The frenetic silliness and uneven tone are unfortunate distractions from the genuine pleasures of the film, including Cabello's appealing performance as Cinderella, and the creative and energetic musical numbers.

This supposedly uplifting true-life baseball tale never quite strikes the necessary emotional sweet spots that these types of inspirational sports movies shamelessly if effectively milk, despite a pitch with great potential.

While “Oh. What. Fun” has an excellent director, Michael Showalter, who also co-scripted, some nice music, and top performers, including Danielle Brooks as a delivery driver Claire meets on the road, and the exquisitely lovely Havana Rose Liu, very appealing as Jeanne’s daughter, it keeps undermining our sympathy with off-kilter stakes and inert efforts at humor.

The movie’s impersonal, conventional telling of a reasonably standard male coming-of-age story almost tends to make the punk milieu it depicts beside the point.

The film's short-comings are especially upsetting since Schwarzenegger is actually rather good in the film, and proves once again that, despite a severely limited range, he knows how to brood.

Maggie Q and Michael Keaton have such snappy, sexy chemistry with each other in The Protégé, it’ll make you wish their connection were in the service of a better movie.

Ultimately, “Roofman” is a slick but incurious film that is so preoccupied with showing the what of Manchester’s story that it doesn’t bother to examine the why.

There are some fun ideas and moments in Dead & Beautiful, but Verbeek seems to want to avoid offending anyone with the suggestion that the rich are vampires—which is the premise his movie is built on.

This is a confounding movie. Its pace is leaden, its structure lopsided, and while Dunham and Fry are both first-rate performers, their respective personae — both public and on-screen — are difficult for them to fully transcend.

This message is preaching to the choir, much more likely to reassure those who are already believers than to engage those who are seeking answers.

Nothing nearly so wacky or grotesque goes down in this romantic thriller, but you’ll wish it would.

Problem is, this doesn’t reinvent the formula as much as follows it by rote, which makes it an enormous step down.

Just another unimaginative rip-off.

The end result proves to be as awkward as its title thanks to its uneven screenplay and tone, and questionable casting in supporting parts.

Unfortunately, many of the most compelling elements of Still Life in Lodz are bogged down by distracting filmmaking flourishes.

Senior Year takes two high-concept premises—the going-back-to-high-school movie and the waking-up-from-a-coma movie—and slams them together in an intermittently amusing but mostly obvious comedy.

A missed opportunity; a documentary that plays too much like fan service, ignoring actual insight or even detailed history of its chosen subject in favor of unapologetic adoration.

There are vikings in this movie, and there is destiny. Pure to its junky intentions, if you like your movies served to you without confusion as to the character or their narrative arc, here it is: The destiny of a viking.

The alternately cornball and self-aware dialogue and the clearly not state-of-the-art CGI would seeming charmingly retro (like something from a TV miniseries two decades ago) if the movie didn't trot out one epic action film cliche after another.

The effort is noble, to give Bishop a chance to tell her story, however compromised its framing and end product might be, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

Is it a real film, or a feature that uses the porn milieu to turn out a piece of softcore titillation that’s halfway between porn and actual drama? No doubt some of the film’s makers and defenders would argue for the former.

It’s a film that seems to have no further point than to remind us that some powerful jerks were once powerful jerk kids. Point taken, but it’s not cinematically satisfying.

Detroit was directed, written, produced, shot, and edited by white creatives who do not understand the weight of the images they hone in on with an unflinching gaze.

The scenes under water are exquisitely beautiful, but it is the screenplay that feels soggy.

Ride On isn’t a generic beat-em-up but a stingy elegy to a bygone era of filmmaking and an unbelievable melodrama about an older artist and his estranged daughter. A lot of emotional baggage is attached to Ride On, and very little of it gets unpacked.

Unfortunately, “Back to the Past” doesn’t really stand on its own, and its creators don’t know how to offer viewers anything new.

The film isn’t necessarily terrible, but it proves to be deeply unmemorable by offering viewers little more than a rehash of things they have presumably seen before and then taking an unconscionable amount of time to do so.

A drama that’s tastefully restrained to a fault in a particularly British manner.