Funny Boy falters when trying to link together the personal and political, making for a well-intentioned film that never delivers much depth.

Callbacks to other “Insidious” films are half-hearted, and “The Red Door” seems to give up on trying to make all of the pieces fit after a while. What does work are a handful of scares in the film’s first half.

Given that she’s one of the greatest actresses of her time, Mirren naturally finds ways to reveal glimmers of humanity in her portrayal of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. But the artifice of her physical transformation too often smothers her, resulting in a stoicism that makes her an elusive figure.

It’s an amiable misfire. But Brie Larson sure can light up the screen, and she does so here — she’s a pleasant singer, too — and that’s enough to raise this from a one-and-a-half star movie to a two.

This ensemble drama about troubled upper-middle class strivers is slick, confident, and rather empty, and structurally more self-defeating than clever.

Although it's gorgeous to look at (especially Joan Bergin’s costumes), Disenchanted fails to truly rekindle the magic, or the biting wit of its predecessor.

Common Ground is a well-meaning PSA that waters down the complex history, practices, and systems of American industrial agriculture into something palatable for audiences looking to feel good about the bleak future of this dying planet without actually having to do any hard learning, thinking, or direct action.

All in all, Very Good Girls is a very bad excuse to subject those of us who have enjoyed Fanning ever since 2001’s "I Am Sam" to seeing her flash her bare fanny, fondle herself provocatively and cavort in her underwear for no dramatic purpose. Yes, she should be allowed to grow up onscreen. But without a story that justifies it, it just feels sad and desperate.

It’s never a good sign when characters in a film promptly declare: we are aware you are watching and we’re here to teach you a thing or two.

A weirdly hideous hodgepodge of images and ideas, as convoluted as its confusing title would suggest.

Rather than presenting something akin to the heady youthful cravings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as contemporary versions of Romeo and Juliet, the equally tragic Marguerite & Julien often feels more like a version of Richie and Margot in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” crossed with the pre-teen runaways from “Moonrise Kingdom,” but minus the humor and insight.

Leo can sometimes have a jolt of energy from its slapstick sequences or its bright color palette, in which Leo the lizard flies through the air, floats on a bubble, or meets other talking animals. But it's all defined by its assembly line animation, in which the spell of watching life-like characters and settings can be easily broken by looking at the backgrounds of shots for just a few seconds.

If Tartt’s book is about grief and the sudden trauma that can derail a life’s trajectory, Crowley’s film feels like it doesn’t understand either of those things at all, merely using them as exploitative decoration on a beautiful but shockingly hollow experience.

It's sad when a movie that aspires to tell a sad, even tragic, story can't quite connect, and lies there inert on the screen instead of galvanizing or even stirring emotions the way it means to.

The Angry Birds Movie isn’t a total turkey. The animation itself is OK and I did laugh out loud once.

The movie is pedantic, humorless, dry — all of the things that, as it happens, “The Searchers” is not.

A more accurate title for the low-budget indie Civil War drama would be, “Man (Sing.) Goes to Battle. Eventually. Sort of. For a While. Then Leaves. Other Man Stays Home.” But to avoid that marquee-buster, here’s the concise version: “Mumblecore Civil War.”

It feels like all the good ideas during the pre-production of “Until Dawn” were sanded down until the film lost almost all of its edge, wit, and actual horror. All that’s left is a depressingly repetitive exercise in hyperactive editing, overheated sound design, and forgettable characters.

A little bit of nuance, which might seem out of place in such raunchy environs, actually goes a long way.

This Beautiful Fantastic is not meant to be realistic. It's supposed to be a fairy tale. That's fine, but it's a very low-stakes fairy tale, wrapped in a strained garden metaphor.

A strong cast giving their all — including Jon Hamm, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Catherine Keener and Amber Tamblyn — can’t do much with such heavy-handed, self-serious material.

This could well be the single most implausible film playing at your multiplex this weekend and bear in mind, "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" is still in release.

Although nowhere near as obnoxious as such recent faith-based offerings as “God’s Not Dead” and “Do You Believe?,” The Masked Saint is still kind of a chore to sit through, even for those predisposed to like anything that brings together Christian faith and sleeper holds.

Merely being violent and unpredictable does not make a film like Jackpot funny. Therein lies the biggest problem here.

Boss is a film suffering from one fundamental problem, to wit: a lack of commitment to its central purpose.

While this kind of manipulative melodrama is often easy to dismiss, what makes The Starling even more frustrating is the amount of talented people who got sucked into its spin cycle of sadness.

Other than that acquisitive movie-mad mindset, it is a pandering, self-flattering mess, featuring unearned catharsis, lazy clichés and characters presented in broad, sometimes-offensive stereotypes.

It’s a promising start, but one that ultimately doesn’t quite deliver. The movie’s plot feels scant, as if it’s only skimming the surface of what it’s like to be a child who has no one to trust or turn to in this world.