There are too few real humans in Life After Beth, resulting in a lack of both brains and heart.

The new film is ripe for big laughs with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson as, respectively, the snobby British bombshell with sticky fingers and the rough-around-the-edges though equally cunning con artist, but neither actress is given rich enough material to bring the film’s most interesting ideas to the finish line.

That Peaceful occasionally takes us out of the patients’ world and into the emotional strain put onto the nurses and other doctors is a deft way of showing how cancer affects all.

The Pass is finally nothing more than a modest stage adaptation and a vehicle for Tovey, but on that level it is focused and skillful.

This “based on a true story” underdog tale is infectiously determined to make you fall in love with it, like a mangy dog that plops its head in your lap and gazes adoringly at you until you scratch it behind the ears. Eventually, you give in and scratch. And then you wash your hands.

Fisk and Hoffman (the younger) make a fine pair on screen with a natural chemistry; it’s nice to see her back in a romantic leading role. You just wish the two had more substantive material to work with. In fact, the Hallmark holiday version of this film would likely have been more entertaining, or at least shorter.

The gendered themes at play here do little to boost the quality of Buck and Schlingmann’s storytelling, which is too tangled to follow at times.

For all its telling — and showing — of sex, Bloom Up never really gets going until its final few minutes. And that late-stage twist occurs during the rare scene in which everyone is fully clothed.

The film's look and feel are far more purposeful and propulsive than the story and script, but even so, Space Station 76 has more than a few laughs inside its brazen bizarreness.

There is a tug-of-war here between [Bailey's] attempt to explore her characters in a very serious way with a consistent emotional basis and the demands of the material as written by Glen Lakin, which is clearly meant to be played as farce most of the time, particularly towards the end.

This is the sort of film in which we’re told that a certain action is impossible, until it isn’t, or that a certain thing would never happen, and then it does, so even with all those lives on the line, the movie can’t effectively build up stakes or consequences.

As a portrait of an author on the verge of a breakthrough, this is a run-of-the-mill, occasionally clumsy biopic; as for contextualizing Christmas, it never explains how it functioned before Dickens and only briefly mentions how it changed after him.

Deception, as a novel and as a film, offers a curio for obsessives, a postcard for archivists, and a not-too-interesting bump in the road for everyone else.

Sincere but uneven, professionally acted but amateurishly presented — there’s a lot to like about Family Squares, but there’s always something getting in the way of its intended impact.

As a 20-minute short or even a 50-minute TV program, London Road might maintain its sharpness and its potency, but as a feature film, its cleverness wears a bit thin and its messaging gets too overblown.

Like pouring yourself a warm glass of milk or slipping into a hot bath, the languid and visually sumptuous romance lulls you into a sleepy sense of calm, never asking for more than gentle aesthetic appreciation for its impeccable craft.

Youmans ultimately grapples with several tough themes that center the black Baptist South in a way that is rarely seen on screen. Even so, the inept editing and screenplay ultimately bring down Burning Cane.

No amount of self-referential jokes can make up for a lack of heart and spirit. Thankfully, Annie lacks neither.

It’s undoubted that the Gibbons twins were both original thinkers who were victimized by a system that did not recognize them as autonomous people, but it’s unfortunate that The Silent Twins is keen to do the same, reducing them to vehicles for aesthetic flexing and moral lecturing, rather than, as they themselves would have requested, simply letting them be.

Ellis and editor Richard Mettler craft an agonizing and unforgettable finale; if their sense of pacing had been as sharp throughout, “Anthropoid” might have fulfilled its potential.

Even flashy, grumpy Jones can’t act like a defibrillator powerful enough to crank this generic movie into competition for Statham’s better solo outings.

For what it’s worth, The Upside is exactly what you think it is: the latest Hollywood effort that aims to show that a black man and a white man with seemingly nothing in common can see past their differences and develop a mutual friendship. It’s just as pat and basic as it looks and sounds.

One of the keys to executing a high-concept premise is knowing when to show restraint, when to say no to an impulse for something aesthetically “cool” if it means crafting a more compelling narrative. That subtlety is in frustratingly short supply here.

Mackenzie shaved 20 minutes or so after its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, but there’s still no getting around the fact that what starts as a human drama of occupation, unease, brotherhood, and political fracturing invariably must give way to the mechanics of lengthy, loud, and splatter-enhanced combat.

It’s all about radical acceptance but can only talk about the real-world application of its message in general metaphors, so people who don’t actually accept 'weird,' 'different' kids won’t have to think about how wrong they are.

It’s not so much a movie as it is multimillion dollar background noise while you stare at your phone.

While Landon has made fun genre outings before with “Happy Death Day,” “Happy Death Day 2U,” and “Freaky,” Drop is, at its best, never more than just down the middle. At its worst, it’s an oddly clunky experience that strands its performers with little to work with.

It’s too bad that Chastain’s heady, exquisitely subtle performance is dragged down by the laughably vehement male characters that seek to speak for her. You can’t keep a good woman down. But you can constantly talk over her, I guess.

While Have a Good Trip tries really, really hard to not fall into the usual traps that make putting hallucinatory experiences on screen look silly, it can’t help itself.

