Personal or not, this lazy fantasy doesn't offer many more pleasures than an Instagram account.

The Age of Adaline begins with such a wackadoo premise that you wish the filmmakers would commit to the nuttiness, or at least explore and explain how its weird world works. Instead, Adaline’s forever-29 status just sprinkles some cheese on a timid and unimaginative, if stylishly framed, romance.

"90 Minutes" is one of the better faith-based films out there.

We keep getting glimpses of a compelling subject, but it’s hard to know what Nichols is really going for, since he tosses so many disparate elements together without tying them into a meaningful thread.

Lucy in the Sky becomes a strange experience that tries to force too many themes together at the detriment of its otherwise fascinating heroine.

Peter Rabbit feels obligated to point out all of the clichés that it’s rehashing, in the mistaken belief that doing so absolves itself from coming up with anything better to replace them.

Oliver makes sure that every scene in Jonathan is slow, earnest, tidy, and very cautious, and he pulls back from anything that might be too dramatic.

Jenny’s Wedding isn’t ill-intentioned or actively bad; it’s just a little too familiar, a little too safe and a little too satisfied with itself.

A few minutes of nail-biting, recreated heroism isn’t enough to justify the other 90-or-so minutes in Clint Eastwood’s dry salute of a movie, The 15:17 to Paris, which struggles to mix patriotism, friendship, God, and destiny into something meaningful.

The House That Jack Built is kind of a bore. As much as von Trier loves to push our buttons with graphic imagery, he also wants to get under our skin by talking, talking, talking. And while the gore got the headlines, the talk is what sinks the movie.

The Little Stranger has all the disquieting atmosphere of a total void, and like a total void, not a lot happens in it. You might get sucked into the cold, but you’ll grow bored quickly.

The Gates' is constantly on the verge of getting better, sometimes on the verge of getting good, but it never quite gets there. It’s a missed opportunity for thrills, social commentary, humor and/or horror.

Credit where credit is due to Wicker, it’s not every day you get to see an Oscar-winning actress mount a Hollywood heartthrob made into a literal wicker man. Alas, despite the novelty of seeing icon Olivia Colman climb a towering Alexander Skarsgård like a tree, the magical fable within which this happens is not only regrettably far less fun than this description sounds, but an oddly wearisome affair.

Where Anderson went to great lengths to address some salient topics in his novel — like colonialism, the American healthcare system, and the obsolescence of the working class — Finley’s “Landscape” lacks the worldbuilding necessary to make any such strong connections. This could be a scathing indictment of our country’s growing class divide. Instead, it’s a nice-looking, entertaining movie that conveniently pulls its punches.

Despite a worthy message about the importance of embracing one’s past—blocking your trauma is no fruitful way to deal with it—“Insidious: The Red Door” still fizzles in its final stretch, becoming an over-plotted labyrinth of loose ends that drags more than it entertains.

There are plenty of silly recurring jokes and a collection of quirky characters, but it all exists to cover up just how empty the film itself is at its core.

This Papillon just lopes from place to place, and indignity to indignity, without any special style or verve.

It doggedly follows the well-worn rom-com path, down to saving all the personality and occasional laughs – very, very occasional ones – for the supporting cast.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.

Tom of Finland is a film about a man who was famous for very dirty drawings, but it is unfortunately restricted by a dehydrated kind of good taste from ever being very dirty or very sexy.

Una keeps drifting away into flashy and superfluous details.

It would be one thing if the film was fully committed to its nastiness — a type of comedy we don’t see much of these days at all — but “The Estate” is too often hampered by its own self-awareness.

Nothing about the interactions between Daniel and his former pen pal in the second half of the movie are even remotely believable, and so the rosy climax of Private Desert enters the dangerous realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, revealing that the makers of this film are as recklessly naïve and morally questionable as their protagonists.

The bulk of these stories just aren’t very engaging — or even good.

What’s most disingenuous about Trial by Fire is that it knowingly simplifies the institutionalized and ingrained biases that foster the very matter it’s trying to address.

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

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.

The early sections of Sidney are much stronger than what comes later, because it is Poitier himself telling the tale in interview footage and setting the expansive, very dramatic tone. He knew how to tell a story so that each nuance would make itself felt.

The action’s accent on Russian rogues, lethal ladies and Rivera-set car chases makes The Transporter Refueled feel less like a film and more like the world’s most violent Vanity Fair fashion spread, all poses and pouts instead of the two-fisted, rough life of the originals.

Timely but dreary and dramatically inept.

“The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” unlike the stellar predecessors of the series, feels curiously starved for real insights into the opposing shades of the human soul.

Army of Thieves, a by-the-numbers heist movie and prequel to Zack Snyder’s gloomy zombie caper “Army of the Dead,” traces over that previous movie without ever improving or even just replicating its lighter elements, especially its chases and safecracking shenanigans.

