The movie ambles along amiably enough for a while; it’s better if you are a fan of one or more members of the cast.

Please Stand By is a sensitive character study whose story beats are a little bit overly familiar, to be frank. Dakota Fanning is excellent as Wendy.

The China Hustle is not interested in offering a crumb of hope, thereby enabling the frustration it will inevitably arouse in viewers to dissolve into apathy once the credits roll.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

Cho finally delivers in these scenes, twisting and turning his plot, while also giving us the car chases and gunfire we’ve been waiting for. The only question is if you’ll still be awake by the time he gets there.

The movie is most naturally a showcase for Efira, whose work as an unusual 17th-century nun in “Benedetta” demonstrated she could play dazzling and tormented with equal facility and who gets to work a similar range here.

The film bizarrely takes what could have been a touching and powerful drama about the traumatic family ties that bind (and occasionally choke) and attempts to refit it as a straightforward, if mostly low-key horror exercise chock-full of scenes involving various things popping up out of the darkness with numbing regularity.

What this Netflix original lacks in narrative originality, it makes up for through a game voice cast, a wonderfully realized world, and a surprisingly dark spin on its story.

Like the DisneyNature films, it’s strikingly pretty, not just in its gorgeous views of the Austrian countryside, but also in the interiors populated by talking heads and delectable foodstuffs. It’s also startlingly tame, as if its subject, famous celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, was a commodity whose brand needed to be protected.

In the end, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? feels less like a complete piece, and more like the start of something searching for its perfect form without an ideal end in sight. Considering the country’s current political landscape, it seems fitting.

At first, the story is fascinating. Soon, it becomes dizzying. Quickly, it turns sickening. And eventually, it’s heartbreaking.

Even at a brisk 79 minutes (including credits), “Glorious” feels like an intriguing idea that’s been stretched thin to feature length.

It's hard to tell if Kevin Pollak's documentary Misery Loves Comedy is too much of a good thing or not enough.

Like the title that goes on a bit longer than it needs to, the filmmakers here have a habit of underlining and emphasizing elements of their story that would have been more powerful without a more subtle approach. But this is still a remarkably moving piece of work, a documentary that understands that a diner can’t save your life, but that doesn’t make it any less essential to it.

A strange and memorable but not entirely successful film, "Sweet Dreams" turns colonialism into a source of pitch-black slapstick comedy.

Driven is an odd or maybe ironic title because that man, Jim Hoffman, has a very un-driven demeanor, coming across as disarmingly impromptu, maybe some goofy charm.

The Wasteland is the unique case of a horror movie with a more robust visual sense than a lot of its contemporaries, but that still doesn’t create a larger terror. It’s more the stuff of directors' reels, not nightmares.

Take away the cameos—in the recording booth, and animated on-screen—and you get something that's a little too close to the same old junk.

Extraterrestrial never settles into a groove, and therefore never becomes more than a collection of effectively icky scenes.

So what does work about Army of the Dead? It’s fun and unpretentious, driven more by its action set pieces than anything else. It’s clearly as inspired by modern “fast zombie” films like “World War Z” or “28 Days Later” as it is the works of the master, and there are moments when its grand insanity just clicks thanks to the set-piece ambition of its filmmaker and the willingness of its cast to go anywhere he leads them.

There is more in How to Build a Girl that works than doesn’t. It’s charming and sweet, and even in its more serious moments, the movie never loses its sense of humor.

A deftly made suspense film, but one that falls somewhat short of its aspirations, both as a satire and as a psychological thriller with a critical societal eye.

The Chosen retells one of the most dependable stories in literature, the story in which two people from different backgrounds overcome their mistrust and learn to accept each other's traditions.

Paris 05:59,’s charms are likely slight enough, and its raunch raunchy enough, to keep it from becoming one of those rare exceptions.

Much of the movie is dedicated to the hard science behind the discovery of CRISPRs that has opened a whole new Pandora’s Box of possibilities both terrible and great, but I wish there were more of the human element in Human Nature.

Kodachrome, alas, too often travels a well-worn and predictable highway, one that was traversed to near-perfection not too long ago by Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.”

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

I Am Madame Bovary plays out as a comedy, a lampoon of the incompetence and laziness of government officials.