In The Name Of… might have worked moderately well as a character study, if not for the film’s insistence on treating other priests as mustache-twirling villains.

Accepted as fantasy, 5 To 7 has a bright, literate charm that’s hard to resist, thanks to the scattered witticisms in Levin’s script, a deftly managed tone, and fine performances across the cast.

White House Down is never more than a sliver away from gleeful self-parody. It’s pure patriotic kitsch, the cinematic equivalent of a black-velvet painting of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in its talons as it soars majestically over Mount Rushmore.

Despite its shortcomings as a narrative, Man Of Tai Chi nevertheless feels like Reeves made exactly the movie he set out to make, assuming he didn’t set out to create a movie that was “good” by any stretch of the imagination so much as intermittently entertaining, albeit probably not for the reasons intended.

Between its distinctly modern intelligence and razor-sharp plotting, Anderson’s clever contraption matches the heights of Gothic grandeur that keep Poe held in esteem today.

My Old Lady isn’t the tart slice of dessert that its initial scenes suggest it might be. In fact, it only becomes truly compelling in its second half, as Horovitz drives toward darker material and farther away from the light.

Much of the fun of Malice derives from Sorkin, Frank, and director Harold Becker understanding the been-there/done-that formulas of thrillers past and tinkering with them as much as possible. Instead of a little bit of misdirection, they devote a vast swath of the film to one.

Though the pacing is lumpy, to say the least, Blackhat occasionally bursts to life when Mann breaks out one of his signature action setpieces, which have the distinct pop of heavy artillery and the immediacy of video.

No amount of cosmic fireworks or woozy strings can hide the nice-guy passive-aggressive bullshit squatting at the center of Comet—it’s like a dreamy, swoony De Beers ad that stars Cecil Rhodes.

Its pleasures are familiar and its frightening bits less frightening than before, but Insidious: Chapter 3 still does right by a series that’s served as proof that, in horror, less can be more.

Cuban Fury feels overpadded and distracted, with no time to establish its leads, let alone the bare connection between them that might give viewers a rooting interest in their future.

There’s a promotional bent to Mad As Hell that whiffs more of branding than rigorous documentary filmmaking.

The Machine is small science fiction. In a genre that openly invites invention, it barely bothers.

Past the novelty of its conceit and casting, and the animating intelligence of its first-time director, Henry Hobson, Maggie is a bit of a drag.

Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus is the best kind of failure, impassioned and singular, but it’s a failure all the same— glacially paced, stiffly acted, shapeless, and for the most part tremendously boring. It’s an intriguing idea ruined by the execution. There’s a fine line between hypnotic and somnolent.

At the end of Winter In The Blood, there’s a general sense that not everything the Smiths attempted has worked, but it’s hard to separate the strong moments from the weak ones, much as Virgil can’t separate one day from the next.

Like a stale Big Mac served in gold leaf, Taihuttu’s film offers up some central meat that never matches the aspiration of its textured flourishes.

Wasteland reveals itself as little more than a bloodless plot engine, but it purrs and hums under the ultra-slick chassis.

The characters occupy homes where nothing is ever out of order, but Barthes creates a sense of unease that never lets up, and a suggestion of chaos underlying all the neatly arranged possessions in the Bovary home.

Scott loses the humanity amid all the gods and kings. The setpieces, however, elevate the film around them.

The best that could be said of Ragnarok is that it delivers the goods—nice scenery, crisp pacing, the requisite horror and suspense beats—but it needs something, anything, to give it some distinction.

One of the problems with We Are The Giant is that not all the stories carry equal weight, both in terms of effectiveness and in the sheer amount of time Barker spends on them.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.

With Hitchcock halfway out the door, Jamaica Inn could have come across as strictly a work-for-hire gig, but it displays enough Hitchcockery to show he wasn’t as disengaged from the material as he would later claim he was.

After establishing the AFFA’s complex, corrupt social structure, Stone and Logan wimp out considerably in the second half of Any Given Sunday, piling on the sports-melodrama clichés.

Life Of A King manages to sustain a hilariously over-the-top tone of naked sincerity from start to finish.

Ahluwalia’s commitment to accurately capturing the era’s aesthetic almost compensates for his failure to mine a good story from a great setting.

While the film is often playful, it never attempts to be particularly funny, perhaps out of a fear that too much levity in a World War II-themed movie would be in poor taste. Instead, it loads on great quantities of tacky crowd-pleasing moments and clichés.