24 Exposures has a handful of interesting ideas, and a lot of cute topless girls, but it doesn’t add up to much.

The only aspect of the film that even makes it watchable ends up being Shannon’s portrayal of Westinghouse.

The Internship might be the best worst comedy of the year thus far.

James Wan has delivered. Don’t be fooled by the diminished fanfare because his good work should not go unappreciated.

The Ice Road is a serviceable, if incredibly convoluted, addition to a recent run of bland action movies that ask the actor to do the bare minimum— scowling as things explode around him.

A sour, tedious and derivative film that doesn't just prove disappointing in its own right, it actively makes us resent the first film retroactively for inspiring it.

Whatever inspired the compulsively addictive (I assume) fast-selling book series isn’t found in yet another dull, tiresome race-against-the-clock European mystery thriller with a historical twist.

For how much Changeland mostly feels like a story grounded in reality, its dream-like conclusion—or lack thereof –kills, with lethal injection, any belief that a journey has actually taken place.

Undone by a generally detached air, and by lengthy, choking narration (a factor of shooting without sync sound due to the noise of the camera), Stereo (and arguably his next feature too) is most valuable today as a document of Cronenberg the student, the filmmaker-in-gestation, searching for, but not yet finding that perfect balance between kink, thought experiment and actual entertainment.

The film’s haphazard construction is made all the more frustrating because somewhere in this material is a much more resonant picture.

Speaking from personal experience as a fictional creature made of three-parts shamrock, two-parts rainbow, and one-part outdoor plumbing, I can tell you “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a very accurate portrait of modern Irish colleen/gombeen relationships. ‘Tis true, we none of us own a computer or a mobile phone (the air’s so thick with faeries and Catholicism that you can’t get decent Wifi anyway).

This newest film is an undercooked potboiler, one so tastelessly bland and visually indistinguishable that you wonder if anyone associated with the project realized what makes cheapo crime fiction so fun to consume.

Holland is full of good ideas, good acting, and stylish design. However, it is too much to overcome with a meandering narrative and a deeply exploitative main character that oscillates between being framed as sympathetic and unlikeable.

Taking a step back from the many odd beats that make up the film’s rich tapestry, one can vaguely identify a method to its madness: Three Floors attempts to uncover the darkest impulses in man and to paint a stark picture of a confused world in which people seemingly have little control over what they’re doing. But like most melodramas, this one tends towards ideas of reconciliation and forgiveness, and there too, Moretti stumbles more than once.

Make no mistake, Bosworth and Hirsch give their all in this film, but no amount of fiery insult-slinging or saccharine ‘How we first met’ details can make this stale script seem new. The tropes aren’t just old, they’re antediluvian.

Fitfully entertaining, and even more rarely actually funny, Daddy's Home, tellingly, only really comes alive in the very last portion of the third act.

Mark Strong and an underused Brian Cox are fine, and Taissa Farmiga demonstrates why she is acknowledged as one of America’s most promising young talents. But she deserves a better role, everyone involved deserves a stronger script.

There's no doubt Austen fans will find things to admire, but like the protagonist, you can’t help but leave Austenland feeling a bit unfulfilled.

Under the Electric Sky shows you the transformative, incredibly positive power of dance music, but in terms of a movie, it falls a little flat.

One should applaud Diesel and Caruso for breathing unexpected energy into what could’ve been another lame, uninspired continuation. It’s wild, loud and totally out of control, and that’s periodically a pretty good thing.

Other than the enjoyably silly banter between Damon and Pascal, there are few moments that endear you to anyone on screen. The movie’s tone veers from bombastic to goofy with speed but little grace.

As the overly long movie becomes about 130 minutes of his own propaganda, Washington romanticizes an ideal of man that has never actually existed, instead of a human being who did.

The Family is ultimately a headache, nearly two hours of baseball bat beatings and dull witticisms, with zero inventiveness or energy.

Despite a talented cast, the comedic aspect of the movie is tepid at best. Outside of Ariel’s character (Edebiri saves a lot of it), the jokes are obvious and predictable. Moreover, Ariel is the only well-rounded character in the movie despite, maybe, the ego-driven Moretti.

