The director does an excellent job of setting a properly ominous mood, effectively delivering a procession of jump scares that succeed in keeping viewers on edge. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Tarryn-Tanille Prinsloo proves less effective, failing to deepen the characterizations or situations in sufficiently interesting fashion.

In essence, every dramatic goal is achieved far too easily, every opponent is ultimately made of straw. The characters are never truly challenged, as if the filmmakers are afraid that any credible peril might prove too frightening for some little kid.

The most thrilling aspect of director Per Fly's drama is watching the interactions between co-stars Theo James and Ben Kingsley. Even as James sucks all the energy out of the room with his inert performance, Kingsley creates oxygen with his dynamic, wildly entertaining turn.

Although the prescription drug users that Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) profiles have some interesting things to say about how these products affect their performance and perceptions, the steady stream of talking-head experts doesn’t do much to raise the movie’s pulse.

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.

True to its title, Los Angeles Overnight makes excellent use of its extensive L.A. locations, thankfully foregoing the familiar landmarks that have become cinematic clichés. It's a shame, then, that the film doesn't succeed in its ambition to infuse noir tropes with originality.

Christopher's lengthy two-hander scenes with Pooh quickly wear out their welcome; what at first is agreeably amusing shortly becomes grating, then just tedious.

This would be an interesting subject to explore at length, with a host who didn't seem to be padding an opportunity for self-promotion with the trappings of science. Unfortunately, Friedkin goes overboard in the short film's final scenes, describing a second encounter with the possessed woman that was far more dramatic than this one.

The central figure in Sebastien Chabot's documentary exhibits undeniable passion. Describing the object of his adoration, he comes across an intelligent, articulate and more than a little long-winded. Whether or not you'll enjoy hearing him expound at length will depend on how interested you are in gardens.

It’s a decent concept for any sort of movie – a thriller, a horror flick, a comedy – but the problem here is that writer-director Joe Martin never quite decides which one he wants to make.

Wang’s verite approach attempts to strike a tone somewhere between revealing and contemplative, but her principal subjects are too young and inexperienced with the world to have much of import to say.

The film tries but often struggles to properly fuse the personal and the political.

Hart has fashioned a tale of matriarchal inheritance, but one whose fierce message is undercut rather than deepened by its child's-book clarity. The intriguing setup receives underpowered execution, the intended jolts landing all too softly.

The New Romantic comes off as too forced and calculated.

Perhaps because it wants to play to both sides, the film's viewpoint is awfully muddied when it addresses conflict between traditional DJs — who know how to handle turntables, read a crowd's mood and do their thing for many hours at a time — and those who premix a whole set to a USB stick, hit play and just bounce up and down onstage.

Less successful as a drama, the out-all-night period piece is overshadowed by many similar coming-of-age tales (the best of which are often made by artists with first-hand knowledge of the period they're depicting). But like its twenty-ish hero, it is well-meaning enough that some viewers will be forgiving.

Animation work is never exactly jaw-dropping but fits the bill, with plenty of colorful set pieces in both the great outdoors and the high-tech headquarters of HairCo. Snarky dialogue is minimal compared to most tongue-in-cheek cartoons, while a few pop culture nods (to Star Wars and Better Call Saul) will give older viewers something to look out for.

The movie delivers an inspiring message about the power of faith and forgiveness, which is its obvious raison d'etre. But it does so in the sort of formulaic, cliched and simplistic manner that afflicts so many inspirational films.

While it's well-intentioned to a fault, and driven by deep convictions, the film also is diffuse, lethargically paced and short on thematic trenchancy, building powerful individual moments but seldom sustaining a compelling narrative thread.

But the synthesis is underwhelming on screen where it might have resonated in Lipsyte's book. Here, Measure becomes a mildly nostalgic, mildly romantic entry in a genre that, more than most, requires that the viewer feels a personal connection to the misfit protagonist on screen.

Cocote tells a relatively simple story in willfully obscure, opaque fashion. While the film features many intriguing elements and often proves visually stunning, it ultimately feels a trial to endure.

For undemanding audiences not looking for too much substance in the summer's dog days, Dog Days should go down relatively easy.

Newcomer Myles Truitt inhabits the role with an earthbound soulfulness — what you might call the opposite of heroic flash — and even when the film’s progress feels more mechanical than organic, he’s easy to root for.

