Despite some solid low-budget make-up work and decent central performances, “Monster Island” doesn’t have enough meat on its bones, somehow feeling narratively inert even at just 83 minutes.

It's richly imagined, and you can tell everyone had fun immersing themselves in this strange and often disturbing world.

Genndy Tartakovsky brings back all the fan favorites from the previous two films and sets them all on an overcrowded, doomed cruise, but the thin plot feels less engaging than the previous films and the jokes less inspired.

If you ever wanted to see a wartime movie that feels directed by a kinder, gentler Michael Bay, Come What May is right up your alley. It plays like a more cultured — and very French — version of “Pearl Harbor," complete with bad CGI battle sequences, jaw-dropping plot coincidences, over-the-top nationalistic gestures and dialogue that often sounds swiped from a soap opera.

Unfortunately, more bland than broad humor otherwise stands in for Polsky and Herzog’s personalities.

To see him wrestle with his own past, the pressure of a whole country’s dreams, and the relief of making them come true, is occasionally riveting, but it’s also what makes Pelé all the more a missed opportunity for a sharper portrait.

Every once in a while there is a bright spot, most notably a scene with Gary Sinise as a sympathetic bartender and JoBeth Williams as a fragile barfly.

If you long for the gritty charms of mid-‘90s indie cinema in general and “Trainspotting” specifically, T2 Trainspotting gives you exactly that. And by “exactly,” we really do mean “exactly.”

In the annals of sexually-charged event cinema, Fifty Shades of Grey barely lights a candle let alone combusts with unbridled forbidden passion.

While Powell’s film is highly bloody and invested with psychological realism, it lacks a pulse and curiosity that doesn’t befit the excitement promised in the title.

So much time and energy put into something that, try as I might, I could only muster interest in sporadically. All of this well-meaning effort to waste on a film that never finds the right tone to connect with viewers. It takes a lot to make a movie like Outlaw King, even if it provides so little.

So much of the needlessly complicated and rules-driven action inside the park plays like wasted motion, visually as well as narratively speaking.

It sounds fun in theory, I guess, and there are some entertaining moments of rude irreverence here and there but the giddiness gets a bit tedious after a while.

Before its typically inoffensive and unmemorable finale, Four Samosas inevitably skids into a self-conscious Anderson parody that even the uninitiated will see coming from miles off.

Everything about “The History of Sound” is restrained to a fault—until it’s about the music. And then it bursts with passion and pure emotion.

It’s passable for an easy watch and some uncomfortable chuckles but is bearable only on behalf of Hunter’s loyal antagonism while falling short just about everywhere else.

On a basic level, the film is entertaining enough, but anyone hoping for a particularly fresh or innovative take on the show or its creator is probably going to come away feeling a bit let down.

As it is, The Good Mother starts with a gunshot and ends with a whimper.

One almost wishes Chaves and Johnson-McGoldrick had not tried to reinvent the wheel, and instead just stuck with the franchise’s sophisticated simplicity and tried-and-true paranormal formula. Without a focal haunted house, this one just doesn’t feel like a film that belongs in “The Conjuring” universe.

The movie has an aura of indie navel-gazing that kept me at arm’s length.

Frustratingly not-quite-there from start to finish.

To call Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris a mixed bag would be generous. It packs all the wild action you came to see into a 20-minute stretch near the end, and elsewhere gives us something like a platonic buddy version of Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy.

Lazenby himself takes center stage to tell his story and explain his actions at last but the end result is a sometimes frustrating work that takes a potentially fascinating tale and renders it mostly inert thanks in large part to its questionable approach to the material.

Great actors Ben Mendelsohn and Rooney Mara do their best to elevate the frustrating Una, but their director doesn’t seem to understand what he has in these two performers, constantly pulling back from their raw emotion and complex characters.

A by-the-numbers sequel that mostly ignores the stuff that made its predecessor stand out in exchange for formulaic would-be thrills.

A thoughtfully feminist spin on “Pretty Woman,” this film is not.

6 Underground is definitely some awfully loud shit.

The result is a listlessly soapy melodrama, save for a little bit of modern-day nudity and bloodshed, could have been churned out 60-70 years ago and then gone largely forgotten in the ensuing decades.