Mainstream may be up-to-date on stylistic grounds, but its narrative could use refreshing.

That kind of gallow’s humor defines the surface tone of Arkansas, which often feels like a riff on “Breaking Bad,” only now it’s more about how sad it is to be poor white trash.

Daddy Issues is not the laugh-out-loud rom-com it had likely aspired to be, yet it’s just charming enough to make you wish it were better.

This is a Sad Rich People movie, no more so than a lot of American films dating back to the dawn of cinema, but it's no "The Leopard" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Great Gatsby" or you-name-it.

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.

The most frustrating thing about the British prenatal horror movie Kindred is not that it’s impersonal, but rather that it’s not personal enough.

The ending — with its revelation of what these girls were really after all along — is so frustrating, you’re likely to wonder: Is that all there is?

Branagh, the actor, comes through unscathed. Branagh, the director, not so much.

The movie also falls back on a lot of boogity-boogity docu-clichés. Skittery editing, ironic music cues, that sort of thing.

The shooting is picturesque, the acting overbaked.

Though it has a few big laughs, Uncle Drew mistakes its goofy pitch for a free pass to be very simple with its comedy, and sappy with its emotions

Fanning delivers a performance of such astonishing depth and emotional range that her presence here is both a relief and strangely frustrating, since the film that surrounds the young actor is sadly no match for the qualities she brings to Potter’s profoundly personal narrative.

Unfortunately, the film never finds a way into Berg's personality that explores his many facets without reducing him to a blank-slate character at the center of a traditionally-made period thriller.

Clumsily conflates our country’s racist genocide of Native Americans with the era’s marginalizing of women and their lack of rights.

While the action and suspense set pieces are executed with typical Ritchie bravura, the movie falls flat a lot of the time in between.

The entire story takes place in and around a spectacular house with curiously sterile interiors that are more like the setting of a magazine ad for expensive liquor than a home real people live in. The bigger problem is that the world of the characters is not fully inhabited either.

Good scripts make you forget they are scripts. The script for Prisoner's Daughter is quite talky and never takes wing. You can almost see the words on the page, despite the strong efforts of Beckinsale and Cox.

Making his directorial debut, Hsu clearly has an eye for striking imagery, and Detention is filled with moments of shuddering, abstract beauty. But his ghost story never quite materializes from its uncanny ether.

The Vault is not, in other words, just derivative—it’s also flabby and bland.

Luke and the other actors do their best, especially Zosia Mamet as June’s friend and Melissa Leo as Charlie’s mother, but the dialogue never creates vivid, specific, consistent characters.

I’d have an easier time accepting the trite, asked-and-answered conclusions that director Muye Wen and co-writers Jianu Han and Wei Zhong lead viewers to if they were more adept at tugging at viewers’ heart-strings.

The execution is riddled with problems, not the least of which is the absence of Salinger’s actual work.

The Runner squanders at least one great performance (Fonda’s) and delivers a dispiritingly inert cinematic experience.

Coogan and Rudd's generally charming performances both give weight to their otherwise wisp-thin characters, but their swishy mannerisms also speak to the superficial nature of Fleming's presentation of Erasmus and Paul.

If you already are a fan of the Indigo Girls (and this writer is), then you know what their music means and the impact it's had on you. But if you don't know, if you want to learn more, “It’s Only Life After All" doesn't get the job done, even at 2 hours long.

Half-nifty, half-cheesy.

There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the senior action flicks that have become ubiquitous.

Daldry’s latest, Trash, co-directed with Christian Duurvoort, not only pitches the same Academy woo, it shamelessly mimics Best Picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire.”