Once it reaches the meat of the story, it seems to lose its confidence.

The ick-factor deepens as the story progresses, but the mystery never does.

All that unsavory business aside, the biggest problem with the third act is how the film discards the novelty of its own premise in order to bring its star into the action. When Berry trades her headset for a rock, it’s the bluntest metaphor imaginable for a film that’s completely lost its mind.

Going The Distance could stand to color outside the lines a bit more, but it's perceptive about the problems of young people torn between pursuing love or their nascent career ambitions, and the witty script, by first-timer Geoff LaTulippe, is spiked with refreshing profanity.

The film is something like a digital tiger itself: an approximation, not exactly the same as the real thing. With the cut to credits, it ceases to exist.

There’s something liberating about a comedy where all four central characters f--k up with such youthful bravado.

Has its moments, but by the time it reaches its anticlimax, Roth won't be the only one irritated at getting jerked around for no discernible reason.

If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.

Keeping audiences at a distance—watching and empathizing with Cherie, but never building suspense regarding her survival—Run Sweetheart Run loses its breath long before Cherie’s story arrives at its ludicrous conclusion.

It almost seems that Watts made a movie this intentionally scuzzy and low-rent as a severe form of penance to the gods of authenticity for the sin of making millions jet-setting around the world appearing in big, glamorous super-productions. But she goes too far in making the audience suffer as well.

As a comedy, it's painfully unfunny, and as a drama, it's both silly and overcrowded with unnecessary characters and subplots. Still, Best Men has its moments.

Regardless of one’s math on the ratio of fun to dumb in Aquaman, there’s no way to watch this deranged follow-up and not conclude that Wan’s back where he belongs. Still, a little of that time in the superhero trenches seems to have crept into his supernatural comeback.

Suffice it to say that Day Shift is not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s a damn good time for a night at home on the couch: sometimes all you need is Jamie Foxx in a Hawaiian shirt and Snoop Dogg as a black cowboy, slaughtering hundreds of vampires with swords, shotguns, gatling guns, garlic grenades, and decapitating roundhouse kicks.

The sequel, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, isn't motivated to change the formula in the least, but it's ever-so-slightly more palatable, if only for being less of a total spazz.

Though its title and general tone lament the stifling atmosphere of the years between childhood and full-fledged teenhood, the movie misses the animal hostility and physical awkwardness of genuine tweens.

Williams delivers a solid, twinkle-free (though closed-off) performance, but the film as a whole can't decide what it wants to be.

It’s poised to become one of the biggest rom-coms of 1998. But barring the invention of time travel, The Rewrite remains tethered to the realities of film releasing in 2015, which means it will get most of its play as a VOD simulation of earlier hits.

While the first Train To Busan was an affecting, character-driven tale of grief and redemption, Peninsula flounders in generic spectacle. Even fans may wonder if there are any bones left to pick on this franchise.

This is a well-crafted, exciting movie, sometimes more impressive for maintaining those qualities in the face of an utterly unsurprising story.

Seyfried expertly balances the girl-next-door star power that made the real Lovelace an unlikely casting choice with a more subtle strain of fear; Sarsgaard is as terrifying and hiss-worthy as he’s been since "Boys Don’t Cry."

It’s an absolutely outlandish rom-com premise, and though the film tries to lampshade it as such (#whatishappening pops up in the movie’s in-world social media), part of what keeps Marry Me watchable is the dangling question of what kind of hoops the movie is going to jump through to justify keeping up the matrimonial charade.

The result is a movie likely to appeal as much to anyone who enjoys pop-scored animal hijinks on TikTok as to anyone who actually remembers the books.

Shot with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the Russian-made action flick Hardcore Henry mimics the experience of watching someone else play a very derivative first-person shooter with sub-Duke Nukem humor.

