At barely 80 minutes (and ending with a musical number from Brandy), Best. Christmas. Ever! resembles a television holiday special more than a feature film, and its plot follows the predictable Christmastime themes of love, acceptance, and being thankful for what you’ve got.

Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films.

Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers.

As the harried friends careen across the resort through a series of comical mishaps, the movie has the feel of a TV rerun. More compelling are the too-rare moments of plotless leisure.

The trouble with Reptile is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.

The tale is one of greed and grift. But BS High, a documentary about the saga, is too taken by the audacity of Roy Johnson, the founder of Bishop Sycamore, to critique his actions.

The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.

People who are immune to atrocious acting in minor roles; to occasionally poor dubbing; to a totally unoriginal story; to the sort of sloppiness that allows at least one reference to the octopus as a squid; and to a climactic sequence that looks like feeding time at the aquarium when it is at all intelligible, will cull the exceedingly minor rewards of "Tentacles" from some realistic underwater photography, a nicely manipulative opening sequence in which the baby vanishes; and the bobbing corpse gimmick that was more shocking than anything else in "Jaws."

Most of the comic invention in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is embraced in the idea and the title. The notion of having these two clowns run afoul of the famous screen monster is a good laugh in itself. But take this gentle warning: get the most out of that one laugh while you can, because the picture...does not contain many more.

Here is but another repetition of the standard tale of the vampire bugaboo who likes to sink his oversized dentures into the necks of pretty girls.There is nothing new or imaginative about it.

Razooli wants us to see the fantastical narratives children conjure to manage real-world uncertainties, but his vision lacks focus.

Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to.

Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.

Wolfhard and Bryk don’t relish violence or gore: Hell of a Summer is surprisingly tame, with most of its kills kept tastefully offscreen.

If the movie succeeds at anything, it’s in capturing Marley’s lingering spell on fans.

It’s an aspirationally farcical home invasion thriller that never fully thrills, despite a game cast that does its darnedest to liven up an unfocused script — Skotchdopole wrote and edited his film, too — that’s fashioned from genre odds and ends.

Sweeney and Powell could do wonders with a better script, something that makes more use of the way they grin at each other like they ate knives for lunch. She’s skilled at layered insincerity; he specializes in smirky, put-on machismo, shooting the camera a horrifically funny tongue waggle.

It’s hard to care about Mía’s efforts to survive when coincidence drives the plot, and the production looks and feels cheap.

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. Yes, again. And judging by this junky British film in color—asplatter with catchup or paint or whatever, to simulate the Count's favorite color—he can descend again.

This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience.

The look of Freud’s Last Session could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer.

One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; Role Play merely spins its wheels.

What we get here isn’t interesting, and it’s not told in an interesting way.

The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.

Blink Twice is haunted by lost opportunities. As a woman and survivor, Frida feels ignored. But Kravitz leaves the erasure that Black women feel untapped.

While sex drives Sebastian, the movie is stuck in foreplay mode.

Rowland commits to the thankless task of playing a smart woman gone stupid. Rhodes can’t do much with Zyair, whose affect is more flat than seductive.

While the high jinks are too haphazard to give him a credible — or heck, even coherent — character arc, Cena is here and there able to seize moments to show us the fissures in his layered personas, a fragile construction of confidence, ego, vulnerability and need.