Wiig really shines in the film, proving that her finely honed comic timing can make a character work even when the film ultimately doesn't.

America: The Motion Picture only works in fits and starts, more a series of discrete parodies than coherent film. While some of these moments are amusing, and occasionally laugh out loud funny, most are only mildly entertaining.

Third Person is an audacious failure, one that even its starry cast can't save. With a trite script, and an even more glib thematic undercurrent, Third Person is nothing short of an outright embarrassment.

It's a shame Reitman goes down such a dull and tired road with his movie, because the cast give some really nice turns.

In spite of its various imperfections, Ben-Hur always manages to entertain, proving the timelessness of epic structure and scale. And even if nothing about the movie particularly stands out on its own, when all the pieces come together, one cannot help but feel immersed in the world and ideals presented.

Like a Spider-Man pointing meme doomed to continue eternally, ‘Dominion’ points to the terrifying possibility that nostalgia might serve as a renewable resource for Hollywood. (Ironic, given the fossil-fueled power of ‘Jurassic.’) Trevorrow gives audiences what they want – or, at the very least, what the studio bosses at Universal think they want. But at what cost?

In keeping with the movie’s mission of being many things at once – a rom-com, a thriller, a low-budget actioner – Murder Mystery also makes an honest if flat attempt at sentimentality that, admirably, is never meant to be taken as an emotional core so much as a springboard for an action-packed finale.

Hillbilly Elegy has nothing to say about the circumstances that caused these addictions and resentments, and it certainly has noting useful to say about “economic anxiety.” There’s nothing remotely thoughtful or even provocative about it, which is a shame – at least that would’ve made it memorable.

What's distinct about Mr. Jones is that it lengthily utilizes three separate storytelling techniques... Given the sloppiness of Karl Mueller's directorial debut, it feels less like innovation and more like an attempt to cover up shortcomings.

For a story with so much feeling, there’s surprisingly little emotional resonance in Adore.

Tiresomely told, uninteresting, and turgid, Electric Slide is as insipid as it gets — a meaningless movie about almost nothing at all.

The Words fails to surpass dramatically the bland lack of specificity in its title while still offering a solid roundup of performances from its talented ensemble cast.

It flails for the heartstrings, but instead of reaching them, it only tugs at that muscle that makes you roll your eyes at its old-fashioned, melodramatic attempts at emotion.

It's all very cheap, wholly unconvincing, and loaded with dull narration.

As undercooked as ‘Jacqueline’ can be, the movie oddly comes to life at the end with its themes of pointlessness and God laughing at your plans finally coming full circle.

Whether or not you've steeped in film noir lore, Hotel Noir still plays like an enjoyable little thriller.

She is Love feels incomplete; it’s a series of scenes searching for a narrative and a trio of talented actors searching for believable characters.

Marfa Girl is not going to convince Clark’s detractors, nor will it disappoint his fans, as most of what people consider his trademarks are in place.

With all of its glaring faults, Automata has some shining moments, most of which come during the surprisingly emotional climax.

Its insistence on trying to balance wannabe sincerity and earnest actions with laughs is a tonally misconceived idea. Ultimately more forgettable then deplorable, Baywatch isn’t so much a disastrous spill in the ocean as it is disposable garbage making a mess.

The Secret Scripture is a film with a lot to say, which struggles with the best way to say it.

Black Out ultimately limps to feature length, burying its intriguing leading man underneath endless mishaps and shenanigans.

A hard film to hate, but an even harder one to defend, Joe Dante’s throwback zombie comedy Burying the Ex is a completely unreconstructed B-movie that is perfectly happy to breeze by on charm, nostalgia and the attractiveness of its leads.

The oily slick of sin across the surface of this film isn’t what makes it wickedly fun; it’s the utter devotion to its bonkers twist, at once defying logic and good taste. Serenity knows it’s trash, but that’s not to say that it’s not entertaining trash.

Despite a tone that oscillates between quirkish and mawkish, it’s yet another warmed-over male midlife crisis movie, given supposedly higher stakes because the middle of life will be as far as this male will get.

