With fantasy material like this, we need to be made to believe in the inventions and the conceits, and we cannot do that if they are shot and staged in such a truncated and perfunctory way.

The Last Witch Hunter aims for pulpy, comic-book fun, but it’s never as fleet, funny, or detailed as it needs to be. And if you’re looking for something above middling in terms of plot, characters, world-building, even action sequences, you’ll need to seek it elsewhere.

The existence of a movie like Sleepless constitutes definite proof that there aren’t enough good scripts to go around; Foxx, Monaghan, Mulroney and Union (who finally gets introduced into the action in the silliest way possible) deserve much better than this.

There are some random chuckles along the way . . . . For the most part, though, The War with Grandpa seems like the sort of brightly-lit disposable family comedy that fills the Disney Channel schedule, only with an insanely overqualified cast.

As well intentioned as its flurry of feelings and sentimental performances are, “Berlin, I Love You” isn’t given the space or the format to truly sail. It fails to build on political landscape or culture and instead tries to pull on the heartstrings of its audience with half-baked concepts.

Ferrell and Hart don’t bring anything that we haven’t seen from them before, but they create a bouncy, playfully defiant rapport. It’s promising enough that you wish they could have made a movie in which they’re just making us laugh, instead of leaving us wondering how every third scene could be made less offensive.

Sure, Ghosted feels mostly awkward, but everyone seems to be in on the joke for some shameless fun. And that’s all you might get from this movie, a little pick-me-up before you ghost it forever.

This shaggy superhero spoof doesn’t consistently live up to its best moments, but at least those moments are there, with most of them stemming from the hilarious interplay between McCarthy and Octavia Spencer.

Red One might not save Christmas but at least it saves face.

What Alice Through the Looking Glass constantly underscores, however, is that even the greatest cinema trickery serves little purpose without stories and characters to support. The pictures are pretty (or scary or awe-inspiring) but they ultimately don’t mean anything.

Imaginary may not reinvent horror, but it knows how to conjure up a good time.

To some, a film with undeveloped themes, thin characters, and superficial gore might seem like a bad thing. To connoisseurs of the slasher genre, it’s all part of a well-balanced breakfast. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s narrative efficiency and tight 81-minute running time make it an ideal delivery system for creative kills and memorable gore.

The laughs are mild, but at least some exist.

This is a movie that is confident in clean living, blinkered righteousness, and manly sentimentality, and it is shamed by some brief footage of the real Freddie at the end, an actual person whose story has been diminished by this slack, dawdling, offensive film.

A textbook example of what happens when movies are treated like content, something to fill a quota, not to be thought about or enjoyed, so that Netflix can tell their subscribers technically they have a new exclusive movie this week, quality be damned. And in this case quality was indeed damned. It was damned straight to hell.

There are no build-ups or pay-offs here, just a lot of random moments of people saying stupid stuff, and fashion people being gently lampooned.

There’s plenty of fart jokes, forward motion and bright colors to engage easily-entertained children, but their parents will be subjected to yet another movie that has all the zing of watching evolution in real time.

The first “Point Break” was absurd and hyper-macho, but the director committed to the story enough to make it, at the very least, vibrantly watchable. This remake offers nothing but the absurdity, along with a handful of impressive stunt sequences that are both its reason for being and a complete distraction from what little story is happening here.

This “Mummy” is rags that produce no riches.

Vacation does occasionally spring to life, delivering the kind of ouch-inducing humor of personal humiliation and bad luck that we’ve come to know from the ongoing adventures of the Griswold family. But while those laughs are welcome, there aren’t quite enough of them to sustain the experience.

If this is just one bullet point in your Valentine’s Day to-do list, an excuse to hold hands or neck in a darkened theater, or maybe as a litmus test for your date’s artistic tastes, it’s a harmless, mostly generic action rom-com.

Failing almost entirely at amusement, “The Road Chip” may be most useful as a lesson for children to be more discerning about their movie choices.

“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.