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.

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.

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.

Catherine Called Birdy only shows that dropping Dunham’s sensibility down into the Middle Ages results in a viewpoint that is suffocatingly small and unenlightening.

As both writer and director, Cronenberg focuses so intently on the surface that he neglects to include enough substance.

Each gun- or fist-fight features a few cool individual images, but these standalone elements never exceed the Russos’ blurry presentation. That’s especially deadly in an action movie that’s constantly trying to give viewers the impression of speed and scope.

The film’s failure to modulate its tone, its intensity and its messaging makes it a dreary, one-note production.

It’s too bad that neither the philosophy nor the pyrotechnics on-screen in Chappie can distract you from your own sinking feeling that you’ve seen almost all of this before.

A zombie movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger sounds like it should be campy fun, but first-time director Henry Hobson’s Maggie is grimly one-note, a small mood piece and character study that relies heavily on its three main actors: Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin and Joely Richardson.

Anyone looking for an introduction to Gibran’s poetry can find it in any bookstore; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is achingly well intentioned, but not especially well executed, and its failings as a film can’t be overlooked.