Atlas is rote and routine, using the concept of sci-fi and artificial intelligence in the most obvious way: A.I. runs wild, attacks humans, and becomes the central enemy of the entire world; the ultimate threat that humanity must face, battle, and hopefully defeat. But all of it is conventionally realized, uninspired, dull, and something you’ve seen done more inventively a thousand times before.

By the time the origin movie stuff is wrapped up and the audience finally gets to see The Lone Ranger and Tonto on their first of their legendary deeds, it's far too late in the movie, particularly if your patience has already been drained by the simple yet over-elaborately staged plot, that struggles to be compelling.

The idea of turning a true crime story into a intellectual cinematic exercise is novel, and could be witty and sharp, but 'Angel' never comes across that way.

We'd be able to give this movie a pass if it actually took its own original concept seriously, which is the biggest problem that After The Dark perpetuates.

If "subtle" horror movies are going to be this devastatingly boring, maybe it's time to bring back the buckets of blood.

Chun admirably attempts to make each thriller-y motion mean a little bit more. But oftentimes he fails, and the back half of the movie is filled with perfunctory suspense set pieces, doused in blood and full of trauma, that leave little impact.

One can’t fault Hazanavicius’ motivations too much, especially given the lack of attention given to the events in Chechnya over the past fifteen years... It’s just a shame that he does it such a banal and trite way.

You Are Here is a shockingly inept comedy.

Predictable and overdone, it’s yet another unremarkable studio comedy that wobbles on its before getting knocked out.

Aiming for a trifecta of small kids, their older sisters and parents in the audience, Fun Size fails them all in a movie that is neither a trick nor a treat.

The filmmakers’ inability or unwillingness to actually engage with the discourse it builds Echo Boomers around leaves the film feeling both artificial and hysterical.

No one can fault the cast for giving it what might be seen as a decent shot, but if Star Trek: Section 31 leaves you with one thing, it’s that the final frontier, which is future spinoffs, might be best left alone.

Outcome—and it’s bad scenes shot behind obvious blue screen and fake, manufactured sunsets—is terrible. But what makes it memorable is the queasy way the movie keeps collapsing into the very pathology it thinks it is exposing. It wants to mock the famous for living inside a bubble of privilege, paranoia, and vanity, yet it ends up sounding like it was made from inside that bubble.

Never once does it carry any of the unclassifiable “It factor” charm that sometimes elevates a mediocre movie. Nope, “Red Notice” is just deeply unexceptional and pedestrian: a lot of lights shining on three worldwide-class superstars, with perfect white teeth with explosions and gloss all around them, and never once creating anything that resembles a captivating spark.

The Bye Bye Man just skirts so-bad-it’s-good territory, unintentionally making the audience laugh more than they gasp.

Unfocused, and feeling mostly incomplete in even the most basic standards of documentary film, This Time unfortunately reflects an amateur approach that is felt not just in the filmmaking but in the very people trying to bring The Sweet Inspirations, Pat Hodges and Bobby Belfry to bigger recognition.

Caught In The Web grows slack as its premise evolves.

Refn has consistently delivered films that have subverted our expectations, and has proven himself a master at stylistic self-reinvention, but this feels like the first time he’s gone back to any particular well.

Ultimately, the cumulative effect is deadening, just another chapter in an endless battle between overtasked and underpaid good guys, and cowardly baddies; the only real humanity in the film comes from Hudgens’ Cindy, who seems like a wild card of sorts, her character’s dimensions suggesting a world outside of the lurid details of this case. Refreshingly, she’s the only one in the film who refuses to be defined by the death and tragedy surrounding her.

Despite youngster Aksoy-Etaix’s commendable performance, not only will you not believe, you also won’t care.

The greatest benefit of the shock release of The Cloverfield Paradox is that going in cold makes the most out of the film’s bonkers turns.

Super Mario Galaxy is nice to look at and dead inside, a committee-made franchise object masquerading as an adventure, and ultimately little more than an empty commercial for Super Mario branding.

