A genuinely nasty and disturbing piece of work, but its cumulative nerve-shredding effect is not just the product of effective direction. Sheri Moon Zombie delivers her best serious dramatic performance yet (before marrying Zombie, she used to be a porn star).

The whole cast (which also includes Oliver Platt as a simpatico family solicitor) sinks its teeth into the material, which is reasonably meaty.

There There doesn't come to life, even as an intellectual or artistic exercise.

A modest little suspense puzzle that simulates rather than builds on vastly better “my neighbor may be a murderer” stories from “Rear Window” to “Stranger Things.”

All in all, it’s stupid fun, done with enough panache that its thin story and sometimes too-glib attitude doesn’t hurt it too much.

The Book of Clarence, the religious epic by multi-hyphenate talent Jeymes Samuel, is a handsomely crafted picture that simply loses the plot.

It’s a throwback to goofy action movies that don’t get made at this budget level that often anymore, a time when major studios would release an original flick about massive sandworms in the desert or J. Lo and Ice Cube fighting a giant snake. To that end, despite a clunky set-up, “The Gorge” delivers on its potential.

Rabbit Trap, a supernatural drama about a young couple haunted by a creepy child, revels in the tropes and tics of a few decades’ worth of British folk horror.

The result is a very creepy, suspenseful story that’s also a better-than-average character study.

R100 is, consequently, a comedy that tries to alienate you by suggesting that escapism is futile, all things inevitably devolve, and nothing inherently means anything.

Although Pet Sematary is a largely dreadful film, it is slightly better and never as offensively bad as the first version.

The movie is sleek, smart, and reasonably thorough, and it offers the enticement of never-before-seen home movies provided by Armstrong's family. But it can't really stand out from the flood of material released to cash in on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, because it arrives on the heels of two daring ones, Damien Chazelle's "First Man" and Todd Douglas Miller's "Apollo 11."

A wonderful ensemble, a brilliant director, and a genius screenwriter all get together for The Laundromat, a film they clearly took very seriously, but that they never figured out how to make entertaining to an audience.

The hazy horizons and warmth of the Wild West lend to stunning cinematography, but the bones of the visuals are not enough to support the film. Mandler’s direction is effective for the genre, but there’s a fatiguing number of posed cowboy-against-the-horizon shots that begin to feel kitschy on account of their frequency.

As Antonina, though, Chastain seems bound up as an actress, held back in creating a character mainly by the demands of doing a Polish accent.

The film loads itself down with two different plots, one cliched, one new and fresh. This makes "Ezra" a sometimes frustrating watch, but there's a lot here to recommend.

If you are in the mood for a "they don't make movies like that anymore" movie, meaning soapy melodrama with enough glamorous glow to keep you from thinking too hard, then The Last Letter From Your Lover might do the trick.

As a comedic confrontation with the inevitability of aging and death, it’s no “Jackass Forever.” But it’s funny and a wee bit poignant, and the main trio has the good taste not to ask us to feel too deeply about three guys whose chief appeal is that they’re miserable and petty and witheringly sarcastic and don’t try to hide it.

While it's unlikely that this film will take up too much time in any future Lifetime Achievement Award clip reels, Dreamland is a testament to the importance of sheer star power to help carry even haphazard material along, at least up to a point.

Director Sarah Adina Smith has a gift for striking images and creating intriguingly spooky moods, bordering on gothic, but the plot is so overstuffed we hardly have time to even notice Jacqueline Bisset as the demanding director of the ballet group.

Ip Man 3 also sneaks in welcome moments of mushy romantic sweetness between Master Ip and his wife, Cheung Wing-sing (Lynn Hung).

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

The film patly confirms what "The Lion King" already taught '90s kids: we should take comfort in knowing that everything in life is natural when seen as part of the "circle of life," as surprisingly effective voiceover narrator John Krasinski reminds us.

Pleasant but unchallenging.

I Came By is undeniably well-composed and entertaining enough for its missteps to be overlooked most of the time. Yes, it’s a rewrite short of greatness, but Bonneville makes it worth a visit even if its final needle drop over the credits is indicative of its shallowness.

They’ve shared home movies previously, but this documentary—meaningful in concept, but fleeting in its expression—puts them in close-up, with Gainsbourg behind the camera in her debut.

The star rating at the top would be two-and-a-half if I were only judging what's on the screen. The other half-star is for audacity.

A twisted genre experiment that plays with sexuality, classic genre tropes, and general lunacy, it’s half a movie, but it’s so committed to its rebellious tone that it makes for a hell of a half.