In Janney’s capable hands, our heroine is fully fleshed out, yet lean with more gristle on the bone than meat. She delivers zingy one-liners as well as she does a knock-out punch. Her refreshing spin on this archetype, blending masculine bravado and bluster with feminine wit and wisdom, elevates the spartan material.

As vicarious, you-are-there re-creations of historical events go, it’s creditably workmanlike; whether that’s the best use of the dream factory is another matter.

Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century.

To a person, these comedians are looking for a connection, some attention, and appreciation — which makes them, as Penn Jillette points out toward the end, just like everybody else, only they have microphones and spotlights.

Taken's subject matter is too serious for an escapist chop-socky movie, and the sleazy, exploitative tone undercuts the thrills.

It would take a heart of stone not to be affected by My Sister’s Keeper, but the film’s unceasing manipulation has a Medusa effect on the organ.

This is a loud, ugly, foul comedy whose shortcomings extends far into the supporting cast.

Peel away the many layers of reference, and all that's left of Americano is the raw need of a lonely, confused young man who's distant from his family, awash in vague memories, and struggling to find himself. This is less a movie than a patient for pop psychologists.

It's as dull as it is brainless, the work of creators who've spent far more time concocting silly stories about Shakespeare than learning from him.

Jack Reacher isn't much of a man, and Jack Reacher isn't the story of a man. It's mythmaking for self-satisfied sociopaths.

Paint Your Wagon divided audiences and critics. With its central three-way marriage, debauchery, polygamy, Paddy Chayevsky script, and unconventional stars, it was too damn weird and adult for family audiences and too corny, old-fashioned, and bloated for the druggies and stoners.

Ultimately, the absence of any meaningful sentiment about grief or personal growth (or anything else) makes the story’s maddening, rote familiarity feel especially lazy—which is why Clerks III lives up to the legacy of its uninspired characters in all of the wrong ways.

If it doesn’t lead people to believe that Cobain was murdered, it might achieve its secondary goals — to at least nudge them toward the possibility, and to get the authorities to consider re-opening the case. It’s intended as a call to action, not just a salacious re-hash.

A film that leans on withheld information to drive a mystery but lacks anything for viewers to latch onto emotionally.

Super exists in the no-man's land between indie quirk and raw exploitation, and when it works, it's thrillingly off-balance.

Its lack of legitimate wit, cleverness, and focus makes a promising concept feel like a wasted wish, conjuring little of the magic that made its predecessor feel so memorable.

That sense of mystery definitely keeps Partisan intriguing, though it also creates expectations that Kleiman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sarah Cyngler, isn’t especially interested in fulfilling.

Try as its talented cast does to pump some life into these desperate archetypes, it’s impossible not to draw unflattering comparisons with other, better films.

The absence of necessity or consistency has its appeal; it guarantees that the movie stays unpredictable even as it pilfers shamelessly, piling cliché upon cliché, but rarely in a way that makes a lick of sense.

Vanishing On 7th Street does work well as a kind of mood-piece, observing all the ways we surround ourselves with the illusion of warmth and security, before the shadows creep in.

My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn, Liv Corfixen’s behind-the-scenes look at the production of "Only God Forgives," has a clear precedent in "Hearts Of Darkness," Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes look at the production of "Apocalypse Now."

Wolf Man rarely bares its teeth, opting instead for tail-tucked melancholy. Relatively absent of jumpy gotchas or relieving humor—though there is a slightly tongue-in-cheek moment involving a doggy door—the film relies on injecting its Gothic origins with a dose of modern dread. Dangers lurk outside the home, but could just as easily infiltrate it. The march of death could hasten its pace for anyone at any time, rendering those around them impotent.

It's just another gangster movie for the pile.

A slightly above-average slasher film that's only partially redeemed by small but endearingly loopy shreds of black humor.

Calls on De Niro to drum up the sort of emotional intensity that's been allowed to atrophy of late. City By The Sea isn't always worthy of him, but it makes enough demands to bring out his best.

