Suspended Time does provide some of the pleasures frequently associated with Assayas’ work. . . Mostly, however, the project feels like the result of a writer-director killing time, sketching impressions of a life put on hold by outside circumstances, without figuring out what he wants to say with it all.

Director Tom Gustafson (Were the World Mine) has crafted a sweet if plodding love story but it’s hard to truly hate on this whirling candy-colored poetic fairytale — it’s just too sincere, much like the musical source material.

After a compelling first hour, the director can’t seem to get to the dramatic and emotional crux of the epic story, which runs a bloated three hours. When he finally does get there it’s in the dreaded Big Speech, which even an actor of Rogowski’s generous gifts can’t make into anything but a teachable moment.

For a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

Relentlessly fast-paced and filled with hyperkinetic visuals, the sequel hits the sweet spot in terms of what its target audience wants, even if adult non-aficionados will find little of interest other than the starry vocal cast.

Mooney eagerly mines the trove of Y2K cultural references to shape a narrative fine-tuned to a particular millennial sensibility, but struggles to meet the very low demands of its internal logic.

Salem’s Lot is a clipped horror that partially works thanks to a handful of assured performances and key style choices.

It’s an intriguing premise. ... But The Greatest Hits is the kind of film that should sweep you away with its charm and emotion. Instead, it’s too transparently button-pushing to go beyond the stale tropes of the weepy drama.

The comedy never quite settles into a comfortable rhythm, and eventually backs itself into a corner so far away from any recognizable reality that it threatens to undermine the very message it wants to send.

Despite a juicy hook built on heated emotions and drastic actions, Magpie proves too cold and ultimately too timid to spark much of a reaction.

The Contestant is a missed opportunity. It’s a documentary about voyeurism that, in the absence of freshly delivered insight, just reintroduces and rehashes the voyeuristic impulse it’s largely condemning.

After its darkly comic set-up, the mild proceedings seem generally undercooked, lacking the subversiveness that could have given the remake a reason for being. It coasts along mainly on the charms of Jones, who displays considerable comic chops as the beleaguered Tanya.

Fine performances and powerful visuals only partially compensate for the inevitable air of familiarity that accompanies Marco Perego’s debut feature.

Indeed, the film’s main strength is not its overly familiar if convoluted plotting but rather the strong performances all around.

The film is a concert movie for Shyamalan’s daughter, the musician Saleka, wrapped in a middling thriller kept afloat by a compelling performance from Josh Hartnett.

Taken together though, the script’s rather shaky foundations and Crowe’s bombastic performance effectively derail the narrative in the second half.

This latest addition to an apparently unkillable franchise adds nothing original to the formula. It’s a formula that works, to be sure, making for a pleasant enough time filler. But that’s about it.

It’s not terrible but it’s far from great, instead landing in that dispiriting morass best identified as “passable entertainment,” designed to make critics grasp for new ways to say “Meh.”

There’s much to appreciate in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino’s second consecutive bittersweet paean to his home city of Naples. At least for a while, before the too-muchness of it takes hold and the character at the center stops being intriguing and just becomes a siren with an air of mystery but too little evidence of all that’s supposedly going on behind it.

The ending is a bit flat and anti-climactic.

There are amusing moments reminiscent of the original, but in terms of tone and coherence, the movie loses its way.

Flight Risk manages to deliver some high-altitude thrills in its breathlessly paced 91 minutes. But its clunky dialogue, uneven performances and less-than-grade-A special effects ultimately make it the Spirit Airlines of airborne thrillers.

That the film works to the extent that it does is largely due to the unique charms of its muscular leading man and the well staged, extremely brutal fight sequences featuring enough gore to test the boundaries of an R rating.

Unfortunately, the superbly orchestrated car chase/shootout, taking place both in a tunnel and on winding mountain roads, occurs nearly two hours into this equally bloated sequel’s 144-minute running time. Until then, you spend a lot of time watching the characters luxuriate in the European settings via consuming copious amounts of croissants, gelato and tiny cups of coffee.

Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool. It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold sui generis experiment than a hot mess.

This is a documentary about psychics that make you think Ouija boards might be a better investment.

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.

It would be difficult to convince anybody without a pre-existing interest that this constitutes compelling storytelling on any level.