Depicting a close encounter of the decidedly low-budget kind, Extraterrestrial boasts an undeniable technical competence but can't shake off its inevitable been there, done that quality.

The second installment, which reveals some of the reasons behind their imprisonment, lacks a similar sense of originality and urgency, undercut by overly familiar characterizations and dilatory pacing.

An amiable but wholly unnecessary movie that plays like a feature-length version of those reels one watches while eating rubber chicken at a banquet honoring a much-loved artist.

While director David Fincher drills out some perfunctory, generic scares -- not counting Weaver's buzzcut -- Alien 3 is amazingly dull and humdrum. [20 May 1992]

The emotional connective tissue that made Lee’s film so poetic, romantic, tragic and thrilling is missing here, reducing Sword of Destiny to a series of loosely related fight sequences and gauzy, overwrought flashbacks.

Replacing the first two films' simplistic, man-on-the-run premise with a stuttering plot comparatively light on action and stuffed with red herrings and inconsequential characters... Besson's team has signed off the trilogy with a whimper rather than the kind of unfettered bang delivered by the first two films.

What new information The Culture High offers is almost entirely subsumed by its sprawling ambitions to make every conceivable connection to the marijuana debate, limiting both its reliability and its impact.

Default’s search for ultra-realism ironically starts to make it look ultra-artificial.

The filmmakers’ unsubtle style is responsible for killing many of the jokes. But they do succeed with several of the performers.

A technically ramshackle affair whose primary attribute is Tukel’s deadpan comic performance and self-deprecating willingness to portray his character as a total dick.

After a while, you give up trying to make sense of the plot and sit there gaping at the car crashes, fight scenes, and shootings. The problem is that even the mayhem quickly becomes repetitive.

A puzzlingly confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of supervillains and then doesn’t know what to do with them.

Thanks to Jon Cryer’s likable-schlemiel shtick, a lost-cause rom-com is more watchable than it has any right to be. But that’s not enough to make Hit by Lightning remotely involving.

The degeneration into familiar genre tropes reduces the impact of the wittily satirical set-up, with the result that Starry Eyes fails to live up to its initial promise. But the film indicates genuine talent on the part of its directors/screenwriters, who infuse the proceedings with a dark, gothic creepiness that is further enhanced by Jonathan Snipes' retro, synthesizer-infused score reminiscent of John Carpenter.

Although there’s talent on display in all aspects of this time-jumping, visually distinctive independent that rests its commercial hopes on the names of leads Justin Long and Emmy Rossum, Esmail strenuously overplays his hand with the torrent of obnoxious dialogue he asks his male lead to deliver, which is enough to make one want to run out several times for a breather.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

With nary a likable character in sight until the late arrival of some unearned emotion in the closing scenes, this is a posey, abrasive drama, though one that's stylishly made and acted with more conviction than the script merits.

The leading man aside, a fine cast is thoroughly wasted in a tale that centers on old-fashioned Cold War-style conflict rather than the sort of terrorist drama that's more pertinent today.

The film is certainly watchable, thanks to the elaborately staged action sequences and Statham's killer charisma.

Writer-director J.C. Khoury’s second feature is a romantic dramedy featuring a conventionally appealing cast that’s squandered on a dissatisfingly derivative premise.

A picture whose tone wanders between arid academic exercise and something close to parody of the more pretentious trends in current auteur cinema.

While Avery handles the kinetic action set-piece with impressive swagger for a first-timer, his self-penned screenplay is a major weak point.

The spectacle of a dissolute hedonist suddenly acquiring a heart and a conscience late in life is shamelessly, and shamefully, contrived in its emotional trajectory.

The screenplay, written by French arthouse writer-director Antoine Barraud (Les gouffres) with an assist from U.S. scribe Edwards, too often seems to be under the mistaken impression that making a movie for kids means everything needs to be overly spelled out, especially by using as many short-hand clichés as possible.

It should be a sturdy player upon its release in home video formats, assuming that its target audience knows how to operate their DVD players.

Stefan Haupt's (The Circle) documentary Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation explores the building's tortured history and the current efforts to bring it to fruition, but in a disappointingly dull style that fails to do justice to its outsized inspiration.

It provides only scant background information and no deep insights about the musicians, other than that they seem like very nice people who apparently perform more for the love of church than money.

While Helen Mirren elevates the material with her usual aplomb and the events being depicted inevitably are stirring, this is a stodgy crusade-for-justice drama, directed and written with minimal flair.

For a film that takes great pride in its heroine's nonconformism, pretty much everything in Allegiant feels conventional.

The characters are ciphers, the narrative is dull and even the sights and sounds become numbingly bombastic after a while.

This derivative smoothie appears to have been made by putting Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and the Coen Brothers into a blender along with Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths. The brash result squanders a talented cast, sharp visuals and spectacular locations on a grisly trail of mayhem that rarely yields much mirth.