Fighting With My Family reminds us several times that the sport is as much about charismatic storytelling as it is about skill. Judged by that standard, the film is far from belt-worthy.

A twisted tale of toxic female friendship, the film offers its share of pleasures: eye candy in human, sartorial and real-estate form, as well as the unmistakable flair of a director and performers who know their way around a piece of pop entertainment. But the result leaves you scratching your head.

Unfortunately, the updating does the venerable story few favors, and the lack of star wattage makes this Little Women a dull affair.

Night School has a lot to learn about how to live up to its potential, but it squeaks out a passing grade in the end.

It's great to look at, nearly giddy with pop-culture love, and its particulars are intriguing. But those pieces — by turns weird, soulful and exhilarating — merely accumulate, when they should be generating magic.

Although it provides a fair number of mild scares and laughs, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween feels more like a kiddie film than did the original.

As enacted here by unquestionably fine actors, this story does not emerge as compelling or convincing, and the film is aggravatingly narrow-minded in its interests. However, if one stays with it all the way to the end, it is absolutely worth sitting still for the end credits, over which is played a monologue by Nic which is the best thing in the picture.

Has clear appeal for heartland Christians who are more concerned with uncomplicated edification than with storytelling. It would be more at home in the rec rooms of churches than in movie theaters.

The sluggish pacing and digressionary plot elements make the proceedings feel as slow as the gait employed by the film's undead supporting characters.

Most of the laughs seem unintentional and come too late in the movie — after several reels of serious build-up — for the audience to adjust to its tongue-in-cheek qualities. Making a good horror-thriller, or even a good horror-comedy, is not child’s play, as this schizoid film all too unfortunately proves.

It suffers greatly from obeying the imperative the first sequel established: Trying to blow minds and up the ante the way that FX-pioneering adventure did, this one offers a series of action set pieces that go from big to huge to ludicrous, even as the script's additions to fear-the-future mythology underwhelm.

Attractive and capably acted but oddly airless, the drama is a downer without offering much reward for our time.

At first, there's a certain cheesy charm to the Eurotrash '70s aesthetic, with a cast of minimally skilled actors spouting lines like, "Young lady, have you seen anything queer in the area?" But any resemblance to a coherent thesis is purely coincidental.

Awkward performances and dialogue undercut interest in the characters so much that none of their raw, fleshy deaths matter a hoot, and by the time the rip-roaring triple ending rolls around, many viewers will have lost count of who’s still standing and who’s food for the birds.

Despite the estimable talent on hand both behind and in front of the camera, the story never comes to convincing life and doesn’t, in the end, have anywhere particularly surprising or interesting to go.

Beyond a few scattered insights, Quest mostly remains on the surface of someone it portrays as a kind of culinary Prometheus, all the while failing to justify why that should be the case. It's like a tasting menu that never really turns into a full meal.

Superficiality reigns, but then a truly affecting scene will pop up.

Though its tone is amiable and its performances are (mostly) professional, it's hard to care if these four people live happily ever after or never see each other again.

The message tends to melt into a paint-by-numbers screenplay that pushes too many genre buttons to be thoroughly exciting.

With so many discussions to drop in on, each with its own stuff to show off...each sequence can only hint at what's fascinating about its field.

The film is overlong and wildly uneven (just as it was two years ago), but it benefits from a strong cast making the most of some sharp moments exposing the underside of male privilege and domination.

While Levin’s writing is sharp and observant, it’s also often overwrought and eventually just plain tiresome.

Cotillard, looking like one of the most glamorous white-trash fantasy figures in the history of the movies, has a hypnotic quality that will make you follow her character whatever she says or does.

A banal and patronizing cautionary sermon for lovestruck ladies torn between heart and head, sexy-dangerous bad boys and dependably dull husband types.

One imagines Godard spending whole days playing with dials, switches and buttons to discover the very moments he wishes to emphasize in his clips, and a good many of them are passingly arresting.

This is a picaresque road movie about two mismatched characters, with rookie director A.B. Shawky offering a motley and not entirely smooth cocktail of drama and melodrama, a dash of social critique and insight, some chuckles and a few tugs at the heartstrings, mainly by virtue of its near-virtuoso score.