As low-stakes viewing about two blandly likable people, People We Meet On Vacation at least looks better than the cheapest level of streaming rom-coms, and fans of the book will probably find something to like. Ironically, however, its place on Netflix means it’ll miss out on its truest calling as a film you half-watch on a plane.

A conclusion featuring a dizzying string of betrayals that leads to a confusing anti-climax robs the film of even cheap action thrills, making Hoodlum an almost thoroughly forgettable experience, albeit probably the only film in history to unite Queen Latifah and The Mod Squad's Clarence Williams III.

As a babysitter, the movie’s not much different than a brief marathon of episodes. As a family bonding experience, it may qualify for adults as a mild form of psychological torture, presenting storylines that feel ready to wrap up at the 15-minute mark and then must continue on for another hour.

The meat of the movie is the behind-bars rendezvous between Finkel and Longo, whose interactions raise questions of journalistic responsibility and the banality of evil. But when a closing block of text announces that the two men still talk on a semi-regular basis — a surprise, given the finality of their last on-screen meeting — it’s hard to shake the feeling that a truly complex liaison has been reduced to an acting exercise for a couple of moonlighting funnymen.

That Mazer succeeds in playing this for laughs — however sporadic — rather than as a kitchen-sink downer is an achievement in itself.

The runty little brother of "The Hunger Games" has gotten surprisingly proficient in that area of well-produced sci-fi junk where a lot of the dialogue consists of variations on, “Go, go, go!”

In some ways, it's a more grown-up story than Happy Feet, with more complicated messages delivered in subtler ways.

As escapist comfort-food cinema goes, this is a stick-to-your-ribs, tryptophan-coma-size helping.

His (Crowe) movie is a male weepie, slickly lit, but clearly the work of an amateur. Its emotional thrust — the search — is made limp by indiscriminate direction and the kind of quantity-over-quality mindset that invites tacked-on romances and dream sequences that play like dream-sequence parodies.

While FD5 is less generic and less facilely goofy and ironic than past series installments, it's still a rote execution of formula that scores its biggest points with self-aware references to its predecessors - including a closing-credits montage of kills from Final Destinations past.

As with the previous films, there are as many ludicrous plot holes as there are genuinely surprising twists, and little of what happens in the story would hold up to any kind of scrutiny. (Why are these stage magicians so well-trained in hand-to-hand combat?) But that’s part of the fun too.

Director Nia DaCosta provokes some incredibly likable performances from her cast, and stages some truly memorable set pieces that are suffocated by a rote plot that only distracts from that breezy appeal.

No Strings Attached isn't a BAD piece of formulaic product.

An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.

The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.

Closed Circuit may be little more than a high-minded, shrewdly topical gloss on a shopworn genre, but its cynicism is bracing.

Casting is half the battle in a conversational comedy, so it helps that director/co-writer Stu Zicherman has skillfully filled even the smaller roles.

The fundamental problem is that Tricked is more mildly amusing than funny, and most of said amusement comes from the pacing, which is one uninterrupted sprint.

Like a family dinner with an eccentric uncle, Holidays’ quirkiness is fitfully entertaining, but ultimately exhausting.

Roustabout revels delightfully in the arcane details of carny life.

Director Henry Jacobson’s gory thriller is initially quite effective when it complements the lies families tell each other with arcs of jugular blood.

It seems questionable whether this was really intended as a movie in the first place.

There's no right way to do an adaptation, particularly a difficult-to-adapt work like this, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Perry's film offers a casebook of things-not-to-do.

After so many smirky bloodfests, They Will Kill You scarcely needs believable human relationships to earn some goodwill. All it really needs is Beetz convincingly going through hell.

Not much reason to see this one, because in 1961 Disney made an animated version called 101 Dalmatians, which is better.

In its mad hurry, the movie denies itself its own genre pleasures—chiefly, the ways assembling a ragtag robotics team and an equally ragtag robot might add a little bit of Mission: Impossible or MacGyver dynamics into a sports-style narrative.

