A superficial force eats at this movie from the inside, including the way that it’s a brawny script with nil visual grit, and a style that mostly announces itself with sporadic neo-noir lighting.

A largely tedious cinematic lump of coal that unsuccessfully tries to stretch its one-joke premise out to 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic.

In fact, very little here is special, despite the individual charms of Evans and co-star Alice Eve.

The Takedown works overtime to uphold the façade of heroic policing in the most generic way possible, for god knows what greater good.

Yet while the doc might prove that his approach worked, it’s progressively tedious to revisit these hits through such a thick air of self-affirmation.

The whole thing is too much of a tease, and once you figure that out, there's no actual suspense to speak of, just momentary manipulations.

It took 20 years for an Artemis Fowl movie to come out, and now that it’s here, the film itself feels like it’s in a hurry to be over already.

A film that starts off on a reasonably restrained note but which quickly grows so ridiculously ham-fisted that it almost makes its predecessor seem reasonable and open-minded by comparison.

Beyond some effectively icky make-up effects, Contracted: Phase II sells nothing that viewers absolutely must buy.

Where The Wall excels is in the creation of an extra-untantalizing desert atmosphere. The dust is practically inhalable, the sunlight glaring, and the characters grow ever more sand-gritted with each mishap.

Odd Thomas becomes a film that's going through the motions with too little character, style, or atmosphere to keep it engaging.

A sex comedy that just lays there and expects you to do all the work. Gordon-Levitt's direction is repetitive and dry, and his screenplay is a collage of badly cut out pieces from other movies.

Mostly, Fifty Shades of Black is exactly what you expect it will be. It hits all the notes of its source material, only it amps them up, and it seems to get the inherent absurdity of this premise even more than Sam Taylor-Johnson’s movie did.

As the movie did its slow fizzle, I couldn’t help but wonder when the #MeToo movement was going to make its way into actual movie content. Because the misogyny inherent in Josie isn’t just objectionable, it’s boring.

It’s unfortunate that the finished tribute doesn’t quite come together, and the tension between needing a compelling narrative and paying respects to bands whose music changes our lives never gets resolved.

The Bag Man is so sloppily executed it feels like they didn't have enough light fixtures to get the effects they wanted. But that's only one of the problems.

Little Accidents is quietly earnest, handsomely produced, and too dramatically inert and dogged by the commonplace to make much of an impact beyond conveying the dreariness (as opposed to the dread) of life in a coal-mining town.

A near-future dystopia that navigates a fractured society hours away from collapse, Michel Franco’s New Order is a relentless and blood-soaked study of social injustice, gripping to watch despite its graphic and escalating brutality. Sadly, it’s also one that only vaguely engages with the need for prosperity for all.

It's telling that Demon House features a real-life exorcism, but it feels more superficial than supernatural.

Many fans wished to see these two actors trade witty barbs once again, but the pair’s new movie, Men in Black: International, strips away just about everything fun from the duo except their on-screen presence.

From first till last, this tale of a hard-boiled bounty hunter helping a Scottish lad on his quest to find the woman he loves, who’s on the lam in the old West, is a tissue of creaky contrivances and outright absurdities.

You’d think a movie in which Adam Driver fights a bunch of dinosaurs couldn’t possibly be boring, but that’s exactly what 65 is.

Neither as sweet or profound as the fanciful American indies like Ghost World that clearly inspired it, nor all that insightful in its interpretation of a single mother’s universal struggles, Bagnold Summer is sadly a forgettable film, often too ironically close to being the kind of bore its central character Daniel’s accidental summer in the English suburbs threatens to be.

Does Girl work as a film? No. It does not.

The result is a muddled mixture, offering some moments of exuberance and humor without ever being singular or exceptional.

As a horror and a comedy, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey has no rhythm with either, and it's too dim to be worthy of a curious look.

Unfortunately, Mary Poppins Returns falls quite short of being practically perfect in every way. The cast puts on a good show, but very little can be done to salvage the forgettable numbers by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and dance routines that already look dated.

The Pod Generation is thoughtful and timely but flat, an opaque expression of an overly simple thesis.