Blomkamp continues to baffle even more with Demonic, as he’s made a horror film that is so rote it’s hardly scary, all to showcase a developing technology that is intriguing as a sales pitch but unconvincing as a narrative device.

Mainstream feels far more like a callow freshman effort, frantically tricked out with visual gimmicks and affected whimsy, none of which freshen up its palpably millennial stance on that ever-renewing question of whether or not the kids are all right.

While riffing off almost every film about androids that came before it — “A.I.,” “Ex Machina,” etc. — Baird’s film fails to add anything new to the sub-genre, creating a derivative pastiche of better works that often looks visually compelling but collapses under an underwritten script.

Water’s film is merely bland, a boring hodgepodge of Gen-Z references and a workmanlike script that never seems to understand what it’s trying to say.

By time the third act arrives, the film turns harshly toward cliché, convenience and melodrama to disastrous effect.

The cavernous emptiness of The Canyons cannot sustain itself, and it makes for a mostly flat, strained and uninvolving experience (not helped by the pace which makes 90 minutes, feels like a sluggish two hours).

This newest “Space Jam” installment is a good time and boasts real heart. LeBron’s steady work as the lead and a narrative undercurrent built on a believable father-son relationship makes for a breezy 115 minutes and improves on the harmless, yet admittedly stiff original. And while LeBron might not be in the Finals right now, he has definitely scored a win here.

Deformed from the start, it confirms the very thing argued by its narrative – namely, the folly of unwarranted resurrections.

The strength of Goodbye World is that it understands the foibles of these characters and lets them be as flawed as they are while they are also trying to survive not just the apocalypse but each other.

Largely inert and undramatic, what you're left with is a tedious sentiment: “by the grace of god” this horrible crisis ended without violence, explosives, or spark. Congratulations?

At 100-minutes, the movie drags and drags until finally losing steam in the last act and then collapses into a pile of worn out platitudes, limp gross out gags and gooey sentiment.

Unfortunately Things People Do scuppers its own chances by having people do things we just don't ever, ever believe they would.

Pan is a cacophonous assault on the senses, all computerized cinematographic mayhem and deafening noise, and its hurried pace extinguishes any genuine character development.

It’s all window-dressing for an ending that reveals this alternately goofy and self-serious big-budget Hollywood product to be little more than a two-hour prelude to a potential future franchise.

There is something of a manufactured air to the proceedings, one that is acutely aware of the techniques and traits of other similar better film, but without the strength in writing to back it up.

The film isn't bad enough to be some kind of potential cult classic: it's tedious, with even the stranger moments and plot developments failing to raise the pulse.

Runner Runner is content to stay high gloss, with no filler.

Neither romantic nor comedic, When We First Met is almost too vapid to be aggravating. After watching it, you might be tempted to hunt down a time-traveling photo booth of your own so that you can undo your mistake. Luckily, this movie is so shallow you probably won’t even remember it after you wake up tomorrow

The truth is, while Red Lights isn't terrifically scary, it is thrilling in other ways, constantly playful and often tongue-in-cheek as it works through the hokey conventions of the genre.

The country-fried romance written and directed by Bethany Ashton Wolf becomes a victim of self sabotage as it nears its (predictable) conclusion, removing any good will it created in its first half.

A wildly misbegotten mess, a goulash of incongruent tones and unclear motives.

Certainly possesses a lot of energy, but it's never harnessed or focused effectively. As a buddy comedy, all four leads have done better, and you already know what those movies are, and this one doesn't stand among them.

Retreading "Prisoners" territory to an extent that at times makes you wonder if they’re two parts of some sort of Canadian auteur experiment that no one else is in on, what is lost in the transfer, however, is any of the Villeneuve film’s subtlety or shading, and we are left only with its most lurid, credulity-stretching highlights, with all other textures blasted out to snowy blankness.

