What The Rookie feels like is an assembly of scenes that were not attached to characters we can care about. The dialogue is wooden, or artificial, or self-consciously cute. Most of the characters are not given even perfunctory development.

Rich in atmosphere but short on substance, director and co-writer Gareth Edwards’ film has the look and tone of a serious, original work of art, but it ends up feeling empty as it recycles images and ideas from many influential predecessors.

With a road movie story that aims toward simplistic and rather formulaic romantic wish-fulfillment, it offers some interesting scenery, but its main attraction is another estimable performance by the talented Garcia.

Sam Elliott is Sam Elliott as Sam Elliott in The Hero, a sentimental and sporadically effective celebration of the veteran character actor.

Ang Lee is a great director whose last film, the Oscar-winning “Life of Pi,” made ingenious and very effective use of 3D technology. But that film had a much better story than Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

Take away the noise surrounding it, and Sound of Freedom has distinct cinematic ambitions: a non-graphic horror film with what could be called an art-house sensibility for muted rage and precise, striking shadows derived from an already bleak world. If “Sound of Freedom” were less concerned with being something "important," it could be more than a mood, it could be a movie.

Lacks sufficient inspiration and follow-through to be truly exciting.

It’s amusingly slick and mean for a while, but ultimately the film’s one-note nihilism grows numbing, and its stylish visuals and well-chosen soundtrack can only do so much to keep it lively.

Verow, who wrote the script with his writing partner James Derek Dwyer, incorporates many familiar queer narratives and supernatural elements for a story with many twists and turns, some of which work better than others.

Like Slimer shoving snacks in his ravenous maw, “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” tries to cram way too many characters, storylines and iconic images into its two-hour runtime.

It is over-plotted, with three different storylines mixing comedy and adventure.

Small Crimes works in part but is strangely murky in others. There's a lot of dead air. It's the pettiness, the small-ness of the characters that makes the greatest impression.

There’s a reason “John Wick” was just about a guy avenging his dog. Simple is often better, and “Mayhem!” too often clutters what works about it with exploitation or shallow characterizations.

Plane rushes through its emotional and explosive beats so that it can get to the next crisis without having to fill out the previous one, and it wildly skims on the good stuff in the process.

We can never quite settle into the connection to the couple because while it makes it indisputably clear, despite some claims of Photoshopping, that they really do scale the tallest and most iconic structures in the world, there is a discomfiting artificiality to the storytelling.

As a moviegoer, however, you do have a choice. Either weep with them–or laugh at them. Or stay far, far away.

This is a movie that’s annoying in part because it doesn’t care if you’re annoyed by it. It doesn’t need you, the individual viewer, to like it. It just needs a crowd to see it. Whether you’ve been entertained or enlightened is immaterial. It’s Barnum time. You don’t like it? This way to the egress.

The film is blessed with a fairly strong cast and while it isn’t nearly enough to make it succeed as a whole, whatever degree that certain scenes do work are almost entirely due to their efforts.

Oblivion is a special effects extravaganza with a lot of blatant symbolism and very little meaning. It starts slow, turns dull and then becomes tedious — which makes it a marginal improvement over the earlier film. It features shiny surfaces, clicky machinery and no recognizable human behavior. It's equally ambitious and gormless.

There’s enough here in the sheer wealth of material that fans of Peterson’s or jazz could find this documentary worth the runtime. But it’s unfortunate that Avrich and his team were not able to shape this material into an overall stronger narrative.

The script is very sparse. It feels like an outline, a general idea rather than an actual filled-out story. Because of this, there's a slightly belabored quality to the film. We see where it's going. We see how it's going to go.

It's anchored by committed performances and fascinating details, but it never quite figures out how to lock the audience into whatever odd groove the storytellers have obviously decided to settle into.

It’s a disorganized onslaught of primary source material that doesn’t so much shed light as it does simply exist.

There is a curious datedness, monotony and lack of excitement throughout “Lisa Frankenstein,” that feels dull despite its preferred power-ballad “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon, and colorless in spite of its magenta-heavy production design. In its best moments, Williams’ debut feels very much like its central monster—undead, but with no place to go. It’s a cosmic disappointment.

Parents with young children who hope this is a sweet and inspiring film about an underdog Little League team will find that there is too little baseball and too much about a family confronting a devastating loss. Those who are more interested in the story of the adults will find there is too much baseball. Steee-rike.

Only trouble is, none of the elements — the scary stuff, the psychological drama, the family-dynamic crises — really deliver the wallop necessary to provide truly memorable horror fare.

Arthouse horror flick The Eyes of My Mother actively alienates viewers by presenting episodes in a woman's life from a post-human, God-like perspective. Sometimes. Usually. Probably?

It doesn't take long to realize that writer-director David Ayer has spent more time adding flesh to his battlefield sequence than he has in fleshing out the screenplay. The end result, while technically impressive, is a dramatically bloodless affair, despite the gallons of gore on display.