Technological updating and a few clever narrative twists are the sole saving graces of the otherwise pedestrian Preservation.

Its paper-thin characterizations, hackneyed plotting and overdependence on viciously profane humor put this effort more in the minor league of Tammy, McCarthy's previous collaboration with her director/co-screenwriter husband Ben Falcone, than her truly inspired work with Paul Feig on Bridesmaids and Spy.

Russell pulled off some outrageous moments in I Heart Huckabees, the feature he made before this film, but the evidence here suggests Nailed had issues even before the money ran out.

The longer the proceedings go on the more wearisome they get, with Perry's character quickly wearing out his satirical welcome. By the time it's over, you'll almost wish that La Ultima Pelicula would live up to its title.

Effie Gray is an exquisitely dreary slice of middlebrow armchair theater which adds little new to a much-filmed story.

The fragile film’s bid for poignancy is so aggressive and its sensitivity so studied that it eventually drowns in syrupy banality.

Haphazard plotting and seriously undernourished character development aside, none of the emotional stakes have been planted deeply enough to elicit audience involvement in young Pete’s plight.

By the time the relatively brief but seemingly interminable proceedings reach their conclusion, viewers may feel like they've been held hostage themselves.

Director Stephen Kijak, who previously explored far more compelling musical territory with Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, has delivered a behind-the-scenes portrait that should please the band's diehard fans but offers little of substance to the uninitiated.

It's all busy-ness, noise and chaos, with zero thrills and very little sustainable comic buoyancy.

Rings finds a couple of nice, if inconsequential, little chills.

Despite its apparently sincere identification with its protagonist, Entertainment feels like a sick joke.

Despite the director's frequently stated mission to liberate the poetry in his material by excavating what he has described as "ecstatic truth," this is a literal, rather flat epic that keeps telling us in voiceovers of its spiritual dimension, without actually generating much evidence of it.

In their awkward attempt to shoehorn these kids into the first pic's formula, Stoller and his writing collaborators care far less about creating believable characters than getting to the next laugh.

Clever enough to provoke a few abrupt laughs along the way, this big screen debut for two television stalwarts, director Matt Shakman (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and writer Robert Patino (Sons of Anarchy, Prime Suspect), is sabotaged by some frightfully on-the-nose expository dialogue and an adamantly prosaic visual style.

Of interest to Police fans but hardly a rock-doc for the ages.

When in doubt, the director cranks up the assaultively reverberant score from po-faced '80s rockers The The (aka Matt Johnson, the director's brother), which at least provides intermittent pep to this increasingly torpid wallow in the moral mud.

Unfortunately, despite displaying an admirable stylistic ambitiousness and excellent use of its NYC Lower East Side locations The Girl is in Trouble never manages to feel like more than a strained, modern-day pastiche.

Sure, it's a kick to see Stiller and Wilson back in the shoes of these camera-ready cretins, but for every joke that sparks there are several that just lay there.

Lumbering, lifeless, and—strange thing to say about a cadaver—almost entirely charmless. Almost entirely because both Lily James, as headstrong heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Sam Riley, as her brooding suitor Mr. Darcy, make for a delightful onscreen pair.

Club Life demonstrates that not everyone has a compelling story to tell.

With its softball insights about midlife reinvention and its quasi-illuminating glances across the cultural and class divide, the movie takes its place, a la the similarly contrived The Visitor, on the spectrum of It’s Never Too Late character studies.

Another day, another exorcism…ho-hum.

Despite the strenuous efforts of all involved, Every Secret Thing never manages to overcome its overwhelming air of artsy pretension.

Strip away its gorgeous wintry landscapes and we are left with a symphony of ponderous New Age mumbo-jumbo masquerading as philosophical wisdom.

Any film that tries to revive this technique needs a clever story or unusual filmmaking ingenuity to stand out from the crowd. The Gallows has neither. It has enough mild scares to captivate the under-25 crowd.

Interminable dull stretches blunt the impact of undeniably exciting action sequences, making the series finale unlikely to leave even fans wanting more.

The film falters when it ham-fistedly attempts to detour into sensitive drama.

In a simpler form, Mojave might have been a gripping if minor genre film. Instead, it's undone by the sort of pretentious overwriting that might have seemed impressive in the '70s but now comes across as merely forced.

First-time feature helmer Romanowsky has a hard time distinguishing between the things that draw her to Elliott's story and the things that make him pathetic.

Sagnier and especially Baye try to locate the heart in their cartoonish maternal characters, and newcomer Lasseron is at least a warm and spunky presence in a role that's severely underwritten, though all of them are frequently upstaged by all the bells and whistles newcomer Neel feels he needs to keep throwing at the screen in order to mask the fact there's not much of story in the first place.

In terms of drama, or melodrama, or just bad drama, Freed rarely delivers the goods while trying hard to give fans what they came for.

