Another day, another exorcism…ho-hum.

Despite the strenuous efforts of all involved, Every Secret Thing never manages to overcome its overwhelming air of artsy pretension.

Strip away its gorgeous wintry landscapes and we are left with a symphony of ponderous New Age mumbo-jumbo masquerading as philosophical wisdom.

Any film that tries to revive this technique needs a clever story or unusual filmmaking ingenuity to stand out from the crowd. The Gallows has neither. It has enough mild scares to captivate the under-25 crowd.

Interminable dull stretches blunt the impact of undeniably exciting action sequences, making the series finale unlikely to leave even fans wanting more.

The film falters when it ham-fistedly attempts to detour into sensitive drama.

In a simpler form, Mojave might have been a gripping if minor genre film. Instead, it's undone by the sort of pretentious overwriting that might have seemed impressive in the '70s but now comes across as merely forced.

First-time feature helmer Romanowsky has a hard time distinguishing between the things that draw her to Elliott's story and the things that make him pathetic.

Sagnier and especially Baye try to locate the heart in their cartoonish maternal characters, and newcomer Lasseron is at least a warm and spunky presence in a role that's severely underwritten, though all of them are frequently upstaged by all the bells and whistles newcomer Neel feels he needs to keep throwing at the screen in order to mask the fact there's not much of story in the first place.

In terms of drama, or melodrama, or just bad drama, Freed rarely delivers the goods while trying hard to give fans what they came for.

For a film so seemingly interested in educating audiences about the evils of sex trafficking that it provides horrific statistics at the conclusion, it has no compunction about including copious doses of female nudity.

This ungainly portrait strikes a lot of poses, as if inviting the viewer to admire its impressive cast list, fine period detailing, "cheeky" British humor, and insouciant attitude towards violence. But none of it disguises the fact that the film is also tonally incoherent, vacuous and structurally a bleedin' mess.

There's no catharsis at the end from the journey taken, just relief that it's over.

While its emphasis on character dynamics and a slow burn atmosphere is to be commended, Dark Was the Night is too derivative and familiar to make much of an impact.

What We Did On Our Holiday could be used as a textbook example of how to ruin a movie with a bad third act.

It’s an instant camp classic, especially because it takes itself so adorably seriously.

While the director/screenwriter is to be commended for avoiding the usual bloodsucker clichés, he hasn't replaced them with anything particularly interesting, with the result that the story plays like a quasi-mystical melodrama featuring characters about whom we care little.

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.

Neither funny enough as an outright comedy nor solid enough as a drama, and certainly not believable as an affaire de coeur.

This is the kind of indie doodle of a movie in which several potentially interesting ideas co-exist but never quite come together and where supporters will call the narrative "freewheeling" while naysayers will insist on "rambling."

The writer/director deserves credit for his comparatively low-key approach to the potentially exploitative material, but much like the infant baby at its center, the film seems artificially cobbled-together.

Safelight squanders the efforts of a talented cast who are unable to lift the material beyond its clichés.

The frequently dazzling performance footage is offset by long dull interviews with dancers who intone such platitudes as "the language of music is rhythm…rhythm is the language of life."

Featuring long stretches in which little is said or happens, the film never quite burrows into the viewer's skin in the way in which it was obviously intended.

Only the writer's most ardent fans — and they are legion, judging by his book sales of over 190 million copies — will find anything of interest here.

Monson does succeed in editing the frequently dissimilar footage together into a fairly attractive package, although an animated sequence depicting the power of cosmic forces and another illustrating an historical timeline of human events feel rather too forced and self-consciously showy.

A home-captivity picture boasting all the implausibility associated with that genre and nearly none of the thrills.

This unquestionably good-looking film, shot by world-class cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis (The Drop, Bullhead), plays like a Low Countries-variation on the classy Spanish-language work of Guillermo Del Toro, at least in terms of style if not substance, with what little narrative there is more of a clothesline for small-scale set pieces rather than a conduit for character insight.