The House With a Clock in Its Walls is easily Eli Roth’s best motion picture, and that’s not an attempt to damn the film with faint praise. It’s a spooky and amusing piece of family-friendly Halloween cinema, sharply produced and mostly effective, told with skill and panache.

Despite this noble intention to create palpable tension — and dialogue — between two strangers, Dwain Worrell’s script repeatedly falls short.

A very strained attempt to understand the motivations of the women who killed for Charles Manson.

Apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before.

it’s an endearing Sundance bonbon: quirky but not annoying, charming but not cloying, slight but in a good way.

The target demographic for Lorne is SNL fans who won’t benefit from a documentary like Lorne.

The result is touching precisely because Boylan does not aggressively ask for sympathy for her character. She earns it by being fair, sensitive and honest as a performer but especially as a writer.

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.

Zombie’s film, though clearly sweet and well-intentioned, seems only partially formed, a Frankenstein monster with only half the parts.

At once a darkly comic social satire, a pitch-black moral thriller and an earnest plea to recognize mental illness, The Dinner is a seven-layer dip overflowing with compelling individual ingredients that, when mixed together, make the finished dish awfully difficult to digest.

There’s no rule that every criminal has to be charismatic, or all their heists have to be heart-pounding. They just can’t commit the one sin that’s truly unforgivable: leaving us bored.

For all it throws at you, it’s neither consistently funny nor scary enough to leave a mark.

As nauseating as the film's inventive sadisms can be, Frank succeeds far more in the details than in the larger picture that tries to relate this world to ours.

This is a slow-burning movie, but its stealth and intelligence eventually packs an emotional punch.

Ritchie’s reunion with leading man Jason Statham delivers the scheming, the shooting, and the swearing that the director’s fans have come to expect, by the bucketload.

The filmmakers let the story slither at its own rhythm, so that the magnitude of the psychological control can be fully exposed. To accomplish that, their superb cast guides the film through a poisonous doctrine taken not from the pages of imagination but from real American folklore.

The movie never feels like an attempt to recapture past glory as much as fit Evans’ style onto a well-trod narrative. It’s a B-actioner elevated thanks to a singular director, and while I know “Gangs of London” has plenty of fans, I hope we won’t have to wait another seven years for Evans’ next action film.

The final third of I Origins helps make up for much of the movie's earlier shortcomings, and while it does have a nice gothic look, it's not nearly as captivating as Cahill intends.

This airless, laugh-less true story about 20-something wheeler-dealers who became arms salesmen during the Bush-Cheney invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has no point of view, nor anything to say about war or commerce or even 20-somethings who wheel and deal.

Willfully empty but wildly entertaining, The Equalizer stands out from its peers like a wolf among lapdogs, as Fuqua and Washington bring out the best in each other for the benefit of the audience.

Giving life to a horror vision that would not have nearly the same power and potency without her at the forefront of it, Sweeney has never been better than she is here. What a darkly beautiful yet brutal, bloody and bold film this is for her to wield.

Ultimately, “Viral” feels like the sequel or second season in a series where a first (or at the very least, a recap) would have been helpful. As a topic of tremendous ongoing importance with roots that desperately need exploration, anti-Semitism deserves, and needs, a look into its global impact and perpetuation that makes a deeper dive than this documentary provides.

The Intervention is a movie whose small moments are worth savoring even when the big ones don’t come off as intended

Begert’s aim is to shake Hollywood up. Yet his two movies-in-one proves that some old rules persist for a reason. As good as Schwimmer is as Martin, that story sinks under the weight of the one Fike and Ryder tell.

A sex comedy lacking in sex, silliness or subversion, when just one would do.

Unlike many previous films and TV shows that ponder the possibility of life on Mars, “Settlers” is thoughtful and nuanced, with Rockefeller posing extremely difficult (and resonant) questions about entitlement and even the future of human existence.

As good as Hargrave is at staging and shooting action, you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns in a film built around fistfights and automatic weaponry.

It’s in little danger of becoming a classic but it’s gratifying to know that Barry Jenkins made this film his own, telling a fine story with genuine emotion and visual aplomb.