For a film so seemingly interested in educating audiences about the evils of sex trafficking that it provides horrific statistics at the conclusion, it has no compunction about including copious doses of female nudity.

This ungainly portrait strikes a lot of poses, as if inviting the viewer to admire its impressive cast list, fine period detailing, "cheeky" British humor, and insouciant attitude towards violence. But none of it disguises the fact that the film is also tonally incoherent, vacuous and structurally a bleedin' mess.

There's no catharsis at the end from the journey taken, just relief that it's over.

While its emphasis on character dynamics and a slow burn atmosphere is to be commended, Dark Was the Night is too derivative and familiar to make much of an impact.

What We Did On Our Holiday could be used as a textbook example of how to ruin a movie with a bad third act.

It’s an instant camp classic, especially because it takes itself so adorably seriously.

While the director/screenwriter is to be commended for avoiding the usual bloodsucker clichés, he hasn't replaced them with anything particularly interesting, with the result that the story plays like a quasi-mystical melodrama featuring characters about whom we care little.

It's so preoccupied with hammering home the point that Armstrong was a liar and a cheat, it can't risk giving him any credit for having charisma to spare, or at least enough cunning to know how to manipulate our current fantasies about heroic sportsmen.

Neither funny enough as an outright comedy nor solid enough as a drama, and certainly not believable as an affaire de coeur.

This is the kind of indie doodle of a movie in which several potentially interesting ideas co-exist but never quite come together and where supporters will call the narrative "freewheeling" while naysayers will insist on "rambling."

The writer/director deserves credit for his comparatively low-key approach to the potentially exploitative material, but much like the infant baby at its center, the film seems artificially cobbled-together.

Safelight squanders the efforts of a talented cast who are unable to lift the material beyond its clichés.

The frequently dazzling performance footage is offset by long dull interviews with dancers who intone such platitudes as "the language of music is rhythm…rhythm is the language of life."

Featuring long stretches in which little is said or happens, the film never quite burrows into the viewer's skin in the way in which it was obviously intended.

Only the writer's most ardent fans — and they are legion, judging by his book sales of over 190 million copies — will find anything of interest here.

Monson does succeed in editing the frequently dissimilar footage together into a fairly attractive package, although an animated sequence depicting the power of cosmic forces and another illustrating an historical timeline of human events feel rather too forced and self-consciously showy.

A home-captivity picture boasting all the implausibility associated with that genre and nearly none of the thrills.

This unquestionably good-looking film, shot by world-class cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis (The Drop, Bullhead), plays like a Low Countries-variation on the classy Spanish-language work of Guillermo Del Toro, at least in terms of style if not substance, with what little narrative there is more of a clothesline for small-scale set pieces rather than a conduit for character insight.

Director Miguel Angel Vivas (Kidnapped) fails to bring any visual flair to the sluggishly paced proceedings, and the CGI effects prove less than convincing.

Substitute a cat for the bunny (no spoilers here about its fate) and you have the ironically titled, generic thriller The Perfect Guy that somehow wound up on the big screen instead of on Lifetime.

Genre fans, at least, should be satiated by the copious amount of gore and viscera on display, although whether they'll be hungry enough for the next installment--all too obviously set up for at the conclusion--is another matter.

This material cant help but be interesting, even compelling up to a point, but its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched.

Should well succeed in attracting their literally faithful audiences, although its heavy-handed proselytizing and soap opera-ish storytelling will prove a turn-off to those who don't pray on a daily basis.

To paraphrase a famous line from an old political debate--I've seen Carrie, I love Carrie, and Some Kind of Hate is no Carrie.

Watching Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus go through their familiar comedic bickering routines has become like spending an evening with a long-married couple whose constant sniping has grown wearisome.

With director Jerome Enrico mining the material for only the most obvious gags, the social commentary of the central joke never rises to the level of hard-hitting satire, instead settling on a broadly observed collection of types.

Dad’s Army is hobbled by too much broad slapstick and labored clowning.

While the two leads are appealing and display an undeniable chemistry, the narrative skimpiness makes their efforts for naught.

Pod has a hallucinatory quality that makes up in ferocity what it lacks on cogent storytelling.

The Golden Cage (La Jaula de oro) is a lukewarm examination of a hot-potato political issue.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

The Disneyesque adage is unfortunately all too typical of A Ballerina's Tale, which, other than adding to the pop culture barrage that has accompanied this gifted dancer's rise to stardom, does little to provide insight into her unique story.

Pizzo finds nearly no drama in Freddie's path from high school to college ball.

Confused both dramatically and politically, this is a film whose perhaps worthy ambitions seem to have outstripped its makers' talents — ironically, Forgotten is an expression of the very political forgetfulness it wishes to rectify.

There is actually a lot of imagination at work in the film, though frustratingly it rarely comes together in an emotionally meaningful way.