Alternately both repetitive and repulsive, this home-invasion thriller never quite hits its stride.

It's never fun watching a comedian's shrewdness ossify into shtick. Yet whatever incisiveness Ricky Gervais once had (and he had plenty, if The Office and Extras are any indication) is barely evident in the new Netflix-released satire Special Correspondents

Director/co-screenwriter Pearry Teo succeeds in investing the silly proceedings with spooky visual stylishness, providing enough scary demons and possessed mannequins to deliver the requisite jump scares. Unfortunately, the film also features sound, which results in the audience being able to hear the inane dialogue accompanying the familiar horror tropes.

Originality or insight aren’t very high on the priority list of this drama.

For a film that's presumably intended to convey the rich emotional rewards of motherhood, it's not terribly convincing.

It's So Easy and Other Lies makes for a tedious cinematic experience that will only be appreciated by McKagan's hard-core fans. And even they're likely to come away less than enthusiastic.

A puerile combination of raunchy sex comedy and bland action vehicle, CHIPS will likely manage the difficult feat of simultaneously alienating fans of the original series and newcomers who will wonder why a buddy cop comedy displays so much homosexual panic.

Cruz’s aces performance apart, very little about this extremely disappointing film feels real, and some of it is risible.

Whatever social commentary is intended in this cautionary tale, it is lost in the overall thematic murkiness, and the film is reduced to being a series of increasingly silly, ultra-violent episodes.

As banal as its title, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage lacks even the impact of the monologue about the subject delivered by Robert Shaw in Jaws.

Incarnate, much like its central character at key moments, barely seems to have a pulse.

Blandly internationalized, generically derivative, drained of any personality, edited as if by computer and bleached of the slightest hint of emotion other than a holiday card-like sympathy for children and allegedly cute animals, The Meg is a one hundred percent inorganic meal, something made from pre-tasted and then regurgitated ingredients.

The film is well-intentioned but dramatically unconvincing, full of clichéd situations and on-the-nose dialogue about kids getting their shot and living their dream.

Shock doc The Blackout Experiments augurs to be an experiment in audience walk-out.... it is neither scary nor shocking.

It’s not a problem there’s a hole, as it were, in the common-sense logic of the film’s world; it’s that there’s a big, gaping hole where the illogic should be, a whole lot of nothing where there should be metaphor, playfulness, all that juicy, enigmatic, magical-realism stuff that helps films like Being John Malkovich and its many knockoffs become fodder for film-studies essays.

Jonas is, it should be said, the most likeable thing about this watered-down noir.

Writer-director James Bird’s second feature tells an entirely familiar story with a dash of transvestism thrown in, but doesn’t do anything interesting with that twist – and the lumpen screenplay is drag enough.

Under the stilted direction of Alex Ranarivelo, it's all as clunkily melodramatic as it sounds, with the climactic trial sequences proving particularly slow going.

Irving and screenwriter Peter Warren find it surprisingly hard to milk the charms of performers like Amy Sedaris and Justin Long for laughs.

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

The film is as shapeless as a real life — amusing in an extremely mild way on occasion, but no more goal-oriented than a protagonist who, time and again, shows that all he really cares about is getting high and tossing a ball around.

Attempting to mix emotional pathos with broad farce, the film fails on both levels.

Given the tragic and highly charged events it depicts, All Eyez on Me is oddly low on emotional bite, perhaps because it never feels real. As clean and polished and blandly overlit as a TV soap opera, Boom’s film looks and feels smaller than Tupac’s cinematic life story.

By the time director Alexandre Aja brings together the pieces with an illuminating pang of emotion, most viewers’ confusion will have given way to indifference.

[An] empty ponderousness suffocating the film.

Laughs do not exactly pour forth from this dreary and frequently insulting picture.

The movie morphs from sluggishness to confused ludicrousness, as it turns into a thrill-deprived thriller.

Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.