters. It's the transparent ways in which the movie conjures easy resolutions to issues that it otherwise does a fine job convincing us are not so simple.

Beckerman intersperses the footage with static, loud and jagged, and the couple of "effects" included are quick and dirty. If you're going to go the found-footage route, you might as well try to find a new way to approach the material. Beckerman has.

The culture clash here between "goddamn hipster freaks" and people of the woods is more complicated here, and the way it unfolds is brutal and shocking without being depraved itself.

A largely fun watch, a corporate crime tale of consistent tartness enacted by a superb cast.

Turgid even in its brightness, overwritten in a way that does nothing to camoflauge its first-draft quality, jaw-droppingly overacted by all but one of its central cast members; it’s a Woody Allen disaster that elicits both a cocked head and a dropped jaw.

There's not much awe showcased here. The film is mainly horseplay, wasted motion, and talk, talk, talk, with a few good action scenes.

There is simultaneously too much and not enough going on in writer/director/co-star Josh Lawson’s feature debut. He crams in too many people and plot lines but offers too little in the way of character development and credible emotion.

As a commentary on Reynolds' career trajectory, The Last Movie Star is hit-or-miss. What is undeniable, though, is the space Rifkin has created where Reynolds can do what Reynolds does best, and if you're a fan (as I am) there's much here to treasure.

The movie’s impersonal, conventional telling of a reasonably standard male coming-of-age story almost tends to make the punk milieu it depicts beside the point.

Medieval is a bleak and visually oversaturated allegory about the 15th century revolutionary Czech soldier turned military leader Jan Žižka (Ben Foster). There's blood and chainmail, yes, but it's also a self-serious allegory about duty and faith during miserable times.

Austin Found features a great ensemble cast, but never manages to explore unique territory.

This should be a haunting, claustrophobic nightmare, but Natali over-complicates the source material — just like his characters, our reasons for investing in what happens next get lost in the fields.

Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player” is one of the most over-directed films I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been playing this specific game for a long time.

The appeal of such stories is obvious. Breakthrough, though, is less a story than it is a sermon, aimed directly at the choir and nobody else.

The Hoebers have woven a delightfully weird streak throughout the humor that’ll keep you on your toes. It’s consistently a pleasant surprise in what is otherwise a predictable story.

Overlong at a mere 87 minutes, there's nothing timeless or elegant about this flop entirely composed of elements derived from much better films.

The latest animated blockbuster from Illumination is their most soulless to date, a film that feels like ChatGPT produced it after data and imagery from the games were fed into a computer.

While I might actually go out and buy the soundtrack album, the last thing I’m gonna say about the movie is friends shouldn’t let friends pay money to see We Are Your Friends.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

The frantic adults and kids in Trish Sie’s The Sleepover are often screaming, but that doesn't mean they’re getting anywhere. You’d think that a story about a mom's cool secret and kids breaking curfew would be a lot more fun, especially with a charismatic cast like this, and yet The Sleepover is mostly about killing time, specifically that of your own.

Sweet Girl is too long and disorganized, and often just too much, for its own good. It seems to want to be five, possibly six landmark 1990s and early aughts blockbusters at once.

Working alongside veteran screenwriter Joe Carnahan, who’s made his name with this kind of brash, muscular storytelling in films like “Narc” and “The Grey,” Hernandez Bray tries to get his arms around a lot at once. Quite often, he’s successful.

Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland beige in the mostly straight-to-video The Calling, a piece that almost miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, and Donald Sutherland.

A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

Watching The Apology, one gets the sense that Locke and her team got to tell the exact story they wanted to and on their terms. Their drama has unusual integrity since it's (mostly) not about canned answers to complex questions.

There are about half a dozen bright spots in the new animated feature The Addams Family, but in between them is the unbright and unoriginal storyline about how the real monsters are the ordinary people, not the weird people.

Lily James brings a refreshing straightforwardness to the role in the second half, as the character takes the reins of the situation, but has a difficult time convincing us in the first half that she is susceptible, cowed, in thrall.

Everything here feels timid and toothless, lacking in true atmosphere or genuine scares.

While some creepy and unsettling events are in the film, none truly rise to a level most would recognize as horror. There are a few minor jump scares, but this film lives in its own realm.

The end result is a movie so resolutely bland and forgettable that the cast and crew probably expended more sheer effort dragging themselves to the set every day than they did in staging all of the various chases and shootouts and whatnot.

Four brilliant, accomplished, gorgeous female actors play four friends who take a bachelorette trip to Italy in this dumb, dull, dud of a waste of their time and ours.

It is an entertaining, family-friendly romp with wish-fulfilling yeses, extended comic mayhem, and satisfying consequences.

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.

Like Slimer shoving snacks in his ravenous maw, “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” tries to cram way too many characters, storylines and iconic images into its two-hour runtime.

Jesus Revolution is more of a wistful wish to bring in a wave of new followers than an effort to understand what they'll need once they’re there.

Reminiscence aims for something existential within a well-recognized film-noir template. Sadly, the result is an unpersuasive, vaguely pessimistic dystopia at best, one that liberally pulls 101-level references from recognizable Hitchcock flicks and neo-noirs alike, only to drown their time-honored spirit in murky waters.

At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination.

It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.

Based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, Paul Ireland’s Measure for Measure is filled with drama, although perhaps not the kind you’d expect from the Bard. No, this is a modern-day adaptation—one grappling with xenophobia, drug addiction, and gun violence. There are no period costumes here, but there’s a stone-faced Hugo Weaving to make up for it.

A presence that initially was disturbing grows repetitive and almost predictable over the course of an entire film.