The director and his actors never really make the Gu-Lu connection persuasive.

Sobel’s inexperience with the feature-length format and the requirements of specific genres shows, with Workers Cup constantly struggling to reconcile the horrible fate of what are essentially modern-day slaves with the aspirational side and dreams of victory and beyond that are the end game of any underdog sports story.

Quite funny for much of its running time, the film feels like it simply runs out of steam in its third act, settling for a lazy, pandering resolution and seeming happy to have made it to the 83-minute finish line.

The end result is pleasant but bland.

What keeps the material from feeling too scattershot is the vitality of Cassel’s performance, which is full of life even when he’s not always in the best of health. He’s a much-needed charismatic center that almost manages to keep the entire enterprise together.

Lorna Tucker's documentary profiling famed fashion designer Vivienne Westwood displays a genuine tension between the filmmaker and her subject that initially proves intriguing. Unfortunately, that tension soon dissipates, and all that's left is a much too cursory portrait of a figure whose fascinating life and career should have led to a more interesting film.

Mystery-wise, the film teases viewers pretty effectively, with plenty of jolts that suggest the boys are on the right track balanced by other signs they're making something out of nothing.... But with a couple of small exceptions, attempts to flesh out the teen characters don't work very well.

The leads all take this as seriously as possible, and Lennon goes the extra mile by investing scenes with Edgar's parents with believable emotional baggage.

This is the second feature from Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq, but unfortunately it lacks the nuance and insight of her impressively poignant yet controlled debut feature, I Am Yours.

Though the 55 year-old plot's bones are sturdy and its new performers gifted, moviegoers hoping for a mercilessly funny post-Weinstein revenge fantasy (its poster declares: "They're giving dirty rotten men a run for their money") will walk away feeling conned.

The structure feels fairly novel for such a B-grade fright-fest — call it Last Year at Amityville — but it’s soon outdone by the litany of torturous scenes that the director piles on one after the other.

Stern's melancholy on election night in 2016 is genuinely affecting, but despite some incisive footage en route to the depressing conclusion, the film ultimately leaves us feeling that the director has become a little too close to his subjects to probe as deeply as our national chaos requires

Arguably, the film's hard turn into Scaresville taints what has made it appealing up to this point — and certainly, a tease in its final shot is a cheap gesture toward a possible sequel. But what comes before benefits from the cast's solid familial chemistry and an unhurried approach to the question: Should we want to talk to loved ones who've died, or leave them (and ourselves) in peace?

Though enjoyable as it touches on some of the liveliest scenes in New York City's recent pop-culture history, the doc's appeal is greatly limited by Garcia's blinkered perspective on his own life.

Skin plays out with the clarity, simplicity, rawness and grim poetry of a folk tale, tackling on the way some pretty elemental themes, but it’s a tale as told by a very dull speaker. By the end, viewer sensations are mixed, with pleasure at having entered a strange new world, but also frustration at its sheer lack of drama.

Despite its undeniable visual artistry, the latest incarnation of White Fang fails to leave a lasting indentation.

While its indispensable girl-power self-affirmational instincts are sound and a committed cast assiduously focuses on delivering an uplifting message, this is regrettably uninvolving material.

Earthlings is rather scattered in both its portrait of Van Tassel as a man and its explanation of his cultural impact.

The dramatic approach here is clear, efficient and entirely on-the-nose, with little time for anything that might distract from the hagiographic effort in play. Its sole purpose is to ennoble and proclaim a hero, which its subject almost certainly is. But it makes for notably simplified drama.

The problem is that The Night Eats the World steers so far into the quotidian of its hero that it can become quite frustrating, and even rather dull, to sit through. The threat of death doesn't become as tangible as it should, and the suspense wears itself too thin.

The absence of a light touch here means that even the teasing banter and sexual tension between appealing leads Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt is a bit stiff.

Only in its final moments do things crystallize with a nasty, half-ironic commentary.

Despite ample access to its subject and testimonials from both Jett's contemporaries and the younger stars she inspired, the film is a disappointment, and has limited value for viewers hoping to experience (or relive) the years in which Jett proved a woman could rock as hard as the boys.

For all the technical prowess on display, Notes on an Appearance proves too fragmentary to hold the viewer's interest. Its minimalist aesthetic quickly becomes wearisome, lacking sufficient variety or substance to warrant even a brief running time.