Strangerland starts off promisingly enough, but it just can't decide where it wants to go, or even how to get there.

Given the talent assembled, the emptiness at its center only makes it feel like more of a waste. But it does look great, it does sound great (the score, by "Drive" soundtrack contributor Johnny Jewel, is one of the film's best elements), and can be fitfully interesting.

Devil's Knot lacks potency or a compelling narrative reason why anyone remotely familiar with the case needs to be watching it.

It’s a mighty snoozy affair, in which we discover that Doremus’s cinematic style —intimate, personal, and improvisation — has not so much solidified as cauterized.

The more dramatic moments feel unanchored to the more farcical, and the humor ranges erratically from scatological to tender/heartwarming and back to cheap shots at slightly uncomfortable stereotypes. "Uneven" would be the kind way of putting it, but "messy" is probably nearer to the truth.

Its soundtrack is enjoyable, and Dosunmu’s work with director of photography Benoît Delhomme is pleasing to the eye. However, the slightness and muddled storytelling of Beauty mar a film which at times feels it has something to say.

The beloved characters constructed by Austen are rendered insipid in this retelling that can’t quite seem to find its footing, trapped between a desire to dip into hip modernism and an inherent pull towards the original material.

Perhaps The House That Jack Built is the kind of film you make when you fervently want someone to stop you, to save you from yourself and the demons of your worst nature. Perhaps, this time, we should oblige.

While Corsicato treats his subject extremely gently – there’s barely a hint of criticism of Schnabel and interviewees tout how controversial his work is without explaining why – his almost idyllic portrayal of Schnabel at work and play nevertheless makes for a largely seductive and engaging experience. But the lack of context often derails the entertaining film.

The Roads Not Taken is perfectly satisfactory in terms of style, but the film leaves much to be desired when it comes to content.

Jem has less in common with its neon-drenched ‘80s source material than with the real-life Internet-to-red-carpet trajectory of Justin Bieber — a similarly generic teen idol with moves dully modeled on superior artistic predecessors.

The Iranian filmmaker guides his lukewarm homage to the seminal work of the renowned Polish director with an A-list French cast, crafting an examination of the traps of creativity that lacks the driving force of the spark it sets out to dissect.

After a genuinely promising beginning, Halloween Kills, already somewhat robbed of potential suspense by the fact we all know that another go-round, “Halloween Ends,” is on its way, seemingly doubles the body count of the previous installment while roughly halving its IQ.

This is not the stuff of stirring humanist drama, but rather a bland scenario about boring people that want to mature but have no idea how.

The People We Hate at the Wedding is a career nadir for this cast, an asinine, poorly executed-excuse for a comedy. A little advice? Save yourselves and just RSVP no to this disaster.

Desplechin and his film seem to have a perverse and single-minded fixation not on “dazzling, interesting” women, but lost, tragic ones—women who can gravitate toward and glom onto Philip (Denis Podalydès), an inexplicably francophone version of the author, who lavishes the attention.

Uneven though it is, the film is peppered with enough cherishable dialogue tics and dummkopf punchlines to make it a enjoyable watch.

Ritchie’s ‘King Arthur’ is a pleasing big budget spectacle, oddly aligned to the filmmaker’s thematic interests and startlingly compatible with his signature razzle-dazzle style. In fact, the soggiest moments in the movie are the ones that adhere the closest to that ambitious multi-film strategy, lessening the fun, and emptying its impact.

The film is a pure expression of the id for a filmmaker who thrives on moving at 100 cuts per second; for everyone else, as the expression goes, your mileage may vary.

For as many laughs as they’re trying to get, only about half of them land. All told, Jackpot is an action comedy that is light on laughs and heavy on repetitive droning fights. Jackpot even fails as a social commentary.

We’re a dozen action thrillers deep now, and you start to wonder: is Neeson really making these for us anymore?

Perhaps hardcore Jet Li fans will be able to get some joy out of it, but we'd suspect that even they will struggle with this one.

A joyless, glacially paced compendium of interchangeable scenes of people floating around in their goofy masks and capes, tossing clichéd dialogue and CG lightning bolts, and punching each other into buildings.

