There are lots of jokes, even though they’re only sporadically funny. There are lots of action sequences, even though they’re edited haphazardly and sometimes hard to follow. There are lots of monsters, even though the more we learn about them, the harder it is to care.

While initially playing like a fish-out-of-water (or, more specifically, into-the-water) rom-com, Hunt’s Ride winds up being surprisingly satisfying, a film with the guts to talk about the things that really matter underneath what could have been a glib, shallow version of the same tale.

Ultimately, Campbell’s film fails because it can’t decide whether to be cheeky escapism or a thoughtful character study, instead landing in between with something repetitive and too often a little dull.

Tron: Ares has, in no uncertain terms, a great frickin’ soundtrack. The movie, on other hand, completely sucks.

This is a movie that neither works as a quirky dark comedy about the hapless people of a small town (on that note, the film is painfully unfunny), nor as a period piece on the anxieties of the Reagan era, no matter how many “1984” references the characters throw at you.

Bad taste needs to be more honest and more all-inclusive if it’s to make a lasting impression, and MacFarlane’s bad taste here is both too wishy-washy and too knee-jerk cruel to really make any impact.

Ultimately, though, All We Had is exactly the kind of movie of which people say, “Oh well, its heart is in the right place.” A clichéd comment on a clichéd film: what could be more apt?

Its empty, loud breathlessness is the real bunk to behold: think trailer for a movie more than movie itself. Or more accurately, think teaser to the trailer to the movie. It’s a broken record of ersatz positivity and empowerment, practically shout-singing at you to be all you can be while it mostly just is what it is, plastic flash without any enduring oomph.

Despite having an emotional arc that becomes evident within its first few minutes, Luck registers as original enough conceptually to maintain one’s interest as we follow the formulaic structure of its screenplay. The resulting fable feels like a typical case of “you’ve definitely seen this before, but not precisely in this manner.”

At the end of the day, “DASHCAM” actually doesn’t seem to have much of a point to make. It’s a mean little joke of a horror movie, one where the worst people seem to live longest and endure no consequences, and if that’s what “DASHCAM” has to say about life itself then fair enough, but it’s not presented with cleverness or pointed satire. Savage’s film just keeps digging a hole and somehow it never reaches any depth.

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.

Colman does her absolute best to counter a scenario that manages to be both strangely off-putting and patly predictable, by shaping up a tartly unsentimental turn.

The minimal character development will frustrate filmgoers seeking substance, as will Coppola’s stilted dialogue.

I felt frustrated walking out of Underwater: Here’s a movie with good production values, a great leading actress, and a fantastic score, yet it gets so lost trying to figure out what story it wanted to tell that it completely forgets to form a connection with the audience.

Tucked away in The Independent is a smaller family drama in which Elisha deals with her parents and the illness of her father. These scenes are far better than anything else in the film because Turner-Smith gets to play something realistic rather than over-the-top and plot-driven.

Ultimately, The Gallerist gets by on its zippy pacing, committed performances, and a tinge of meanness that holds enough suspense.

If logic had anything to do with it, that would mean 'Thrash' was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. 'Thrash' may be arbitrary but it’s too energetic to be bad.

This movie hardly rates as first-class animation, but it gets in, gets the job done, and moves on both swiftly and well.

It’s a movie about escape rooms that literally kill you, and if you’re willing to buy into that premise, it’s about as good as a movie with that premise could probably be. So, hey, 2019 is looking up.

Since the genre of video games-turned-into-feature films has inflicted some real doozies on audiences, Tomb Raider towers above most of its peers by being merely OK. By any other measure, this is a saga of fits and starts, and we can only hope for smoother sailing if the film inspires the sequels it clearly hopes to engender.

The movie’s biggest strength is its balance between mordant humor and psychological fear.

Gran Turismo works best because it eschews its video game origins quickly before settling into a standard race car film. It’s unknown how fans of the game will respond to the movie — no one watching the movie in this critic’s theater pointed out any specific game Easter eggs — but on the whole fans of racecar films should be in for a good time.

