The problem is that both as a director and as an actor, Okuda never makes a particularly convincing case either for sex or for deeper commitment as a road away from the abyss.

This isn’t a movie. It’s a MySpace page.

Oblivion is a terrific-looking movie, alternating spare, sterile environments with homey organic ones, and making both look tremendously pretty. Kosinski also handles his action well, with cut-and-dried clarity and edge-of-seat energy.

Writer-director David Riker, who previously made the accomplished 1998 Paisan homage The City (La Ciudad), has a great eye for detail: He sketches the narrow boundaries of Cornish’s sad life in Austin expertly while bringing a village square across the border to vivid life. He also gets another fine performance out of Cornish.

The issues the movie attempts to tackle—parental expectations, heartbreak, anxiety over choosing the right path—have all been addressed better in other films.

You cheer on these boys but you’re not left with much once the credits roll and their story becomes but a wistful tale of a time gone by.

Spies In Disguise isn’t clever enough to reconcile the disingenuousness of setting off a litany of pointless explosions and battles before clarifying that this stuff is bad, actually.

The​​ disparate elements of a self-serious, straightforward plot and maximalist creature design keep Spellbound feeling kiddywampus, teetering between cloyingly obvious sincerity and confusing complexity.

Director Mark Waters has done probably the best possible job translating the material to film, and the truly filmic moments work well, but with this dialogue-heavy material, it's like trying to translate Run-DMC lyrics into Old French.

This is a slight film, unlikely to be remembered in the long-term by anyone but completists who discover it during deep dives into its leads’ respective filmographies. But, oh, what a giddy ride awaits them.

Writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones places less emphasis on the culture surrounding witchcraft—there’s no occult store to shoplift from in this film, for example—and more on the girls’ innate supernatural powers, manifested mostly as sparkly wisps of CGI and stunt people in harnesses being jerked across the frame. This is of a piece with more contemporary teen-witch entertainment like the rebooted Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, as well as the film’s message about finding and harnessing one’s own innate magic.

Offering the winning combination of a subversive spin on a well-established villain, Orphan: First Kill is a gnarly, wild and absolutely demented ride.

It's difficult to figure out exactly where the film might be heading at any given point, since it follows the loping, meandering rhythms and casualness of a character study rather than conforming to the conventions of any particular genre.

Begins by living up to its fans' rabid expectations, and ends by justifying skeptics' doubts. In between lie roughly equivalent levels of tedium and hilarity.

It’s the first, and probably last, sports comedy to take its visual cues from Ang Lee’s "Hulk."

X-Ray is extremely dull, and unwisely trusting in the power of its talented central duo to carry the film.

Smith emerges as this subtlety-impaired film's most intriguingly ambiguous character, at times an acid-tongued shrew and at others a bluntly righteous truth-teller. The liveliness of her performance helps ensure that while Married is stiffly written, didactic, and whiplash-inducing in its tonal shifts, it's also very seldom dull.

Forget the gritty realism and quippy one-liners that so often define the modern action genre, War Machine is proudly, almost guilelessly old-fashioned.

There’s enough here to merit a watch. One of the movie’s more unexpected pleasures is Alexander Falk’s handsome digital cinematography, which goes far beyond the call of duty for a micro-budget documentary.

This 73-minute speech isn’t really much of a movie, and as advocacy it’s unlikely to reach Trump-leaning voters. But as a case for Clinton aimed at third-party supporters who are convinced they couldn’t stomach casting a ballot for her, it might turn a few heads.

Becky is not without its grisly low-brow pleasures. But nothing in the movie makes a damn lick of sense.

No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.

In basketball terms, it’s not just that Boogie’s a star player who never passes the ball. He also rarely shoots. He mostly just stands in one place, listlessly dribbling.

Conceptually bold and rapturously beautiful Gerry, a minimalist landscape film that's unlike anything on the American independent scene.

And while it is enjoyable and has many great moments, it doesn’t quite come together with polish.

The unquestionably well-intentioned and obviously deeply personal Luckiest Girl Alive would benefit from more mature guidance.

Something of a cross between the formalist whimsy of Wes Anderson and the God's-lonely-man psychosis of "Taxi Driver," the film breaks all the rules, but the tonal schizophrenia that results isn't an accident.

There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.