The whole movie is encased in air quotes, and its sole purpose, apart from that winking, is to argue that even artsy-fartsy grumps secretly identify with Hollywood wish-fulfillment. Would Guerschuny the film critic have liked The Film Critic? If so, he’s a soft touch.

For all the scary refrigeration on view, this is a concept that’s long since gone stale.

Whenever it features feet flying through the air, Brick Mansions is a pleasure. Asked to do anything else, it’s one stumble after another.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

Rather than having its characters’ circumstances reveal something about societal dynamics or human nature, Aftermath avoids depth; Engert casts his material in strictly suspenseful terms.

Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters continues a tradition of adequacy that could be described as “epic-ish” or “majestic-esque.”

After The Ball commits its most garish faux pas in rooting its plot in the thorny politics of high fashion, despite an apparent lack of any understanding of how the business works.

Need For Speed modifies its outlaw antihero with all sorts of unnecessary pain and backstory, and the film is slow to leave the starting gate because of it. But once it does, Need For Speed becomes a much fleeter vehicle, powered by impressive practical stuntwork, eye-popping cross-country landscapes, and the sparking chemistry between Paul and Poots.

Though Dorff isn’t the only thing wrong with Zaytoun, he is still its biggest liability, and the rare case where one miscast role ruins a film’s essential premise.

Although the film is supposedly about movement, Growing Up And Other Lies frequently stalls out, and whole patches of it grind on without momentum or purpose.

Angels Sing is a heartfelt but less-than-polished piece of work that isn’t for everyone, particularly those who can’t suspend the disbelief required to accept preposterous plot developments, or the sight of Lyle Lovett wearing a variety of snowman sweatshirts. But graded on a Christmas-movie curve, it actually isn’t bad.

As Above/So Below purposefully generates a certain air of mystery by keeping the exact nature of its protagonists’ experience enigmatic, but for a film that takes place underground in tightly enclosed spaces, it’s surprisingly thin on suspense and palpable physical danger.

The result is a relentlessly dour film livened up only by Bardem’s shameless scenery-chewing and the occasional jolt of action. Otherwise, it’s an endless frown of a movie that does little but confirm that Penn’s talents, while impressive, aren’t limitless.

The bigness of Mann’s performance can’t help but set the film’s tone, which goes manic and high-strung to the point of hysteria before settling down and becoming really stupid and gross.

A crowd-pleasing, proudly working-class celebration of large women, old women, broke women, and women who love women, Tammy isn’t just consistently funny and unexpectedly touching and tender, it’s also genuinely subversive.

The songs are fine; the slaughter is sub-standard.

Everyone’s there to get the job done, Dolph Lundgren style, meaning Skin Trade is a throwback to the one-man-army actioners of the ’80s, sprinkled with updated stats on human trafficking. If the film happens to raise awareness, then that’s more bonus than objective.

It’s a pleasant enough expression of a series of familiar story beats, but apart from a few brief action-sequence moments, it could hardly be more rote or vanilla.

Phantom Halo is overstuffed even before Bogdanovich starts layering in the soliloquies and comic book metaphors.

Rare is the Western that’s too low-rent to be satisfyingly lurid, but with hardly any tension or personality to its name, Sweetwater just misses the mark.

The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.

The setpieces, in addition to mostly rehashing better scenes from earlier films, feel thrown together to serve the effects, and the effects look far less astonishing than anything in Cameron’s first two films.

While Sleepwalkers fails spectacularly as a horror movie, it triumphs as a loopy camp comedy. Sleepwalkers gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, which is saying something, as it starts out batshit insane.

As Christian knock-offs of secular films go, The Remaining is surprisingly respectable. At the risk of crazily overrating the film, The Remaining has to qualify as one of the most stirringly adequate, totally acceptable explicitly Christian horror movies ever made.

The most pressing issue with Ouija is that Stiles and Snowden cannot seem to write a single interesting line of dialogue. They volley between conversational banalities and whatever exposition might be needed to get the film to its next scary setpiece.

The November Man doesn’t pause for a moment’s breath, which tightens up the action at the expense of clarity, character development, wit, politics, themes, subtext, and all the other things that can go into a thriller besides bang-bang and crash-crash.

There are no casual conversations in The Citizen, and no idle moments. It’s pushing its agenda at every moment, first gently, then relentlessly.

Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.