Lewin and co-screenwriter Allen Palmer don’t exactly raise the dramatic stakes very high. The formulaic storyline fails to sustain interest, not helped by the sluggish pacing and predictable gags and characterizations.

Some of the dialogue is fun, especially as delivered by Plaza, who amusingly always seems to be commenting on the outlandish proceedings even while taking part in them. And now that Grant’s pretty boy handsomeness has matured with age, he’s eagerly leaning into the character actor stage of his career. Chewing the scenery with gusto, he gives the film a jolt of comic energy whenever he’s onscreen.

The movie itself doesn’t always live up to its ambitions, playing like a loose assembly of sketches that are by turns hilarious and tedious, with a third act that fizzles out and an ending that doesn’t land smoothly.

Last Survivors doesn’t only aim to offer up the usual pleasures of postapocalyptic thrillers like A Quiet Place or It Comes at Night — it also tries to deconstruct their dark appeal, with intriguing but uneven results.

Director Power orchestrates the thriller plot mechanics with reasonable skill, and the film’s concise 90-minute running time ensures that the pace never bogs down.

Stearns’ third feature (following Faults and The Art of Self-Defense) is his least satisfying so far; as visually drab as its predecessors, it has more difficulty mining its off-kilter aesthetic for nervous laughter and conceptual provocation.

The queasy mix of realism and wish-fulfillment will set many viewers’ heads spinning, or at least shaking with disappointment, in this well-intentioned but unpromising debut.

Bradley Rust Gray’s blood is a beautifully observed film that never arrives at its desired emotional destination.

Clearly made with the best of didactic intentions, and especially affecting when paying tribute to “original gangster” film theorist Laura Mulvey, interviewed all too briefly here, the film is founded on a simplistic, poorly argued thesis that is way out to sea, many waves of feminist film theory behind from what’s going on these days in academic circles and feminist discourse.

Viewed on its own, it communicates much less than its maker seems to intend, hovering in a not-very-satisfying zone between advocacy doc, first-person impressionism, and (very) tentative essay film about the world’s tendency to view difference as freakishness.

While it has a few genuine scares (cat lovers will want to avert their eyes for one horrific scene), it never achieves the deliriously freaky heights one expects from a film version of one of King’s cheesier novels.

Superior feels like Diet David Lynch: an unsatisfying substitute.

Dark Glasses is never all that scary, and some of it is just plain silly, but if you take it at face value it can be enjoyable enough to sit through — more of a reminder of what Argento used to do best than an example in its own right.

Mild fish-out-of-water humor and an element of mystery may satisfy fans of Novak’s work on the again-popular The Office, but fall short of proving he has much potential as a big-screen auteur.

The problem with Meier’s latest, despite the strong cast and solid direction, is that it explores the tense and thorny nature of blood ties without ever delving into the psychology of it all, often leaving us in the dark as to why the characters behave the way they do.

The result is a somewhat uneasy mix of social critique and bizarre sex drama in which Guiraudie seems to be spitballing different ideas without making all of them stick.

Though there aren’t many laughs on the way to that Battle of the Bands, Sollett’s unassuming cast and breezy pace ensure we won’t be too bored before we get there.

Writer-director Shin’s labored attempts to use genre tropes to explore the complexities of domineering mother-daughter relationships never fully develops.

With less pedestrian writing, there might have been some genuine uplift in the outcome of a family reinforcing its bonds while taking on future missions as a unified team. But Secret Headquarters is mostly just meh.

Thinly scripted rom-com Ticket to Paradise puffs its way through 104 minutes mostly on the vapors of its lead actors gassing around together, albeit with an assist from spectacular Australian scenery standing in for Bali.

Forster’s steady direction keeps this thread of White Bird affecting even when it conforms to predictable narrative beats.

The doc circles its subject with a mix of fascination, reverence and minor disgust.

Although this true story (even if embellished a bit by the filmmakers) inevitably builds some emotion, it ends up feeling more banal than spiritually exalting.

For most of its 110-minute run time, Don’t Make Me Go is a solidly likable drama, anchored by lovely, lived-in chemistry between John Cho and Mia Isaac as a father-daughter duo. But a misguided third-act choice throws off its bittersweet vibe, leaving a distinctly sour aftertaste.

