Suncoast joins a more forgettable crop of teen movies, lacking plausible character development and sufficient depth to make its themes resonate.

Oculus eventually becomes little more than a series of ghostly figures and twisted visions on its way to a cop-out of an ending that you'll see coming an hour away.

The Kings of Summer flirts with profundity, seeming to yearn for it and fear the honest expression of it at the same time. There is much here to admire, but the overall impression is of a film that does not have the courage of its convictions.

This is a compelling story about persistent problems that affect the majority of Americans, even though you don't hear about them very often in mainstream media. The blunt title says it all.

The entire thing has a whiff of missed opportunity, and sometimes you might wonder if Lowery and his co-writer Toby Halbrooks wanted to dive deeper than they knew Disney's copyright-tending, merchandise-selling executives would have allowed.

Perhaps with less questions left unanswered, “Drift” would permit a more sympathetic lead, but the flatness and flippance of its context leaves everything on the surface.

To the credit of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, the film knows its pop-culture touchstones (Groundhog Day and Time Bandits) and acknowledges the influence those Harold Ramis and Terry Gilliam classics have on its YA story. That doesn’t make the film particularly unique, but at least it makes The Map of Tiny Perfect Things honest.

The voice-over explains things that we could have understood from looking at the images. It rarely passes up the opportunity to drop in a cliche.

A certain sloppiness prevents The To Do List from entering the female coming-of-age pantheon of "Sixteen Candles," "Clueless" and "Mean Girls."

If These Walls Could Sing never feels as comprehensive as it could be about the subject. It operates as an addendum to better Beatles documentaries like "Eight Days a Week," "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," and "The Beatles Anthology," and that lack of an identity prevents McCartney's film from being a well-earned tribute to one of the world's iconic studios.

If the characters aren’t three-dimensional and the plot is so predictable it creaks into motion by the five-minute mark. you haven’t done the work necessary to pull in your audience. You’ve got to give us something to hang our cowboy hats on.

Not to sound derisive, but there’s definitely a target audience here. What they’ll get will be mildly satisfying: a film that’s well-acted but tastefully restrained to a fault, with gentle humor about aging and a central mystery that isn’t all that engaging.

Dog is uneven in tone and quality but shows promise in the way Tatum and Carolin approach the story with care and heart.

The direction is efficient and coherent. Arterton has been lately choosing roles that emphasize flinty self-determination over movie-star charisma, and she’s getting better at them all the time; this is one of her most credible and engaging portrayals yet. James Norton is equally impressive.

A rather uneven Bond, one with a great story but a few too many problems, belonging somewhere in the middle section of the series' canon.

It doesn’t all make sense or add up to much, but there’s a consistency to its inconsistency that I admire. It’s something that works on a mood more than literally. Kind of like a great country song.

This is a nice film. A sweet film. A film you can watch with your mother-in-law.

Does the movie work? Intermittently, sometimes brilliantly.

Leigh Janiak's Fear Street Part Two: 1978 has more slasher thrills, but the fun of this series that makes it Halloween in July returns with an overly serious face, resembling something of a killjoy.

What a singularly weird, gross tale this turned out to be.

The story overstays its welcome eventually, with the impending tragedy that would conclude the film fizzling as a result.

Never as fun as it should be, despite a gripping central crime.

It’s a tick too long and has a section that’s far too expository for a film that’s at its best when it leans into surreal nightmare logic, but this weird movie works its fear factor in unexpected, creative ways.

Unlike “Stranger Things,” The Wretched is a little too cute about teen angst, and not light enough on its feet to make you want to root for its ostensibly typical adolescent.

It’s exciting, quietly volatile stuff that digs refreshingly deep into the fears of the coming-of-age genre.

It’s structurally awkward, jumping around in time needlessly and sometimes confusingly, rendering Nureyev’s story weirdly inert until the final 20-30 minutes.

The words that keep ringing in my head regarding Adam McKay’s Vice are courtesy of the bard: “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Crazy, violent and shocking events go down in Paradise: Faith — events that will startle the devout and non-believers alike — but Austrian director Ulrich Seidl depicts them all with same sort of monotone detachment he uses in the film's more mundane moments.