Though it’s a series that has seen its day, this swan song should attract genre die-hards with its elegant visuals and some humorously imaginative murders which are the director’s trademark.

Despite the general bloat, The Last 49 Days has its share of little pleasures.

Quincy is an unapologetically partisan insider's portrait. The material is rich and the cast list starry, but the overall package veers a little too close to gushing vanity project in places.

The child's discovery of the beauty of nature, the workaday brutalities of farm life and the adult world's disappointments and betrayals rings true, to a point, and the young actor in the role is memorably guarded and watchful. In Hjörleifsdóttir's adaptation, though, the themes are too studied and neat, playing out in a way that can feel oppressive rather than revelatory.

Set disbelief aside, and primal phobias may well suffice to get you happily to the other side of this adventure.

Unashamedly formulaic and relentlessly puerile, The Festival is no better than it needs to be, which may be as much commercial calculation as artistic limitation.

Clearly coming from the left but happy to make characters of all political stripes look bad, the film is often hard to take, offering laughs that are rarely cathartic enough to compensate.

Throughout the proceedings there are hints of the film that might have been, but every time it seems on the verge of being arresting, it pulls back, as if from fear of offending.

This prosaically competent comedy-thriller turns a rich true story into a tonally uneven blend of lukewarm laughs and low-level suspense.

Though it is intermittently witty, visually playful and laudable in its attempt to appeal to both head and heart, Laws abandons its characters to its big concept.

Originally teased with the droll but less marketable title Colin You Anus, Wheatley’s sporadically amusing semi-farce has a lively rhythm and some fine performances, but the baggy screenplay never delivers the emotional grace notes and knockout revelations it promises.

The insanely self-indulgent running time of two hours and 40 minutes and the tendency to undercut tension with fussy dialogue that continually draws attention to its cleverness make Zahler’s third feature a lot less fun than it seems to think it is.

Though it starts uneventfully, the doc perks up in its second half, highlighting the kind of practical headaches nearly no other artist in the world has to contend with.

For a movie about what’s going on under the elaborately staged surface, it’s pretty much all surface, right down to its shallow observations about gender fluidity, queer identity and the creative freedom of the alternate persona.

This is in many ways a frustrating film, its commitment admirable but its execution chaotic.

All of these beasties are "scary." Though they'd be much more so if they felt less like franchisable IP and more like fervent expressions of the ills of the eras on which the film aims to comment.

Extravagant action choreography makes the most of colorful set design, unlikely gimmicks and wrasslin'-style brutality. But Hodson's script offers far less diverting banter than it might've between the fight scenes, and has a hard time imagining the unconstrained id that makes Harley Quinn so magnetic.

Though fans will enjoy the behind-the-scenes view, and anyone interested in creativity can appreciate watching a master attempt to expand his turf so late in life, the doc's narrow scope and aesthetic limitations make it a fans-only affair, certainly not a full-bodied account of this man's towering career.

The cast handles the sometimes ludicrous plot shifts with relative equanimity, although Cavill seems like he’s trying way too hard to embrace his role as a conflicted cop and father attempting to protect his teen daughter while pursuing a killer ruthlessly targeting innocent young women.

For all its effective atmospherics and performances, Don't Go has an inevitably familiar feel.

More reliant on atmosphere than action to build suspense, Duncan Skiles’ The Clovehitch Killer offers an intriguing perspective on the darker side of American values, but lacks the conviction to entirely expose the cultural contradictions that often enable compulsive murderers

The film is most effective in its quieter moments.

Anderson, who previously made several Beach Boys/Brian Wilson video docs, is attentive to chronology and to Butterfield's legacy, but isn't making the kind of film that might win the artist new fans or magically transport older ones back to the moment when he was at the top of his field.

One wishes the script might have shared the degree of precision that has obviously been applied to the technical side of the production, which is resplendent in visual dazzle from the smallest beads of sweat on a character’s forehead to the vintage knit fabrics to those sprawling exotic vistas.

Deeply felt if not always convincing, the sophomore feature (the director's first, Las Lloronas, was in 2004) has the otherworldly flavor that sometimes accompanies very low-budget productions, and in this case rides that vibe further than its script might deserve.