Despite its very brief running time, the film feels plodding, never quite managing to land either the intended dark humor or scares to which it aspires. You can admire its ambitions but lament the missed opportunities.

A surfeit of bad-ass mystery-man posturing and dearth of either convincing emotion or visceral kicks makes this pastiche unmoving, an assemblage of tropes few will enjoy wading through.

Excitement is hard to find in Joo-hwan Kim's The Divine Fury, a leaden good-vs-evil tale that takes issues of faith very, very seriously but fails to make K.O.-ing the Devil look the least bit fun.

There almost isn't a single shot in it where every member of the cast isn't Acting ... The result is, at times, insufferably pleased with itself.

The movie aims to make Daphne's journey raw and real, but mostly it's just insipid.

Overlaying the drama with the false cheer of lively music and bouts of humor, the story feels out of touch with the very emotions it desperately tries to evoke. Neither tearjerker nor very affecting drama, it defaults to somewhere in the middle.

As jumbled as all this is, the film never achieves the kind of sweaty intensity of the original.

The story takes place in 1953, and the relentlessly artificial-feeling film feels like it could have been made then as well.

This bloodthirsty comic-book fantasy is let down by its infantile humor and derivative, incoherent plot.

Miller demonstrates even less conviction than his writers, relying on frequent flashbacks to fill in backstory that’s not evident from the main plot and substituting CGI exteriors for actual locations. His workmanlike approach conveys the essentials without delivering many of the thrills or stylistic flourishes that the genre demands, adequately fulfilling a familiar expectation for forgettable entertainment.

Netflix's To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You is a charmless sequel to a charmless YA rom-com. (Extra rom, hold the com.)

It's certainly an imaginative concept for a detective story, but the storyline gets so convoluted and baroque that unintentional humor sets in. By the time we learn the outlandish motivation of the time-traveling serial killer and her true identity, the twists have been coming so fast and furious that we've long stopped caring.

Nearly everything misfires here — bizarrely so, since we can see where the laughs should come, how they would work, and how a more competent movie would get from A to Z. (To be fair, some jokes do land, just not as satisfyingly as you'd hope.)

Neither funny, insightful nor moving, it's mostly objectionable for its failure to exploit the facets of Coogan's screen persona that line up so neatly with the smug blatherers who dominate the AM dial.

The unfortunate result is that you wind up thinking how much more you'd prefer to be rereading that contemporary classic than watching this tedious exercise.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed ... To be fair, while Parker's film lacks finesse and the writing too readily slides into bullet-point didacticism and self-righteous speechifying, it does go to some lengths to give both sides a voice, even if it inevitably stacks the deck.

Although earnest to a fault and certainly fulfilling its goal of being family-friendly entertainment, The Great Alaskan Race ultimately proves less exciting and not nearly as adorable as Balto, the 1995 animated film inspired by the same events.

Its largely Hispanic cast and extensive Puerto Rico locations lend a unique quality to Paul Kampf's prison drama starring Laurence Fishburne as a morally corrupt warden. Unfortunately, those elements are the only original aspects of this turgid exercise in prison movie clichés which doesn't even manage to be convincing as melodrama. Although certainly well-meaning in its condemnation of capital punishment, Imprisoned is too dully executed to achieve its desired impact.

It would, after all, take a sleuth of Hercule Poirot-like talents to discern what attracted these supremely talented (not to mention, in the case of one of them, Oscar-winning) thespians to such lame, cliched material.

Initially a sluggish stalker flick whose undergraduate moral debates are tiresome instead of provocative, it eventually transforms into a patriarchy metaphor as obvious as, well, all those Greek-lettered paddles that decorate both the frat's and the sorority's clubhouses.

The corny, eventually rather contrived result doesn't end up doing justice to either its cast's talents or the quality of Winton's acclaimed prose.

But while the film is effective on its own narrow terms, it lacks the spark of urgency, suppleness of tone and freshness of insight that would make it truly compelling.

Unfortunately, it all plays out in completely tedious fashion, having all the urgency of watching someone having an impassioned argument with their medical insurance representative.

Auggie is purposefully grim in style and execution, moving at a snail's pace and seemingly photographed in drab shades of gray. Although its running time is a mere 81 minutes, the pic seems to last forever.

The computer animation proves competent if uninspired, and somehow manages to make even its presumably fail-safe puffins devoid of cuteness.

Blumhouse has certainly proved very successful with its inventive, low-budget approach to horror, but now that the company is spewing out movies like an assembly line, more and more duds are starting to appear. Everything about this effort, including its hackneyed, overfamiliar title, smacks of laziness and a cynical indifference to its lack of originality.

The Parts You Lose somehow manages to be both unmoving and tension-free, wasting the talents of several notable actors in the process.

You might think that director Michael Bay is angling to make his star, Ryan Reynolds, the Tom Cruise of a dumber, car-crashier version of the Mission: Impossible films. But what his new 6 Underground actually feels like is the over-serious pilot episode of a gimmick-d