Chupa willfully becomes one of those family films that takes plenty from the toy box of cliches left before and hardly gives anything back.

There’s a truly ambitious film buried in Glass, and I do mean buried. The problem is that Shyamalan can’t find the story, allowing his narrative to meander, never gaining the momentum it needs to work.

It’s a remarkably straightforward origin flick, lacking in true satire of its genre, carried almost entirely by its lead. Deadpool is a fun character, but he’s still in search of a fun movie to match his larger-than-life personality.

The irony is that as Gallner’s performance gets stronger, the film around him grows weaker.

Only the most committed genre fans and academic-minded masochists will want to hang around until the bitter, arthouse-meets-choose-your-own-adventure style ending.

As well-paced and cleverly deployed as all of the slapstick is here, it's hard to watch Jeff get slammed in the head or Pam step on Legos without wincing more than we laugh.

Allen’s mawkish performance aside, the rest of the cast do the best they can within this all too easy structure.

Save for a few references of being abandoned by his birth parents and adopted later, the source of Jobs's jerky behavior never is revealed.

All My Puny Sorrows has all the elements to pack a devastating punch, but there's no real sense of urgency. It's like people are just marking time, like the end has already been determined, it's just a matter of resigning oneself to the inevitable.

The Unholy is not designed to be deep, but since glimmers of depth are present, the lack of follow-up makes this a disappointing watch.

Del Toro always brings it, and this is actually one of his more intriguing performances in a long time, but one consistently wishes that it was in a movie that knew what to do with it.

The latest example of what I call an emperor’s-new-clothes film is Neon Bull.

Unlike the recent "God’s Not Dead," which is the "Beaches" of faith-based films in that it embodies every single complaint against its genre, Heaven is for Real attempts to cast a wider audience net.

While Where Hands Touch demonstrates confident filmmaking from a technical standpoint, Asante’s plot choices around the ambiguous development of Lutz feel irresponsible, especially during these risky political times that uncompromisingly demand us to be the opposite.

Alexandre Moors’ film is also so lacking in anything new or compelling to say — either emotional or political — about its subject that it ends up a rather dispiriting slog of a movie.

Is American ready for a feel-good movie about a toxic, conservative talk show host who learns to listen? Maybe, but Frank Coraci’s Hot Air is too shallow, sloppy, and unfunny to lead the cause, basing itself off the nation’s divisiveness as if it were a wistful set-up for ideological kumbaya, all while being afraid of starting a tough—and true—conversation.

Standing Up is mainly an exercise in personality development for Grace, raising her self-esteem, and giving her confidence.

The Report is also surprisingly free of tension, given the subject matter; if you’re going to experience any anxiety, it’ll probably come from a sense of worry over whether all of this is going to be on the final exam.

The only really surprising—and, therefore, the most disappointing—thing about Morbius is the fact that it’s an honest-to-goodness horror film. But only for a few seconds.

Stockholm Bloodbath is a half-promise. There's plenty of blood to be had, but not much of it boils.

Ninety minutes of footage like this, minus any characters or plot at all, probably would've resulted in an artistically better use of a couple hundred million dollars than "Jurassic World: Dominion," which will doubtless be a smash on the order of all the other entries in the franchise, even though it doesn't do much more than the bare minimum you'd expect for one of these films, and not all that well.

To be honest, the film does not exactly make a convincing case for the idea of Berlin as a hub of passion, or really for its existence as a movie.

The performances are better than the material deserves—particularly those of De la Reguera and Huerta, whose reactive closeups have a silent-movie expressiveness; and Lucas, who once again proves that he's willing to play deeply unlikable characters without signaling to the audience that he's a nice guy offscreen, actually.

The romantic fantasies and the time travel plotting of “Meet Cute” are a total mismatch.

Despite some game acting (and one truly superb moment from David Strathairn), Maladies remains on too low a boil to communicate any sense of stakes for the various characters. It seems to be trying to say something about creativity, and living one's life on one's own terms, but it's a muddle.

The most significant and bizarre problem with Muppets Most Wanted is a lack of a protagonist.

It’s almost too pretty in a self-consciously artful way, and that overriding aesthetic suffocates the underlying truth of the lead actors’ performances.

The tone of Thanks for Sharing is somewhat similar to the tone of "The Kids Are All Right": earnest, modestly exploratory, definitely smart, but extremely judgmental toward some of its people.