The veteran action director fully delivers the goods with Silent Night.

Both the director and writer show such patchy story sense that a lot of the buildup to the final bloodshed and malevolence registers as suspense-free clutter.

Anyone who has seen the original knows exactly where things are heading, with the result that the proceedings seem far more manipulative than unnerving.

It’s a minor, but most edible, bloody bonbon.

Despite the film's choppy and tonally dissonant storytelling ... Hawke’s performance quite literally carries the movie.

Adult actors pretty much let the youngsters upstage them. The two leads, Bennett and Vanier, do a nice job holding the center of gravity while the film goes nuts around them. Best of all, Shorts is short, finishing before you can truly get tired of all those wishes gone wrong.

It packs plenty of rabble-rousing ammunition, but its sloppy execution is unlikely to win any merit badges for marksmanship.

Livingston and director Steven Sawalich keep the character in constant motion, his dialogue sprinkled with humor and his energy contagious. The film also is surrounded by a crew of ferociously individualistic characters.

Occasionally stupid (stretching even fright-flick conventions) but scary nonetheless, the picture should please horror fans.

The flatly generic results certainly appear at odds with the picture's stirring visual style, which pays homage to the great Flemish artists.

A fantastical romp that proves every bit as transporting as that movie about the blue people of Pandora, his "Alice" is more than just a gorgeous 3D sight to behold.

A film that doesn’t quite know whether it wants to educate its audience or give it a thrill ride. It proves more interesting for the former elements than the latter, but it nonetheless delivers plenty of compelling moments along the way.

Only the faintest glimmers of genuine, earned emotion pierce through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time.

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 uniformly winning cast, led by Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson, and the ultra-accessible touch provided by director David Frankel provide for a constant steam of gentle mirth, if not huge laughs.

Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.

The movie is a testament to the star power of Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, who, as the longtime friends at the center of a run-of-the-mill comedy, are the only reasons to see it.

While it hardly sells Wrinkles as a culture-shaking phenomenon, this modest documentary will play best to those who enjoy being creeped out by him enough to suspend their disbelief.

There almost isn't a single shot in it where every member of the cast isn't Acting ... The result is, at times, insufferably pleased with itself.

Gunnarsson's film ultimately lacks the grandeur and wit necessary to make the legend fully come alive. Still, the film does offer certain kicks to those who like their action films infused with fantastical elements and benefits greatly from its highly effective lead performances.

Despite its value in providing superb starring turns by Lena Olin and Bruce Dern, the film never manages to overcome its air of familiarity.

Regardless of the film’s shortcomings, it’s a thrill to have this giant of an actor back on a movie screen, hopefully next time with a more satisfyingly fleshed-out screenplay.

It alternates between too simplistic and incomprehensible, spending much of its time in between those poles in the "I understand, but I don't care" zone.

Nothing un-beguiles a fairy tale more than forced whimsy and labored magic, which is precisely what plagues Ella Enchanted.

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

More powerful than an argument or a treatise, The Last Interview is an immersive experience. It will be a reminder for some and an eye-opener for others of why John Lennon mattered to people, and why his murder was so shattering.

Bullock is an irrepressible hoot in writer-director John Lee Hancock's otherwise thoroughly conventional take on Michael Lewis' fact-based book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game."

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.

A true story of courage, determination and guts that deserves a more exciting approach.

Galland's film plays more like a cable-ready mystery than a cult film in the making, offering just enough chuckles to stay afloat.

Director Anne Fletcher has made better rom-coms, like The Proposal, but they had better scripts. Written by producer Kristin Hahn, Dumplin’ clings timidly to its YA roots, which are firmly on the unsophisticated side of the spectrum.

Dog-lovers are the obvious target here; but the slow, meditative doc holds appeal for some of the rest of us as well.

Although the overlong film skirts with hagiography, at times feeling more like a promotional DVD extra than an objective account, it nonetheless has an undeniable emotional pull thanks to its fairy tale-like narrative.

While not exactly a misfire, Rodriguez and Cameron's joint effort lacks the zing and originality of their best individual work.

You may come away more impressed by the intentions than by the achievements.

A flat-footed and seriously unsexy romantic dramedy.

