Khumba is disastrously uninspired. Not even a galaxy of stars, united in their willingness to take a check, can save Khumba from being the boringest plucky outsider of all.

Ad Vitam, which in Latin means “for life,” is at times brisk but narratively unclear, delivers its share of action, but not the characters to keep you emotionally invested.

The easy chemistry between the characters reflects the real-life friendship of the two stars and it is clear to see that like Emma and Charlie, Haddish and Crystal get a kick out of each other.

It’s a film that’s been thought out but doesn’t reach any new conclusions; that assembles some good elements, but doesn’t really consider how they all fit together. The truthful elements are not enough to overcome the clumsy and cliché ones, and in the end it’s a film that’s more satisfying before you know how it ends.

It’s more like a reusable ribbon bow. It's not great. It's nothing special. But you can keep it year after year and place it on presents as long as you have scotch tap—or Lohan’s irrepressible charm—to hold it together.

Come Away evokes memories of “Radio Flyer,” the equally appalling 1992 child abuse drama where fantasy and cruel reality merged in ways that were shockingly offensive.

Playing namby-pamby is not Sam Rockwell's strong suit.

Gruff and always on the cusp of irate, Gibson is fine as this twist on Santa, but his performance, like the whole of the movie, simply rides on a single, warped idea. The slightly clever gimmick and simple plot are the true stars of Fatman, a movie that misses out on a whole lot of what could have been.

Anna was written and directed by Besson himself and it still feels like a misfired rehash of his greatest hits.

Standing Up is mainly an exercise in personality development for Grace, raising her self-esteem, and giving her confidence.

A horror movie, a creepy and atmospheric and sometimes blood-soaked horror movie, and it’s got a good amount going for it.

All of these nuances, as well as whatever satirical social commentary the movie wanted to make, are lost in the climax, a press conference staged with a threadbare quality that’s sadly typical of too much original Syfy fare.

While Chappelle neatly outlines the tragic events caused by his spiritually bruised protagonist, it’s hard to stay engaged with his philosophical query that divides arguments into distinct rights and wrongs early on, and only asks shallow questions.

The movie is an ambitious experiment, but a long and tedious one, and our revels end long before Mazursky's.

Table 19 also feels the need to be a romantic comedy in which all's well that ends well, and it's here that the movie fails most conspicuously.

Throughout its last hour it keeps jumping into your lap and demanding love without doing anything to earn it.

While the premise has some undeniable potential, it has been executed by writer-director Lotfy Nathan in a manner that is neither particularly frightening nor spiritually enlightening.

The unappealingly named comedy Eat Wheaties! is a tedious exercise in patience that, like a bowl of soggy cereal, I would not recommend to anyone.

Morris & Anders, who also directed, literally repeat many of the same set-ups and punchlines from the original “Bosses,” only more crassly this time and with more discussion of bodily fluids. And nothing is quite as cinematically desperate as someone telling you a joke you’ve already heard only louder.

A missed opportunity; a documentary that plays too much like fan service, ignoring actual insight or even detailed history of its chosen subject in favor of unapologetic adoration.

Merv is heartwarming, in the abstract, but the heat generated is strictly lukewarm.

Pistorius does solid work throughout in expressing various states of panic, but she’s mainly reacting to Crowe’s improbable omnipresence.

The plot is completely forgettable and Story’s direction is atrocious here. He can’t balance the numerous attempts at unfunny comedy with the sudden outbursts of extreme gunplay. The action sequences lack any sense of excitement and only once do the stars of comedy and action align.

When you reach the critical point that you consider that Trejo, the star of such gems as “Zombie Hunter” and “Dead in Tombstone”, to be above this material, you know you’re in a rare category of awful.

Like its predecessor, "Code 8: Part II" uses its high concept sci-fi to critique the increasing violence of the militarized police state, especially in the age of surveillance.

With a few, rare exceptions, the attempts at humor in “Suicide Squad” land with a thud—that is, if you can hear such a sound over the deafening din of gunfire and the bombastic score.

You’d think a movie in which Adam Driver fights a bunch of dinosaurs couldn’t possibly be boring, but that’s exactly what 65 is.

A strange little movie that attempts the tricky feat of combining comedy, drama, sci-fi and romance, but it doesn’t get those individual elements right so it never coheres as a whole.

Imagine a J-horror plot involving a child possessed by a swamp demon told through the aesthetics of the screenlife found footage subgenre, and you can pretty much imagine how writer-director Pablo Absento‘s new film, “Bloat,” will play out.

If Tartt’s book is about grief and the sudden trauma that can derail a life’s trajectory, Crowley’s film feels like it doesn’t understand either of those things at all, merely using them as exploitative decoration on a beautiful but shockingly hollow experience.

Ultimately, Beneath is better than your average Roger Corman clone because it is more serious than trivial.

