“Allegiant” ends up feeling like a mid-season climax to serialized TV drama. The pieces are in play, the wheels in motion. Stay tuned, loyal viewers, and you’ll get your answers next year.

The Dreadful is worth watching for Harden’s perfidious performance alone. And whenever she’s not on-screen it’s worth the wait.

This is a movie full of characters you would walk away from at a cocktail party, engaging in the flattest brand of smart banter imaginable.

When 'The Banana Splits Movie' got there first, and did it slightly better, you’re in trouble.

Collide has been sitting on the shelves for over three years; no need to get up now and see it.

It’s hard not to engage in eye-rolling over what already promises to be one of 2017’s worst movies: The Space Between Us spends so much time piling one daffy, laughable plot beat upon another that it never bothers to nail down the characters.

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

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

It’s nice that the two photogenic leads are treating sex like a pleasurable activity rather than an onerous chore in this second entry, but overall, the film plays like an un-asked-for collaboration between the Hallmark and Playboy Channels.

Like a bad orange, this adaptation of the series-spawning novel by Rick Yancey lacks both juice and flavor.

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.

Overall, The Longest Ride feels cloying and contrived; the only time it’s unpredictable is when the plot takes a turn so utterly unbelievable that, admittedly, no one would see it coming.

Like a Boss is vibrant and sometimes funny, but rarely heartfelt and entirely stale. While it hits a few sentimental notes, the film’s failure to delve into the friendship it celebrates, or to say anything significant about women’s relationships in business, ultimately hampers it.

As handsomely mounted, TV-movie-quality cinema goes, “Light in Darkness” is at once the best looking, most coherent, and least histrionic of the franchise.

The battling, metallic heroes have never looked better, but Michael Bay's choppy, dissonant storytelling methods remain as audience-punishing as ever.

The film’s most genuinely funny moment involves A.J.’s ringtones, which should perhaps come as no surprise — the stakes, and the laughs, are so small that Ride Along 2 was apparently designed to be watched on your phone.

Sheridan proves he can still act the crap out of a movie, even when crap is all the movie has to offer.

The spaceships and the destruction are bigger but not better in Roland Emmerich‘s twenty-years-later follow-up, where only Jeff Goldblum‘s sense of humor saves the day.

Imagine “Battlefield Earth” without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious.

The material swings between the sensual and the puritanical with whiplash-inducing speed; the dialogue all too often has the flat, dead sound of a first draft.

Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.

To be fair, the unraveling of “Careful” is not the fault of the stars.

Visual stakes are heightened here, to an absurd, laugh-inspiring degree, the deaths sliding into the realm of “Saw”-style ridiculousness.

The new Firestarter is a lot like the old Firestarter, if the old Firestarter was duller, cheaper, and devoid of almost all meaning.

Rife with stereotypes, a terrible script, and odd “300”-esque cinematography that just doesn’t fit, this is not only a film nobody asked for, but also one that nobody should be forced to endure.

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.

The death scenes range from goofy and completely preventable to modestly suspenseful.

Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.

While Tyler Perry’s Acrimony doesn’t quite live up to its stylish trailer — that water-torture sound design promises a floodgate that will burst at any moment — it’s the kind of “women’s picture” that used to be Joan Crawford’s bread and butter, the sort that allows its star to glamorously lose her grip in a succession of great outfits.

Unfinished Business isn’t a laugh-free experience — Nick Frost steals every scene as a business underling with a kinky side — and some of the comic set pieces actually work.

The Hitman’s Wife Bodyguard is a comedy with not one legitimate laugh, and an action movie where cars keep blowing up while the A-listers yell at each other, as though that were inherently amusing or entertaining.

Michael Goi, serving as both director and director of photography, does a better job placing the camera around the claustrophobic location than he does exploring the depths of his actors.

It’s clichéd, stodgy and overly faithful to the original books.

It is simply what it is, and that is a hugely expensive but uninspired “Star Wars” knockoff with some thrilling action sequences, and some truly ugly moments that taint the entire thing.

The Lazarus Effect is a smart, unsubtle chiller that should leave even a dedicated horror fan shaken and spooked from its opening scene’s revelations to its final scene’s implications.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie that takes its characters and its premise seriously, until it doesn't, and that operates at two speeds: tortoise (ponderous) and hare (head-spinning).

Countdown can never be taken seriously enough to work as a conventional horror thriller, and it’s never quite funny enough to be a great horror comedy. But it’s got just enough eccentricity and self-awareness to entertain despite those obvious deficiencies.

Families with canines are better off staying home and having an old-fashioned backyard frolic than trotting out to see Show Dogs, a panting, poorly trained entry in the live-action/talking animal genre that for once makes viewers long for the candy-colored, half-witted professionalism of third-tier Pixar-knockoff animation.