This film, looking so little like its indie contemporaries, nurtures our appreciation of small details, emotional accomplishments most films would breeze right past or bring too sharply into focus.

The culture-clash procedural, which brings the small-town teen to big bad Hollywood, feels more perfunctory than inspired.

It’s a very tolerable watch, if somewhat interminable and rather lacking in proper drama. But perhaps that’s just what an audience of hardened Dion fans would want from a viewing.

While Murphy coasts along on charm, his material is just not sharp enough to generate big laughs.

ABCs of Death 2 mainly serves to demonstrate that even talented filmmakers need a lengthier running time to craft even a moderately successful short.

Olin never wavers in her commitment. She's often extraordinary in individual moments.

Malick's most distinctive ambition here is his attempt to create an almost pointilistic portrait of a man by evoking acute moments of his past and present, and this sustains real interest for a while, as you wait to see how it all might come together. But as the film just keeps offering more of the same...it doesn't build or pay off with what it seems designed to do, which is to provide either a dramatic or philosophical apotheosis.

Dramatically, the film is a shambles, with whiplash-inducing lurches in tone and pacing that make it seem as if portions were edited out of sequence.

Subjects Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey are colorful in quite different but complementary ways.

Allen's dialogue is witty, his plotting zings along with forward momentum in all the right places, and his observation of elastic moral principles in flux is both mischievous and unsettling, yielding a tasty final-act Hitchcockian twist.

Directed with feeling for its richly layered protagonists, the film is elevated by its emotional complexity but simultaneously dragged down by the relative shortage of propulsive, hardcore action.

In the end, the whole clean-up project is as shrug-worthy as most of the "Unrated Director's Cut!" edits that go the other direction on home video, promising more nudity and gore but changing little of consequence.

A minor addition to the Korean action cinema canon, The Merciless offers thin pleasures in a glossy package.

Unfortunately, where episodes of the series used to take their cue from a question posed by one of Carrie's columns, writer-director Michael Patrick King never finds that focus, and Sex and the City loses its tart edge in the process.

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.

While it aspires to draw the same audiences who admired "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Hero," The Promise is but a pale imitation of those landmark films.

A melodrama benefitting from excellent performances but suffering from a too-obvious script.

The massive jumble of standoffs, near-misses, tense confrontations, narrow escapes and slick victories, while momentarily exciting, can lack plausible motivation and credibility. More often than not, one wonders not so much what just happened but why, and what was at stake.

Enjoyable heist pic is more talk than action.

An uneven mix of serious issue movie and sensational thrill ride, Honour is no masterpiece, but it is an accomplished debut.

This would all be moving enough, but the film also benefits greatly from Conde’s endlessly charismatic personality.

Cartoonish hyperbole aside, the investigation does have its high points.

Mike Mendez's shamelessly Corman-esque Big Ass Spider! does almost everything just a tiny bit better than it needs to.

The film's greatest achievement is in the way the accomplished 3D treatment -- this is Jeunet’s first foray into the format -- emerges entirely naturally, as the precise expression of a gifted child’s vivid imagination.

We're treated to generous excerpts from the finished product, which is all the more resonant for the moving profiles that have preceded it.

Victoria is definitely what you would call a passive protagonist, and although the film subtly explores questions of ethnic identity, it doesn't necessarily keep one engaged until the end.

Balloon simply doesn't feature the sort of cinematic thrills necessary to keep us fully invested in the travails of its central characters. It's not that the events are depicted in anything less than bombastic, hyperbolic fashion. It's more that the filmmaker lacks the directorial finesse to calibrate the suspense for maximum cinematic effect.

A reasonably amusing effort that manages to poke fun at Brooks' neuroses and governmental blundering with equal skill.

Easily the most ambitious film of the director's career, but also the most infuriating for all of the sociological and psychological points that it tries to make in ways that are too often unearned or poorly defended.

Oh, "Blair Witch," what hath thou wrought? It has taken less than a decade, but the concept of horror films filmed documentary-style has officially become a tiresome cliche.

Robert De Niro and writer-director Paul Weitz find the most congenial material either of them has had in quite some time in Being Flynn.

The film is stylish as hell with sharp dialogue, a tongue-in-cheek plot and visual and editing razzle-dazzle.