Danluck (“North of South, West of East”) gets us halfway there, with a solid cast and crew, an apt depiction of emotional exhaustion, and a heroine we want to root for in a strange setting we’re ready to embrace. But she floats too ineffectually between dream and nightmare, never settling on one or committing to the other.

It’s so divorced from reality that it’s practically grounds for divorce.

They’re all trying to make a meal out of starvation rations. The cast’s efforts aren’t in vain, and the film is better for having them, but a thing can get a whole lot of 'better' before it gets 'good.

It is a bold, stylish and dynamic adaptation that makes big choices that may have one puzzling through both the characters’ and filmmakers’ intentions — or maybe not. It is a mirror after all, and the moral of the story is left up to us, which is perhaps the most daring move of all.

The overall mood created by the crummy, pinched visuals and logic-strained rhythm is of something scanned and discarded, like a tabloid article or a Lifetime movie.

What grates about director Yuval Adler and his co-writer Ryan Covington pilfering so obviously from Dorfman’s work is that they haven’t done anything particularly interesting with it.

If you were trying to produce a parody of what a Tolkien biopic would look like, you’d get the exact same film.

Set aside for a moment that the movie is literally hard to look at: it’s also tonally chaotic, and repeatedly trips over its own unspeakable horrors, before falling face-first into bowls of insufferable sugar.

Freud’s Last Session will certainly find its fans, and the actors are all superlative. But the whole affair feels a bit too dense to enthrall and the script never dives deep enough into these characters’ psyche to tell us something new or particularly unique.

"Quantumania” may not swing for the fences as ambitiously as recent entries like “Wakanda Forever” or “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but it does take the wildly disparate tones and plot threads that are seemingly endemic to this series and turn them into an entertainingly cohesive whole. To be continued, obviously.

Despite the film’s few imperfections, it’s still enjoyable to watch the cast of older actors refuse to age out of a young man’s genre.

Jolt won’t be the talk of awards season, but it knows how to entertain, offering the enjoyable spectacle of watching one woman taking down everything and everyone in her way, using what the world has told her (and so many other women) to get rid of — her feelings and her demand to be heard.

Slow, emotionless and boasting fairly mediocre production values, this misguided kid movie turns Jack London’s classic tale about the natural world into something barely recognizable as part of that world.

It feels as if there’s a better movie in here somewhere, lost beneath the wild-eyed freneticism and the unsatisfying exposition.

No matter how much directors Eric Warin and Eric Summer (who wrote the story with Laurent Zeitoun) try to distract with dumb comedy — usually involving the annoying Victor — or cartoony action...the relationship between Félicie and Odette is a warm, heart-tugging one.

I Feel Pretty is an honest-to-God fiasco. Virtually every single aspect of this rigidly unfunny comedy is botched, from the characters to the plot, the themes to the core message.

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with the idea of setting an all-ages haunted house-style chase movie in a corny bulk retail store. The main thing holding back Spirit Halloween: The Movie is that its young stars never get to convincingly act their age.

Rock Dog stays firmly in the realm of the pleasant but unremarkable, an air-guitar effort when a stab at virtuosity might have yielded something more memorable.

It gets through its storyline and makes its underscrutinized points about fidelity — it’s right there in a title — and then it’s over, and the only thing we have to show for it is a missed opportunity to let these characters reveal their inner selves for more than three minutes.

Movies don’t get much juicier, funnier, creepier, sadder, or smarter than writer-director Justin Kelly‘s King Cobra.

Other than to show that a woman called Mary who wasn’t a prostitute was involved in the final weeks of the Jesus story, I have no idea what the filmmakers wanted for this project. I’m pretty sure they didn’t achieve it.

Yes, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is ultimately a Saturday matinee writ large, but that’s nothing to sneeze fire at; countless big, expensive action movies fail at making their way into a viewer’s pleasure center, but this one knows exactly how to be, in the truest sense of the word, sensational.

