It's not the most original of concepts, and writer-director Liz W. Garcia struggles with the tone throughout, but The Lifeguard is often saved by Kristen Bell's sensitive and complex performance.

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

By the time you’re meant to learn just what the tie is between John and Louis, you’ve stopped caring. But, thanks to the excellent if a little on the obviously-pictorial-side cinematography by Robert Barocci, you’ve seen some lovely vistas on the way to indifference.

The opening party represents what is best about the movie: it's pure mayhem and it's entirely silly.

The filmmakers were able to pay his fee, and so Hopkins shows up for another rubbishy, misbegotten project and shames the whole enterprise with his open and volatile face, his incisive voice, his mere ultra-soulful presence.

The plot’s central mystery suffers from “Body Double” syndrome in that the movie has so few characters that the villain’s reveal can only elicit a shrug.

The end result is the kind of vaguely distasteful Yuletide concoction that viewers normally find playing on cable channels that they don't even realize that they have.

As tedious as much of this sounds, an odd thing happened around “Allegiant’s” midway point. The fairly packed audience started vocally reacting “Rocky Horror”-style to some of the more overtly melodramatic turns with “oohs," “ahhs” and even laughter.

Lead actors Byrne and Deen do grounded, stalwart work, and director Mitu Misra occasionally succeeds in making the characters’ milieu’s register with force. But the storytelling is rickety.

A cross between "Ocean's 11" and "The Expendables." American Renegades is also not nearly as fun as that sounds.

A morality play wrapped up in gothic horror tropes, “The Dreadful” is definitely committed to the bit, and its darkly medieval setting is a refreshing change of pace. I just wish it were a medieval tapestry that worked as a whole, rather than just in fits and starts.

In a comedic bildungsroman like this one, it’s apt to have doubts about the hero early on, but you’re not supposed to want to throw him out of a high window. I did, and I never quite recovered from that feeling.

The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Jonah, the rest of the characters aren't much more fleshed-out than the screeching beasties.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has most of the right elements for a good post-Amblin kiddy fright-fest, except maybe good dialogue and distinct characters. Watching the movie, one gets the sense that the games’ morbid personality has been sanded down to its most generic jump-scares and banal revelations.

Films don't have to feature likable people to be successful. Far from it. But a film has to let us know why we want to watch these people. Like its lead character, In Stereo does not want to do the necessary work.

The main takeaway from War of the Worlds Goliath is that such a yearning still burns in some folks. If its articulation here were more compelling, it might have struck me as stirring rather than merely odd.

Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.

Even if you allow for the the fact that the film is geared towards the 5-year-old set, it's still a pretty dreary experience, made even more so by screamingly vivid colors, uninspiring animation and grating songs.

Hand-in-hand with its bleeding-heart nature, Collide has the ballsy idea of making a serious action movie about a fool in love, but that just becomes one of its many bungled stunts.

It’s almost a shame that the film overall isn’t better and that David Spade doesn’t give half the effort of his co-star because Lapkus is just good enough to allow one to see how this movie could have worked.

Watson and Bruhl give it their best, and Nyqvist makes a powerful villain, but Colonia winds up being a movie that wants to get its way on too many levels, and winds up not satisfying on most of them.

The whole thing ultimately collapses in a heap of unintentionally hilarious melodrama.

Much like “Self/Less,” Amnesiac feels like a director-for-hire gig for an artist too talented for the job.

That’s one dismayingly archaic trend throughout The Young Messiah: the fiendish characters are also wildly effeminate.

Jackals put me in a foul mood. Maybe that’s the intention of this lean, mean slab of B-horror trash: to set you on edge and keep you there long after it’s over.

Annie is light on its feet, frothy, and always insistently, at times provocatively kind, determined to melt grumpy hearts like marshmallows.

Out of the Dark never leaves much of an impression despite character actor Stephen Rea's endearingly cocky performance, and an exotic—though largely under-utilized—South American setting.