Dialogue, quirky incidents and a general acceptance that this is the unfortunate way life is make this more than just a genre exercise, though hardly a breathtaking grabber of “Get Out” proportions.

Wallows in bleakness and settles for sentimental gestures.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I came away feeling cheated by Eddie the Eagle. It’s a jolly real-life tale about an underdog who made a splash at the 1988 Winter Olympics, and it does make you feel good, but it turns out that the film’s story is 90 percent fiction.

Reminded me of the occasional thrill of coming upon Haring's puzzling, unsigned chalk drawings in the New York subway at the turn of the 1980s, before he made a name for himself above ground.

Mulholland Falls is a provocative crime drama with a limp script and a forced feeling. But star Nick Nolte is a ticking time bomb as a brutal Los Angeles police detective with a hulking, gasping sense of pain and meanness. He gives the film an odd, askew tone that keeps it tough and alive.

The third and most uneven film adaptation in the series.

The film's overall construction is faulty. Its dramatic situations ring consistently false, and the story is phony as anything off the Hollywood assembly line. And yet, it's sincere phony.

Thus a tightly edited, 90-minute action flick becomes a bloated, 105-minute exercise on how not to direct an action film.

Leoni is a very attractive woman, and she should be credited for giving a brave performance, but her character starts to produce involuntary shudders when she appears onscreen.

uUninspired, unnecessary and formulaic.

It's not a great film, but Event Horizon produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.

Glitters, but it's not pure gold.

There are some nice moments and beautiful scenery, but the film is often slow and the dialogue is overwrought.

It starts exploring different facets of its premise and transforms itself into a fairly competent suspense thriller. That's enough to make it respectable, but a few things keep Next from being lovable or memorable.

Does a number of sly things.

Turns into a pedestrian slice 'n' dice feature.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring.

Becky is no “Straw Dogs.” Really, it’s mostly just a nasty genre movie with some gruesome scenes of violence. But it’s served well by a script that doesn’t merely embrace the gimmick of a pubescent girl fighting bad guys — it takes it seriously enough to explore it, at least a little.

Considering the talent on both sides of the camera and a story that worked beautifully the first time around, Shall We Dance? should have been a lot better than OK.

So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short. By that standard, this new "Nightmare" is a fairly decent effort.

A formulaic, predictable and yet reasonably likable picture.

There's something wrong with a time-travel movie that allows an audience's interest to drift so that we have time to worry over where he's parked, and whether he remembered to take his key.

The problem with this one may be that it just isn't British enough.

The movie gets bogged down in the formula conventions of romantic comedy, and in the process, it loses all honesty.

It's a coy, cautious film about a frank, fearless writer.

There’s nothing wrong with Aftermath, but for one strange and nagging thing: To watch it is to want to be faraway from its world and everyone in it. The movie draws a circle around itself that holds no attraction or appeal, though it’s in every other way competent, well-acted and reasonably intelligent.

The New Zealand feature Boy almost pulls off the trick of merging cartoonish humor and '80s pop culture with a story glancing at deeper family issues. The film has an appealing 11-year-old hero, but in the end feels half baked.

Has a certain slow, mechanical quality.