[A] third-rate, run-of-the-mill actioner, which, for some reason, was edited to look like an episode of “CSI.”

The potential of this movie’s premise might have been squandered by cliches, but McBride and DeWitt keep it watchable.

Retaliation is no masterpiece, but it’s a movie whose fun doesn’t feel like a four-letter word -- popcorn entertainment that not only rivals what you see during summer, but surpasses what you see from Sommers.

In fairness Superintelligence could skirt by on surface-level examination of its themes if it was funny. Comedy, more than any genre, lives or dies on the delivery of its central promise: If a comedy makes viewers laugh, then it’s a successful comedy. This is not a successful comedy.

Though the comedic talents of its supporting cast (mainly Acaster, Ranganathan, and Brown), and the veteran performers (Brosnan, Driver, and Menzel) do their best to anchor the haphazard, bloated mess of a film, Cinderella is an uninspired fairytale that feels less like an empowering, new twist on a classic and more of a lazy, virtue-signaling attempt at cashing in on Cabello’s fame and legion of fans.

The problems run far deeper than craft — it is simply a film that has no reason to be made, a story without point or insight or drive.

Fountain Of Youth may feel superficially dynamic, and cinematically, it sure tries its best to trick you into thinking it’s a vigorous thing, but it’s just a cup filled with empty calories, sustaining nothing and ironically, only just wasting precious minutes off your life.

Like its predecessor, Machete Kills is never less than busy with ridiculousness.

This high-concept horror too easily crosses over from charmingly erratic to nonsensical.

For every moment of comedy that lands or drama that touches a nerve, there are ten of “why the bloody hell should I bloody care?” or “cry me a river, you had to sell your Brueghel.”

Contrarian so-bad-its-good specialists with PhDs in advanced irony once hailed the “Venom” films as entertaining campy classics and tongue-in-cheek antidotes to the more conventional superhero genre, but you will not be surprised when none of those scholars pipe up in support of this grueling cinematic slog that further underscores just how bad the entire affair was all along.

Marlowe isn’t the catastrophe that others may make it out to be, but it’s instead just inert, forgettable immediately after the credits roll. Jordan feels like he’s going through the motions, uninterested in bringing any personality to the genre.

The Purge manages to be smart, scary, and subversive.

It's like stocking a team with proven performers and hoping that everything else will work itself out at the end, including a rickety script, indifferent direction, and a plot that pretends its final act is anything other than a cliché-hugging inevitability.

It's ultimately a convoluted, muddy (both literally and figuratively) and overlong bore that takes an intriguing premise and does absolutely nothing with it.

He (Fishburne) rips into his dialogue like steak, savoring every word as if he were paid by the syllable. For a moment, we’re in a different movie, one where someone has decided to singlehandedly deconstruct a cliché. It’s a very short moment.

The most Crisis will give you is the empty gift of occupying two, completely uneventful hours of your life.

Ultimately, put its questionable politics aside, Without Remorse, even as a simplistic action thriller is joyless and lifeless, an arid space of empty macho bullshit with a lead character who is the equivalent of a bulging forehead veins meme.

While The Sonata has no shortage of gripping moments, it’s still missing the weirdness and stylishness that made the similarly themed “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Frantic” classics.

It may be bloated, but Moonfall always feels like it’s moving at a somewhat brisk pace. And the filmmaker’s greatest talent is collaborating with visual effects teams to craft images that somehow get seared in your brain.

The movie is so apolitical; there could have been a nice slant to the movie, about how both sides of the aisle could get together to kick out these Korean terrorists. Instead, it remains totally void.

The crime isn’t that Kick-Ass 2 is vulgar (which it is), but that it’s for so little gain.

Hell Baby works as a joke factory first and foremost, a collection of tropes (some mocked) second, and a movie a distant third.

There are shades of “Lars & the Real Girl” here, but where that film skewed towards dark comedy (which helped temper its outlandish premise), "Emanuel" is almost completely humorless.

It’s technically impressive and faulty in equal measure, expunging most of the substance in favor of occasionally effective, but mostly cheap, scares.

When you plunk down your $12, you will get the destruction you were promised. But it's too bad it's such a repetitive, unengaging, glaringly digital experience and worse than that, you'll have to sit through the disaster that is the rest of movie.

