Techine's last screen retelling of a sensational tabloid case, The Girl on the Train, was sly, illusive and seductive. This one is just inert.

Generic B-level horror marked by numerous dull patches, long stretches of expository dialogue and, save for Astin’s admirably intense turn, uninspired performances.

The screenplay muddles its emotional core with a clunky cross between old-fashioned Hardy Boys mystery and a far-fetched weapons-trafficking subplot.

Ultimately feels as shallow as the lives of most of its principal characters.

There’s certainly an interesting documentary to be made about soccer, the world’s most popular sport by far, but This Is Not a Ball isn’t it.

Though clumsily enacted, the eventual revelation at least avoids the sick-punchline feel afflicting some dramas sharing this theme.

The film’s scattershot approach proves more enervating than enlightening, with the barrage of information presented in such a haphazard manner that continuity and coherence become lost.

There’s no shortage of eye candy on display, with acrobats, dancers, fireworks and carnival rides providing a colorful backdrop to the fairly formulaic story arc. The lack of specific background on the event's origins and history is somewhat frustrating, however, since the 85-minute runtime could certainly accommodate further exploration.

A lot of banality gets passed off here as profound thought. That and the somewhat self-conscious actors make it difficult to engage much with either character.

The picture's first-person focus makes it surprisingly uninformative and occasionally annoying.

As allegory, the picture requires viewers to connect most of the dots without assistance, offering a preachy bit of dialogue once or twice but failing to use action or the camera to say much about non-sanguinary addictions.

Postman Pat: The Movie is a mostly charmless and dark affair.

Wit is in short supply, but director Miller at least keeps things moving briskly throughout the relatively brief running time.

Commercial director Bruce Macdonald’s first feature film feels curiously inert.

Paltrow shows a capable hand with the actors... However, the characters only intermittently engage our interest.

There’s a terrific central idea at the core of the film, but it’s lost amid the endlessly repeated nightmare episodes, the banal subplot concerning the couple’s domestic problems and the clunky exposition and visuals.

Suffering from its forced attempts at pseudo-religious profundity and its familiar depiction of a spiritually lost central character eventually finding salvation, The Calling is ultimately all too resistible.

The Young Messiah is just, like, barely competent enough that the faith-based target audience won't feel entirely cheated.

Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity, although clearly lovingly intended, is too haphazard and unenlightening to fulfill its mission of educating Western audiences about the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Aiming for Hitchcockian suspense but coming closer to daytime drama, the film offers only occasional tension.

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

Director Camille Delamarre (Brick Mansions) and his collaborators have devised a few nifty sequences.

Andy Serkis' decidedly non-Disney Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle may have intended to offer a darker, grittier take on the classic Kipling stories, but the end result proves to be more of a murky muddle.

It’s a pretty trying movie to watch, though it does have some striking images.

In the end the taste of H.K. filmmaking dominates in the film's deliberately chaotic visual style, a circular narrative that heads nowhere, and lyrical song interludes that abruptly interrupt the non-stop action and camera movement.

In an era where there's no shortage of clever animated features that appeal to kids while still tickling the grownups, the laughs here are about as fresh as the short-lived 1960s sci-fi comedy, It's About Time.

Director-screenwriter Hopkins is unsuccessful in navigating the absurd storyline’s jarring tonal shifts, with the result that this kinder, gentler variation on Ms. 45 mainly emerges as off-puttingly bizarre.

It's pretty silly stuff, leaving the film to rely on more conventional car chases, woman-in-peril scenarios and mistaken identity to keep things interesting -- all seen on that laptop via security cameras and the like.