The best scenes in this movie show that Guðmundsson has a talent for make-believe, drug trips and fantasy scenarios, and if there were more such set pieces in Beautiful Beings, then it might have been something more distinctive rather than the latest in a very long line of films about young people left on their own.

The Freedom to Marry is a movie that discourages complex thinking or contradiction, but there are little hints here and there of something more frightening and unstable.

It’s the movie equivalent of a multi-course banquet of colorful foams: wisps of flavor emerge here and there, and admiration reigns, but in the end you’re unlikely to believe you’ve actually had a meal.

A thriller without thrills is merely a drama, and The Wedding Guest is a dull drama at that.

The sheer number of artisans creating great work on this film does become a disappointment, though. Without a proper story or dialogue, what good is skin-deep beauty?

It works in the hits, and it casts singers who make those hits sound virtually identical to the original versions. What the movie doesn't do is answer the question, “Why did I just spend 134 minutes watching the Frankie Valli episode of ‘Behind the Music'?”

Tells the story of Amy Winehouse but shows no passion in telling it and has nothing to say about the events that transpire. It’s the utter minimum of what a biopic can be.

If Boyd’s perspective is limited, his focus is sharp.

Whatever nuance existed in the original novel, whatever detail regarding the complicated emotional existence of actual human beings, is reduced here to not-quite-suspenseful-enough plot points and an impossible forbidden romance that makes almost no sense.

Unfortunately, The Deer King fatally (and repeatedly) stalls as its plot starts winding down and its creators lunge for a character-driven moral to a symbolically freighted parable.

The failure of Catfight lies not with the leads, then, but with wasted opportunity.

Like its villain, Kung Fu Panda 4 can do an imitation, but we can tell it’s not the genuine article.

Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase is clearly made by people who have thought through the material and tried to make it enjoyable and palatable, but the set-up at the end for further sequels feels a little too hopeful.

It’s a horror movie for people who want to watch a scary movie but are hanging out with someone who gets scared very easily, and so they decide to compromise. Not too scary, not too silly, not much of anything really, but not much to complain about either.

Graham, Robinson, and Barantini’s thematic concerns about how restaurants work are strong enough ingredients. It’s too bad they’ve been subjected to the one-note flavoring of a single-take movie.

This is a movie that shows the Curies’ work changing the world, but then has Marie say, “I can feel our work … changing the world.”

If anything, “Don’t Die” may work better as a cautionary tale of what happens when you give your entire identity, thinking, and online persona to playing an avatar of fitness. It’s a shame that Smith seems to see such radical actions as mostly harmless.

If only Anything’s Possible had been content to depict this relationship in all its newness onscreen without burdening these two appealing characters with a pile-on of issues more suited to a newspaper editorial than a narrative feature.

Rogue Agent is plenty fascinated by the abridged version of this saga — bad men are out there — but you’ll wish for that darker, less cleanly shaped telling the more you think about its scarier contours.

The film largely squanders Woodley's considerable talents by having her talking about (but never showing us) the numb but open wound that is Kat's relationship with her mother. More disappointingly, the film never figures out how to translate Kat's lack of emotion into something that makes us feel anything other than distant pity.

Brice’s script boasts a few surprises, but this is essentially a highly competent film about boring people’s boring problems.

A capably rendered, urgently argued portrait in courage that never quite rises above curious-footnote status.

In superlative previous films like “The Host” and “Mother,” Bong elevated, then transcended, the humble genres of the monster movie and the murder mystery by refashioning them into exquisitely heart-wrenching human drama. Disappointingly, then, his alchemical touch is absent here. Snowpiercer warms the heart, but doesn't penetrate it.

"Art Addict” may be encyclopedic, but it’s all-too-rarely insightful.

The documentary is so outwardly focused, so intended for Western audiences, that it barely transcends the nature of a Wikipedia page, afraid to push back or to show anything that might complicate the notion of what a female leader has to do either to get work done or to be respected (or ideally both).

It speaks the language of climbers everywhere, but in the process reduces its very real historical innovators to two peevish regional managers in a sniping session, a dry duel set in the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The most impressive aspect of James Franco’s In Dubious Battle is, by far, its cast.

A few odd touches and one impressively, cathartically violent sequence don’t compensate for the film’s resistance to its own ideas.

For the Christmas romcom devotee, it will provide a breath of fresh air in its competency of craft, though for those looking to dip a toe into the genre, Something From Tiffany’s is almost too grounded and complacent in its lack of drama.

It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.

Director Jono McLeod’s filmmaking itself is inventive and odd, and that’s almost enough – emphasis on the word almost – to make up for the fact that the story itself is something of a letdown.

A movie with more potential directions than its globe-trotting-assassin heroine has wigs, “Ava” offers moments that suggest it might have succeeded as an action thriller, a dysfunctional family drama, or a character study. Since it commits fully to none of these, the results are the sort of bland bang-bang-pow that keep Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis afloat in between movies that critics actually like, or even see.

Cardasis proves that he has some talent for both objectivity and subjectivity, but too often this movie settles for mild good intentions and “you go, girl” fantasy, and there’s little room for those things in the very tough world Cardasis is attempting to portray.