The Woman in the Window thoroughly struggles to keep the viewer interested in Anna’s fight to prove the veracity of her version of the story

Comes to you courtesy of WWE Films, though it's a considerable departure from their recent family-friendly approach. But it does make sense that the audience for post-apocalyptic films will start out with the Speak & Spell version of this premise, a knuckle-dragging time waster you could predict with your eyes closed. But hey. It's a movie.

Temple and Panabaker are quite good in their lead roles, to the point where you start to hate the fact that the movie's thesis thrives on the girls being damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

The movie is propulsive and, if you aren’t nauseated by the ethics, quite engaging.

Sabotage is perfectly acceptable by it's peculiar standards, the action skillfully rendered but the scarcity of character development and perplexing ethics make the picture an uneasy watch.

Miss Bala fails both when judged on its own merits and when compared to its predecessor. Just like Gloria in the film itself, Rodriguez is the only hero here. She works hard to elevate the material, but both she and her character deserve so much better than this.

The story is so poorly-plotted, nonsensical, and misogynist that it's hard to imagine one person liking this material, much less millions of literate book lovers.

You get the feeling that if there were less fighting and more character work, not only would Bell knock it out of the park, but Raze would be a better, more interesting movie.

It knows of its B-movie roots, its tired plot and well-worn archetypes, and beneath the burden of the sorely unoriginal, it does manage to be occasionally funny, occasionally surprising, and occasionally the bloody and bombastic genre cliche it set out to be.

Nicolas Pesce is a tremendous talent with a sick imagination that is distinctively his own, but “The Grudge” feels like payday one-for-them compromise. One that unfortunately sullies and derails the reputation of an otherwise on-the-rise filmmaker who should be above this kind of second-rate material.

A weird, uneven mixed bag, there’s much about Mojave that’s paradoxically maddening and doesn’t really add up. As the movie plot becomes less interesting and more straight-forward — like a slasher movie with the evil antagonist character slowly closing in on the hero — it becomes funnier and more purely enjoyable.

Between the charming Copley performance, the ingenious visuals, the absolutely incredible all-electronic Hans Zimmer score (seriously, this is one of his best ever), and the propulsive narrative thrust (Blomkamp is rarely singled out for how swiftly he moves things along, plot holes be damned), there is a lot to appreciate and even love about Chappie.

By keeping the film’s emotional core at a distance for most of the film, the only catharsis the audience feels during its denouement is from the relief that this bleak, miserable slog is finally over.

The film is not only repetitive but also profoundly uninspired documentary filmmaking.

While the movie is not without its charms, there's nothing indicating that it's actually a Hammer movie.

Our Day Will Come is the kind of polarizing, in-your-face movie that we too rarely see in cinema these days.

In lieu of any sharp insight into the period and its notorious figures, the film's brash, ultraviolent encounters instead build a showy exterior with nothing of import left standing.

As it stands, Gibson and Goggins carry the show and the Nelms stick to their stern tone without wavering. Whatever other marks the film misses, at least it has conviction.

Paranormal Activity 4 is listless, dreadful and boring, an almost painfully inert and superficial ghost story that lacks specificity or scares. Time to turn the camera off, guys.

The picture isn’t plotted with story beats, only shock moments.

Dark was the Night had the potential to engender scares, but the movie suffers from trying too hard.

Léa Seydoux’s hypnotic performance helps keep the film from sinking too fast into utter boredom.

First Time Female Director is a tremendous disappointment because Peretti is such a gifted performer; it’s understandable to go in pulling for her (this viewer certainly did), but those layers of goodwill just peel away as scene after scene simply does not work. Too much of what she’s assembled is just half-hearted cringe comedy—much of it without the comedy half of the equation.

In his first narrative feature in 10 years, Blitz doesn’t find the comfortable balance between self-conscious weirdness and overpowering emotional resonance seen throughout his other, better works. It’s not an outright disaster, but it’s not the shining success it should’ve been.

McCarthy has a great knack for vicious verbiage, and in combination with her supreme physical control there's pleasure in seeing Darnell tear an opponent to shreds, even (or especially) when she's in the wrong.