When I say The Garfield Movie is the best Garfield movie, it’s going to sound like faint praise. Because it is. But faint praise is still praise.

As soon as Willis deploys his trademark smirk, and the comfortable vengeance of tracking down his wife’s killers while avoiding detection takes over, it just becomes a million other B-movies about lowlifes getting what they deserve.

A shabby low-rent thriller with a few vaguely interesting ideas and an ensemble that deserves better material.

Marshall’s Hellboy is a horrifyingly good time. It captures the breathless quality of reading 30 issues of a single comic-book series in one sugar-addled afternoon, shoving as many amazing characters and storylines and images into one film as it can possibly hold. It could have seemed overstuffed and frenetic, but this new “Hellboy” instead comes across as imaginative and freewheeling.

Never was a film I’m more likely to forget, than this of Romeo and his Juliet.

As Nomis steps up the pace like a runner losing balance and falling forward, the clichés pile up and plot points fly at us more like insecure stabs at holding our interest than naturally edgy developments.

The finale, though a bit cheesy and decidedly telegraphed, is sweet and a welcome antidote to all the bare-skinned romping.

The smooth professionalism of so many outstanding participants can’t help but elevate a very ordinary film a little bit higher. Despite the best efforts of both McCarthy and O’Dowd, though, there’s never a moment where it truly takes flight.

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.

A thriller that wants to be more than that and stretches the bounds of plausibility to get there, Inheritance may have you squirming in your seat and shaking your head in equal measure.

The vignettes sometimes resonate with the viewer but don’t really connect into a plot, there are too many characters with too many stories and pretty good flashbacks, and some of the jokes are impossible to laugh out loud at unless you’re a highly trained and paid actor.

The joyless and perfunctory Hot Pursuit would be a black mark on anyone’s résumé, but it’s an especially disheartening one for Witherspoon at this point in her career.

The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics.

Named as if it knew its destiny, The Disappointments Room brings together those horror movie standbys that just can’t quit each other — a creepy old home and a troubled family — for some truly convoluted, non-scary, and execrable psychological mishegoss surrounding a hidden chamber and the noxious historical shame it holds.

A convoluted plot leaking sappiness, in-your-face preachy dialogue, and TV-movie-style lighting are adequate, so long as its bigoted message is getting out there. God Bless the Broken Road is subtler than its predecessors, but that’s not saying much.

An utterly idiotic movie that uses social media as a conduit for witchcraft and mayhem.

While an energetic kids’ fantasy with cool creatures fighting each other is probably a reasonable win for Disney’s new premium service in these days before most theaters reopen, it’s hard to watch it as an adult and not wish for something that produced a little more magic of its own.

When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like The Crow to emphasize the plot, the plot had better make sense. And it doesn’t. It’s got perplexing rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems like it matters anymore.

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.

Homelessness among military veterans is a noble subject for a filmmaker to take on. So it deserves a better vehicle than Sgt. Will Gardner, writer-director Max Martini’s clumsy and sometimes downright laughable portrayal of an injured Iraq war vet.

Most impressively, the film admits that the line between faith and magical thinking isn’t as solid as most believers would care to admit — and the Church knows it. Unfortunately, these worthwhile ideas are contained in a phony-baloney tale more artificial than a polyester teddy bear stuffed with Splenda and Cheez Whiz — and just as appealing.

Neither good nor bad, nor campy nor scary enough to be in any way memorable, The Boy Next Door is a lot like our own neighbors, just there. You could make the effort to sneak a peek, but it probably wouldn’t be worth your while.

The first thing you need to know about Expendables 4 is that its studio somehow made the grating decision to fashion its title as Expend4ble. It’s a needless spelling challenge for a dull and vulgar flick with a lot of empty-calories muscle, but little-to-no skill or fun to spare.

Everything in The Electric State feels done for convenience, so there’s no tension in the storytelling or the emotional stakes. It glides on a smooth track from point to point without ever considering how narrative friction would deepen the characters and the story.

The tone and plot of the film keeps swinging this way and that.

Cox’s film plays like a pureed mash-up of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Social Network” and last month’s indie heist film “American Animals” — without the richness or texture of any of those films.

Stonewall somehow manages to be simultaneously bloated and anemic, overstuffed and underpopulated.

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.

With zero romance and nonsensical thrills, the only legitimate theft here is of the viewer’s time.

Issues of continuity and logic pale in comparison to how the film forces Eckhart to act. It’s rare that we see someone as talented as Eckhart be relegated to work this shoddy and dispiriting.

The movie has too much on its plate in selling its paint-by-numbers uplift.