Corner Office succeeds all too well in conveying the deadening effects of office work, practically serving as a testimonial to the pandemic-created trend of working from home.

Strip away the IMAX scope, the booming score and the flyboy swagger, however, and all that remains is a hollow shell of bland, beaten-down war movie tropes that leave Jonathan Majors to effectively fend for himself with his deeply-rooted lead portrayal of the first Black aviator in Navy history.

The film is affecting, because it outlines the saddening end of an adored American icon. But for all its promises of unheard insights, it seldom goes much deeper than an E! True Hollywood Story.

While the movie itself may prove nearly as unmemorable as its hero ostensibly wants to be, it’s anything but inconspicuous.

There’s so much potential heart and heartbreak in Firebird’s tale of forbidden passion that the screenplay and the cautious pacing become frustrating; with every ache measured and spelled out, the film’s dogged striving for poetry too often leaves it feeling disappointingly prosaic.

It’s a sweet but oddly circumspect film, ruled by a friction between warring demands: the allure of wistful memories and the rigor of complex appraisal.

Mysius goes all out here, but her film overshoots its target by a few miles, even if the mise-en-scène is inspired and lead Adèle Exarchopoulos excellent as always.

However intrinsically fascinating the Gibbons sisters’ story might be, Smoczynska and Seigel’s interpretation of the material feels off somehow — a little too pleased with its own quirk, and too preoccupied with surface texture and color to help viewers truly understand its troubled protagonists.

This is Jackman’s movie. He makes Peter’s helplessness intensely moving as he keeps trying, against mounting odds and false breakthroughs, to communicate with a child who remains out of reach. Sadly, that goes for The Son, as much as the son.

Disenchanted lacks the charisma and curiosity of its predecessor.

[Ovredal] handles the darkly creepy atmospherics expertly and makes fully convincing the ship’s fateful voyage through stormy and vampire-besieged seas. But he’s not able to bring much spark to Bragi Schut, Jr. and Zak Olkewicz’s slow-paced, formulaic screenplay, which lacks the dark wit necessary to keep us invested in the gory proceedings.

More than two hours in length, The Sentinel packs too much into a weird tale that shifts ground between political thriller and psychological drama -- too much to be completely comprehensible except to Desplechin himself. It would require a severe editing job to rescue it, even for the friendly art-house crowd. [19 May 1992]

Civil often feels more like an infomercial than a documentary.

Signed, sealed and delivered, Book Club: The Next Chapter is an unabashed love letter to four great movie stars. As a vehicle for their talents, it’s less of a sure thing.

Matt Sobel’s overhaul tones down the cruelty and eliminates the more grotesque touches, resulting in a chamber drama that never gets under the skin.

There’s definitely some gas in its tank in the opening sections, which are somewhat promising, but then the story takes a predictable route that fails to deliver enough suspense or interest to go the full distance.

For all the surface wildness of Lawrence’s Slumberland, it’s about as rule-following a family pic as you can find.

Unfortunately, despite its intriguing premise, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone lacks the necessary ingredient to make it truly memorable; it simply isn’t very scary.

Luckiest Girl Alive struggles to balance its dual aspirations: delivering an emotionally wrought tale about survival and wrapping its gravity in the cheeky breeziness of publishing comedies like Freeform’s The Bold Type.

Enola Holmes 2‘s shortcomings don’t wreck the film — it’s a serviceable sequel — but the tension between the topics the film tackles and the soft-pedaled approach is one that hopefully won’t haunt future projects.

This third collaboration between writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale (following Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) is far stronger on gothic atmosphere than suspense. It’s capably acted and visually effective, with lots of mist-shrouded woodlands and chiaroscuro interiors, but the storytelling is stilted and uninvolving.

Like other live-action remakes, The Little Mermaid is a neatly packaged story ribboned with representational awareness. There’s enough in it to fill an evening, but it doesn’t inspire much more than a passing sense of déjà vu.

There are instances where you can see the director experimenting and attempting to disturb Disney’s imposing order, deploying close-ups, almost ground-level pans and strategically sweeping views to find warmth and tactility within a cold technique.

