The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

At some point, queasy horror-comedy Another Evil stops being about one man's comically vain attempts at exorcising his home, and starts being a weird character study about a laughably desperate wannabe exorcist.

God & Country is an illustration of that classic conundrum faced by so many political documentaries with an alarmist tone. Even when its concerns are justified, such a project tends to alienate rather than entice, and those who are inclined to agree with its points will come away feeling that their worldview has been reinforced, while the viewers who are arguably most in need of seeing it will remain unaware of it or dismiss it as propaganda.

A classic, and classically lamentable, good-news/bad news proposition. In the good news department, it’s largely a sturdy, enjoyable domestic comedy drama.

The movie is well put together, enough so that if you’re not entirely tired of its clichés, it might constitute a tolerable entertainment. I’d rather watch “Double Indemnity” for the 15th time.

Towelhead presents material that cries out to be handled with quiet empathy and hammers us with it. I understand what the film is trying to do, but not why it does it with such crude melodrama. The tone is all wrong for a story of child sexuality and had me cringing in my seat.

Akilla’s Escape is undone by its own lack of faith in the viewer, opting to explicitly tell rather than rely on its fine actors to show us who their characters are.

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.

Jimmy & Stiggs is a slick wallow into a cranked-up, self-destructive headspace that frequently over-compensates for what it lacks in plot and character development with sheer vigor and volume alone.

A tedious and only occasionally amusing comedic riff on “The Purge” franchise.

The array of TV veterans assembled for the film don’t necessarily do anything wrong, and their charisma sometimes translates from small screen to big, but, as is so often the case with the indie dramedy, an unrealistic script lets down a talented cast.

The World is Full of Secrets concerns text more than anything else — not the visuals within filmmaking or performance, but the stories being told. As an experiment with the sensory experience of film storytelling, it backfires. To best engage Swon's massive amounts of text, you’re better off closing your eyes.

A typical Hong character performs the same actions over and over again, with minor, but noticeably different results.

In his bleak film, Guðmundsson combines the kitchen sink drama of growing up in a cycle of violence and/or poverty and the magical realism of teenage fever dreams, with mixed results.

A strong sense of style and a promising premise are undone in a film that never quite figures out how to write itself out of its corner.

Lean, sincere, impassioned filmmaking, yet it fails to leave as much of an impression as it clearly wants to.

A feature debut that might have its heart in the right place but can’t quite manage to smoothly blend the spiritual with the silly without a few Biblical hitches here and there.

A sometimes diverting, but overly familiar series of set pieces in search of a good melodrama.

By indulging in the exact same instincts it insists are problematic artistically, Peter Rabbit 2 wants to have its carrot and eat it, too. But maybe that won’t bother you. Maybe you’ll be grateful for a return to the theater and the opportunity to do so with your kids. In that regard, the sequel hops along in sufficiently bouncy fashion.

Watson and Bruhl give it their best, and Nyqvist makes a powerful villain, but Colonia winds up being a movie that wants to get its way on too many levels, and winds up not satisfying on most of them.

Let’s hope the upcoming projects in this fully-formed franchise learn a lesson from this gang of thieves and steal some ideas from better movies.

All the pieces would seem to be in place—on paper at least—for a rich and gripping grown-up drama. So why does the result feel so elusive and unsatisfying?

With Girls of the Sun, she handles the action sequences with a deft hand and a feel for tension, but her character development is woefully lacking to the point of empty cliché.

A movie with which it is easy to find fault, and if you’re a particular kind of person, you’ll find fault with it without even trying too hard.

The premise isn’t thoroughly uncomfortable so much as it is simply tedious; Barbara Hershey’s focal character Tabitha is made to appear more and more helpless in the film’s scant psychological thrills, and yet we’re stuck with a flat anxiety for a feature's length.

The subplots dangle, the suspense unravels, and the primary relationship never takes off. What you’re left with isn’t an arresting piece of filmmaking, but an idea that is stretched beyond the ability to naturally hold one’s attention without relying on loud filmmaking and even louder themes.

I admire the intentions behind Cherry. I even admire the Russos' desire to "do one for themselves" after directing so many films in a corporate-driven context. But Cherry warrants a simpler down-and-dirty approach.

The cast is filled with actors doing everything they can to make their characters as memorable as possible even when the script (credited to four people) isn't lending them the support they deserve.