It lacks that extra layer or two to make it interesting. The script and direction is all bones, no flesh.

Red State is gloriously unencumbered by fidelity to genre conventions, which lends it a thrilling element of unpredictability even when the action frequently grows shrill and heavy-handed.

There really ought to be a lot more movies like Hit & Run, but only if they're just a little bit better.

Nowhere the film goes is unexpected... but the plainspoken Freeheld charts a mostly admirable course there.

Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.

Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.

As with "Women In Trouble," Gutierrez unveils a series of loosely connected characters and subplots that concern players in and around the porn industry, but the intended colorful irreverence looks a lot like standard indie quirk.

Careening from bubbly romantic comedy to bitchy melodrama to the darker matters of murder, incest, and suicide, the film possesses the catch-all qualities for which Bollywood cinema is known, but Bose exerts about as much control over them as the conductor of a runaway train.

Propelled by a fine Tomandandy score and a savvy assortment of seductive new-wave hits, Attraction is top-notch trash, a guilty pleasure designed for the decadent 14-year-old in everyone.

There are multiple reasons why Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is such an entertaining movie even now, but the biggest is that Matheson, Solomon, and director Stephen Herek found the perfect Bill and Ted in Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, two young actors with just the right boyish energy.

Reeves rigid delivery makes Constantine's occult backstory sound pretentious and silly, and converts Constantine himself into a repressed cipher. The film's biggest revision isn't in not making him blonde, or not making him British. It's in not making him human.

Asking the question “what makes a good person” might have been an intriguing idea. However, in trying to come up with an answer, A Good Person ends up presenting an overwrought narrative that’s full of cliches that do not resonate.

Jurassic World Rebirth‘s attempt at rejuvenating its franchise mirrors the vitality of its once-extinct reptiles: This movie may have breathed life back where once it was thought lost, but this life is not pure or sustainable.

A movie that jumps on buzzwords like “canceled” like a hungry dog on a juicy steak, but never coalesces into a coherent statement about, well, anything.

Unfortunately, Canet's 2010 film Little White Lies feels like "Tell No One" minus that inciting incident, and therefore minus the plot.

War On Everyone’s saving grace is its freewheeling refusal to commit to any particular tone, including the rancid one that generally dominates.

While moments indicate that not everybody working on the project was asleep at the switch, Quest For Camelot is strictly for bored toddlers and those breathlessly anticipating the completion of the Ferngully trilogy.

No Reservations is pretty much the dramatic equivalent of a burger and fries, however pretty the presentation.

The Equalizer 2, which reunites Washington with director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk, puts fewer disposable goons in McCall’s crosshairs, trading the original’s rote killing-up-the-ranks revenge campaign for some half-assed approximation of a murder mystery. Call it a lateral move for this unfortunate franchise.

Enjoy the wordplay in the title, because that’s as witty as the horror comedy Life After Beth ever gets.

The film suffers for her (Brenda Blethyn) egocentrism.

The series kept it going for one more entry, but throws its commitment to the era away with movie number three, a ploy sure to anger Ice Age purists everywhere.

Crudup delivers a bracing, uncompromising performance, but it's unmistakably a solo turn in a romantic comedy that's supposed to be about the blurring of egos and the fusing of two idiosyncratic voices into a single harmonious duet.

But as that film approaches 90 years old, Disney made a remake that looks 100 times worse—and, necessarily, has been updated in an attempt to tell a more human tale. Aside from coating the story in a sickly “live-action remake” sheen, like dipping a juicy red apple in a vat of poison, Snow White also pads out its plot so that the character at the center actually has a character, that her love interest is more than a randy stranger in the woods, and that her foe’s villainy is more political than mythic. But the extra half-hour is just as muddled as the misguided classic elements, all of which forge a tarnished tiara to which Rachel Zegler is the single crown jewel.