Had Pixar perhaps taken more risks with that plotline, they might have pleased a smaller demographic than such a project requires to be profitable, but they might also have delivered a movie on par with some of their best work. Instead, the elements all fit perfectly into place — so much so that water eventually puts out fire, and we’re left without much of an impression.

Although Tomlin (for whom Weitz wrote 2015’s Grandma) and Fonda are thoroughly capable of taking their characters in any direction required of them, Moving On ultimately strands the actors — and the audience — at an awkward impasse.

It all plays as routinely as you’d expect, making the film directed by Mark Dindal (The Emperor’s New Groove, Chicken Little) feel much longer than it is, at least for anyone over the age of 10.

The bigger problem is that the movie leaves itself nowhere to go but deeper into biblical doom and gloom, with an unwavering sense of purpose that highlights Shyamalan’s able craftsmanship but also exposes the pointlessness of this claustrophobic exercise.

I found this movie messy and overstuffed, but I laughed almost as often as I cringed from its obnoxiousness and can’t dispute that a vast audience will delight in every moment. Even if they spend much of the running time sticking blades through each other’s handily regenerating flesh, Reynolds and Jackman make sweet love and appear to be having a great time doing it.

The drama feels flimsy when it strays from the swamps, rendering the politics of the time as almost secondary to the visual spectacle of a harrowing escape.

The new film is much pokier in its pacing, with duller characters. Despite some highlights, including Branagh in top form as an even more somber than usual Poirot, the film is watchable but it is also something lethal to a mystery: uninvolving.

This is a film best experienced in a group setting, among friends, the kind of project that fosters conspiratorial thinking and could inspire multiple watches — if only it got out of its own way.

Even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

A sense of admiration and responsibility courses through the doc, an orientation that eventually curdles the narrative.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.

Despite the formidable star wattage and estimable talents on display, however, Maybe I Do fails to overcome its obvious stage origins, feeling all too schematic and talky. The plot feels like it could have been lifted from a French farce from the last century.

Justice regurgitates information that was largely already in the public sphere, so its main purpose will likely be as a for-the-record summation, albeit a workmanlike one puffed up here and there with generically ominous music to suggest murky machinations at the highest levels of government.

A generally compelling story with obvious contemporary and global resonances gets an unfortunately dry and surface-level retelling in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.

It all results in a documentary I found consistently interesting and never revelatory. I learned things, but given the opportunity allegedly presented to the production, not close to as much as I might have wanted to learn.

It’s more like the kind of standard Sundance-bound dramedy we’ve seen lots of times before, albeit with a charming cast and some sharp bits of commentary on race, identity and gender that come courtesy of screenwriter Adrian Tomine, who adapted his 2007 graphic novel of the same title.

Scrapper is a sweet bit of fluff that’s trying too hard to be funny and offbeat and ends up being too often simply annoying.

The film struggles to maintain the verve of this opening sequence (which nails a specific anxiety of liberal middle-class Black people), subsequently becoming a series of set pieces — some more energetic than others — in search of a thesis.

Harlow makes a surprisingly strong impression in his film acting debut, signaling that more big screen roles are in his future, while Walls provides the requisite simmering intensity and formidable physicality as the anger-prone Kamal.

Despite Wilson’s on-the-nose caricature and the enjoyable comic performances of such supporting players as Lusia Strus and the ever-reliable Wendi McLendon-Covey, Paint never delves beneath the surface.

As usual, Butler brings a convincing humanity and vulnerability to his action movie heroics.

What Ralphie goes through over the course of this absorbing enough but bludgeoning portrait of corrosive masculinity makes him both victim and monster.

Although the storytelling conveys deep compassion for the plight of persecuted peoples, and Hussein’s unflinching performance speaks volumes, mostly without words, there’s a grim inevitability to The Survival of Kindness that becomes wearing, making its 96 minutes feel longer.

Fresnadillo’s film puts on fewer airs of disruption than other versions of this story, so the narrative comes off as less self-satisfied. Still, it struggles to sustain an inspirational tenor.

Lift doesn’t seem to trust viewers enough to withhold details. It’s too insecure, too eager, too anxious to be mysterious. Its tricks are not so much revealed as word-vomited through clunky exposition.

The film is so refined and filled with good taste, not to mention poetry citations and dialogue rendered with quotations marks, that it often feels inert.