The protagonists here aren't as insufferable as those in the first Unfriended, but Susco's plot gets harder to buy by the minute; as a first-time director, he doesn't get much out of his cast; and boy, does this Screenlife gimmick grow thin quickly.

If the movie only lavished as much thought and care on its characters as it does on each intricate set piece, Shooter might have been a classic.

Biased as journalism but engrossing as a movie, this documentary about a controversial Holocaust figure should be taken with a grain of kosher salt.

Only proves more intent on establishing an ominous mood than providing thrills. Muted and restrained to the point of tedium, the picture offers little that's distinctive to set it apart.

Originality or insight aren’t very high on the priority list of this drama.

Burning Man takes its time getting us to feel for a troubled character but gets the hook in solidly once it decides to.

Killam, who recently departed SNL after six seasons, shows a great grasp of his character’s escalating bewilderment and frustration.

Although it makes for an initially absorbing narrative and filmmaking challenge, with nowhere for the characters to run or hide, the thrills and shocks gradually become repetitive, as the writer-director recycles his own material, forcing the girls to evade the same threats again and again.

Scott has an eye -- and it's a very good one -- for sieges of castles, charging horsemen, hand-to-hand combat, glistening swords arcing through the air and deadly arrows whistling toward helpless targets.

While Highway Courtesans has many relevant points to make about the subjugation of women in impoverished societies, it lacks the focus and narrative momentum to sustain its admittedly brief running time.

Sutton is aiming to make a grand statement about America's downtrodden, and he never lets you forget it.

There is something really nasty about this cold, calculating exercise in mob psychology and human venality.

It's all here: the ingenious, obscenity-laced language, the double crosses that turn into triple crosses, the swaggering characters so in love with themselves. GottaLove RocknRolla!

This legal procedural remains strangely flat, despite its star power and a gripping central performance from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. An unimpeachably well-intentioned treatment of a dark chapter in American justice, it's methodical and serious-minded to a fault.

A sharply observed tragicomedy that draws laughter as genuinely as it coaxes tears, the nicely paced film tempers its themes of loss and sorrow with a cynically witty edge and is graced by a perfectly pitched Sigourney Weaver performance.

Presumably intended as an inspiring portrait of a private individual daring to live his dream of traveling in space, Man on a Mission instead comes across as a cautionary tale about having too much time and money on your hands.

There are simply too many characters jostling for attention and too many competing plot strands in a not-quite-seamless marriage of hard-edged social realism with a lyrical novelistic overlay. That said, the film is rich in poignant moments and negotiates its frequent shifts from violence to gentleness to sorrow with sensitivity.

It’s an entertaining, fast-spaced space adventure that benefits immeasurably from the charisma (mostly vocal, but still) of Pedro Pascal as the bounty hunting Mandalorian Din Djarin and the adorable cuteness of the animatronic Baby Yoda, excuse me, Grogu.

The combination of diverse casting and female empowerment themes results in a perfectly politically correct Aladdin for these times. The only thing that seems to have been left out is the magic, which is a bit of a problem considering that one of the main characters is a genie.

Amusing dark English comedy produces its share of chuckles.

Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger doesn’t show up until more than an hour into this relentlessly unfunny comedy and by then viewers may have tuned out long before.

A pitch-perfect, guilty-pleasure serving of late-summer schlock that handily nails the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the Roger Corman original.

There's a shakiness in how Hormann utilizes the fact that Aynur's murder is a foregone conclusion. It's as if the director is delaying gut-wrenching emotion as opposed to letting it emerge organically from the stylistic severity.

A supernatural action comedy that can never live up to its exciting opening scenes, Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End mixes horror-tinged mayhem with smart-alec laughs but loses momentum early and gets bogged down in exposition.

A satisfying action pic that finally realizes the potential of its pulp-meets-sociopolitics conceit.

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.

It quickly spins its shaky premise off into an unconvincing study of emotional need and an even harder-to-believe revenge thriller.

It's a story cut from familiar cloth that's absorbing enough but never quite escapes its whiff of cliché.

The spirit of that most modern of 19th century heroines, Becky Sharp, remains intact, and Nair's Indian touches make for an intriguing, fresh approach.

A sprightly musical revue built around Cole Porter songs and a few biographical tidbits culled from his extraordinary life.