Frozen 2 has everything you would expect — catchy new songs, more time with easy-to-like characters, striking backdrops, cute little jokes, a voyage of discovery plot and female empowerment galore — except the unexpected.

Successfully restraining himself throughout from getting fancy or experimental, Haynes has intently devoted himself to the story and his actors, with strong, unshowy work that ideally serves the tale being told.

For all its familiar elements, Crown Vic is a well-made and strongly acted effort showing real talent on the part of its writer-director.

There are teasing glimpses of artistic genius in A Dog Called Money, but eccentric choices and muddled intentions, too. A talent as strong and singular as Harvey deserves a more probing, less indulgent film than this.

Banks brings Charlie’s Angels into the modern age with flair, all while unapologetically raising a feminist flag, championing female friendships and subtly making a point about the urgency of the ongoing climate crisis.

Marc Lawrence's story about Santa's daughter, despite its solid cast, aims squarely at not-too-picky kids and mostly ignores parents' desire to be entertained as well.

Playing Kane, a flamboyant crime boss who lives up to his name by using a walking stick, Flanery chews the scenery with gusto, as if auditioning for the next Quentin Tarantino movie. He's the most enjoyable element in what otherwise proves a flimsy vehicle for its producer/star Natalie Burn.

Good Girls Get High is sweetly amusing throughout, knowing enough not to wear out its welcome thanks to its fast-paced 77-minute running time. It also benefits enormously from the highly appealing performances of its two leads who don't seem to be faking their enjoyment during the energetic dance interlude performed during the end credits.

Playing With Fire strikes strictly predictably beats. Key and Leguizamo, comic talents who are wildly overqualified for this sort of thing, work hard, very hard, to infuse the tired material with laughs. But they're mostly hamstrung by their one-note characters

For all its nasty twists and turns, its fake-outs and flashbacks and pile-up of double-crosses, this story of an elderly con man and the wealthy widow he targets feels fatally devoid of danger. Square, tame and tidy as the London-area house kept by Mirren’s primly elegant, creamy-complexioned septuagenarian, The Good Liar is a work of skill but little spark.

It would have been nice if Cold Brook had added up to something more substantial, but at least it's a film about grown-ups who generally try to behave that way, and these days that feels like a rare thing.

Drowns in its own preciousness.

No film involving Nicholas Cage and a blowgun with curare-tipped darts can be all bad, and Primal gives us at least a little of everything we'd want in this kind of yarn.

It's a misfire by just about any measure, but it earns some warm feelings for its determination not to be like anything else currently in circulation.

Wes Tooke offers stiff dialogue and sometimes oddly structured action, leaving much dramatic potential unexploited. Yes, Emmerich stages plenty of aerial battles in which fighter pilots plunge through hailstorms of sizzling projectiles. But those hoping to get a thrill would be better served by revisiting his Earth-vs-aliens war flick Independence Day.

Sergio Pablos' Klaus invents its own unexpected and very enjoyable origin story for the big guy who gives out toys every Christmas eve. Shaking off most Yuletide cliches in favor of a from-scratch story about how even dubiously-motivated generosity can lead to joy, it contains echoes of other seasonal favorites (especially, in a topsy-turvy way, Dr. Seuss' Grinch) while standing completely on its own.

For all its aggressive energy, The Current War is an uninvolving bore, making it unlikely to measure up as the kind of Oscar-baity prestige entry The Weinstein Co. obviously had in mind.

The story gets a bit more involving as it goes, though some elements that might've been memorable (a musical number from a dog played by Janelle Monáe, for instance) fall flat.

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

While Cox's typically sterling performance is not quite enough to rescue The Etruscan Smile from succumbing to bathos, it goes a long way toward making the film palatable.

Susanne Wolff, who impressed critics last year in Wolfgang Fischer's "Styx," makes another strong turn here, grounding what could have become a merely lurid tale of dissipation, danger and sex work.

The film maintains its edge because el-Toukhy serves up this unsavory dish cold, without any mollifying humanistic judgments or reassurances that people are actually better than this. The central character is as heartless as any treacherous double-crosser in a film noir, but without the constant stylistic reminder that we live in a nasty, dark, dog-eat-dog world.

The film, directed by Danny Gold, offers an alternately moving and amusing exercise in infectious nostalgia that should prove appealing even to viewers who weren't in the 1949 graduating class of DeWitt Clinton High School.

It doesn’t have Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick or even much of the Overlook Hotel, but Rebecca Ferguson and other good actors provide some shine of their own in Doctor Sleep, a drawn-out and seldom pulse-quickening follow-up to The Shining that still has enough going on to forestall any audience slumber.

A highly original and rather touching account of loss, both physical and emotional.

While there are a lot of names, facts and intriguing assertions to absorb here, Gibney and editor Michael Palmer weave the dense narrative into a brisk, gripping and fascinatingly detailed thriller, enhanced by Robert Logan and Ivor Guest's suspenseful score.

Thanks to the efforts of the talented filmmakers and the committed performances by the all-in cast, there are some undeniably spooky moments. But you have to sit through an awful lot of tedium to get to them.

Tiresomely unimaginative feature.