The original film was unpredictable and loose and every so often gave up the aura of dangerousness. If anything, the sequel is a tepid, watered down, and at 100-minutes oftentimes boring attempt to recapture the magic but without any of the whimsy.

Leconte’s never been the edgiest of filmmakers, but A Promise is so free of anything close to an edge that it’s like watching a beige sphere for ninety-odd minutes—and it feels much longer.

Loo and Lau’s Dragons is too busy reveling in tilted angles, music video editing, mind-numbingly clichéd dialogue, wooden acting and a one-dimensional story about brotherhood.

In a parallel universe, perhaps Naked Singularity might have delivered on its bold aspirations, but in the world in which it exists, that is, sadly, not the case.

This film requires so many leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief that you might develop acrophobia.

What Addicted To Fame lacks in nuance, it makes up for in insight and honesty.

It's well-acted, certainly, though these performances belong in a film with sharper pacing, one that breathes easily. But, this directorial debut from Phil Dorling and Ron Nyswaner breathes like a frequent smoker: in fits and starts, peppered with coughs and dry heaves.

No matter how it shakes out, 'Mad Man' will never be more than an interesting curio that provides a basic overview of why Stern matters. But for the rest of us, the images themselves will be the greatest evidence on their own of Stern's innovation in photography, fashion and advertising.

It might not be as risk-taking as previous Shainberg gems, but his knack for expertly crafted drama remains.

The ugly truth here would be to tell you to just skip the film, and the dare is to actually pay money to see it.

There’s very little in The Huntsman: Winter's War itself that is actively bad. Compared to some of its blockbuster rivals, it’s reasonably watchable, never offensive, and mostly coherent.

While it’s an occasionally funny film with good performances from its stars, it’s poorly and cheaply made.

A b-movie potboiler at best, and indebted to countless other and much better films, this tedious, dumb, so-bad-it's-almost-funny procedural is an overstuffed thriller that offers one single idea, and proceeds to beat it to death, without much of anything to say.

Mute is in desperate need of a firmer hand. Once upon a time, that hand might have been Jones’. Now he’s invisible in his own pastiche.

Awake is not even smart enough to play a little dumb, and so even the silliest, most gratuitous parts involving very cranky humans turning into killing machines are anticlimatic and frankly boring. The apocalypse has rarely been this abysmal.

Tedious effort.

Venom isn’t sure what film it wants to be, and it makes for an unintelligible, queasy roller coaster ride.

Argylle proves hollow from the inside out.

The Hustle is profoundly stupid and it treats its audience as though they’re even less intelligent than it is.

While Hedlund and Macdonald exhibit incredible chemistry, the outlandishness of the twists “Dirt Music” takes makes their performances nearly impossible to appreciate due to their cartoon buggery. Working with “Notebook”-level cheese, here the story’s stale.

Because we’re living in the worst timeline, these actors and concept are wasted in a movie that lacks spark, flavor, spice, and generally anything that generates or even resembles substantive heat.

With long stretches (we're talking 20-30 minutes) without a single guffaw, Identity Thief is aggressively dull, and will joylessly steal two hours of your life that you will never get back.

The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s short.

Lynch has a sure hand... The camera moves but never feels overly active, and within the first few minutes the geography of the apartment is so brilliantly laid out that you feel like you could navigate your way around blindfolded. It has a nice tempo, with the appropriate lulls in the action and some surprising reveals.

There seems like there could have been quite the stylish biopic in Rapkin’s version of events, but the telling is underwhelming, making this film a continuous stream of possibilities that are never opened or explored.

There have been some reports that this is the last entry in the series, but it feels like the franchise is (finally) just getting started. "The Expendables 4" anyone?

Philip Noyce is a natural choice for this kind of film. He’s great with actresses in peril and at keeping tension ramped up to eleven. But using the collective trauma of a generation of parents and children as the backdrop for a real-time thriller, whose lives have proven time and again to matter less than the right to own an AK-47, remains unconscionably distasteful.

It’s the kind of garbage that does a disservice to the fearless possibilities of the horror genre and its knack for sly social commentary.