One emerges from the theater thinking we may have just had a good time, but the more it sits with you, the more you realize that no matter how epic the battles were — and they certainly were epic — they didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as the original.

As for the writer-director, Ol Parker, he doesn’t come up with any urgent artistic reasons for the existence of its follow-up, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, but he does make it surprisingly watchable, and he manages to overcome some mountainous obstacles.

The lead actors are attractive and charismatic and give nuanced performances. Unfortunately, the dialogue they are given to speak is often trite and too many plot strands are unconvincing.

White Girl wants credit for its provocations, but it’s not provoking us towards any particularly insights, just pointing out that white privilege exists and then calling it a day. It’s “Woke af: The Movie.”

The moments of absurdity land with a wonderfully weird grace, while the desperately vulgar gags about sex and scatology echo and crash as though they were being uttered in a middle-school boys’ restroom.

This journey to cobble together the old squad should be more fun that it is. Although you could say that about most of Uncle Drew. The onus is less on the performances; each former player holds his/her own.

The Chaperone is case of a not-so-good movie made by people who are unquestionably talented.

Mortdecai is by no means a disaster — the occasional joke lands, and there’s at least some fun to be found in the frenetic farce of all the conspiracies and the running-around... Still, I spent most of the movie waiting for it to find its rhythms and set a witty pace for itself that would allow the humor to build and the outrageous situations to pay off grandly.

Central Intelligence doesn’t feel like the birth of a great comic duo — more like a blind date that goes a little better than expected. The chemistry’s not there yet, but let’s give it another shot.

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 word Competent! rarely makes it into a movie’s marketing materials no matter how accurate it is.

Happy Clothes gives us an intriguing snapshot of a creative force who can mix patterns and colors more fearlessly than anyone in the business. But it ultimately leaves us craving move.

No matter where Ferguson goes, he finds a way to sit someone in a chair and point a camera at them, resulting in a movie whose stultifying dullness works against the urgency of its message.

Ultimately, American Chaos isn’t bad, it’s just kind of too late to do any real good.

There is some humor to be found here, of course, and a bit of exploration of the sheer boredom of being trapped for days inside four white walls, and moments of real connection between Bahari and both his family and the political revolutionaries he gets to know on the street. But Stewart doesn't pursue any of these ideas enough to stick, resulting in a film that relates incidents without ever really telling much of a story.

For a comedy set around one epic catastrophe of a rotten day, this wisp of a farce feels strangely chaos-deficient.

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.

As directed by Ari Sendal (“The Duff”), the film keeps its low-key, harmless energy at a steady simmer. Every once in a while a joke is funnier than you might expect, or a monster looks surprisingly spooky, but overall this is a safe, by the numbers Halloween family film.

The fact that it's released by Paramount plays like a punchline, and it’s unclear who’s getting punched.

If you want a comedy that works hard to be touching, you might find that here – but honestly, you’d expect a movie about pickles (and a movie starring Rogen) to have more of a bite than this.

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.

The melodrama can be effective at times, and there’s an admirable urgency with which it tackles significant issues in U.S. immigration policy.

The story undertakes an undeniably worthy subject. But Thank You for Your Service has too many moments that fall flat, seem unlikely, or don’t elicit the desired response. The complexities of PTSD deserve a better, more thoughtful and layered film.

I am not religious, nor have I ever claimed to be, but I enjoy a good inspirational tale. And I do believe that miracles can occur and that those stories absolutely serve a purpose in mainstream films. But in “Breakthrough,” I found myself being dismissed as a viewer, being directed to put my confidence in a story that was layered in the superficial aspects of faith — to trust without question, and just to believe that prayer conquers all, even as the film provides no foundation as to why I should.

It’s not bad, guys. But guys, it’s not good.

Bahrani (and co-writer Amir Naderi) want the audience to go to the dark side with them without losing their faith in the system. To anyone who has watched this crisis unfold over the last decade, it will feel like a cheat.

I felt frustrated walking out of Underwater: Here’s a movie with good production values, a great leading actress, and a fantastic score, yet it gets so lost trying to figure out what story it wanted to tell that it completely forgets to form a connection with the audience.

For the diehards and the curious, it should hold some intrigue, because in its exploration of pop longevity and band dynamics, it’s more a cousin of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster . . . than the typically image-conscious, preserve-the-legacy music doc.