Much as in his atrocious remake of “Rebecca” in 2020, Wheatley mostly phones it in here, and he does so with a rotary landline. At least until the final half-hour, when he’s finally free to unleash some monstrous chaos, this is one of the dullest films of the year, a plodding, poorly made giant shark movie that inexplicably lets the giant shark take a backseat to an evil underwater drilling operation. This thing just has no teeth.

Bliss is far more kooky and tedious than it is good, and it's so confusing that even the movie's sense of humor is a question mark.

Father Stu understood how to connect to skeptics and non-believers. Instead of reaching a broader audience, Wahlberg and Gibson preach to the choir.

As a result, anyone who does bother to show up will find themselves bearing witness to unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things to each other while hoping in vain that the two guys from "Funny Games" will show up hoping to borrow a couple of eggs.

When the inevitable finale with a thoroughly sign-posted twist arrives, you might realize you’ve already spent all your goodwill towards Milburn’s stylistically over-bloated film that chases one cliché after the next over the course of an overstretched running time.

Costner responds by bringing an easy integrity and seemingly effortless humanity to his part. And hence making a messy, meandering and silly movie rather more watchable than it deserves to be.

Broad themes like staunch hope, and vital human connection, become cheap sentiments, vanishing into air. “IO” isn’t science fiction storytelling distilled so much as it is vaporized.

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.

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

This is, among other things, something of a fatty movie. It goes out of its way to hit “beats” that it presumes will be satisfying to a mainstream audience.

Little more than an ugly collection of tropes stolen from "The Exorcist" and "Seven."

The movie never builds enough momentum, emotional or narrative, to get the viewer on its side.

The ultimate invasion of its subject's privacy.

Lift is as generic and forgettable as its title, the kind of glossy, empty action picture that Netflix just keeps pumping out, whether we need it or not.

If only Blood and Money weren’t stretched so thin. More development of character, suspense and plot would have gone a long way toward making this stick to one’s crime genre-loving ribs.

It’s a B-movie with a blockbuster attitude, and not in a fun way.

The dialogue isn’t just awkward and unbelievable — it’s as if it was written by a teenager raised on only bad horror movies.

The Twin just treads water with B-movie style until it gets to the deep ending. And that’s where the whole thing drowns in its lack of ambition and execution.

This big, splashy blockbuster is perplexing because it's full of loosely-connected incidents that are rarely character-driven, or even narratively intelligible beyond a point.

While Smurfs: The Lost Village may not be better or more entertaining, the acknowledgment that it is aiming solely for the kiddie audience this time around at least makes it slightly more palatable than its predecessors.

While the end result is certainly no masterpiece, it is still better than the average action potboiler and contains a couple of exhilarating set pieces that offer further proof—not that any is needed at this point—that De Palma remains one of the unquestioned masters of creating and executing moments of pure cinema.

As it stands now, Aloha feels like several films at once, crammed together and sped up, with results that are emotionally hollow and narratively confusing.

A puzzle movie with too many unnecessary pieces and not enough essential ones, but it's superior to its predecessor in a few basic ways.

This is the kind of movie that leaves you with the impression that more thought was put into catchphrases and fan service than into a compelling plot, thoughtful characterizations or imaginative action choreography.

The best thing I can say about it is that it’s not another retread of its predecessor.

I really enjoyed listening to Statham talk. His fight scenes have their predictable, violent payoffs, but his rambling monologues are unexpectedly, gloriously entertaining. This film’s tagline should be “Come for the stabbing, stay for the gabbing!”

Every time that Mine threatens to come apart under its own pretensions (which is relatively often), Hammer does something subtle and believable to ground it.

A melodrama with an interesting trick in its tail, but I don’t think that director Garcia pulls the trick off as well as she might have. The movie is sumptuously shot by Christophe Beaucarne; every frame is robustly picturesque. But the story could have used a little less “Under the Tuscan Sun” and a little more “All That Heaven Allows.”

For devotees, the essence of the Little Women story remains, and, for newcomers, it is a sweet film that should inspire them to explore the book and the more traditional adaptations. It has a sad loss, a joyful reunion, a love story, a writer finding her voice, and one of the most endearing families in literature.

If there is such a thing as a pulse in movies, there are sections of this one where a defibrillator would come in handy. This is not due to a lack of action scenes but those included are strung together with long, slow stretches.

There's a lot to like in Ali's latest, Highway, which is a gorgeously assembled, ambitious piece of work, although it doesn't coalesce into a holistically successful film.

A movie like Make Your Move rests on the success of its various dance sequences, not its plot. And the dancing here is exciting, innovative, and specific.

A movie hopped up on the period piece sadism within Tarantino’s regurgitation cinema, Outlaws & Angels gravely mistakes Tarantino’s audaciousness for its own originality.

