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.

The novel presumably filled in the blanks to build an engrossing tale, one that here comes across as a rote suspenser, complete with jump scares and a violent climax. The actors nearly elevate the proceedings to something greater.

Director Adam Wingard (reuniting with Stevens after the terrific 2014 thriller The Guest) orchestrates the monster madness with impressive visual flair even if he relies on an excessive number of ‘80s-era pop song needle drops to make things seem more exciting than they actually are.

While Ryan’s bountiful charm is as evident as ever, her character unfortunately comes across like an older version of the manic pixie dream girl. And the movie’s heavy-handed magical realist elements counter the slightness of the material to deadly effect.

While De Angelis knows how to create visceral action and moments of intensity, he’s incapable of the slightest hint of subtlety.

The film works best when Waititi gets out of his own way and lets the characters speak for themselves instead of self-consciously extinguishing any warmth with jokes.

It offers plenty of cheap thrills, or more accurately cheap kills, presented with the sort of attention to bloodthirsty detail that horror aficionados crave. Pity, though, that there aren’t really any more actual grindhouses.

The result is more admirable than captivating, losing its way in old school hijinks (wacky professors, evil spies, a femme fatale) that grow outlandishly phantasmagorical as the plot thickens.

Wicked Little Letters swerves between comedy and tragedy without ever hitting its stride. The movie is at its best when it doesn’t strain to turn every moment into a joke, instead letting the story breathe a bit.