Though it ticks all the boxes, there is a lack of surprise and originality.

A listless thriller that can’t find its footing, Abandoned does occasionally rouse itself enough to suggest a better movie that never comes to pass.

X-Men: Apocalypse provides a hint at what might one day take down the ubiquitous superhero genre: utter dullness. For all its bangs, the movie is ultimately a whimper.

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.

It’s kind of a mess, a crazy balancing act that flails as often as it connects.

A bewilderingly facile and preposterously plotted misfire that offers few pleasures as either a star-driven thriller or a big-screen indictment of the forces that devastated global bank accounts.

The awkward transitions and clichéd merrymaking that define Lisa’s story will likewise be either more feature than bug for genre fans or just one more thing that makes Azuelos and Fierro’s narrative seem lazy and confused.

Though there are flashes of more chaotic comedy that get the pulse racing here and there, for the most part Chasing Summer is a surprisingly safe genre riff.

What makes this film go astray are the problems that plague so many screen biographies: too much narration, too much telling and not enough showing, and presenting an artist's accomplishments in lieu of exploring his perspective.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women celebrates the bravery and creativity of Diana Prince’s mastermind and his muses, but with a tepidness toward the complications of their lives. The result is a gauzy, sexy ode to unconventionality that feels distinctly and disappointingly conventional.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Scarlet Bond mostly lacks the animating unpredictability and sugar-rush energy of its source material.

Where “In A World…” felt intimate and focused, delightfully dysfunctional but relentlessly hopeful, “I Do” is noisy and meandering.

Performances aside, Glass is a pretty mixed bag of exposition-filled dull moments and pedantic dialogue.

Shyamalan has had some difficulties as a director of late, and it’s understandable to hope that by placing him back in the realm of lower budgets and more manageable expectations he could impress us yet again; that turns out not to be the case this time.

The only way ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ could be more hypocritical, and taken less seriously, is if the characters also yelled “Hypocrisy sucks!” while sitting on Whoopee cushions.

The Żabińskis were as unfailingly heroic as it gets, but memorably rendering a resistance shouldn’t be so resistant itself to the rough-and-tumble humanity of the details, and the unsentimental doom that shrouded it all.

Curtis’s twee, nudging, corny comedic voice is very much the main sensibility here, far more so than anything offered by director Danny Boyle or anyone else involved.

The awkwardly titled gay rugby romance In from the Side is so padded out at 134 minutes with both rugby games and sex scenes that the final effect is numbing, and writer-director Matt Carter doesn’t bother much with either plot or character to fill out his narrative.

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.

Marshall-Green’s directorial debut is an intriguing story centered on a flawed protagonist, and with more polishing in the second half of the film it could have really sailed.

A waxen falseness suffuses the stilted, stubbornly generic picture, from the casting to the humor to the lesbian-friendly milieu. Like the fast-food mozzarella sticks one of the characters devours in moments of existential woe, it feels like a calculated imitation rather than the real thing.

The Circle takes a valid concern about lack of privacy in the Internet age and turns it into a hyperbolic and finally laughable melodrama.

For his part, Castillo makes the best of the clunky dialogue and cliché lines, but the story never lets his acting chops shine through.

The structure here is haphazard, to say the least, and there is a serious lack of concentration and follow-through. Too much ground is covered too quickly, and often confusingly.

We watch The Parenting in blasé curiosity, as we engage in the purely intellectual exercise of sussing out what’s gone wrong.

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 comes across less like an actual documentary you would show to a curious audience than a good-job-everyone piece of internal documentation you’d screen at a company party or to potential outside investors.

The drama is muddled, the action is murky, and the storyline can’t help but get goofier and goofier until, by the end, every attempt this movie makes to ground the “G.I. Joe” series gets blown up. It’s hardly the worst film the “G.I. Joe” series has delivered, but it’s certainly the least interesting.

Delivering boredom when it promises mayhem, Wild Card is a bad bet that doesn’t pay off for either the film’s makers or its audience.

The new characters are all one-dimensional, and we learn nothing new about the old characters from the series.

Instead of focusing on the strength of some of her material here, Utt strikes out in far too many directions.

Piven’s Ari is so over-the-top in his narcissism and megalomania that he’s fun to watch, but the other lead characters are the kind of bros who should be having drinks thrown in their faces on a regular basis.

A movie about identity that doesn’t know its own identity, Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf starts in the wilderness, and pretty much stays there as it tries to tease sympathetic human drama out of the singularity known as species dysphoria, a condition in which people believe themselves to be not human, usually an animal.

Seventh Son tells a story of dragons, witches, ghosts and ogres, but the most fantastic thing about it is the idea that someone thought this lumpy, bumpy and swollen sack of tired tropes and cluttered CGI would attract audiences.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

Unfortunately, Spot the Painting is this wooden movie’s only sustaining thrill, because the investigation plot rarely generates any lasting interest.