Experimentalism isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the form, content, visuals, and motifs of There There aren’t inspired or interesting enough to warrant serious mental engagement.

It succeeds about half the time, making for a split decision where Sweeney and Christy both emerge as champions while the film itself can’t quite go the distance.

It’s a mannered and muddled take on an exciting subject, and even Taymor’s trademark flights of fantasy are fairly hit and miss.

This ambitious approach is, unfortunately, more intriguing than effective.

A compact and fairly well-made documentary.

Despite this noble intention to create palpable tension — and dialogue — between two strangers, Dwain Worrell’s script repeatedly falls short.

Clemency is a film that is just almost great. The level of restraint Chukwu has in her writing and execution, while admirable, is the very thing that prevents it from truly soaring.

Lopez, while certainly dancing all the right steps, is only ever a composite of a movie star who feels trapped in a surprisingly stiff production. She deserves better than what the film gives her, but there’s never a moment when she gets it.

It’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t exist without awards, and makes a compelling argument for phasing them out altogether.

The film’s major saving grace is how it seeks to be inclusive in its depiction of Christianity. Through a collective endeavor, a sense of community and faith is reinforced.

It’s as if the makers of The Night Before have it in them to make a touching and funny movie but instead throw that chance away by not taking what they’re doing seriously enough.

The time travel stuff is mined for funny jokes for a few minutes and then the film shows zero interest in all the worms it’s uncanned. It’s a whole lot of “what ifs” and not a lot of “then whats.”

While The Shitheads doesn’t turn completely, it never fully recovers from what ends up feeling like an out-of-place, car-into-a-brick-wall choice of a tonal crater.

Surge captures the protagonist’s collapse but shies away from catharsis, judgment, or context. Karia’s film lives in the moment and no matter how overwhelming it may seem, the moment is fleeting.

The film is a clunky and at times ridiculous affair, taking a situation that might reasonably happen and turning it into something melodramatic and ultimately unbelievable.

Young Messiah is more quiet than action-driven, more sober than fantastical (that slinky Satan notwithstanding), and more dull than poetic.

With Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams starring as its furtive, inflamed lovers, Disobedience has pedigree to spare. But the result feels wonky and lopsided, as if several crucial scenes were left behind on the cutting-room floor.

As a representative display of historical-but-reimagined players on well-worn ground, The Harder They Fall has undeniable pop, but as a movie needing character, narrative, and pacing beyond revitalized nostalgia, it’s all too often a bloody, showy mishmash that rarely holds its clichés and archetypes together with any lasting resonance.

The new New York Ninja often feels like a pre-fab midnight movie that was made with apparent love and care but without much urgency or creativity.

While Dell’Anna’s performance will captivate you as you follow Cabrini’s path to success, the film’s inconsistent pacing makes it a biopic for a single viewing.

Apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before.

You get flashes of the clever comedy this might have been — a funny line here, an amusing bit of business there, the occasional whiff of relevance — but it too often lumbers along, coasting on the backs of some very talented performers.

Unfortunately, the second half of Firebird is far less involving than the first.

Grahame’s contributions to cinema are more than worthy of a reevaluation. Her complications, too, deserve more than this tepid, uncurious portrait.

There are moments of fun to be found in Think Like a Man Too... It's just a pity that the movie does better by members of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority than those of the Screen Actors Guild.

What Coogan and Brydon are doing in these films is an acquired taste, but if they want to continue on doing them then they’re going to need to cut down and edit their interminable actor impressions.

Writer-director David Ayer tries hard to make this dirty not-quite-dozen into an engaging band of misfits, but the results feel undercooked and overstuffed, with 10 pounds of supervillain backstory being crammed into a five-pound bag.

Studio 54 is a case of a documentary attempting to tell a story that obviously cannot be fully or satisfyingly told at this juncture. As such, it has value only insofar as it suggests how much that era cannot quite be re-captured.

This ultimately feels like four very promising movies mashed together, with spectacular highlights bumping into each other in a way that’s ultimately lacking, even as they all demonstrate the prowess and bravado of the filmmaker.

None of its core characters, including the female protagonist (played by Florence Pugh, “Fighting With My Family”), make any rational decisions (while being too distant to care about anyway).

The ending of The Quiet Girl is modestly dramatic compared to what has preceded it, but the emotional charge we are presumably supposed to feel has been cut off by all the contemplative long shots that have kept us for so long at arm’s length.

There’s nothing particularly terrible about Moana 2, but the fact that it’s necessary to write 'there’s nothing particularly terrible about Moana 2' means something still went wrong.

Please Baby Please may pay homage to queer aesthetics, but it fails to make any coherent points about gender or sexuality.

Hyams’ film doesn’t make the most of its concept but, although it’s not a particularly interesting slasher, it is an efficient one. Fans of the genre will no doubt have a little fun with it. The fun just isn’t infectious.

Blended director Frank Coraci, a Happy Madison vet, is too much of a company man to elevate this passion-phobic rom-com beyond something more than an above-average Sandler production.