These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra’s most feverish populist nightmares.

Like the songs sung by its young cast, Knives and Skin feels like cinematic karaoke, lacking in authorship or deeper meaning. The cast, two actresses in particular, give it their all, but it is an aggressively hollow experience.

Whatever promise the “V/H/S” horror anthology franchise started with is barely present in V/H/S/85, a low-energy potboiler that promises to transport genre fans back to the analog past for some reason.

The movie has an undeniable black hole at its center in the fact that it barely mentions Axl Rose, and includes no original Guns N' Roses recordings.

IF is a well-intentioned misfire—a kid's movie without laughs and a parent's movie without purpose.

Unfortunately, The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

So often bogged down by pseudo-naturalistic long takes and generic cop/robber power dynamics that it makes one wonder what the point of watching such a film is.

The directorial pyrotechnics keep Solace from “dragging” in a narrative sense; the very real boredom it nonetheless elicits is more existential.

But because the movie is at heart as fake-sentimental as any other such motion picture, or greeting card, or what have you, there's a lot of backpedaling after, say, a random attempt to milk laughs out of human trafficking.

The young ones that this film is being aimed at are of the age when the movies can genuinely be magical, and the best ones can form memories that will last a lifetime. “Migration” may pass the time, but my guess is that those kids will retain more lasting memories of whatever their parents got for them at the concession stand than anything up there on the screen.

Hyena is such a nasty and brutish item that even the hardiest of moviegoers may find themselves repulsed by some of the sights that Johnson has in store.

The Devil Conspiracy is nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake and twice as difficult to swallow, regardless of where you reside on the theological spectrum.

As loud and in-your-face as these developments are presented, they're amount to a shabby collection of Blumhouse-lite scenes that would be a parody if it weren’t so dull.

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

The story ends up being one wrong turn after another. A GPS hasn’t been invented that could get this plot-hole-riddled script back on track.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin feels less like a chance to creatively reboot a hit franchise and more like a way to cheaply profit off any residual interest left in it.

Yes, the casual-chic interior designs shine as much as her mom’s ever did. But I never really felt at home with Home Again.

Imagine “Office Space” with forgettable characters and nothing to say about this next bleak phase of the business world.

There's not only nothing new here, there's nothing convincing either. And if I'm supposed to judge Bumblebee based on how well it succeeds at what it tries to do (rather than what came before it), it's still not very good.

Muzzle is filled with intriguing aspects not explored meaningfully. There are so many different threads, themes, and plots, even Scotch-taped together in the hopes it will come together. It doesn't.

Maybe the heart of the problem is that Kate and Meg's behavior doesn't track with the practical realities of lifelong, functioning friendship between (most) women as experienced by...well, any functioning adult who lives in the world.

When she least expects it, the face of the cat transforms into a monstrous one, with sharp, pointy teeth and a roar. Yes, this is going to be one of those horror movies.

A staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, American Pastoral is hopelessly weak.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

How can a movie this visually glossy be so devastatingly uninteresting and dull?

Fernando Coimbra’s Sand Castle offers too little to the War is Hell genre to be noteworthy.

Worst of all, the pacing here is just off, leading to a film that drags even at 90 minutes. If the cold doesn’t kill you, the boredom will.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.