Writer-director Kelker never establishes a consistent tone, eventually aiming for a tragic conclusion that feels hopelessly unearned.

It's never fun watching a comedian's shrewdness ossify into shtick. Yet whatever incisiveness Ricky Gervais once had (and he had plenty, if The Office and Extras are any indication) is barely evident in the new Netflix-released satire Special Correspondents

It may be Hot Sugar's Cold World, but that doesn't mean we have to live in it.

Where Attenborough's script lent an air of dignity to the shorter film, Allen's reading of Philip LaZebnik's cutesy narration has a canned feel, and is unlikely to connect with viewers too young to appreciate cliched humor about the joys of bachelorhood versus the duties of parenting.

Eli Roth and screenwriter Joe Carnahan could have done the same thing, manifesting the rages and fears that afflict the country we live in right now. Instead they offer a cheap and dishonest Death Wish that (references to social media notwithstanding) is interchangeable with get-tough knockoffs that have flooded cinemas for decades.

Blumhouse has certainly proved very successful with its inventive, low-budget approach to horror, but now that the company is spewing out movies like an assembly line, more and more duds are starting to appear. Everything about this effort, including its hackneyed, overfamiliar title, smacks of laziness and a cynical indifference to its lack of originality.

Every conceivable button is pushed to achieve rote satisfaction in young viewers, while any notion of creating tension and suspense is dutifully ignored. Not for a moment is actual peril considered as something worthy of a dramatic climax.

Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.

Lack of originality and self-awareness prove to be a fatal combination. There is something way too familiar about Hoffman's rites-of-passage portrait of wasted youth, with its inevitable soundtrack of fashionable angst-rock and predictably retro-cool cult-movie influences.

In terms of real horror, nevermind sexual-politics provocation, "Grave" can neither re-create its predecessor's impact nor compete with stranger new beasts like Lars von Trier's "Antichrist."

This is a shallow snapshot of First World problems and feeble conflicts that makes you despair for the state of gay-themed drama, perhaps even more so because it's capably acted and assembled with a slick sheen.

Far stronger on atmosphere than actual suspense, Grand Isle plods along in tedious fashion, not helped by its awkward framing device that gives it the feel of a Southern fried police procedural.

Despite the best efforts of the talented lead performers and an overqualified supporting cast, this is a movie for which you should practice social distancing.

No legitimate distributor would bother with a film "whose crackpot elements aren't even exploited in a way that will appeal to those watching solely to make fun of them."

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

The charisma-endowed Washington and Sy do all they can to make the proceedings engrossing but even they are hard-pressed to make it interesting.

Director/co-screenwriter Pearry Teo succeeds in investing the silly proceedings with spooky visual stylishness, providing enough scary demons and possessed mannequins to deliver the requisite jump scares. Unfortunately, the film also features sound, which results in the audience being able to hear the inane dialogue accompanying the familiar horror tropes.

Depicting the very long, violence-filled night that ensues after a group of young people trespass in a creepy, abandoned prison, Against the Night proves as generic as its title.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

The dialogue suffers from a strained, turgid quality, most resembling a daytime soap opera.

As leaden as the bullets whose random behavior it revolves around, Géla Babluani's 13 fails to recapture the sweaty tension of his original 13 Tzameti, a French import that reeked of style and first-timer ambition.

The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.

Whatever you have to pay, it's too much.

Making her feature directorial debut at the tender age of 70, veteran actress Connie Stevens delivers an obviously heartfelt but sadly unfocused melodrama in the form of Saving Grace B. Jones.

Onscreen, it somehow manages to be at once wildly overblown and terminally boring.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

This talky, ham-fisted effort proves particularly disappointing because it should have been much better than it is.

This Bannon is a snooze, occasionally making a wry aside but nearly never saying anything unusually smart or new. ... It's hard to see what ordinary viewers at any point on the political spectrum will gain from this particular status report.