Aïnouz rarely builds tension through these machinations; surprisingly, given what’s at stake, “Firebrand” is often a bit of a slog.

A movie that veers off the track of slow burn into turgid pacing a few too many times to be entirely effective.

The kind of meat-and-potatoes genre picture that might be passable if the people involved in making it had given the same thought and concentration to the development of the plot and the ending as they did to the fairly involving set-up.

More damaging than underwritten character dynamics is the overall tone of “Road House,” which needed to be far more tactile to be effective.

Barnes & Heigl take their characters the distance provided them by the story, which is not very far.

Too bad it isn't a wickeder, subtler, more imaginative movie.

Bad Behaviour is a frustrating watch. Englert doesn't wrestle the material into a manageable form, and struggles to find a consistent tone.

The film clearly has a lot on its mind. But by the end, you still might not know what it was, even though the hurtling camerawork, jagged edits, brutal physical confrontations, and bone-rattling sound design will send you home feeling like you’ve had an experience.

Mitchell’s documentary is modest and rambling, too — perhaps too much so.

In “Stopmotion,” the debut feature from Robert Morgan, the medium—the painstaking and time-consuming process of stop-motion animation—may be unusual but the resulting film, an undeniably grisly but ultimately tedious tiptoe through the genre tropes, certainly is. This is all the more frustrating because in the middle of it all is a performance by Aisling Fransciosi that is so strong and committed that viewers will wish that the rest of the film had made the same kind of effort that she clearly did.

The problem is that the Mamet brand of tough-talking puzzle movie is harder to pull off than it looks, and writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka just don’t have the gift of dialogue needed to elevate this thriller beyond its foundation.

This layered melodrama strains for emotional impact with only occasional success while eventually blurring into an overlong and contrived parlor trick.

One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty.

Gadot remains a winning and winsome figure in “Wonder Woman 1984,” and she retains her authentic connection with the audience, but the machinery around her has grown larger and unwieldy. Maybe that was inevitable, the urge in crafting a sequel to make everything wilder and brasher, more sprawling and complicated. In the process, though, the quality that made the original film such a delight has been squashed almost entirely.

This is all fascinating stuff. But you pretty quickly get the sense that Buirski either doesn't find it interesting enough to let it stand on its own or else is afraid audiences will rebel against too many bare-bones elements.

Los Frikis is a complicated movie with good intentions and the goal of sharing underreported stories from the island. I want that too, but I found Los Frikis too saccharine given its somber topic. Perhaps its harder edged critiques were softened for international audiences, but I would have preferred the film more thoroughly wrestle with the emotional, political, and social complexities at its center.

What exerts an odd fascination here is that each character heartily embodies a different variety of solipsistic creep; you start feeling sorry for the creators of the movie for having to live among such awful people. Then it dawns on you that the film’s creators don’t find these people awful at all — they find them normal. Terrifying, really.

Unfortunately, much of Cryptozoo feels like an earnest, flashy genre exercise that’s more eccentric than thoughtful. It looks great on paper, but not so much on a screen.

For what it's worth, The Legend of Tarzan is several unpretentious cuts above the pompous, leaden "Greystoke" of over thirty years ago.

Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.

While some of the kills are sufficiently clever and gnarly, "Mandy Lane" is never particularly frightening.

Throughout the film, Ford’s behavior, which should be in the foreground of this story, seems to curiously fade to the back.

The Single Moms Club is almost good.

A passionate documentary with a lot of valuable information to impart, and a laudable humanist agenda to push. Unfortunately, it’s also not a particularly good movie. In fact, at certain points it can be an actively annoying one.

If you love rape jokes, Get Hard is your movie.

I can’t say how many liberties Penn, working from a script by Jez Butterworth and his own brother John-Henry Butterworth, took with their source material, but the way much of it plays out here feels movie-familiar rather than real-life familiar.

Both an overstimulated multimedia lecture and an anxiety-stoking conspiracy thriller, “The Grab” urges viewers to follow the money, look at the big picture, and so on.

Wendy is a repetitive, shallow film, a children’s fable that means way more to the child who dreamed it up than it will to you.