The woman at its center remains opaque, her romance is listless and her journey to self-discovery becomes an endurance test.

By the end, Black Flies leaves the viewer battered, bruised and bleeding out on the sidewalk, but never fully captivated

This exercise in brutal nihilism ultimately proves as empty as the inane philosophy that provides the film its title.

Director Nimrod Antal (Predators) stages the mostly vehicular mayhem with as much variety and visual excitement as possible, especially in a crucial scene in which Matt is cornered by the police in a tunnel. But there’s only so much he can do with the hackneyed premise.

Unlike Green’s Halloween trilogy, which served up diminishing returns with each new installment, Believer condenses that downward trajectory into the first chapter.

Despite some amusing moments, it never really takes off, burdened by a tiresome romantic subplot that periodically stops the movie dead in its tracks.

This mostly competent but largely uninteresting, bordering-on-silly work upholds the Allen tradition of just carrying on as usual

The film is saved to some degree by the unstinting commitment of Ronan and Mescal, sweating it out in an environment that’s stifling both physically and psychologically. But the screenplay becomes so overwrought that it smothers any emotional connection to them.

When it comes to holiday movies, Candy Cane Lane isn’t at the very bottom of the pack, but it’s far from the top. . . The narrative careens through uncompelling territory before ending on a forgettable note.

Riddle of Fire tries to capture the extraordinary way kids experience the world, but the results border on twee.

It should hurt to watch such a relentlessly ruthless piece of work. Yet its savagery feels blunted when nearly every character but Jimmy feels underwritten and nearly every relationship built on plot contrivance.

Divided into seven narratively ill-defined parts, Sorry/Not Sorry moves like the first draft of an article that has all its sources, but doesn’t quite have a thesis yet. Rather than contemplating the nuances of C.K.’s rise and fall, it is simply an information piece, adding footnotes to the story we already know.

All the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this labored reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular.

There’s never enough tension to disguise its blandness. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, Bea and Ben are too clearly into each other to spark real conflict.

Stretching its high concept but thin results to the breaking point, The Family Plan feels like a movie whose best moments were during the pitch meeting.

Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.

Ultimately, The American Society of Magical Negroes is a film bogged down by its filmmaker’s inability to make the central joke work. The film simply is what it is satirizing: way too concerned with how white people perceive Blackness to the detriment of every single Black character in the film.

Taking two of the most magnetic actors on the planet, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and transforming them into emotionally stunted virtual avatars for more than half the running time is the least of the miscalculations.

Despite the filmmaker’s best efforts to drum up suspense via the usual jump scares, Night Swim turns out to be just as silly as it sounds.

If it’s lucky, Emmanuelle might find an afterlife as a kind of Showgirls for its generation, a great-bad movie that’s undeniably craptacular yet strangely endearing, a shameful pleasure in every sense.

While Hammel might be aiming for an ensemble comedy, Stress Positions lacks focus; the director can’t seem to decide who should be the heart of her shapeless narrative, a feeling compounded by dueling voiceovers.

All the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long.

[Daniels] desire to wrest explicit meaning out of the mother’s experience and corral viewers toward a single conclusion unwittingly places The Deliverance in mawkish and disappointingly cartoonish territory.

Unfortunately, the proceedings become increasingly tiresome the more the characters are killed off, with the result that despite an impressive cast, the film comes to feel like a Coen brothers rip-off.

The Watchers, sadly, is less disturbing than dull, less harrowing than hackneyed.

Unfortunately, the exhaustive repetition of the most familiar parts of her narrative — plus an over-reliance on poorly utilized footage from an ethically compromised earlier documentary project — left me more irritated than moved by Stormy, however persuasive I found its main character.

A cheapo gothic horror film intended to ride the coattails of Psycho.

Straining for its ungainly combination of action, romance and silly comedy, Love Hurts doesn’t fully succeed in any department.