One of the more plastic molds of troubled heartthrob storytelling in recent memory...is the kind of dispiriting effort that thinks it’s scratching an itch for masochistic young girls, but primarily suggests that romance, desire and sexuality aren’t worth genuinely exploring.

The Gallows is not without thrills. What it lacks is the thrill of the chase.

With a combination of jokes that don't land and a constant flurry of exposition and plotting to keep these flimsy plates spinning, Let's Be Cops more often than not feels more like a court-ordered defensive-driving class than a rousing high-speed chase.

The movie’s climactic exorcism jamboree provides some relief from the movie’s overwhelming dullness, and the final segments put the movie’s 3-D to use, but overall, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension feels like the last wheeze of a played-out series.

Director Sean Anders (“Horrible Bosses 2”) and his co-writer John Morris (“We’re the Millers”) execute what are supposed to be the laughs with blunt force. The jokes announce themselves with heavy footsteps, and almost none of them land, stranding a talented cast with terrible material that they’re straining to sell.

A-X-L may be a dog, but he’s designed to be a weapon, so he looks like nightmare fuel. And nightmare fuel usually isn’t the best centerpiece for a family-friendly flick.

Peppermint ultimately possesses the stale predictability of an unwrapped candy discovered at the bottom of a purse.

The film has no suspense, wit or shock value. It’s too ploddingly paced to elicit a proper jump scare, and it’s nowhere near insightful enough to get under the skin. The only thing interesting about this disappointing follow-up is how it takes the original film down with it, retroactively hurting the chances of “The Boy” becoming a beloved cult classic.

If the undemanding silliness of the first “Hot Tub Time Machine” was your cup of comedy, then you may well enjoy another plunge in these waters. Apart from a few laughs, however, I found the experience tepid and soggy.

Visually, Ratchet & Clank has its appeal.... But the story is ultimately too predictable and forgettable to make Ratchet & Clank anything but a kid-targeted holdover between slavishly awaited tentpole behemoths from the comic book world.

The cast of old pros (including Bruce Willis as a soldier of fortune) amble through amiably enough, but a few laughs here and there aren’t enough to make this movie come together in a satisfying way.

There may be no more unexpected (or damning) faint praise for David Ayer’s new movie Bright than this: It made me wish I was watching “Suicide Squad” instead.

In its conflation of happiness and self-knowledge, “Hector” often feels like the visual approximation of a therapy session. And just as therapy is work, enduring this mess is exertion, too.

The film never fully commits itself to neo-noir beyond the plot.

The Lost Girls gets stuck somewhere in the middle of magical realism and a gritty psychological exploration of what it means to believe in Peter and still live in the real world.

The bad news is that no matter how charming or fizzy the chemistry between the actors might be, they're still trapped in the dead, fake melodrama and brainless coincidences of a Nicholas Sparks story.

The problem isn’t that the new 'Animal Farm' is unfaithful, it’s that the changes aren’t an improvement.

If an algorithm recommends The Emoji Movie, Weitz’s film argues, there’s something very, very wrong with that algorithm — and there’s no denying that logic.

For all its cheap talk about the importance of innovation, Agent 47 just feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

Wahlberg and Ejiofor muster enough charisma to keep us watching, and Jason Mantzoukas cuts through the generic feel with some much-appreciated weirdness as the Artisan.

Iranian-born director Babak Najafi (“Sebbe”) and the four credited screenwriters... make things move fast enough to keep you awake, but not fast enough to finesse its plot absurdities past an alert viewer’s mind.

In attempting to work through its family issues, it arrives at catharses that are contrived and unearned, and in attempting to find humor in this pungent situation, it fails to deliver laughs.

The humor is way more miss than hit, prone to the kind of raunch (analingus debates, homophobia teasing, who’s-hot-who’s-not) that feels available, not thought-out, and pain gags that don’t get funnier the more they’re repeated.

Whichever way you wield it, Winchester is a misfire.

The Strangers: Chapter 2' is an improvement on 'The Strangers: Chapter 1.' Then again, a moderate case of food poisoning is an improvement on a severe one.

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

A stroll along the Venice boardwalk is likely to elicit more laughs, and probably even thrills, than Once Upon a Time in Venice.

Too earnest to be satisfyingly arch and too scattered to succeed as parody, Thorpe's goofy musical comedy only manages a sporadic charm through the occasional bon mot or a madcap flight of fancy.

The best way to watch Chronically Metropolitan is to think of it as a parody of a particularly pretentious brand of indie romance. Unfortunately, though, director Xavier Manrique and writer Nicholas Schutt (“Blood & Oil”) play it so solemnly straight for their feature debut that it seems unlikely they’re aiming for satire.