In contrast to Bellucci, who underplays in dignified fashion, Collette works hard, very hard, to sell the concept and her character. That she fails is not an insult to her formidable gifts, but rather due to the flimsiness of the material, which seems better suited to the small screen.

The film pushes against the expectation of queer narratives to follow the same dolorous beats by prioritizing fun and crass humor. But there’s just not enough substance to get us to care about reaching the finish line.

Backed by a colorful DIY aesthetic that makes the most of its budget, the film is nonetheless sappy and, in terms of its comedy, rather cringe-worthy, never quite finding the sweet spot between romance and laughs.

All the pieces are there, but Late Bloomers ultimately fails to sell the film’s core relationship.

For all its brawn and atmosphere and robustly choreographed combat, this is a distended historical tapestry too sprawling to remain compelling, particularly when its focus veers away from the central couple.

The knockabout humor just isn’t all that funny; its transgressive spirit too often feels forced.

While the group’s short SNL videos are often quite amusing, this feature-length venture doesn’t do them any favors.

The doc is stuffed with great archive material. But it largely squanders an ideal platform through which to reaffirm the subject’s vital place in pop music history and reclaim disco as a genre whose influence has never waned.

It’s Hamm’s emotionally wounded small-town top cop who gives the film its engine, especially in his dealings with Mohammed and Fey’s characters. The schemes and cover-ups and collateral damage spin round with little dimension, or, as Police Chief Sanders sums it up, “Just a bunch of people that deserve each other.”

The film’s wistful hope for the future of cinema and its healing power ends up being too self-satisfied to register as an expression of collective faith.

The movie is technically accomplished, well-acted, atmospherically unsettling and certainly watchable. . . But as genre material, it’s generic.

With all the recent controversy surrounding Depp, not to mention Maïwenn herself, the result of their collaboration is a handsome period piece that feels both flat and shallow, and certainly far from any scandale.

The movie goes downhill into predictable territory, finally landing in a soggy quagmire of talkiness and would-be profundity expressed in voiceover at the end. But at least the visuals are nice, with Ceylan’s signature use of snow-capped landscape and wide-angled lensing to the fore.

This is a movie that, its many strengths notwithstanding, seems split between the desire to do something original and an imagination tethered to better movies from the past. That makes it a nostalgic patchwork, not the bold new vision it aims to be.

The Sweet East provides easy jabs and the occasional laugh, but never seems to figure out what it wants to say.

On the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

Filled with the director’s typical operatic flourishes — cameras floating down corridors or over balconies as characters race toward disaster, emotional crescendos set to a racing score by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso — it can also be a rather stuffy affair, with lots of dramatic speeches and religious symbolism that runs the gamut from satirical to heavy-handed.

The film begins to sag the deeper we get into Sam’s story, which requires more digging than Peretti can give us. The jokes are rarely the same, but they hit similar notes; the problems with the characters feel repetitive; and the movie circles the same ideas until plot points need to be tidied.

A chilling story told in a disjointed manner.

The lack of cackle-worthy one-liners here and the entertaining but highly predictable last act make this a little bit snoozy for savvier viewers.

Watching the bullet-headed action star take down squads of government agents and thuggish mercenaries alike, mostly while unarmed, is fun enough. Probably even more so in Imax.

The four lead performers display an undeniable chemistry that makes Vacation Friends 2 pleasantly engaging if not hilarious. But it’s the addition of Buscemi that provides the real comic spark, the veteran actor employing his well-honed persona of angry sarcasm to provide a much-needed edginess to the otherwise bland proceedings.

There’s no doubt, from the way Reptile creeps in the first half, that Singer is a skilled director. But there’s something to be said for restraint, which the helmer, who wrote his screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and the film’s star Benicio Del Toro, doesn’t exercise enough of here. In an effort to prove its cleverness, Reptile clanks, rattles and stumbles in its second half.

Unquestionably, there is a good story here — as Universal itself demonstrated some years ago in Seven Bridges to Cross. But Friedkin has failed to tell it.

Snyder provides an ample display of the visual flair and skill for action that have endeared him to legions of fans who exhibit so much dedication that they’re willing to sit through numerous versions of his films.