Twohy's script contains macho dialogue so ripe it's embarrassing to hear it.

Cooties is a midnight movie for those fine with dozing off about twenty minutes in, once the charm of its single sentence log-line has worn off.

An insipid buddy-cop mystery that feels like a forgotten artifact of the 1980s.

A lot of thrillers are exciting but empty. “In Cold Light” is thrilling but very full in unexpected and complicated ways.

You could get mad at Seifert for being so bad at being so nakedly manipulative. Or you could just give up all hope, and counter-intuitively root for Monsanto. This is a David-vs.-Goliath movie, but David's aim is so spotty that Goliath has nothing to fear.

This not-quite-horror movie is so indulgently languorous — some might describe it as poetic and mournful while those who are less kind would dismiss it as plodding and downright depressing — it is likely to test the patience of many viewers.

This film encourages us to explore who and what he was most loyal to.

How to Make a Killing makes a half-hearted effort to surprise and maybe disturb us with some late developments, but by that point we’ve been numbed by the film committing the unforgivable crime of being dull.

It has a goofy grin on its face from frame one. But it never quite figures out how to pass its good vibrations to the audience.

It's a mixed bag overall — hence my star rating — but it's worth seeing nonetheless, largely because of the explicitly Russian qualities its sustains.

The film does an excellent job of letting us inside Lakshmi's physical and emotional experience.

The movie hits its cinematic stride, as it happens, when events are at their worst. The Promise is drenched in production value and replete with ravishing shots of sunrises and sunsets, but it’s in the scenes of fleeing, of battle, and of horrendous loss that the film is at its most effective. The depiction of the savagery inflicted on Armenia is bracing.

The film is constantly undercutting its own ability to generate any real suspense because whenever one of the stories begins to generate any real head of steam, viewers are jerked into another one and the whole process starts over again.

Thérèse never goes beyond that level of psychological complexity because after a point, Miller and Carter aren't interested in exploring the murky depths of Thérèse 's feelings.

A depressingly rote piece of corporate product that has so little on its mind other than presumably making hundreds of millions of dollars that you half expect the ticket sellers to hand out copies of Comcast’s latest earnings report along with the 3-D glasses.

And it mostly doesn’t quite work, because Fred, as written by MacBride and played by Dylan O’Brien, just isn’t a compelling character.

With these two top-drawer talents anchoring Michael Engler’s The Chaperone, one expects the picture to be terrific, and for the majority of its running time, it does not disappoint.

The cuteness of Godmothered is a winning one overall, especially in how it uses a playful sense of humor and good heart to find its own way to Happily Ever After.

Like most films of its type, “The Final Chapter” is utterly ridiculous in every possible way but unlike a lot of them (I am looking at you, “Underworld”), it at least has a healthy sense of its own absurd nature that comes as a blessed relief. And a couple of the action bits are gloriously goofy to behold.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is zippy and breezy.

They Remain is such a slow burn of a film that it fizzles out. It’s one of those movies that mistakes meandering as building tension, and wastes an intriguing presence on weak characters and an overbearing sense that it’s being made up as it goes along.

This one is more forgettable than it could have been but also nowhere near the disaster that often comes when members of Lorne Michaels' troupe are allowed out during the day.

Despite an appealing cast, though, this film is as aimless as its characters, a slight story about one night in the life of a group of 20-somethings in a small town.

This movie isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s ass backwards.

This film is a bittersweet love story about characters burdened by oppression, but the theme of liberation is as palpable as the sense of loss.

It’s a shaggy hangout film where McCartney and Wonder are dimwitted adversaries who spend their days getting high, insulting one another, and eating veggie dinners. In short, it’s incredibly fun.

The character is so one-note, always tying everything back to his need to redeem himself and his dad and articulating so many of his concerns verbally rather than through his eyes or body, that after a while I wanted to put in earplugs to get a break from him.

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.