Whatever its flaws, this is a rare genre movie that allows two women — both Mara and Taylor-Joy are coolly riveting, particularly when they’re playing off each other — to take center stage in both the drama and the action, both of which get pretty intense.

Simien’s Haunted Mansion is a wondrous blend of horror and comedy, tinged with emotional resonance in its story of grief and how we try to connect with those we’ve lost.

Cronin has an uncanny knack for human mutilation, which would probably be a bad thing in any other context, but if you’re making gross-out horror movies, it’s practically a requirement.

Hot to Trot brings up some intriguing differences between straight and gay ballroom dancing without ever quite exploring them in depth.

It’s a film that positively reeks of good intentions, but it’s so timid and tentative — the words “trans” and “transgender” are never uttered aloud — that it feels as hopelessly retro as casting a cisgender actress in the lead.

Sonic the Hedgehog might not become a kid-movie classic, but it makes for a great little getaway to enjoy with the whole family. That, in itself, earns a golden ring.

While many of the subplots of “Secrets” fall flat or go nowhere (usually both), there are globetrotting sequences of political intrigue that sometimes make Yates’ latest foray play out like an exciting, fantastical espionage thriller.

Same Kind of Different as Me works more effectively when its talented cast is given freedom to engage on an interpersonal level and its various political subtexts are sidelined.

It's hard to get invested in the father-son dynamic here, even it when it represents a diversion from the limp comedy bits and the flatlined suspense.

Lovers of spectacle for spectacle’s sake will come away from the film with many discrete sequences to admire, but there’s not enough of a human element to bridge them together. In terms of its lasting power, In the Heart of the Sea roars in like a great tide, but then just as quickly dissipates.

It’s a movie about two people that ends up being about no one at all.

The result is a film that’s not just incisive and compassionate, but fully attuned to the rhythms of this modern family.

There’s a refreshingly contained, deadpan sass to many of the characters’ personalities – and even Marino’s direction of the actors — that makes these people appealing, not abrasive, and which never devolves into the needlessly crude or ham-fistedly improvised, as so often happens in the more raucously engineered R-rated comedies.

We get a few effective set pieces early on that provide the requisite scares that A Cure for Wellness so obviously wants to deliver, but the movie just doesn’t know when to quit, lurching onward and growing more and more ludicrous.

It’s nothing special, but it’s nothing awful, either.

The fashions are a highlight, and the story of a seething snake pit of a town is watchable and intermittently amusing, until things take a jarring turn about halfway in.

On its own terms, Monster Hunter might work as silly, frenetic entertainment, if you don’t look too close or think too hard. But if looking and thinking are on your agenda, you might also leave it with a real headache.

The silly and sexy horror comedy brings an edgy twist to the adored subgenre and, through its reverence for the beloved decade’s penchant for gothic charm, makes for a ridiculously brilliant spin on a timeless story over 200 years old.

The film eventually provides some memorable gore but the ultimate conclusion is unconvincing and perfunctory.

Wish is a darling film with fantastic music and amazing voice performances, but the story does feel a bit like a house of cards waiting to be poked.

A popcorn-spilling, shriek-inducing, tricky little treat.

Impressive in its single-mindedness, this is nonetheless a movie that dares you to try and like it – and most likely, few will take Sauvaire up on that dare.

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.

Eenie Meanie plays like a decent adaptation of an unpublished Elmore Leonard novel. Even the title looks like it should be on a spinner rack next to Freaky Deaky and Rum Punch.

Like many of Emmerich’s movies, even the better ones, Midway loses sight of the humanity inside its vast vistas of devastation. It’s a giant film with a very small impact.

Hiddleston, who does his own singing, doesn’t get to show off his chops very often. But when he does, the film comes alive, particularly when Williams finally makes it to the Opry.

The cast seems game, and perhaps they realize it’s on them to elevate the material, so the scenes between Reynolds and Jackson have some genuine snap to them, even though the dialogue and characterization are barely memorable.

Poltergeist ultimately plays like the most perfunctory of remakes, one born of rights ownership and title marketability rather than a burning desire on anyone’s part to do something interesting or provocative with a classic. The 1982 original remains unassailable, all the more so when stood side by side with its pipsqueak descendant.

