Populaire’s initial appeal comes largely from its airiness, and it simply doesn’t have the heft or gravity to tackle weightier emotions.

The True Cost’s aim is to make it impossible to ignore fashion’s impact on the world, and it takes an admirably thorough approach to its unwieldy subject. It’s not a particularly cinematic approach, however.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.

There’s a context to Struzan—not just biographically, but culturally—and while Sharkey seems to understand that, his movie, ironically, doesn’t illustrate it particularly well.

Hausner’s previous feature, Lourdes, was sometimes frustratingly opaque, but at least it had a discernible pulse. Here, she seems more interested in period décor and symmetrical compositions than in Kleist, Vogel, or any of the ideas they espouse and/or embody. Her impressive formalism is hollow.

The shocks are no less effective than the ones in the other Paranormal Activity movies, but no more original, either, with only the whipping of a handheld camera to set it apart from the offscreen gamesmanship that’s long been the series’ stock in trade.

Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.

Compared to other, similar offbeat monster movies, Grabbers is under-realized. It isn’t as smartly plotted or funny as Tremors, nor as politically charged as The Host.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

Pasikowski isn’t interested in actual characters or narrative nuance; rather, the prime concern here is censuring Polish anti-Semitism, which, no matter how righteous an aim, eventually comes at the expense of engaging storytelling.

The less oblique and more direct the movie gets, the worse it is.

The best parts of Runner Runner feel like a Rounders facsimile—right down to the metaphor-heavy narration—and the worst seem like a case of mission drift, as if the filmmakers set out to make a behind-the-curtain thriller about online gambling, but got hung up in paying off the plot.

At its best, Running From Crazy is a powerful portrait of a woman who’s wrested control of her life by understanding the patterns her relatives fell into, and consciously breaking them.

Both Kong and Mechani-Kong look unimpressive, with none of the weird grandeur of the classic Japanese kaiju.

Of all the possible ways Diablo Cody’s directorial debut might fail, perhaps the least likely was that it would be innocuous enough to potentially bore the audience into a stupor.

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.

There’s a germ of something interesting and different within the film’s narrative tangle, but it’s unfortunately been subsumed by Hollywood’s dedication to replicating previous successes.

Its pleasures are all glib and surface-level, although Luke and Patton have enough chemistry to make their painfully clichéd relationship go down smoothly.

That’s a lot of concept for a 90-minute horror-comedy, and All Cheerleaders Die handles it with a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can style that matches its tonal schizophrenia.

This film about the loneliness of the young middle-distance runner drops so many heavy obstacles in his way, with such grueling regularity, that it’s like he’s practicing to be a hurdler instead.

In Lau and Loo’s telling, the off-the-boat indoctrination of young, undocumented Chinese families into vicious gangsterism is overstated and cartoonish, like The Warriors trying to pass itself off as a docudrama.

While it’s nothing new and lacks individualistic touches, it’s still solid trashy fun as an overwrought superhero origin story.

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.

Even with all the SFX overlays, it’s questionable whether any of this is entertaining enough to sustain even a svelte 92-minute runtime, but Spurlock and the boys can’t be faulted for holding back.

Once Amoedo lays all the cards out on the table, The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

It’s neither consistently funny nor poignant enough to make the most of its impressive cast, all of whom are capable of delivering better than what A.C.O.D. asks of them.

There’s a difference between elemental melodrama and superficial clichés, and gorgeous cinematography and period production design can only delay this recognizance for so long—and certainly not for two grueling hours.