It's blandly, often listlessly bad, check-the-blockbuster-boxes bad, just-out-of-film-school-and-shopping-a-tentpole-screenplay bad.

Sylvester Stallone can write entertaining formula action scripts like a demon, but he often hands them over to hack directors who don't know how to extract the pulp and the juice from them. On that score, Homefront is better than average.

The 355 amasses some of the most talented and electrifying actresses in the world, then squanders them in a generic and forgettable action picture.

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

This movie is one big, unsatisfying tease.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

Whether you think Casanova's a hero worth idolizing, or a dull-as-dishwater man whore from a sexist past, Casanova, Last Love will make you believe he deserved better than this.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw is more frustrating than the average mediocre horror sequel because you can easily decipher the wasted opportunity up there on the screen.

The Film Critic takes a light and knowing tone, spoofing the sacred cows of the critic world, and cramming every scene with visual film clichés that act like a "Where's Waldo?" of cinema.

Writer/director Liz W. Garcia plays it safe here, with a result that has no surprises but is effectively entertaining, thanks largely to Roberts’ performance, which she seems to be enjoying so much it would be impossible not to enjoy it with her.

In the end, the biggest problem with Slumberland is its utter innocuousness. Because it is bright, noisy, and things are constantly happening, little kids might like it as a momentary distraction—but it certainly won’t inspire them to check out McCay’s original work for themselves.

The action may be serious, but Brick Mansions doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a ridiculous movie that has the decency to acknowledge that it’s ridiculous.

Leatherface tries to show us what made the man we know the legend he is now. Sadly, the makers of Leatherface didn't put enough thought into a sleepy story that could easily be titled "I Was a Teenage Leatherface."

The good news barely outweighs the bad in Dracula Untold, a lightweight war-adventure that is ultimately stranger and more enticing when it remembers it's also a horror film.

Imagine eating a giant bag of Skittles, then throwing it all up in a fit of sugar-induced nausea and you’ll have some idea of what it feels like to sit through My Little Pony: The Movie.

This "Percy Jackson" is a gentler-spirited, less flashy enterprise, though it still presents a natural world that can morph at the whim of a god. I like that.

While I can't exactly recommend seeing Jigsaw, I can tell you that it's fun to watch. I just don't think it's the kind of fun the filmmakers' planned.

It makes sense that another of Flynn’s novels, the sinister Dark Places, would get the cinematic treatment as well, although this failed exercise could be used comparatively with “Gone Girl” as a What Not to Do cinematic lesson.

I cop to laughing out loud numerous times, and I was captivated by Vianne’s big “what’s good for the goose” style speech at the end. If “A Madea Family Funeral” is indeed the final “Hallelu-YUHRR” for Madea, it’s not that shabby an exit.

The optimistic, twisting core of what 2067 is about will keep genre fans engaged even as the increasingly bad performances and frustrating writing pushes them away at the same time.

De Niro, bless his heart, is the engine that keeps this refurbished jalopy puttering along for 90 minutes.

Rodin is no plain biopic, and it certainly doesn’t require knowledge of his work to get hooked on the film. It’s in fact best when it does away with historical details and feels like a film about an artist and their art form, who just happened to exist.

It goes soft and nice and wants us to care about these characters who barely resemble human beings. After all, it’s Christmas. But everyone involved here should have asked Santa for a stronger script.

Although the title is confounding and perhaps the movie’s worst misstep, it’s Byrne’s digitized and stilted delivery that earns the biggest laughs.

The bigger sin here is that “Nobody’s Fool” wastes its comic goodwill and performances by wallowing in the same tired story elements Tyler Perry has been milking on TV and in his movies for decades. He’s done this before, and you’ve seen it before.

Headey is coolly fierce and shares some powerful moments with both Wilson and Winstone as the reporter who threatens to expose this juicy sex scandal. But these scattered pieces don’t create a complete and convincing picture.

Me Him Her might look cool on the outside, but it's a vapid mess.

There are simply too many moments here in which the characters, who we are supposed to care about in some form, are conveniently dumb.

I Love America is hardly a life-changing rom-com. But it’s a good candidate for your next airplane watch.

No one on-screen is to blame for the failure of The Family Plan. They’re all fine, but they’re swimming upstream against a script that doesn’t give them enough to do and a director who fails at blending an average family and uncommon action into one vision.

A couple of pedal-to-the-floor melodramatic twists suggest that “Founders Days” might’ve been a bolder or just meaner genre movie, but its toothless satire, like its timid horror drama, sadly doesn’t cut it.

Kermani deserves credit for expanding on Hill’s story, which has a great premise, but not much else going for it.

The spirit of religious promise that Perione’s film introduces goes quizzically betrayed. What ensues becomes an attempted campy teen thriller, but without the tension or reward.

The resulting mishmash is as exciting as getting a tow from AAA, and just as slow.