It's a supernatural epic that never feels quite colossal or consequential enough, as well as an utter waste of Dwayne Johnson‘s unique dopey-flirty charm.

It’s tough to get invested in a romance between two people more interested in likes than love.

None of these plot points are run through with any thoughtfulness or panache. Despite a great, unaffected performance by Wiggins — the only one among the cast — and the primal joy of seeing the dog actors sprinting, leaping and maybe even emoting, the film is sunk because the characters never transcend their seeming origins in a Disney Channel movie project.

Stewart’s whole career is based on the idea that political commentary and humor go together. Yes, they do – but as Irresistible shows, they do it better when they’re in the moment.

A hodgepodge of exuberant stylistic flourishes and pop culture references, and while it’s often briefly entertaining, it’s never consistently anything except manic.

Masterminds is kinder to its characters than most comedies about the bumbling and under-educated, and that’s Hess’s strength.

Even with all the teen angst and temporal alterations, the film stays fleet, funny and fast, especially as our leads figure out, through trial and error, how they can take advantage of their new abilities in ways large and small.

Some high-concept set pieces rise above shoddy execution and creative mismanagement, particularly any wire stunts involving helicopters, byplanes, or rocket-powered jet packs.

The screenplay reflects actual effort, and Jim Carrey gets to be unfettered in his performance, leading a surprisingly satisfying follow-up.

Wirkola is more comfortable engaging with gunfire than people.

The problem with describing a movie like The Nun II is that its many inane moments sound entertaining when you list them all on one page, but they’re so spread out through this movie that the entertainment is usually quite scarce.

It’s no small compliment to say that 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' is expertly crafted drivel.

The sandbox of “The Seven Faces of Jane” might have been fun for these filmmakers to play in for a while, but the results are drab and uninteresting. If there’s a winner in this particular exquisite corpse game, it’s certainly not the audience.

Even if you agree with the film’s political lean, it’s hard to overlook the unorthodoxy. Common Ground smacks of propaganda masquerading as documentary. If such can qualify as documentary, then so should reality TV.

Wallace smartly leaves room for skeptics of Burpo's account to maintain their doubt; what matters most is that audiences understand the film character's reasons for choosing to believe his son's vision/dream/delirium.

The Giver is an anti-totalitarian allegory so farcically hyperbolic it feels like only a teenager could have come up with it.

Ver Linden never goes the commercial route here with her high-concept idea. Like Palmer, she stays true to her goal but does give the audience several satisfying moments that call for applause.

So let me be absolutely, 100% clear: “The Alto Knights” is indeed a bad movie, but not the good kind. It doesn’t make you feel alive, it makes you feel dead. It’s a tedious, directionless, bumbling chore of a gangster picture, incoherently written and edited, featuring two of the limpest performances of Robert De Niro’s career.

Blair Witch does manage to generate occasional moments of tension, particularly when it strays from the first film’s narrative and peeks into some new dark corners.

Overall, the whole project feels weirdly empty and off-puttingly self-congratulatory, as though the very idea of turning women into action heroes is revolutionary.

This kiddie horror comedy will bring a bracing dollop of creepiness to your Halloween.

It’s a film in search of a character whose sole saving grace may be that it leads its audience to read Sapienza’s work for themselves — because the movie doesn’t do her or her legacy justice.

Mortal Kombat II isn’t the best Mortal Kombat movie, but it’s hard to deny that it comes second. At least with the number 2 and all.

When Shazam! Fury of the Gods tries to look like a big blockbuster action movie it comes across as perfunctory and soulless. The fury signifies nothing. The heart is where this movie’s home is.

If you can’t think of a better way to spend your time, 'Until Dawn' is a thing that exists.

Hamm, an extraordinarily subtle actor whose quiet craft often gets overlooked, is perfectly cast for the tone Pellington wants to strike, and he’s able to emote convincingly in the narrow elegiac range in which Nostalgia tries to operate.