There is a scene in 'The Exorcist' where the soul of Regan MacNeil writes 'Help me' in her own flesh, begging someone to save her from an exploitative entity. I suspect if you look closely enough at Green’s film you can see the soul of 'The Exorcist' crying out the same way.

The film may be unbridled, unfettered and bold, but sometimes those adjectives aren’t complimentary.

Overall, there’s just nothing about this interpretation of the character that makes him stand out as Count…Dracula versus just another standard vampire, a fact that only becomes more troubling since it’s doubtful most people will equate the Demeter with Stoker’s novel at all.

See How They Run lies as dead on the screen as the corpse of its murdered movie director.

When it comes down to it, you can’t have a strong horror movie without a strong villain. Given that Chucky is currently working overtime to torment an entire community, surely Annabelle can do more than offer up a couple of creepy grins before calling it a day.

The Turning is not a total loss. There are some stylish, nearly giallo-like sequences and sensitive performances from both Wolfhard and Prince, both of whom look like they could go further with their roles if the script didn’t eventually limit them to reactions in the second half.

In Cretton’s hands, this fact-based tale of an oddball, destitute upbringing rings false. It’s based on a woman’s complicated personal recollections of her traumatic childhood, and yet it feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged.

Love and Fury itself feels like a commercial that can’t figure out what it is ultimately trying to sell.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.

There are certainly far more despicable franchises in the world of children’s entertainment than the “Peter Rabbit” series, but there are few this negligible, particularly considering the talent involved. Just because you don’t have to aim higher doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

You may want to leave the theater, go directly to a bookstore and buy the source material. That’s good! But you may want to leave before the movie’s over. That’s bad.

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.

The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service.

Rampage is a movie that gets buried in its own top-heavy plot, collapsing itself under that weight just like the Chicago-area buildings do on screen.

In all too many ways, it’s a predictable, tiring wade as both a domestic tale and a pandemic yarn.

For about the first hour of its running time, Dracula Untold is far too restrained and tasteful, and it certainly suffers from its tediously noble hero; it's well made but fatally lacking in thrills or excitement.

Given how much of the new material on Monroe is audio-based, one is left wondering why a project like this wouldn’t work better as a podcast. There is little that’s visually compelling about Cooper’s work, the type of investigation perhaps best listened to in the background of another activity.

There’s a glimmer of a better movie in Richardson’s and Cox’s scenes, which suggest a thorny marriage that barely survived its low points, but it’s inevitably undercut by Teplitsky’s fondness for slo-mo memorializing, music overuse, and a simplistic pace that wants to brush away all the negativity with a well-timed come-to-Jesus moment, and a rousing radio speech.

Cutting through the thick curtain of recycled lovey-dovey remarks and the proficiently dull craftsmanship of the production, Richardson’s radiant charisma acts as a lifeline. One would be hard-pressed to find a moment where she is not earnestly committed to the role’s convincingly bittersweet shtick.

At the very least, it’s not Shakespeare. It’s not even “10 Things I Hate About You.”

Russo-Young (“Before I Fall”) takes some considerable risks in her direction to make The Sun Is Also a Star look different from the typical romantic drama. But not all of these creative decisions pay off.

Far From the Madding Crowd will no doubt captivate future generations of tenth-graders who couldn’t be bothered to read the book, but it flattens the complex characters and grand scope of Hardy’s novel into an airless and overly truncated CliffsNotes version.

Nourizadeh and Landis are clearly going for a Tarantino level of blood-soaked dark humor, and while their cast is game, the film’s bursts of violence grow tiresome as its plot gets more and more ludicrous and hard to swallow.

Hokey and unconvincing, “Tetris” skims the surface of a genuinely curious “true story” thriller, which too often plays out like a Disney-ified version of “The Social Network.”

However depressing 'Rosemead' is, and it’s depressing in all italics, it’s just not deep enough to make running this gauntlet worthwhile.

The Kid simultaneously wants to humanize and mythologize its cowboys — and neither effort works.

Take everything annoying about a cobbled-together, overly familiar YA adaptation, add the built-in wheel-spinning of a sequel, and you’ve got Insurgent, a film that works best when it places its heroine inside virtual-reality situations — at least then it has an excuse for eschewing logic and context.

I would seriously consider cutting off one of my own fingers if it meant I didn’t have to spend two hours alone in a room with John Krasinski’s protagonist from Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.

There’s no thrill, no visceral heartbreak, no fist-pumping revelation. This is just a guy telling you about himself, growing up, growing old, and navigating the Stones’ massive celebrity.

Even at just over 90 minutes, it quickly runs out of steam and can only coast along.